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Posts Tagged ‘Yahoo’

Alibaba’s CEO interested in buying Yahoo

October 3rd, 2011

Jack Ma, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, said on Friday at an event at Stanford University that he was interested in acquiring Yahoo, according to reports, making this the first public overture by the Chinese company which is about 40% owned by Yahoo.

John W. Spelich, vice president for international corporate affairs at the Chinese Internet giant, confirmed that Ma had said at Stanford that he was interested in acquiring Yahoo. “In response to a media question as to whether he was interested in acquiring all of Yahoo, he said he was (on behalf of Alibaba Group),” Spelich said on Monday by email.

Ma did not elaborate further, he added.

Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz was fired from her job on Sept. 6, and replaced on an interim basis by the company’s chief financial officer, Tim Morse. The company’s board said it was commencing a search for a permanent CEO and expected to engage the services of a nationally recognized executive search firm to help it identify candidates for the position as expeditiously as possible.

One of the issues for which Bartz reportedly drew flak, apart from her inability to turnaround the company, was her handling of an already difficult relationship with Alibaba Group which has managed Yahoo’s brand and services in China since 2005.

Yahoo said it was caught by surprise when it found out that Alibaba Group had spun off its Alipay online payment unit to a Chinese company controlled by Ma.

Alibaba Group officials countered saying Bartz and other officials were fully aware of Alibaba Group’s plan to divest itself of Alipay in order to meet new Chinese regulations. An agreement was eventually reached in late July over what Yahoo and other investors considered fair compensation for the loss of value from the Alipay divestiture.

Ma is also reported to have said previously that he would like to acquire Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba Group, a level of ownership which he can now achieve by acquiring Yahoo.

Privacy groups are however worried about the implication to Yahoo users if the company comes under Chinese control, according to Financial Times newspaper.

Alibaba Group runs e-commerce site Alibaba.com that was listed in 2007 on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Group company Taobao, China’s largest online retailer, was split in June into three separate companies to better address its target markets.

Source:http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220450/Alibaba_s_CEO_interested_in_buying_Yahoo

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Did Outsourcing search hurt yahoo?

December 18th, 2010

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A slide leaked by a Yahoo employee has inadvertently tipped the internet company’s hand as to its plans: reportedly, Yahoo is planning on shuttering several social sites and tools, including popular social bookmarking site Delicious as well as Alta Vista, Yahoo Buzz, AllTheWeb, MyBlogLog and the Traffic APIs. Two of these sites – Alta Vista and AllTheWeb – fall into the search category, the source of Yahoo’s origins. Despite – or rather because of – Yahoo’s participation in Bing, at least one observer sees this move as Yahoo’s final exit from search, and possibly as an independent internet company.

“The reality is that Yahoo has very little of its revenue-producing business model left after it made the decision in late August to outsource its search to Bing,” Stephen Woessner, a business professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse told the E-Commerce Times. “I suspect that many people thought that the entrance of Bing into the search market would equate to a decrease in Google’s market share – and yes, Google has experienced a slight decline. But in reality, Bing hastened the demise of Yahoo.”

What he doesn’t understand is why Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz refers to search as one of Yahoo’s strengths. “If search was a strength, then why outsource it to a competitor?”

Recent figures, though, do show Bing inflicting damage on Google, according to new data from Compete. (via MarketingCharts).

Between September and October 2010, the market share for Bing-powered search – which includes Yahoo as well as Bing – increased 8.5%, from 25.8% to 28%. Meanwhile, Google’s still-dominant market share slipped 3.4%, from 70% to 67.6%.

Google’s search share dropped even more compared to October 2009, when it stood 7% higher at 72.7% (Bing did not officially debut until June 2010). Microsoft Search represented most of Bing’s increases in monthly search share (up 12.8% from 12.5% to 14.1%), and dramatically improved in yearly search share (up 38.2% from 10.9%).

Source:-http://www.marketingvox.com/did-outsourcing-search-hurt-yahoo-048328/

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Yahoo doubles third quarter profit, but fails to impress

October 20th, 2010

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Yahoo has reported third-quarter profit of $396m (£234.5), more than double the figure for the same period a year ago.

But the results are regarded widely as lacklustre, extending a four-year slowdown that could increase pressure on chief executive Carol Bartz. Analysts said much of the quarter’s profit came from Yahoo’s sale of HotJobs.

Third quarter revenue was up just 2% from the previous year to $1.6bn, compared with Google’s recently reported 23% increase.

Yahoo expects only $1.13bn to $1.23bn in revenue for the end of year holiday season, below the average analyst estimate of $1.26bn.

In an attempt to reverse its fortunes, Yahoo is focusing on e-mail, instant messaging, news content and social networking.

Bartz has said it will take several years to revive the company, but after nearly two years, Yahoo’s business remains stagnant and its market share continues to shrink.

But Bartz has cut costs by outsourcing non-strategic services and handing over Yahoo’s search engine and related advertising to Microsoft.

The Microsoft partnership has removed the cost of maintaining search infrastructure, enabling Yahoo to focus on display advertising.

On a conference call, Bartz refused to comment on a possible bid to take Yahoo private or combine it with AOL, according to the Financial Times.

“As tempting as it is to tell you what I really think, I can’t talk about rumours,” she said. “We like our strategy, we like our progress and that’s what we are focused on.”

Yahoo’s shares were up just 1% in extended trading after the results announcement, reaching $15.65.

Source:http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/10/20/243431/Yahoo-doubles-third-quarter-profit-but-fails-to-impress.htm

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Yahoo shares surge on rumours of buyout By AOL

October 14th, 2010

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Yahoo shares surged after being fuelled by rumours of a buyout by AOL.

According to news agency Reuters, the shares jumped by almost 9 per cent after reports of a possible buyout circulated around Wall Street.

A source claimed on Wednesday that several private equity firms had approached huge media houses, including AOL and News Corp., about a possible acquisition of Yahoo.

Reuters reports that Yahoo’s stock prices went past $17 per share during the pre-market trade, but were at $16.72, up $1.47 or 9.6 per cent when the market opened for trading. The share price is the highest Yahoo has seen since May this year.

The source who revealed the news also said that the company had not been approached by private equity firms just yet.

Yahoo, which has the second most popular search engine in the world behind Google, is working hard to get back into the game by outsourcing its search services to Microsoft’s Bing and focusing more on online media content generation and online advertising.

Source:http://www.storage.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/10/14/yahoo-shares-surge-rumours-buyout-aol/

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Bing overtakes Yahoo in search

September 14th, 2010

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Microsoft Bing is now the nation’s number two search engine, as it surpassed Yahoo in terms of total share in August, according to new numbers from market watcher Nielsen. Google remains in the top spot.

For the month, Bing garnered 13.9% of all U.S. search traffic, up from 13.6% in July, according to Nielsen. Yahoo’s share over the same period declined from 14.6% to 13.1%. Google, meanwhile, made a slight gain, as its share increased from 64.2% in July to 65% in August..

That Bing has overtaken Yahoo shouldn’t be surprising. Yahoo agreed to outsource search to Microsoft under an alliance struck last year, and the integration went live Aug. 24. Bing is now serving up search results on Yahoo sites.

The integration is thus far complete only in the U.S. and Canada, with other countries to follow. Yahoo also plans to adopt Microsoft’s adCenter as its online advertising platform. Microsoft officials have said that work should be complete in the fall.

Microsoft and Yahoo announced the alliance on July 29, 2009. Under the ten-year pact, Microsoft will place its Bing search engine on all Yahoo sites and, initially, keep 12% of the revenue from Yahoo-driven searches. Yahoo will handle sales and marketing for premium search ads for both its own properties and Microsoft’s.

Also, Microsoft agreed to hire a minimum of 400 Yahoo employees on a full-time basis as it extends Bing to Yahoo’s Web sites. It also agreed to hire an additional 150 Yahoo workers to help with the transition.

Yahoo can terminate the arrangement if search traffic generated by the alliance falls below a specified percentage of rival Google’s traffic. Yahoo also retains the right to expand the partnership by adding Microsoft’s mapping and mobile search services to its Web properties.

Microsoft must submit to Yahoo copies of all data it collects from its sites while providing search services, according to SEC documents filed by the companies. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has said that, by in effect outsourcing search to Microsoft, her company can save $200 million in annual capital expenditures through reduced spending on search-related operations.

Source:http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/data_protection/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400361&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All

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Yahoo engineers talk of outsourcing to bangalore; yahoo PR disagrees

September 7th, 2010

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This has been one of the more interesting stories to track down. We got word over the weekend that Yahoo is in the process of moving large numbers of engineering jobs within the YOS group to Bangalore. Yahoo PR mostly denies this.

This includes YDN (Yahoo Developer Network, the platform for third party apps to be installed on the Yahoo home page) for the most part. And Yahoo confirms that some California based YDN engineers are being moved to other projects, calling it a “pretty minor internal shift of resources.” But At least two senior engineers were fired outright, we heard (we’re holding the names until Yahoo confirms of denies that).

The YOS (Yahoo Open Strategy) group, run by SVP Jay Rossiter, includes YDN as well as other products aimed at developers like YCW and YQL. The idea, a few years ago, was to counter Facebook platform. Only problem is the third party developers never showed up to the party.

Some of the writing has been on the wall, even in a sea of continued Yahoo defections. Neal Sample, Yahoo’s VP Social Platforms, left earlier this summer. And Cody Simms, previously Head of the Yahoo Developer Network, took a new job at Yahoo outside of Rossiter’s group.

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/yahoo-engineers-talk-of-outsourcing-to-bangalore-yahoo-pr-disagrees/

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Yahoo starts Bing transition, kills Search Monkey

August 18th, 2010

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Starting this week, searchers on Yahoo will start to see a little “Powered by Bing” message at the bottom of the results page, as the two companies start the public phase of their huge search deal completed last year.

Yahoo announced the milestone along with several updates to various search products and features that had been up in the air ever since Yahoo and Microsoft signed their search outsourcing deal just over a year ago. Under that deal, Microsoft is to provide the back-end crawling, listing, and ranking technologies that generate search results while Yahoo retains responsibility for presenting those results on search pages.

Webmasters who had worked with Yahoo search products such as BOSS (build your own search service) can breath a sigh of relief, as that product will continue, Yahoo said. However, Yahoo will start charging developers to use the service, which had previously been free.

Also, publishers who had been using Yahoo’s Search Monkey galleries and applications for highlighting search results will have to figure out a new strategy, as that product is going away. Yahoo isn’t giving up on the notion of semantic search–structured content displayed alongside crawled search results–by any means. But instead of having developers create apps for Yahoo, Web site publishers can just add enhanced listing information using standard formats–Google’s approach–and have them displayed in search results.

One potentially confusing aspect of the transition involves the fact that even though results on Yahoo pages will be powered by Microsoft, Webmasters that need to report problems or highlight new sites within Yahoo will need to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer for Yahoo pages, and Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Central for Bing pages. That’s because the transition is rolling out first in the U.S. and Canada, and it will be some time before results in other parts of the world are powered by Bing.

Source:http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20013871-265.html

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