Late last year, Yahoo filed for a trademark on the phrase “Yahoo Axis.” The filing raised more questions than answers at the time, but after six months Yahoo has finally spilled the proverbial beans — Axis is both a new search-oriented add-on for your web browser, and a new browser app for iOS.
Before I talk about what it’s like to actually use Axis, let’s first discuss why the hell they’re doing this in the first place. TechCrunch spoke to Yahoo’s Director of Product Management Ethan Batraski, and he told us his his job has been to figure out what search looks like over the next few years. Yahoo Axis was one of his answers.
“No one’s innovated on ‘How do I get rid of the search results page altogether’”, Batraski said. “That is what we want to do.”
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Well, after days and days of nothing, suddenly things are moving at a fast clip. After news came out just hours ago that Thompson might be leaving the company tomorrow, moments ago Yahoo officially confirmed the news, as we reported earlier: Ross Levinsohn is now interim Chief Executive Officer, replacing Scott Thompson, and Fred Amoroso is chairman of the board.
Scott Thompson’s departure and the reasons for it are not mentioned at all in the statement, which simply says he has left the company. (Earlier a report in AllThingsD had said he would resign for personal reasons, although at least in this statement nothing at all is mentioned for why he has left.)
The announcement from Yahoo also underscores how activist shareholder Third Point is very much a key player in all of this.
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We’re still confirming the news with Yahoo but AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher is reporting that as of tomorrow, Scott Thompson will be leaving his role as CEO of Yahoo, and getting replaced, on an interim basis, by Ross Levinsohn, currently the global media head. Update: Thompson’s now officially out and Levinsohn’s in. Read the updated report here.
Thompson’s position has been mired in controversy since news broke the other week that he had lied about his qualifications — and that situation seemed to be going from bad to worse as the company failed to act on the news in any significant way — and Thompson remained in control. Some may even find the method in which he is finally going unsatisfactory: the company will apparently cite “personal reasons” for his departure, according to AllThingsD.
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What’s the penalty for lying on a resume? It’s an important question for new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, after his PR department offered up the laughable excuse that he made “an inadvertent error” on Yahoo’s website and in an SEC filing claiming he had a Computer Science degree. TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon just wrote this should cost him his new job. At Yahoo, the penalty could include “immediate discharge”. → Read More
You may not know this but Yahoo still operates a product called Yahoo Small Business, which provides SMBs and sites with web hosting, domain name registration, web site design templates, e-commerce solutions and more. In fact, Yahoo says that it has helped millions of businesses get online and grow their presence on the web. Today, the company is debuting a new marketing dashboard to give users additional insight into online reputation, web metrics and more.
As the company explains, the new tool allows small businesses to analyze website metrics and maintain accurate and comprehensive business listings across the Web. For example, the dashboard enables social media monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, including on Yelp, Yahoo and others. → Read More
In the past few months, Facebook’s patent portfolio has grown exponentially as a result of acquisitions of patent portfolios from IBM and Microsoft. After acquiring 650 AOL patents and patent applications from Microsoft, the company now has approximately 1,400 patent assets. Amazingly, only 46 of these assets (24 issued patents and 22 published applications) were originally filed by Facebook.
In recent years, Facebook has consistently looked to the outside to augment its IP holdings with strategic acquisitions of patent assets. The company paid 40 million for the Friendster social networking patent portfolio, acquired a group of patents from Walker Digital, and another from Hewlett-Packard. These deals expanded the portfolio to approximately 160 patent assets prior to Yahoo’s lawsuit being filed. After Facebook’s IPO decision, and the subsequent patent suit by Yahoo, Facebook has kicked its patent acquisition program into overdrive. → Read More
Today Yahoo hit Facebook with five big counter-counterclaims designed to invalidate the patents cited in the social network’s infringement countersuit. If the court concurs, Facebook could be left wide-open in settlement negotiations, and might have to pay Yahoo a hefty sum of cash and/or stock.
Specifically, the old web portal claims that after it sued for patent infringement, Facebook bought patents ”for purposes of retaliation”. Therefore they don’t meet the U.S. Patent Office’s “Duty of Disclosure, Candor, and Good Faith” and should be thrown out of Facebook’s countersuit against Yahoo.
Yahoo also claims Facebook broke their agreement to inform each other of IP issues, couldn’t legally know if Yahoo was violating its patents, and that several of Facebook’s new patents were illegally filed. Finally, Yahoo filed two more advertising patent infringement claims against Facebook that look to be quite incriminating. Here’s breakdown of the five claims and how they’ll influence the outcome of the case. → Read More
Facebook had a choice to make: With just 56 patents to its name at the start of 2012 it could pay its way out of Yahoo’s infringement lawsuit with gobs of money and remain vulnerable to other patent attacks, or make a long-term investment into an intellectual property portfolio it could protect itself with for years to come.
Facebook has wisely taken the second path, upping its patent stockpile to over 1,400 with today’s $550 million cash purchase and licensing of 650 AOL patents from Microsoft today. These new patents cover email, instant messaging , web browsing, search, ads, mobile, and e-commerce, according to a source with direct knowledge of the purchase.
Surely, Facebook might have gotten better deals on this cache from Microsoft and the package of 75o patents it bought from IBM had it not been so desperate, but better late than never. Now with a healthy patent portfolio that I break down below, Facebook may be able to stop scrambling to buy IP, and can fend off the attack of any who would spoil and suck money from its IPO. → Read More
Yahoo today reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2012, and after three years of declining annual revenues, the company looks like it may just be on track to stop the streak — or at least slow it down.
Yahoo posted first quarter revenue on a GAAP basis of $1.22 billion, up one percent from the $1.2 billion in GAAP revenue Yahoo reported in the first quarter of 2011 (which itself was down 25 percent year-over-year from its Q1 2010 revenue.) This is the first time Yahoo revenues have grown on a year-over-year basis since the third quarter of 2008.
At the bottom line, Yahoo’s performance was solid, with net income of $286 million, up 28 percent year-over-year from the $223 million the company reported in Q1 2011. Net earnings were 17 cents per diluted share. Overall, these results are largely in line with what Wall Street analysts expected from the company. → Read More
One would guess that the big Yahoo layoff-reorganization includes a culling of some the company’s weaker properties — and yes, we’re hearing today that this includes Music and possibly Movies, popular sites that don’t monetize well.
Word has been leaking out since last week, when Digital Music News wrote a well-sourced article that didn’t make the situation sound good. “Will there be a music-dot-yahoo-dot-com?,” it quoted one person as saying. “Yes. But will it be integral to the future success to Yahoo? No. Has the traffic been good? No. Has this content been consistently interesting to advertisers? No.” → Read More
One week after Yahoo announced that it would lay off 2,000 employees, the company has now confirmed the second part of its restructuring: a reorganization that puts the company’s assets into three new business units — consumer, regions and technology, with at least one operation put to the side for a potential sale.
The announcement, revealed to the company in an all-hands meeting as well as an internal memo earlier today (first published by AllThingsD), was not released in a public statement, but TechCrunch understands that Scott Thompson, Yahoo’s new CEO, has put three different functions within the consumer division: media, “connections” (interactive and social businesses) and commerce. Regions meanwhile will oversee all of Yahoo’s ad business. And technology will provide the “science” and infrastructure that will underpin how the first two work. → Read More
Last week, Yahoo announced that it would cut 2,000 jobs. Given the employee shortage in Silicon Valley, most of the qualified engineers that lost their jobs in this round of cuts will likely land on their feet pretty quickly. For those who just had enough of the Valley, though, Detroit-based Quicken Loans and its family of companies is offering these former Yahoo employees (and anybody else who wants to apply) a chance to move to the Motor City to “be part of something really big.” Quicken, together with Detroit Venture Partners, Rockbridge Growth Equity and Fathead.com, has set up ValleytoDetroit.com to entice Silicon Valley engineers to apply for jobs at their companies and move to Detroit. → Read More
This just in: one chapter of AOL’s patent journey is coming to an end. The company is selling 800 patents to Microsoft for just north of $1 billion: $1.056 billion in cash to be exact.
Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL (which owns TechCrunch), says that the company will continue to hold on to about 300 patents and patent applications after the sale. These span “core and strategic technologies” around advertising, search and content generation, he noted in a memo to employees. [Full memo below the break.] → Read More
Facebook has executed a masterful response to Yahoo’s patent trolling that protects it legally but still makes it look like the victim. Here I examine how for almost every patent Yahoo claims Facebook infringes upon, the social network has countersued with a stronger, more specific patent for content feed sorting, advertising, and privacy.
Facebook will maintain the moral high ground, and likely bypass a costly settlement. But there’s none of Facebook’s blood in the water, nothing for the sharks to circle. It could have gone much worse. → Read More
Yahoo has made its massive round of layoffs official. The company just released a statement saying that 2,000 jobs have been cut, or 14 percent of it total workforce (which was previously around 14,000). We’ve pasted the release below.
“Today’s actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! – smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require. We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal,” said Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson. “Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate positions. We deeply value our people and all they’ve contributed to Yahoo!.” → Read More
Well, it’s been an eventful last few months for Yahoo, hasn’t it? Remember it was just six months ago that Carol Bartz was fired from her position as CEO, and the Yahoo Board created a circle of elders to decide the company’s fate. Then, early this year, Scott Thompson (formerly of PayPal) was appointed CEO, and Yahoo Co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down from the board in mid-January. Then, a month later, Yahoo officially announced its plans to go after Facebook.
Today, the activity continues, as Yahoo has announced it is appointing three new independent board directors, whose roles become effective on April 5. This is all in spite of the fact that Dan Loeb and Third Point have been trying to drum up shareholder support in favor of their own roster of board members — they don’t think Yahoo’s current board has what it takes to pick the right people to turn the company around. Today’s new appointees include: John D. Hayes, EVP & CMO of AmEx, Peter Liguori, former COO of Discovery Communications and Chairman and President of Entertainment at Fox Broadcasting, and Thomas McInerney, the outgoing CFO of IAC. → Read More
Facebook, according to reports, is buying up a boatload of patents from IBM — 750 in all — that will help the company shore up against potential attacks from other companies claiming the huge social network infringes on their intellectual property.
But for the past couple of years, Facebook has already been taking steps to build up its patent portfolio through the acquisition of patents from a host of other players, from large IT companies, to a patent troll and a defunct social network. And a few surprises. → Read More
For those who may have thought that last week’s patent lawsuit filed by Yahoo against Facebook was a one-off, here are some developments that indicate that we may be seeing more of this to come:
Facebook has now been sued by Mitel, an Ottawa, Canada-based enterprise IT company; and there is emerging evidence of others, including AOL, filing fresh patent applications to cover ever more aspects of social media services. → Read More
Movie ticket seller Fandango is announcing a partnership with Yahoo today that will see it becoming the online and mobile movie ticketer for Yahoo! Movies, a service which now has over 30 million U.S. users according to comScore. The new collaboration offers Yahoo users access to Fandango’s 20,000 screens across the U.S. and will support purchases online, on mobile and on tablets.
Fandango, which added support for PayPal back in December, says that January and February have been the two best-selling months in the company’s history. Much of that increase in usage is apparently coming from mobile devices. Fandango says that 40% of its visitors come from mobile devices, including both phones and tablets.
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Most of the patents that Yahoo is suing Facebook over are for vague concepts that underly a wide variety of web services, but one is for a much more specific protocol that Facebook definitely employs: seamless communication between email and instant messaging users.
If the other patents are ruled invalid for being too broad to enforce, it’s maybe this Patent 7406501 that could stick. Facebook could need a separate defense or answer to this complaint, or it could be forced into a settlement to close the case prior its IPO. → Read More
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