Oh Yahoo!, you silly ol’ thing! According to an email that just came in from Yahoo’s digital marketing agency Something Massive, the struggling content company (platform company? advertising company?) wants us to talk about, tweet about and Facebook about their Yahoo! News Activity feature, and in return it’s promising lots of links and SEO juice. In case we forgot what Yahoo! News is, they helpfully linked to a TechCrunch post detailing the service’s social upgrade in September.
Well, here you go, Yahoo. You’re welcome. Can you please send over those half a million impressions you promised now? (P.S. By the way, “TechCrunch” is all one word.) → Read More
Salim Ismail has one of the liveliest minds and most eclectic resumes in the Valley. The founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder of a number of interesting start-ups including Angstro and PubSub Concepts, he was also a VP at Yahoo! where he launched and ran Brickhouse, their internal incubator.
So, borrowing a familiar work from ex Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, I asked Ismail if Yahoo! was now fucked. Yes, he confirmed, it was. And so, he added, was AOL and most other companies struggling to reinvent themselves in today’s increasingly brutal competitive landscape.
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Yahoo and ABC just wrapped up a press conference at ABC’s Times Square studio to announce a major partnership between the two companies: they’re launching a new ‘News and Information Alliance’ that will see ABC News get a much more prominent presence throughout Yahoo. ABC News will also be launching several ‘web-first’ video series’ that will be appearing on Yahoo.
In short, Yahoo is reinventing its news site: ABC is bringing the premium content to the table, Yahoo is bringing its 100 million users.
A video played at the beginning of the conference made the mission clear: Yahoo and ABC News are gunning for CNN and other online news portals like The Huffington Post. To do that, Yahoo is augmenting its news articles with content produced by ABC News, including several new ‘web-first’ digital series featuring ABC News’s anchors. → Read More
Today at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford, Alibaba Groups’s Jack Ma replied to a pointed question about buying Yahoo with, “We are very interested in Yahoo. Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo and Yahoo is important to us … All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.”
Those “serious buyers” most likely include Alibaba Group investor Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft and Andreesen Horowitz, who have all reportedly reached out to Yahoo’s board.
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Million dollar question is not: will you use the revamped social bookmarking service? But rather, will your mom, sister, and that dorky teenage kid from across the street use it?
As you may have heard, Delicious was saved from Yahoo’s incompetent hands by AVOS, the new startup created by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, in April 2011.
Today, AVOS is relaunching Delicious, which they say was “rebuilt from the ground up”. → Read More
Yahoo News, one of the most popular news portals on the web, is deepening its integration with Facebook. Yahoo has formed integrations with the social network in the past with its products, but we’re told this is one of the most in-depth implementations to date. That’s because Yahoo is working with Facebook’s open graph to integrate your friends’ activity into your Yahoo News experience.
The new Yahoo News friends’ activity feature lets people discover and connect around the news and information they are enjoying on Yahoo through updates on Facebook. Once Facebook users opt-in to sharing conte, you’ll be able to see your Facebook friends’ on Yahoo News and the recent articles they’ve read. People’s activity will also be featured back on their Facebook profile as it happens. → Read More
Is there anything Samsung doesn’t do? The same week I bought myself a shiny new Galaxy S II, they launched a solar-powered netbook for use in the developing world. Unlike any American or European company, Samsung Electronics manufactures smartphones and their memory chips, TVs and their screens, computers and their hard drives. They’re the only entity that’s both arms dealer and aggressor in the midst of the biggest arms race the tech world has ever seen. (Meanwhile, their sister companies in the Samsung Group build ships and skyscrapers, sell life insurance, and operate theme parks.) Their revenue exceeds that of Apple or Microsoft, and their global reach is unparalleled.
Sure, they’re fighting a massive patent war with Apple around the world – but at the same time, every iPhone is 26% Samsung; even if they lose every legal battle, every iPad/iPhone/iTouch sale will still cha-ching in part into Samsung’s coffers. Their flagship phones and devices are Android, but they also maintain their own entirely separate Bada smartphone platform, and have even kept their fingers in the MeeGo pie. Oh, yes, and they’re also apparently launching a Windows 8 tablet any day now. Six months ago this seemed like a pointless lack of focus — but now that Google has bought Motorola, and there’s a real risk of other Android vendors becoming second-class citizens, it seems like wise long-term thinking. → Read More
Carol Bartz is officially out as the President and CEO of Yahoo. In an email this afternoon to Yahoo employees, Bartz, who has been in the top role at Yahoo since January 2009, confirmed that she’d been fired by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board, Roy Bostock, by phone call. At least it wasn’t via text message.
Kara Swisher of AllThingsD initially broke the news of Bartz’s departure. Yahoo has since confirmed that Tim Morse, who joined Yahoo from Altera as the company’s new CFO in June, will become Interim CEO as Yahoo searches for a permanent replacement. Morse will also continue to serve as CFO during the interim. → Read More
At any company level, the board of directors has a direct impact on the organization’s product strategy, hiring, fundraising and much more. And startups have to be very selective in choosing board members who will advise the company in the right direction. In the big company realm, both the media and the company’s shareholders have questioned Yahoo’s board, which continues to employ a floundering Carol Bartz as CEO and supports a bizarre product and business strategy. Then you look at Facebook, where founder Marc Zuckerberg has strategically assembled an all-star board to help the company grow as a public company and expand into new directions. Most recently, Facebook added Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings to its board, joining Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Donald E. Graham, Peter Thiel and Zuck himself. Hastings not only will add his experience in taking a web company public, but he will also help Facebook navigate potential movie and TV show streaming opportunities. Facebook has a rock solid board—almost every member has been a strong innovator in the past few decades.
The fact is that the board plays an extremely important role in some of the major events for any company with shareholders. The board helps manage and make decisions about financing, acquisitions, product strategy and even an IPO. So it goes without saying that entrepreneurs are faced with challenging decisions assembling a board. For big public companies, this has always been the case, but the role of the board at startups is also changing. I interviewed a handful of early-stage investors—Jeff Clavier, Keith Rabois, Dave McClure, and Paul Lee—to find out what startup founders should know about picking and managing a board. → Read More
The latest version of Yahoo Mail opened up to users a few months ago and the company is announcing a new milestone today—100 million monthly active users.
Additional features in the new version of Yahoo Mail include integrated notifications and messages from Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and other email providers within the interface. Yahoo has also made the client more customizable with 50 themes, improved search and made the client is speedier. Within Yahoo Mail, users can also use IM clients from Yahoo, Facebook, and Windows Live. → Read More
The buzz in photography circles this past weekend was a post by Thomas Hawk declaring “Flickr is Dead.” It’s not the first time we’ve heard this attention-grabbing headline. By the numbers, it’s hard to call a photo sharing site with more than 5 billion photos “dead” just yet, and Hawk admits it will take time. But, Yahoo-owned Flickr is facing increasing competition and influential photographers are choosing to upload elsewhere. → Read More
For many years I loved Yahoo Finance. It was one of the only sites I used every single day, and the only Yahoo property I used with any regularity at all. But increasingly, I get angry when I go to the site.
So from now on I’m throwing my support (read: eyeballs) behind a lesser-known Chicago-based company called YCharts in Don Quixote-like hopes that one of two things happens: Yahoo eventually gets under fire enough it fixes its product or someone else (hopefully YCharts) finally builds a great alternative for free, detailed, reliable financial information. → Read More
It’s time for TechCrunched, where we take some of the most popular stories running on TechCrunch and put them together for you in a quick video package. This week was a big one for Apple, with stellar earnings and new products. Google+ took the iTunes App sStore by storm. And Zillow had a big IPO. If something grabs your attention, make sure to click on the links below to get more information.
Also, we’ve created a TechCrunched podcast so you can download episodes and subscribe on iTunes. → Read More
While Yahoo! remains the best positioned digital media company around, Wall Street remains unconvinced.
Yahoo!’s revenues are not growing as fast as other online media companies (GOOG, AMZN, Facebook, etc). Moreover, between Facebook’s grip on display ad inventory and DSPs changing the way advertisers buy inventory, Yahoo’s core business (display, reach) is under threat → Read More
Yahoo just reported second quarter earnings today. The company reported that GAAP revenue(excluding traffic acquisition costs) was $1.08 billion for the second quarter of 2011, a 5 percent decrease from the second quarter of 2010. Yahoo says that this decrease was primarily due to the change in revenue from the Search Agreement and the associated revenue share with Microsoft.
But net earnings per diluted share increased 18 percent to $0.18 in the second quarter of 2011, compared to $0.15 in the second quarter of 2010. Net Income came in at $237 million, which is up 11 percent from the same quarter in 2010. Analysts expected $0.18 per share and $1.1 billion in revenue in the second quarter. → Read More
The combined search market share of Microsoft’s Bing and Bing-powered Yahoo (AKA BingHoo!) keeps creeping up. The latest market share figures from comScore’s qSearch service are out, and the combined BingHoo! climbed to 30.2 percent market share of total explicit searches (excluding the effects of slideshows, contextual search, and Google Instant), up 0.2 percent from May. Google remained steady at 65.5 percent share.
When you drill down into the data, Bing keeps adding share (up 0.3 point to 14.4 percent), and Yahoo seems to have stabilized at 15.9 percent for the last three months. And Bing’s year-over-year growth in market share is an impressive 41 percent, compared to 6.4 percent growth for Google. That’s not a bad growth rate for Bing two years after launch. → Read More
Mark Zuckerberg may be the most followed user on Google+, but good luck trying to find any of your Facebook friends on Google’s new social service. Facebook is making it difficult for anyone to import their friend contact information into Google+. There is no direct contact import feature such as there is for Yahoo or Hotmail, and Facebook is clamping down on third-party services that made it easy to bring your Facebook friends into Google+.
Over the weekend, Facebook blocked a Google Chrome extension called the Facebook Friend Exporter. And in fact, Facebook changed its OAuth 2.0 API in such a way that it “suddenly removed email addresses from the queries without warning,” says Owen Mundy, creator of Give Me My Data. Other data can still be exported, just not your friends’ email addresses. There still might be one back door open to sneak your Facebook friends into Google+. And that’s Yahoo. → Read More
As Mike Arrington wrote back in April, it can sometimes feel like certain photo-sharing websites have more of a hostage-taking approach to their business models than a “lets-please-the-customer” model. The photo-sharing experience then effectively becomes synonymous with platform lock-in — if you try to leave, you may not be able to take your images with you. Or, if you do, you’ll have to pay the price, Budnick. (But, wait, whose photos are they again? Oh, right.)
It’s for this reason that Jaisen Mathai is building an open source photo-sharing service called, you bet, OpenPhoto. → Read More
A new study by Yahoo (embedded below) shows that online video watching habits are shifting. People are watching longer videos and watching more at night during primetime. The chart above shows when people watch videos online. The blue line is today (2011) and the dotted line is two years ago (2009). The two lines show more than a 30 percent divergence during primetime.
So what changed? Peak online video viewing today is during prime time, between 6 PM and 9 PM. Only two years ago, prime time showed the biggest dip in online video viewing as people turned off their computers and turned on their TVs. But now, more people are streaming TV shows and movies from services like Netflix and Hulu, and they tend to watch those videos during the same time period they previously watched regular TV. While people may not yet be cord cutting, this data suggests that online watching does encroach upon regular cable and satellite TV watching. → Read More
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