Tag Archives: yahoo

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Yahoo’s Mayer Dismisses COO de Castro

Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO)’s Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer has made headlines again, but this time not about her work ethics or quirky personality. Mayer is firing one of Yahoo’s top people, Henrique de Castro, who has been the Chief Operating Officer for the company for the past 14 months due to disappointment with his attempts at boosting growth, according to people in the know.

The employees of the company were notified of Meyer’s decision through a memo in which Mayer informed them that she came to the decision of dismissing de Castro. People familiar with the company have said that the friction between the two executives has been heating up over the last six months.

Ever since Mayer took the helm of Yahoo in her much publicised switch from Google in July 2012, she has been trying to reinvent the waning company so it could compete with the younger and more innovative corporations such as Google Inc. (GOOG) and Facebook Inc. (FB). A slew of redesigns and transformations, however, affecting everything from products, to email, to advertising and more, have not as yet been translated into profits. Analysts, in fact, anticipate that the company’s spreadsheets will show a 1 percent drop for 2013, while at the same time predicting a e percent for this year and the coming one.

De Castro’s departure, which was announced yesterday, takes effect today with no replacement having been named by the company. Whatever de Castro’s efficiency level may have been, however, the news are bad for the company right now, as his removal leaves a huge hole in the executive team that will have to be properly patched up before normal operations resume smoothly once again.

And if you’re feeling bad about de Castro loosing his high-profile job in such a short notice, here are some facts that may change your mind. According to Equilar Inc., in the 14 months that he has been with Yahoo, de Castro has amassed a fortune of $109 million in salary, stock awards, bonus, compensation for leaving Google and severance payments. Not bad for a little over a year’s work!

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Could Aviate Hurt Google?

Just when you might have been asking yourself who could hurt Google, Yahoo has just announced its acquisition of Aviate. Aviate is a company that provides contextual app search and organisation for mobile phone users. Contextual search is fast becoming the ‘big thing’ with the major tech brands with Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Apple and Facebook all having contextual or search efforts in progress. So how exactly does contextual searching work?

Basically, this way of conducting a search differs from the regular search we are all familiar with on Google by trying to anticipate what you really mean or want based on cues in your past searches or in other stores of data the search tool has access to. It’s not simply about matching keywords and ranking incoming links. Aviate will organise the apps on your phone’s home screen according to its best guess at what you need to see right now. It can suggest music apps in your car, fitness apps in the gym, bringing you what you need when you need it. If, for example, you have a history of looking up stocks on your phone, Aviate can make it possible for you to wake up to a homescreen of stock quotes instead of having to scroll for an app.

Yahoo is currently working at addressing the current issue of multiple apps whereby most of us end up downloading loads of them but use only a few, as well as having to scroll through several screens of unused or irrelevant apps to get the one that you need. The future of contextual search does however, seem assured.

Such a search product is likely to sit in front of Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store by trying to locate stuff for you before you reach for those other search functions. What the competition will offer regarding similar search solutions remains to be seen but we’re in no doubt that Aviate will take off!

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Who Has 1 Billion Users And Is About To Overtake Facebook?

It’s not Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. It’s a company that most people in the West don’t know. That, however, is set to change, with the explosive growth of China’s Tencent and its mobile messaging app WeChat…Last week, Facebook, the current king of social networks, admitted that it’s losing teen users and that the overall growth in its monthly active users has slowed to 18% year-on-year. This isn’t helped by the fact that it and other Western social networks are banned in China. By contrast, Tencent recently announced that WeChat’s users have almost tripled from the 85 million of the year before. And Tencent’s reach unlike local Twitter-equivalent Sina Weibo and Facebook-equivalent RenRen is not just restricted to China. In just four months between May and September 2013, its overseas users have doubled from 50m to 100m. Tencent has managed to differentiate its product with some killer features that keep users coming back for more. WeChat has neatly fused together the open approach of social networks such as Twitter, where anyone can follow anybody, and more closed networks such as Facebook which rely on mutual friend connections. With a $101bn US market cap, Tencent joins Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon among the world’s most valuable internet companies. It is looking like Tencent will overtake Facebook, although partly because China’s population is bigger and partly because it has an unfair advantage over Western competitors blocked out of the Chinese market. This needs to change. Predictions for the next few years are that Tencent will build a significant global business of great value: with products and brands we’ll increasingly come to know, interact with – and maybe even love. That’s our ten cent’s worth!

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$253 Million in the Bank, Yeah!

Yahoo! Inc. has just signed a $1.1 billion acquisition deal with the popular blogging platform Tumblr Inc. David Karp, the 26 year-old CEO, who created Tumblr back in 2007, will remain at the helm of the company, and also gets to pocket $253 million in cash from the deal. He signed off his message announcing the Yahoo buy-out with “F**k Yeah”, a popular phrase at the young social media start-up, and an indication that he plans to keep the cheeky irreverence that the Tumblr brand has become synonymous with.

“Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our road map isn’t changing,” Karp insisted. “Our mission, to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve, certainly isn’t changing.”

Karp, a Bronx High School drop-out who has still yet to receive his high school diploma, moved to Tokyo by himself at 17 and founded the company upon his return in 2007. It has since seen an explosion in popularity among teenagers and twenty-somethings.

For Yahoo the acquisition is the costliest it has made in years. The pressure is now on for the company’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, to successfully monetise Tumblr without pushing away its ardent fanbase, many of whom support Tumblr because of its alternative flavour and stance against intrusive advertising. Karp himself has been outspoken about his company’s dislike of internet advertising, saying: “it really turns our stomachs” in a 2010 interview. If a balance is struck it could see a new period of growth for Tumblr, which despite its popularity has yet to break even, let alone make a profit.

Yesterday after the announcement was made Yahoo’s stock rose by 0.2 percent to $26.58 per share.

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