The latest punch thrown in Yahoo!'s fight to stay relevant and avoid a take over by Microsoft is their unveiling of their new ad management software, named AMP!, which will ship this summer. Though pay-per-click text ads remain Google's (and thus the online ad industry's) bread and butter, there has been a lot of movement around online display advertising over the past year, an area which Yahoo! is currently top dog. Since the beginning of 2007, Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6 billion, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, AOL built up its Platform A with acquisitions of Tacoda, and Quigo, WPP spent $649 million to purchase 24/7 Real Media, and Yahoo! itself paid $680 million for Right Media. And now with AMP!, is Yahoo! actually opening up their ad silo?
As soon as the online press got hold of a sliver of information about Yahoo! Buzz, the predictable cries of "Digg clone!" were loud enough to drown out anyone who thought that Yahoo! Buzz might be something more than a lame attempt at socially driven news (without the social elements). While many people think that the flurry of recent launches from Yahoo! represent nothing more than a cry of desperation, I think Yahoo! Buzz, at least, sets itself apart from the rest.
Easily the biggest tech story of the past two weeks has been Microsoft's unsolicited $44 billion takeover bid for Yahoo! It's not just the enormous amount of money that has brought it so much attention (though it would rank among the biggest tech mergers of all time), but also because of how drastically the combined company would alter the Internet landscape. If Microsoft succeeds in its proposed acquisition of Yahoo!, the combined entity would be by far the most trafficked on the web and control a third of US web searches.
Since Microsoft made its $44 billion offer for Yahoo! (so far rejected), many industry veterans, including Fred Wilson
and Paul Kedrosky, have proposed ideas for Yahoo! to increase profitability, avoid a take over by Microsoft (which could potentially damage M&A activities) and stay
independent (though without search, I’d call it semi-independent). In this
article, let’s take a look at the other side of the coin and discuss a scenario which would give Microsoft the competition power it needs without
Yahoo!
The rumored launch of Yahoo!'s live video service became reality tonight at Live.Yahoo.com. I'm covering it live, in video below. It looks pretty good though early tests are experiencing scaling issues already. Apparently, the company that gets more web traffic than anyone on earth is incapable so far of handling 400 people watching 30 live video streams. Actually, a flood of early adopters just came in via Twitter and the thing promptly broke - completely as far as I can tell.
The service combines many of the best practices developed by early explorers of the medium, tiny startups that must be very worried tonight. Part BlogTV, part Mogulus and just plain better than UStream - below is a live player and some key points of differentiation. For an in depth discussion of why live video is going to be huge, see this post I wrote last year and the discussion in comments.
Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog
Forget Microsoft, News Corp. or even Apple. Nokia, the world's no.1 mobile handset maker, should buy Yahoo. Or so says Information Week's Stephen Wellman, who puts forward a compelling argument: If Nokia is repositioning itself as a Web services company, to combat falling profit margins on its hardware, then acquiring Yahoo would help to give the company a much needed presence on the desktop (not just mobile), as well as beef up its Web offerings and Internet brand recognition in general.
The takeover of Yahoo! by Microsoft is almost a foregone conclusion (see our initial reaction). Barring a bid from another suitor, such as News Corp. (not likely), eBay (even less likely), Google (no way), or a private equity firm, or a partnership with Google, most analysts seem to agree that Microsoft's bid will be accepted by Yahoo! One of the biggest hurdles in merging two massive Internet properties like these, though, is merging their gigantic and proprietary user authentication systems. There is, however, something that could save Yahoo! and Microsoft engineers from a massive headache in that regard: OpenID.
The latest podcast at ReadWriteTalk is an interview with Adam Taggart, the Director of Product Marketing in the Yahoo! Mobile Group. In the podcast, Taggart discusses with RWT host Sean Ammirati "an overall uber-message" that Yahoo! is currently pushing for Mobile Web. Taggart emphasized that Yahho's approach to mobile is all about scale:
"...we are now in the process of developing a mobile ecosystem that is intended to serve eventually billions of mobile consumers."
Two years to the month after launching its large podcast search and listening site, Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! Podcasts will cease operation on Halloween, October 31st. The site never came out of Beta before the plug was pulled. There's not much information available beyond an underlined non-link now at the top of the site reading "Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007."
Some would argue that podcasting hasn't caught on like it was expected to, that it's been dominated by existing media giants and beaten as a medium by the rise of video. I still love me a good episode from ITConversations, Briefings Direct or our own new show Read/WriteTalk when I'm walking the dog - but Yahoo! users looking for podcasts will soon have to look elsewhere. I don't know how many people ever cared for the site anyway. I hadn't looked at Yahoo! Podcasts since just a few months after it launched, when there were no RSS feeds and you had to login with a Yahoo! ID in order to download audio files instead of listening to them through a pop-up Yahoo! audio player.
The exact date of the closure seems to have fluctuated a bit already, but whenever it happens there are plenty of competitors ready to give podcast search outside of iTunes a go for themselves. See, for example, Podcast.com (from whose Tweets I found this news) and the recently funded Pluggd, who are doing some interesting speech-to-text technology for both audio and video and licensing it out to other media companies.
This evening Yahoo! is announcing two new 'hacks' that have been in development since late March. While it is tempting to write them off as two small features being incorporated into the largest Internet Property in the world, we wonder if there is more meaning here - especially given that Jerry Yang announced a 100 day strategy refresh back in July.
This week I sat down with Bradley Horowitz, VP of Yahoo's Advanced Development Division, to discuss both hacks that are launching tonight. You can listen to the full interview on Read/WriteTalk. As we talked, it became apparent that Horowitz was trying to make these hacks more symbolic. Specifically he commented:
"And even at this time, when the media has widely reported struggles and the internal challenges we have at Yahoo, the Hack spirit is very much alive. And I'm really happy to be sharing with you today a couple of innovations that I think are representative of the kind of things that we see coming out in Hack on a continual basis."
With this in mind, it is worth taking a close look at both of the 'hacks' that are launching tonight.
