As many expected, Yahoo today announced that it acquired the social media service Tumblr for $1.1 Billion in a cash deal this morning. Yahoo has promised not to ‘screw [Tumblr] up,’ and to let it run as an independently operated business. Yahoo’s first move, however, has been to move its official blog to yahoo.tumblr.com. Yahoo estimates that the deal will expand its audience by 50% and its overall traffic by 20%. The company plans to wire its personalization and search into Tumblr’s massive collection of blogs, and the companies will work in tandem on “seamless advertising oportunities.”
Tag: Yahoo
Yahoo Partners With Twitter For News Feed Integration
In an effort to update its offerings, Yahoo has partnered with Twitter to integrate tweets from a number of major news sources into its homepage news feed. This comes on the heels of a major brand overhaul by CEO Marissa Mayer, focused on maximizing personalization of the brand’s products. There has been little chatter about how this upgrade actually applies to Yahoo’s personalization goals, but with their many startup purchases and branding overhaul in progress, big things appear to be on the horizon for Yahoo.
Google Acquires Wavii
Much like Yahoo’s Summly acquisition one month ago, another althrothmic-based, natural-language processing startup that serves short summaries of articles has been snapped up, this time by Google. The Seattle startup Wavii not only fulfills a similar function to Summly, but it also gathers and processes pure online data into summarized bits. The acquisition was confirmed today by Wavii CEO Adrian Aoun. Reports indicate that Google paid more than $30 million for the startup, which will be shutting down to work within Google’s platform, probably very similarly to the way in which Summly now features inside Yahoo.
Yahoo Homepage Redesign
Yahoo has revamped its homepage under the new direction of CEO Marissa Mayer. The new site has focused on personalization, adding a newsfeed that serves articles based on user preferences and social activity. The redesign hopes to deliver more relevant content which should improve ad revenues and revitalize the internet giant.
Marissa Mayer Makes First Yahoo Acquisition: Stamped
New era of digital publishing
The personal digital publishing revolution has been happening for awhile. But a few announcements today make it clear that the wheels of progress are turning faster than ever before. And, that we’re getting closer to the plug-and-play-don’t-make-me-think-open-standards era.
First, at Google’s developer conference, the search and Web giant presented its “intentions” with HTML 5. Continue reading “New era of digital publishing”
CES 2009: Yahoo’s Connected TV
Yahoo announced this week at CES that its content and widgets would be made available across a variety of new internet connected televisions from the likes of Samsung, Sony, LG and Vizio. Users can enable the widgets by just connecting their TV to the Internet and choose from content providers like Flickr, Showtime, MySpace, eBay and others. See a demo here.
CES 2009: Famed blogger on ’09 trends
I caught up with All Things D and bigwig industry reporter Kara Swisher at CES today. Swisher moderated a panel called “What will they think of next, Consumer Technology in 2025” that featured panelists including VPs from Lenovo, Intel, and Qualcomm. After the panel and a little “Where-in-the-world-is-Yahoo” guilty-pleasure chatter* between us, Swisher shared a few thoughts on trends in online and emerging media for the coming year–and if she thinks there is a fail-safe place for advertisers to hedge their sacred bets this year:
Other than this insight from Swisher, the main takeaways from the panelists was four-fold:
