Tag: Yahoo

Yahoo Acquires Tumblr for $1.1 Billion

Posted on by Lab Team

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.” 

Yahoo Partners With Twitter For News Feed Integration

Posted on by Lab Team

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

Posted on by Lab Team

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.