Valleywag
yahoo
Posts Tagged “
Yahoo, Acquisitions
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yahoo
acquisitions
Electronic Arts gives Take-Two shareholders the Yahoo flu
Take-Two Interactive, the marketer of Grand Theft Auto and various sports videogames, has watched its stock price plummet to $16.99 on the news that Electronic Arts has decided to quit trying to buy the company for $26 a share. Much like Yahoo's drop after Microsoft took an offer off the table, Take-Two's shares are headed south of where they were when EA initially made an offer. I'm counting the days until a third company meets the same fate and I get to write the obligatory trend piece.
acquisitions
eBay trying to buy into billion-dollar Korean auctioneer
eBay, having failed to catch on in the heavily-wired nation of South Korea, is in talks with Korean site Gmarket. A few days ago, Gmarket announced Q2 sales of nearly $1 billion, which generated $35 million in revenue. Yahoo bought 10 percent of the company in 2006 for approximately $60 million. [NYT]
acquisitions
Yahoo holds lead over Microsoft in bidding for hot '90s dotcom startup AOL
When it releases its second-quarter numbers Wednesday, Time Warner will also announce it's ready to dump AOL's dialup business. A combination of modem banks, CD-ROM mailers, and ruthless telemarketers which introduced America to the information superhighway in the 1990s, AOL's ISP business still has more than 8 million subscribers who pay through the nose for a quaintly overpriced service. What will be left: A collection of websites and an online-advertising business that has yet to get advertisers to pay anything even vaguely overpriced. Time Warner has flirted with Yahoo and Microsoft for years, but hasn't yet sealed a deal to get rid of AOL, the business which, on paper, acquired Time Warner at the turn of the millennium. More »
Mancrush
Downright adorable Flickr founder wishes Microsoft had bought Yahoo
In an interview with ZDNet, Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield says that he wished Microsoft's bid for Yahoo had gone through — and that the now-scuppered deal wasn't the reason he resigned from Yahoo earlier this month. "Once the ball was rolling I would have rather seen the acquisition happen, he said. "I think a lot of damage was done to Yahoo." The admission will likely shock the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site's faithful core of hardcore fans, who created satirical Microsoft Flickr logos in response to the software giant's bid. Butterfield also implies that Flickr would have been better off under Google's ownership, since that company was more willing to spend on speculative ventures. It's not a purely hypothetical question: Google was very interested in buying Flickr, but the search engine hesitated, and Yahoo ended up buying Flickr instead. I could go on analyzing Butterfield's comments, but I've become too distracted by a Flickr search of photos which demonstrate how fricking cute he is. The results: More »
rumormonger
Yahoo acquisition of GitHub stalled by shareholder fracas?
We hear that some Yahoo executives charged with developer relations, in their eagerness to reach more programmers and have them hook their software into Yahoo services, have been talking to source-code repository GitHub about an acquisition. GitHub's intended audience, programmer Ted Dziuba explains, is "people who spray their shorts over Git because it was invented by Linus Torvalds," the inventor of Linux; it's an alternative to Subversion, a tool for managing software's source code. But this move to fold a community of Torvalds fanboys into Yahoo has been stalled by the recent unpleasantness with Carl Icahn. All acquisitions are on hold until the next board meeting, champions of a GitHub acquisition have been told. Just as well; this deal sounds like a nonstarter, which should be killed for reasons beyond testy shareholders. Yahoo has enough gits as it is.
rumormonger
ValueClick to buy Revenue Science?
Behavioral targeting is all the rage in online advertising. The technology aims to show ads to Internet users based on the sites they visit and the actions they perform, rather than targeting words they search for, as Google does, or matching advertisers' desired demographics to a site's audience, as most banner-ad purchasers do today. ValueClick has introduced its own product, in competition with AOL's Tacoda and Yahoo's BlueLithium. But ValueClick's executives may not be particularly confident in the product — if rumors are true that they're talking to startup Revenue Science about an acquisition. Revenue Science has raised more than $70 million in venture capital, and recently appointed former ValueClick executive Jeff Hirsch as its CEO.
yahoo
Jerry Yang's Olympic dreams
With the Icahn business settled, Jerry Yang can move on to more important questions: For example, is he going to the Beijing Olympics? A week ago, he hadn't quite made up his mind.The dithering was utterly characteristic for the perennially indecisive Yahoo cofounder. But you'd think he could commit to a no-brainer like attending the Games. Yang is a Taiwanese native, and no fan of the Communist regime — China's jailing of a blogger, aided by Yahoo China's handover of email records, led to a humiliating session where he was called to the carpet in front of Congress. But the Beijing Olympics is a seminal event in the rise of Asia, where Yahoo has significant investments — one of the few areas where it has an edge on Google. More »
yahoo
Chipper Yang's latest memo: "Hi guys!"
Legg Mason portfolio manager saved Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's job this morning, and far be it from the always-exclamatory Yang to hide his relief. Yang recorded a companywide video address, and reading a transcript filed with the SEC, we can't help but wonder if Yahoo's lawyers missed a few exclamation marks. "Hi guys," the transcript begins — but we're betting it sounded more like "Hi guys!!!!11!!!!" More »
quotable
