Written on May 6, 2008 – 7:16 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
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Yahoo!, as expected, lost 15% of its value yesterday with more than 279,000,000 shared traded. Average volume of transaction is only 10% of that. My guess is that with that much buying and selling, their stock is actually going to rise slightly today.
In the mean time Jerry Yang, in an inclusive interview with Reuters, said that he is still open to a deal with Microsoft. According to Yang he was simply “seeking common ground when [Microsoft] abruptly ended deal talks.” and “We were negotiating a way to find common ground and then on Saturday they chose to walk away”.
Speaking for Yahoo’s biggest shareholder (they own 16% of stock), Gordon Crawford, portfolio manager for Capital Research Global Investors said “I am extremely angry at Jerry Yang and at the so-called independent board”.
This all goes to show that the Yahoo/Microsoft negotiations are far from over and we will most likely see daily updates coming in for the rest of the week here.
Written on May 4, 2008 – 1:41 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Microsoft has announced just 30 minutes ago that they have withdrawn their bid for Yahoo. Here is a letter from Steve Ballmer to all Microsoft employees and here is the official press release from from Yahoo’s Chairman Roy Bostock (not Jerry Yang).
I can’t wait to see what is going to happen on Monday when the markets open. We assume that Yahoo’s shares are going to drop significantly which will either bring Microsoft back to the table or even Google.
On Friday Microsoft reportedly upgraded its offer from $33 to something higher. Yahoo made it clear that an offer of anything less than $37 wouldn’t be acceptable.
Yahoo News reports that “Jerry Yang and David Filo, the co-founders of Sunnyvale-based Yahoo, flew to Seattle [on Saturday] morning to meet personally with Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and Kevin Johnson, who runs the software maker’s unprofitable online services division”
Everybody anticipated a deal to be announced this Monday based on the news from Microsoft’s new bid and their ongoing negotiations. Seems that things turned out quite different.
UPDATE: Want to know what it was like for David Filo and Jerry Yang to negotiate with Microsoft and have them walk away from the table? Read this great story (from Po Bronson for Wired) about the Hotmail negotiations from December 1998. It gives you great insight in how these kind of deals are negotiated and also shows that walking away from a deal is standard procedure for Microsoft.
Written on April 12, 2008 – 9:56 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Yesterday we reported that Yahoo! is thinking about partnering with AOL and using Google’s Adsense program instead of its own to boost revenue.
It is ironic that today Google AdSense is down with a “The Google AdSense website is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later. We apologize for any inconvenience” message in 27 languages. AdSense is Google’s ad-placing program. It is the program that puts ads on website and blogs. It seems that ads are being served but the site to monitor and manage them just seems down.
Google Adwords, the ad-selling system where advertisers pay money to advertise on Google or on individual websites, is still up.
UPDATE: It is a scheduled maintenance job:
Site maintenance on April 12 at 10am PDT
Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, April 12th from 10am to 2pm PDT. You won’t be able to log in to your account, but we’ll continue to serve ads to your pages and track your earnings as usual.
Located in a different time zone? Here’s the maintenance start time in a number of cities around the world:
Ottawa - 1 pm Saturday
London - 6 pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 10:30 pm Saturday
Hong Kong - 1 am Sunday
Canberra - 3 am Sunday
My suggestion to Google: put a link to that blogpost on your error page. Not every Adsense subscriber reads the Adsense blog.
Written on April 11, 2008 – 10:24 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Yahoo News is reporting that Yahoo & Time Warner are getting close to doing a deal leaving Microsoft behind. This is far from confirmed but an interesting development in this ongoing story. From the Yahoo! News article:
“The source confirmed a Wall Street Journal story saying Yahoo would receive a cash investment from Time Warner in exchange for a 20 percent stake in the combined Yahoo-AOL business. The deal would exclude AOL’s fading dial-up Internet access business and value AOL at about $10 billion.
A deal with Time Warner and AOL would be part of a multi-pronged strategy by Yahoo in which it would outsource Web search advertising operations to Google Inc (GOOG.O), the source said.”
Many readers will prefer anything above Microsoft when it comes to Yahoo and an acquisition but I’m not sure I actually like the prospect of an AOL/Yahoo merger. Once a market leader, AOL is now known more for its lack of innovation and strategic mistakes when it comes to predicting the future of the web.
AOL has the appearance of a sleeping giant.
At least Microsoft is aggressive…
Written on March 4, 2008 – 9:56 am
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
Mixi, Japan’s biggest SNS and blog, has just announced that starting 1st of April they will amend the terms of use (Japanese only) to give Mixi complete ownership and ultimate control over user generated content.
This is big News in Japan with stories on all the biggest Japanese news sites (eg. Yahoo, Livedoor). This may be a game changer in several ways for SNS in Japan.
First we will find out if Japanese users really value the sanctity of their data. History tells us that it is actually not very high on the list of concerns when big companies are involved, but very high when you are dealing with small companies. Mixi being about as big as they come in the SNS world may not cause much of a stir, but if this hits the press enough, they may be in for a backlash and a change of priorities from the users.
Second is what Mixi will do with their new found data dictatorship. Could they start using your friend’s images to advertise to you, integrate advertising into user generated content just as Facebook tried to and received a lot of backlash? Could it be just a first step into censorship as they gear up for a push into China?
I will be keeping an eye on how this shapes up… when someone the size of Mixi makes a move like this it is bound to shape the way all the other players do business.
Written on February 9, 2008 – 8:22 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
A quiet Saturday… nope. The Wall Street Journal just reported that ‘a person familiar with the situation’ says that the board of Yahoo has decided to reject the 44 billion dollar offer from Microsoft because they believe this offer undervalues the company. According to the market Yahoo is worth exactly 40.72 Billion at this moment with their stock trading close to $30.
So what is the value of Yahoo? Is Microsoft going to raise its bid? Is Yahoo just starting to play this game to get more offers from News Corp? I don’t have the answer, but I’ll be watching this weekend.
Written on February 7, 2008 – 8:05 pm
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
Today Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, VeriSign, and Google have joined the OpenID Foundation as board members. The OpenID Foundation board is there to “to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community”. OpenID is really exploding in the last couple of months. With Google and Yahoo! becoming official OpenID providers, the OpenID movement has grown to billions of users. Now the Big Five have announced to not only support OpenID as a provider but also actively help to develop the standard furthermore.
Earlier this year OpenID 2.0 has been released. This is a serious landmark in removing the burdon for web users to store loads of password and username combinations. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them.
In Europe the OpenID Europe Foundation is gathering more and more local OpenID providers to team up. Snorri Giorgetti, founder of the OpenID Europe Foundation, says Europe now contains 17 OpenID providers, varying from France to Estonia. The European Foundation is not directly connected to the OpenID foundation but is there to promote OpenID in the member countries and to support the OpenID consumer websites on a technical level.
Written on February 6, 2008 – 2:51 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Looks like Microsoft woke up AOL with their bid on Yahoo. The smaller rival has acquired two companies in two days. On February 4th they turned a long partnership with widget company Goowy Media into an acquisition and yesterday they bought online affiliate marketing network Buy.at. Both acquired companies are Ads-related, so I think we can say AOL is looking for ways to monetize their free services.
Goowy makes it possible for users to create widgets and monitor them. They also have a gallery of widgets for consumers, who can place them on blogs, social network profiles, desktops and personalized start pages. With the acquisition, AOL secures itself of a division that is a strong force in the widget market.
Buy.at is a network in which advertisers pay its web publishing members only when a click on an ad leads to an action, such as buying a product. It used to be domain redirect service that owned domains like stay.at, download.at, play.at and, officiously, buy.at.
Companies like AOL, such as Altavista, fascinate me. They used to be Internet giants who founded services that learned us to use the Internet. Almost everybody started their Internet adventures at one of these two companies. But now, Altavista seems to have vanished in the search marketing division of Yahoo, yet AOL is still alive and kicking with five acquisitions in 12 months. Probably because their mother company Time Warner sees it like an advertise spin-off of their cable company. Yahoo apparently uses Altavista’s knowledge, but isn’t promoting the brand. The last press info was released five years ago.
One of the few survivors, Yahoo, is now likely to be acquired as well. Strange, for such a young medium, Internet arouses a helluva lot nostalgic feelings.
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