Written on February 4, 2008 – 12:07 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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As Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 stated two days ago, not writing about the bid of Microsoft on Yahoo means losing the ‘media/tech blogger license’. Yet since Boris already wrote an thorough analysis about the possible deal on The Next Web Blog, I prefer to just give you an update on the latest developments.
Google Alliance
Yesterday a source familiar with Yahoo’s strategy said that the company is considering a business alliance with Google ‘as a way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft’.
Read more on Reuters
Poison Pill
Microsoft may end up disappointed since Yahoo has some defense at its disposal should Microsoft’s bid turn hostile. In 2001 the tech company adopted a poison pill. This is a defense mechanism that makes an offer incredibly expensive by giving shareholders the right to to convert their shares into a large number of common shares.
Read more on Yahoo News
Google’s Reaction
This is actually funny, Google is desperately holding on to their ‘do no evil’ credo, even when it comes to.. competition. The pot calls the kettle black.
Read more on Google’s blog
Microsoft reacts to Google
Microsoft responded quickly on Google’s accusation. General Counsel Brad Smith said: “The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and on-line advertising.”
Read more on TechCrunch
Eleven dreams and nightmares
If one giant tries to take over another giant, everybody starts fantasizing about what this might cause. So does one of America’s largest newspapers.
Read more on The Washington Post
Written on February 1, 2008 – 2:15 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Everybody is talking about it: Microsoft today made an offer to buy Yahoo for 44.6 Billion. Just last week we discussed buying some options for Yahoo because its stock was trading around 20 dollars. Now the web is buzzing with the news.
We heard the news while attending a Lunch2.0 at eBuddy. Several phones suddenly started beeping buzzing and ringing and suddenly eBuddy CEO Onno Bakker brought up Yahoo Finance on the big monitor where seconds ago we were still looking at a presentation. Its main headline was “Microsoft Offers $44.6B for Yahoo“. Within seconds everybody was talking about it. One entrepreneur told me “Just imagining Microsoft owning Yahoo gives me goosebumps. I don’t like it at all”. Others were less negative and pointed out the benefits of strong competition for Google.
Patrick pointed out that we heard similar (but wrong) rumors while we visited Yahoo Brickhouse in San Francisco last year where they told us to just ignore it. Inside Yahoo they called it ‘the dance’. They explained that every year Yahoo and Microsoft people get together to talk about working together which always lead to rumors but never turned out to be anything.
Based on that story I’m assuming this public offer by Microsoft is actually the result of extensive talks between Microsoft and Yahoo. The Yahoo Finance story speaks of a ’surprise offer’ but since we know Microsoft and Yahoo have been getting together regularly in the past few years this probably isn’t really that much of a surprise to Yahoo. It also is hard to imagine that Microsoft would make such a bold public offer if it didn’t already know the answer.
My prediction: Yahoo will resist a little, put up a little fight and then give in and accept the offer.
Written on January 31, 2008 – 12:11 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
The Yahoo! OpenID (beta) which was announced earlier this month has just been launched. You can try it out right away. This is expected to move the OpenID movement ahead considerably. All 250 million members of Yahoo are now able to log in to any website, not just Yahoo, that supports OpenID 2.0.
At this moment you can find very limited list at Yahoo which I hope will be expanded soon.
I have been testing OpenID login with Wordpress.com who also offers OpenID. Right now it seems Wordpress has a more attractive offer than Yahoo. At Yahoo my OpenID URL is:
https://me.yahoo.com/a/rEOH03k2oZKSWDlu_x22Z12oud0-
While at Wordpress.com it is:
http://bomega.wordpress.com
I think I prefer the Wordpress version…
UPDATE: It is possible to change your Yahoo identifier URL into something more easy to remember. I overlooked this possibility when I checked the service yesterday. This means that my Yahoo identifier is now https://me.yahoo.com/openidboris. I still think http://bomega.wordpress.com is easier to remember. Thank you Adam for pointing this out to me.
Written on January 27, 2008 – 5:04 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Three weeks ago we brought you the news about Reddit users making fun of Network Solutions’ domain front running. They checked domains like Networksolutionsisstaffedbyterrorists.com, which the service immediately registered. Although this was funny news, the problem itself isn’t. Last year, CEO and founder of GoDaddy Bob Parsons explained on his blog how big the problem is:
The domain name tasting and kiting industry is alive, well and running rampant. The practice of domain tasting and kiting continues to rage out-of-control. In February 2007, 55.1 million domain names were registered. Of those, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept. With the exception of just a few names, 93.5% of those names were registered simply to see how much advertising revenue – paid by big search firms like our “do no evil” friends at Google – will generate when they are associated with a one page Web site and related links.
As you can read, Parsons wasn’t really fond of the way Google made the practice of domain name tasting profitable. That will change now, and Google will gain some ‘do no evil’ points. Because the number one in online advertising will make it harder for the front running companies to show up in the search results. Over the next few weeks, Google will look up names that are repeatedly claimed and dropped in a five-day period. They will be excluded from the Adsense program, so that they won’t generate advertising revenue.
“We believe that this policy will have a positive impact for users and domain purchasers across the Web,” Google spokesman Brandon McCormick told to the Associated Press.
Fighting side-by-side with Google are Yahoo, Dell and BMW, who have filed federal lawsuits against domain name tasting companies that conflicted with their trademarks. It’s not hard to imagine that all these major companies will be able to ban out the shameless act of domain front running.
And to make the story even better, you can still have fun with the ‘mindless monkeys‘ at Network Solutions.
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
Written on January 23, 2008 – 9:49 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
“Yahoo hasn’t given up on search yet”
Yahoo, maybe in an effort to distract us from the massive layoffs coming up next week, has just announced that they have updated their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. In case you didn’t know, Yahoo hasn’t given up on search yet and has a decent search engine itself. The update is taking some time which means that we may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. So far, nobody is complaining yet.
“most of these names are completely unfamiliar”
And then there are all the other Google alternatives that have news. Russian based Quintura was recently named named the Alternative Search Engine of the Year by AltSearchEngines.com. The interesting thing about this list is that most of these names are completely unknown to most of us. Here is a list of 100 search engines who work day and night to become the Google Killer but they can’t seem to make an impression. As the author of the article mentions “At the beginning of 2007, the five major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask) had at least 95% of the search “pie” (it could be as much as 98.3%). At the end of 2007, the same five major search engines, with slight individual changes, still had at least 95% of the search “pie.””. So, as expected, search is a damn hard market to enter.
Techcrunch reports about Twingly, a Swedish company launching in a month or two, which will focus solely on european blog search. I have met the founders of Twingly at Le Web last year and we will do a more detailed interview with them once they actually launch and there is news to report.
“Google lost a whopping $40 Billion in market cap”
Oh, and entering the search market is damn hard but staying there can be tough too. Google lost a whopping $40 Billion in market cap since its stock reached a $747 high in early November. Today it lost another $37.95 (or 6.49%) and is currently hovering around $540. I guess being the number one search engine in the world isn’t all peaches and cream either.
Written on January 20, 2008 – 5:07 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
2008 is going to be an extremely exciting year for Yahoo. With Jerry Yang back as CEO, massive layoffs coming up, the integration of Delicious into their search results and their traffic dipping below that of Google (see graph below) again for the first time since the end of 2006 a lot of people are wondering what 2008 will bring for Yahoo. Or they just wonder if their stock will ever recover again and are waiting anxiously for the earnings announcements on January 29 in little more than a week.
Alley Insider claims to have access to an insider at Yahoo who told them that if the stock price doesn’t rise above $20 per share before the 29th Yahoo will fire 1,500 to 2,500 employees. Earlier this week Techcrunch reported that about 250 employees at Yahoo had been asked to turn in their computers. Yahoo has more than 11,000 employees so firing a large percentage like this will sure have a huge effect on the company as a whole. That might be precisely the effect that Yang is after as he is perceived as too much of a nice guy to run such a mammoth of a company. Taking harsh decisions like this might signal a much needed change at Yahoo, or simply the signs of a death struggle and nothing more than an attempt to please shareholders.
Either way, Yahoo shall not go silently into the night or give up without a fight. And why should they? They still have a market cap of more than 27 billion and are the number 1 news source on the web, Flickr is catching up to Photobucket and Yahoo Mail (with more than 250 million users) is still THE number 1 webmail solution.
The first thing Yahoo should work on is its image. They appear to have lost everything to Google. Unless it can change this perception it might turn into reality. After all, perception IS reality.
Traffic results for Yahoo.com VS Google.com over the last three years:
Yahoo stock price over the last 3 months:
Written on January 14, 2008 – 3:10 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As you might know, this blog has WebTipr’s all over the world who tip us whenever something interesting happens in their country. Today, Yaniv Solnik from Israel emailed me that Yahoo is entering the Israeli market. They’re opening a new research and development office in the Matam high-tech park in Haifa, next to rivals Google and Microsoft.
In an attempt to break the dominant position of Google, Yahoo is partnering with Israeli’s leading portal Walla. Yahoo’s search engine will be embedded in the portal. The remarkable thing is that search engine’s name will remain the same: Walla Search. This implies that Yahoo is purely aiming for the search-advertising market and not so much for brand recognition.
This development in some ways supports Jimmy Wales’ statement about quality search he made in an interview I had with him recently, where he argued that quality search is becoming a commodity. Perhaps it’s no longer necessary to market a search engine on its own because every big engine out there has a certain quality by now. It’s just about getting a piece of the search-advertising pie.
And the pie is pretty good in Israel: the Israeli Internet advertising was estimated at $90 million in 2007, 10% of the total advertising. Of this figure, search engine advertising took about half, $40-50 million, the large majority of which went to Google. There’s also a lot of technical talent in Israel, with companies such as Incredimail and ICQ being spawned from that location.
So what’s next? Will Yahoo do the same in other countries?
[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]
Written on January 12, 2008 – 12:02 am
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
As we already in 2008, it’s a good time to look back and see how much the Internet landscape has changed in the last year in Japan.
Internationally there have been some big shakeups, led by the dramatic effects of the meteoric rise of Facebook to prominence, both good and bad. On these shores, too, there has been plenty of online action, so we’ve rounded up some of the events that have reshaped the Japanese Internet landscape this year.
The big hit
Nico Nico Douga
Any discussion about the top Internet stories of 2007 starts and finishes with Nico Nico Douga. This video-sharing site is uniquely Japanese, blending online video-sharing with user-created, short chat-like text comments that are synced to the movies, allowing whole conversations to flow across the frame. The type of content has ranged from the crude to the incredibly insightful and inventive, and some users have even subtitled music videos with the song’s lyrics. The videos themselves are a geek’s paradise, consisting mainly of anime, video-game footage and videos of young ladies. The unique format and addictive nature of the Web site has millions tuned in, giving it one of the most dramatic growth surges ever as it went from a January launch to become the seventh-most visited Web site in Japan as of December, according to global site-ranking service Alexa.com.
Mobile gaming gets the big company treatment
Disney Wonder Days
Following in the footsteps of the innovative 2006 avatar-based mobile-gaming platform MobaGe-Town, this April Disney threw in its hat with a big press push and its own avatar-based game and social-interaction platform. Disney Wonder Days capitalized on the brand popularity and makes its money from monthly subscriptions. The range of games is pretty slick and offers Disney fans a healthy selection of characters. What it represented mostly was media giant Disney jumping into the mobile social media space to capture the hugely lucrative children’s market. You know the scene is changing when the big names get involved. (more…)
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