Yahoo Killing Message Boards Site and Other Products

Yahoo Killing Message Boards Site and Other Products

By Unknown → Friday, December 13, 2013

The board of Yahoo Inc is weighing a sale of its core Internet business when it meets this week, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The board's meeting comes amid a broader debate about the future of the company and that of high-profile Chief Executive Marissa Mayer.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the possible sale of the Internet business late on Tuesday.

People familiar with the matter told the newspaper the board was expected to also discuss during meetings from Wednesdaythrough Friday whether to proceed with a plan to spin off more than $30 billion in shares of Alibaba Holding Group Ltd.

The company could also pursue both options, the paper said.

The company's shares were up more than 7 percent in extended trading.

Yahoo's core business, which includes popular services like Yahoo Mail and its news and sports sites, could attract private equity firms, media and telecom companies or firms like Softbank Group Corp, analysts have said in the past.

Yahoo declined to comment on the report.

The news comes as Mayer faces growing pressure over the company's performance. Mayer came to Yahoo after a long stint at Google.

Her arrival kicked off heightened expectations of a quick turnaround at Yahoo, which had struggled to grow its advertising business to compete with market leaders Google and Facebook.

Hopes of a comeback crumbled as Yahoo's plan to push mobile, video, native and social media ads - a strategy Mayer introduced in 2014 under the acronym Mavens - failed to increase revenues as desktop search ads continued to decline.

A $1.1 billion deal in 2013 to acquire social blogging site Tumblr also hit snags, with investors arguing that Mayer overpaid for an unprofitable product.

The deal lifted Yahoo's user base to about 1 billion but did not bring in advertisers.

In September, Yahoo's plans for the spinoff of its stake in Alibaba hit a roadblock when the US Internal Revenue Service denied a request to bless the transaction as a tax-free deal.

Yahoo said it planned to proceed with the spinoff despite the IRS announcement, but has not yet done so.

In November, activist investor Starboard Value LP asked Yahoo to drop plans to spin off its stake in Alibaba and urged the company to sell its core search and display advertising businesses instead.

During Mayer's 13-year tenure at Google, she led the Google Earth, Gmail and Google News teams and is credited with helping create the company's celebrated search page.

10 Actionable Trends For Mobile Marketers In 2013

10 Actionable Trends For Mobile Marketers In 2013

By Unknown →

Now one of Asia's top 10 mobile phone markets in terms of adding net subscribers, according to the chairman of GSM Asia Pacific, an alliance of GSM mobile operators. Mehboob Chowdhury spoke exclusively to bdnews24.com Technology Editor Abu Saeed Khan.

Besides, the country has added 8.945 million GSM mobile users in a single year -- from July 2005 to June 2006, according to the latest figure of GSM Association.
"It has put Bangladesh in the top tenth position among the worldwide mobile markets," Chowdhury says.

In an exclusive interview with the bdnews24.com, Chowdhury discloses that Bangladesh now ranks eighth among the top 10 Asian mobile markets in terms of adding net subscribers during January to March, 2006.

Citing the data of Informa Telecoms & Media, a London-based research firm, he says Bangladesh has had 1.265 million new users during the first quarter of 2006. The figure is slightly lower than the net addition of Thailand and Philippines combined, and marginally lower than seventh-ranked Malaysia's first quarter intake.

Vietnam, fifth on the list, has added more than two million mobile subscribers during this period, but its total clientele was smaller than what Bangladesh had in the first quarter of 2006.

The chairman of GSM Asia Pacific credits the cellular mobile operators with this achievement while being critical of the government's "pounding the industry with disruptive policies."

"When the operators made new connections affordable and started slashing the call charges; the government came up with this disastrous tax last year. It was a bolt from the blue (for the operators) that slowed down the market for a while."

The operators, however, turned things around by subsidising this "mindless tax" to revive the growth. The new 8.945 million GSM mobile users that have put Bangladesh in the global map is the result of the operators' continuous subsidy, Chowdhury points out.

Make Better Presentations With the Instagram for Pitch Decks

Make Better Presentations With the Instagram for Pitch Decks

By Unknown →

Facebook will pay $1 billion in cash and stock for Instagram, a 2-year-old photo-sharing application developer, in its largest-ever acquisition just months before the No. 1 social media website is expected to go public.

SAN FRANCISCO, Apr 10 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Facebook will pay $1 billion in cash and stock for Instagram, a 2-year-old photo-sharing application developer, in its largest-ever acquisition just months before the No. 1 social media website is expected to go public.

The price was stunning for an apps-maker without any significant revenue, even when measured by the lofty standards of Silicon Valley, where startup valuations have soared in recent years. It highlights the rising stakes in the social networking market in which services such as Facebook need to constantly excite consumers with new features and mobile applications.

By acquiring Instagram - in a deal announced days after the startup closed a funding round that valued it at $500 million - Facebook may also have sought to absorb a potential rival or at least prevent it from falling into the hands of a major competitor like Twitter or Google Inc.

"Anytime you see a social platform that's growing that quickly, that's got to be cause to be nervous," said Paul Buchheit, a partner at the start-up incubator program Y Combinator and a co-founder of FriendFeed, which Facebook acquired in 2009.

"It would be better to have bought Twitter at this stage," he said of Facebook. "So if you're thinking this could be the next Twitter, it could be a smart thing to do."

The Instagram application, which allows users to add filters and effects to pictures taken on their iPhone and Android devices and to share those photos with their friends, has gained about 30 million users since it launched in January 2011.

Instagram says that as of the end of 2011, its users had uploaded some 400 million photos or about 60 pix per second, suggesting the sort of activity that Facebook seeks as it tries to wring revenue from mobile devices. Instagram launched its Android app just last week, garnering more than one million downloads already.

As Instagram's popularity has shot up in recent months, the company's leadership has mulled possible strategies to expand the service into a fully featured social network - much like a photo-driven, stripped-down version of Facebook, Twitter, or even Path, a company insider said.

Instagram is "a property that would have been amazingly valuable to not just Facebook, certainly Twitter was in the hunt as well," said Lou Kerner, founder of the Social Internet Fund.

"I'm sure Google was interested as well. So to some degree an acquisition like this is both offensive and defensive. It would be a highly leveragable asset for anybody who wanted to compete against Facebook."

Does Apple Ever Regret Making The iPad Mini?

Does Apple Ever Regret Making The iPad Mini?

By Unknown →

Samsung fought until the bitter end to avoid paying Apple, but the company now says it will finally hand over the more than $548 million it owes for infringing the patents and designs of its biggest smartphone rival.

In papers filed in federal court in San Jose, California on Thursday, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said it will make the payment by Dec 14 if Apple Inc sends an invoice on Friday.

Asked if it had done so, Apple declined to comment on Friday.

The payment comes after a US appeals court last May reduced a $930 million judgment against Samsung by $382 million, stemming from a 2012 verdict for infringing Apple patents and copying the look of the iPhone.

Another trial over remaining damages relating to some of Samsung's infringing products in the case is set to go ahead next spring.

Even though the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC had authorised damages to Apple in May, Samsung again appealed the final figure to the same court, and was rebuffed twice more.

Now agreeing to pay, Samsung told the San Jose court that it expects to be reimbursed if it eventually succeeds in a forthcoming appeal to the US Supreme Court over its liability for copying the patented designs of the surface, bezel and user interface of the iPhone, which accounted for $399 million of the total award.

South Korea-based Samsung also said it reserved the right to be reimbursed in the future if a decision by the US Patent and Trademark Office invalidating one of the Apple patents in the case, related to touchscreen gestures, is upheld.

Apple intends to appeal that ruling and said in court documents it "disputes Samsung's asserted rights to reimbursement."

"We are disappointed that the court has agreed to proceed with Apple's grossly exaggerated damages claims regardless of whether the patents are valid," a Samsung spokeswoman said in a statement.

Plotter Turns the Map on Your iPhone Into a Social Discovery Tool

Plotter Turns the Map on Your iPhone Into a Social Discovery Tool

By Unknown → Friday, October 4, 2013

The iPhone 5 -- thinner, lighter and with a 4-inch screen – goes on sale in stores across the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia, with mobile carriers reporting record demand that looked likely to stretch Apple's supply capacity.

The iPhone 5 -- thinner, lighter and with a 4-inch screen -- went on sale in stores across the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia, with mobile carriers reporting record demand that looked likely to stretch Apple's supply capacity.

"The line for the iPhone 5 was 70 percent greater than the line for the iPhone 4S despite Apple taking two (times) as many online pre-orders," said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. He expects Apple to sell 8 million of the new smartphones over the weekend.

The long lines of excited buyers prompted optimism on Wall Street. Deutsche Bank raised its target on Apple stock to $850 from $775, saying "demand indicators are tracking very strongly."

The iPhone is Apple's highest-margin product and accounts for half of the company's annual revenue. Apple shares were up 0.5 percent to $702 in afternoon trading in New York.

JPMorgan estimates the phone could provide a $3.2 billion boost to the US economy in the fourth quarter - a boost almost equal to the whole economy of Fiji.

Apple's rival and component supplier, Samsung Electronics Co, tried to spoil the party, saying it plans to add the iPhone 5 to its existing patent lawsuits against Apple.

Apple began taking pre-orders for the iPhone 5 last Friday and booked more than 2 million orders in the first 24 hours - double the first-day sales of the previous iPhone, the 4S. Shipping time for online orders is three to four weeks.

Prices for the iPhone 5 start at $199 for a 16 GB model and range as high as $399 for a 64 GB model.

As Apple began delivering the new phone, struggling competitor Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry, had to admit that it was once again having service problems in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The iPhone 5 supports faster 4G mobile networks and also comes with a number of software updates, including Apple's new in-house maps feature, which is based on Dutch navigation equipment and digital map maker TomTom's map data.

But not everyone was impressed. Some users criticized the maps feature for a number of geographical errors, missing information, and a lack of features.

And not everyone was thrilled with Apple's success.

Hundreds of French iPhone fans lining up at Apple's main store in Paris got an earful from disgruntled store employees and others protesting against Apple policies.

Marching in front of the Paris store were about 20 former staffers of independent Apple distributors that closed after struggling to compete with Apple's own stores. Joining them were three Apple store employees striking to protest Apple's refusal to offer staffers meal vouchers and a yearly bonus of an extra month's pay - perks that are standard for many French workers.

In San Francisco, Apple store worker Cory Moll, who is seeking to start a union and is the founder of the Apple Workers Retail Union initiative, stood outside the main downtown store with a placard showing his support for the French workers and those who assemble Apple products in Asia.

The line of buyers at the store wound around several blocks.