While the tech blogosphere was in a tizzy last week, some outraged, most envious over the firing and massive golden parachute that Yahoo’s Henrique de Castro received, they missed the larger story: de Castro was not the “dead man walking.” Yahoo is the dead man walking. Gleeful rubbernecking by industry watchers won’t change the company’s fortunes.
Outraged that Yahoo dropped so much on an executive who failed at his job? Surprised that Yahoo paid so much for Tumblr? The desperate always pay too much. de Castro and Tumblr’s David Karp are, I suspect, only the first of many scavengers who will feast on Yahoo’s bones. "Yahoo is the Detroit of web properties." Ouch. But so apt.]]>
"I immediately got email addressed to the [former] account owner and the nature of them made me uncomfortable," Harris said in an interview, noting that a number of emails were from men looking to meet up with a woman.
In the following weeks, Harris was sent emails from department stores, including emailed receipts from recent purchases at Nordstrom. He also received timecards that detailed mileage reimbursements and included the former account holder's name and address.
"It seemed odd to me that this email was coming from all over. It's clear that while the owner supposedly hadn't logged in in a while, she was still actively giving out that email address," Harris said. Terrible idea, Yahoo.]]>
His new role at Yahoo is architect and senior principal engineer on the company’s mobile team, according to LinkedIn, yet another in a string of hires and acquisitions the company has made to bulk up its mobile team over the past year under CEO Marissa Mayer’s leadership. Google upset Queru, its Android open source evangelist, by teaming with a chip company which didn't open source the drivers for the new Nexus 7.]]>
One year ago the aging Internet laggard's fortunes suddenly seemed brighter: It recruited the prominent Google executive. Overnight, Yahoo was splashed across headlines: not for its past foibles and failures, but for new hope that it could stage a comeback.
But in attempting to make Yahoo cool again, Mayer faces a central challenge that stumped all of her predecessors: how to put an end to the steady, years-long decline in advertising revenue and the daily drubbing from competitors Google and Facebook.]]>
That apparent revelation prompted dozens of news articles in the last few days describing the practice as "creepy" or "freaking people out." One wondered if it was an "aggressive invasion of privacy."
The only problem is that Yahoo hasn't, well, actually changed its policy. At all. A version of Yahoo Mail's terms of service adopted in 2011 gives the company the right to "scan and analyze all incoming and outgoing communications content sent and received from your account" and use the profile to "match and serve targeted advertising" to you…
This week's controversy underscores how short memories have become in the modern Internet era: the same privacy flap occurred in June 2011, when Yahoo actually adopted the policy in effect today that permits email to be scanned.]]>
Acquiring Summly seems to have been an almost incidental side effect of a deal Yahoo made with SRI for a piece of "summarization technology."
A source tells us that Yahoo has "agreements in place" with SRI for "knowledge transfer," and the acquisition of IP, code, and technology. Until Yahoo bought it, SRI International held equity in Summly.
SRI once held equity in another startup that was acquired by a big Silicon Valley company. That was Siri, which was funded by SRI International's venture arm, and was later acquired by Apple.
And indeed, inside Yahoo, Summly is called "Yahoo's Siri." Hmm.]]>
…The craziest thing is that there are a lot of really qualified, CS-beefy teams doing really amazing things in the mobile news/discovery space these days - and that would definitely take a $30m acquisition offer or less. I don't really understand why they picked this one. Includes a walkthrough of how the negotiations may have gone.]]>
“I think that’s it’s really important,” Mayer said of competing on mobile. “If you look at what’s happening in terms of the shift to mobile, the number of mobile phones and smartphones in the world has tripled in five years. Tablet sales will outsell laptops this coming year, if predictions hold true,” she added. As someone else observed, it's hard to win if you're in a three-legged race.]]>
"One of the really important things for Yahoo's strategy moving forward is mobile," she said. "So it was really important that our engineers, our salespeople, really everyone throughout our whole organization really understand Android, iPhones, and, you know, Windows 8 and really get a sense of what's happening there and how to create an amazing experience... so we decided we wanted to get everyone upgraded to smartphones."BURN. As you might imagine, Crackberry's readers aren't delighted at being dissed in this way.]]>
Under Mayer’s plan, sources said, there will be new measurements of performance instituted, based on a variety of benchmarks and evaluations, in order to better understand who the best employees at Yahoo are.
Once that is complete, the company is likely to begin cutbacks on compensation for the bottom 20 percent, including moving them out of Yahoo entirely. The company has suffered many rounds of layoffs over the years, which hurt morale badly due to the often haphazard nature of the cuts. Sounds like stack ranking - the thing that turned Microsoft into a rats' nest of politicking.]]>
In data for October released by ComScore, Gmail saw 287.9m unique worldwide visitors during the period, edging out Microsoft's Hotmail, which finished with 286.2m unique visitors. The findings were first reported by GigaOm.
In third place was Yahoo, the once mighty e-mail power, with 281.7m, according to ComScore. Will Windows 8's drive to get people to use Hotmail addresses reverse that?]]>
“In an act of radical transparency that will be a tradition moving forward,” Mayer promised that she will go over the slides — which are usually not shared widely — of her “strategy and vision” that she presented at the board meeting on Friday.
“We want to offer you transparency into what happens at the board level as well as guidance as to where the company is going,” Mayer noted.
Kudos to that! (And send all that transparency my way, please!)
Mayer also said in the memo that she will have another all-hands meeting on October 1, where she will begin “rolling out a new system and process for goals for the company,” including annual goals that will be tracked and graded — first on a company level, then to departments, teams and, finally, individuals.]]>
We have taken swift action and have now fixed this vulnerability, deployed additional security measures for affected Yahoo! users, enhanced our underlying security controls and are in the process of notifying affected users. In addition, we will continue to take significant measures to protect our users and their data. There was something about the file that was odd: none of the contributors seemed very active. Which this confirms. Even so, bad policy by Associated Content to leave a plaintext password file lying around.]]>
• 2,295: The number of times a sequential list of numbers was used, with "123456" by far being the most popular password. There were several other instances where the numbers were reversed, or a few letters were added in a token effort to mix things up.
• 160: The number of times "111111" is used as a password, which is only marginally better than a sequential list of numbers. The similarly creative "000000" is used 71 times.
But in a month's time they were going to change it to 000001, right?]]>
But, said sources inside and outside the company, it appears to be coming down to a contest between interim CEO Ross Levinsohn and Hulu CEO Jason Kilar. Aren't you just thrilling at the white-hot rivalry for... oh, forget it.]]>
Polonetsky recalls conversations within the online ad industry about "not wanting to do things like targeting users based on donor history" because "all of that was considered far too sensitive and likely to alarm users and set off privacy concerns."
"Today, those barriers have been leapt over with abandon," he said. Google and Facebook don't sell access to details of users' political alignment, though Facebook will allow campaigns targeted at predefined groups of voters.
Would data protection laws stop this in Europe? (Thanks @modelportfolio2003 for initial pointer.)]]>
Instead Yahoo will focus on the properties that contribute the most engagement and revenue — news, finance, sports, entertainment and mail. R&D and resources will go to owned-and-operated sites, halting third-party efforts. Among the things that new chief executive Scott Thompson says aren't working is the alliance with Microsoft, which provides search via Bing. That's a big problem for Microsoft.]]>