Yahoo To Buy Tumblr For $1.1 Billion
Yahoo has agreed to buy the popular blogging service Tumblr for about $1.1 billion in cash. This purchase surpassing Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram last year.
Currently Tumblr host 180 million blogs and 217m global users in the past month.
Yahoo Weather iPhone App Looks Awesome
With a new female CEO from Google, Yahoo is spending more money into developing mobile apps as people spend more time consuming content on smartphones and tablets. The latest Yahoo Weather iPhone app looks quite good with the ability to show Flickr photo of weather locations. Although iPhone already has a default Yahoo default app, the standalone new app from Yahoo looks better with improved UI and functionality. Check it out and download on iTunes Store for free.
Google’s Marissa Mayer Jump Ship To Yahoo As CEO
Yahoo has appointed Google executive Marissa Mayer to be its next CEO. Marissa has been a long time Google Web-search executive and helped design the look of the now-dominant search engine. Mayer becomes Yahoo’s sixth CEO in five years. She has a computer-science master’s degree from Stanford University.
AOL Revealed Project Phoenix New E-Mail Client
AOL is trying to jump ahead of the Facebook announcement of new e-mail client by revealing their Project Phoenix Email. Looking at the beta version, it closely resembled Google GMail. The new AOL e-mail will allow you to migrate your email accounts from Yahoo, GMail and MSN.
The full AOL Project Phoenix release will come in 2011. AOL will offer other domains like ygm.com, love.com, wow.com, and games.com.
Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal Gets Green Light
Antitrust regulators in the U.S. and European Commission have given the green light to allow Yahoo to use Microsoft Bing search for a slice of ad revenue. Yahoo will focus on attracting big advertisers and share the revenue with Microsoft.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said, Yahoo gets to do what we do best: combine our science and technology with compelling content to build personally relevant online experiences to our users and customers.
Closer Look At Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo
Nick Bilton of the New York Times did a great summary comparing the big four tech company, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo. Check out the chart.
Source: A Big-Picture Look at Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo
YouTube Improves Accessibility With Automatic Caption
Google adds automatic caption to YouTube using the same technology as Google Voice. Now you can automatically add text captions to videos using speech recognition.
From Google Blog: As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they’re looking for.
Yahoo Adds Photos, Tweets To News
Yahoo is seen to be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon when the company includes tweets, photos and videos to news stories. Microsoft and Google had earlier announced plans to incorporate tweets into their search results.
Yahoo Geocities Shut Down Today
Geocities existed 15 years ago and most people probably forgotten about this web service which was purchased Yahoo for $2.8 billion in 1999. Yahoo stopped any new member registration earlier this year and today Yahoo will pull the plug on the service.
GeoCities allowed anyone to build a custom Web page for free and reserved a small amount of virtual storage to keep pictures and documents. Current Geocities users can move over to Yahoo! Web Hosting service.
Yahoo Finally Sucked In By Microsoft
Yahoo will soon join up with Microsoft in a new search deal. Yahoo will give up Yahoo Search and will start using Microsoft Bing for search engine. All the other Yahoo Services remain intact.
According to CommScore, Google has a 65% share of the U.S. search market, compared with Yahoo’s 19.6% and Microsoft’s 8.4%.
