Archive for the ‘Yahoo’ Category

Google’s Marissa Mayer to helm Yahoo from Tuesday

Tuesday, July 17th, 2012

In a surprise move, Yahoo has hired Google’s vice president from rival Google to be its fifth CEO in four years. 37-year-old Marissa Mayer will take over today from interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

37-year-old Marissa Mayer takes over as Yahoo CEO on Tuesday.

37-year-old Marissa Mayer takes over as Yahoo CEO on Tuesday.

Marissa Mayer was one of Google’s earliest employees and first female engineer. She joined Google in 1999 as its 20th employee.

“Her challenge will also be wooing advertisers that have shifted marketing budgets away from Yahoo,” reports Bloomberg.

Her appointment is seen to signal Yahoo’s desire to re-establish its web presence in the presence of onslaughts from relative newcomers Google, Facebook and Twitter.

In being hired by Yahoo, Mayer pipped hot contender – the interim CEO Ross Levinsohn – who had taken custody of Yahoo when Scott Thompson resigned in May over inaccuracies in his academic record.

Mayer is the therefore the third Yahoo CEO in less than one year.

Yahoo’s sales tumbled 21 percent to $4.98 billion last year. They had peaked at $7.21 billion in 2008, according to Bloomberg. The company is reporting its second-quarter earnings tomorrow.

Jerry Yang quits Yahoo! for good

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Looks like Jerry Yang has quit Yahoo! for good.

Jerry Yang. Photo from www.bloomberg.com. Photographer: Matthew Staver

Jerry Yang. Photo from www.bloomberg.com.

Bloomberg has just reported that:

Yahoo! Inc said co-founder Jerry Yang resigned from the board and all other positions, two weeks after the company announced new leadership under Chief Executive Officer Scott Thompson. The shares rose in extended trading.

I guess the time has come for new blood to lead the company forward.

Don’t think investors will ever forgive Yang for rejecting Microsoft’s acquisition offer for US$47.5 billion in January 2009.

It’s now worth US$19 billion.

Quick summary of IT company results

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

It’s been a busy few days of earnings results from IT bigwigs. Here’s a quick sum-up of the state of the IT industry:

Brisk days of results from Apple, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, RIM BlackBerry, Amazon, and IBMYahoo! did well with profits beating estimates – could it be because expectations were low?

Conversely, Apple didn’t do so good, missing analysts’ predictions for the first time in at least six years – but that’s probably because expectations were so high!

Google’s doing real well with sales and profit beating estimates – from search advertising growth as usual.

Microsoft is patting itself on its back – for not having bought Yahoo! back in 2008. And taking a swipe at Google’s Android – Steve Balmer says you need to be a computer scientist to use an Android smart phone, unlike Windows Phone 7.

RIM’s still trying to find its way forward by taking a step backward – trying to bridge new QNX with “old” BlackBerry OS 7 – hope that works out.

Amazon is being sued for screwing up the career of an actress by revealing her real age against her will in IMDb.

On the corporate IT front, industry bell weather IBM missed analysts’ estimates on slowing revenue growth at its software, hardware and services businesses.

Akamai helps visualize World IPv6 Day

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Akamai has announced that it will provide a real-time data visualization of IPv6 Web traffic served from its global platform on World IPv6 Day on 8 June 2011. The visualization will show the pattern of traffic served during the 24-hour period.

Akamai is the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online.Hundreds of websites and Internet service providers around the world are joining Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai, and Limelight Networks as participants in World IPv6 Day for the first global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6, being organized by the Internet Society.

During World IPv6 Day on 8 June 2011, more than 225 participating organizations from every part of the globe will enable IPv6 on their main services for 24 hours. With IPv4 addresses running out this year, the industry must act quickly to accelerate full IPv6 adoption or risk increased costs and limited functionality online for Internet users everywhere.

World IPv6 Day participants are coming together to help motivate organizations across the industry—Internet service providers, hardware manufacturers, operating system vendors and other web companies—to prepare their services for the transition.

“We see this test flight as an important step towards ensuring the global Internet can continue to grow and evolve so that it can connect billions of new users and devices,” said Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society.One of the goals of World IPv6 Day is to expose potential issues under controlled conditions and address them as soon as possible. Given the diversity of technology that powers the Internet, the global nature of the trial is crucial to identify unforeseen problems.

The vast majority of users should be able to access services as usual, but in rare cases, misconfigured or misbehaving network equipment, particularly in home networks, may impair access to participating websites during the trial.
“We’ve been working to make Google services publicly accessible over IPv6 since 2008, because we believe it’s critical to the long-term prosperity of the open Internet,” said Erik Kline, IPv6 Software Engineer at Google.
Current estimates are that 99.95% of users will experience no problems connecting to web services on IPv6 Day, and participating organizations will be working together with operating system manufacturers, home router vendors and ISPs to minimize the number of users affected.

The Internet Society is supporting World IPv6 Day as part of its efforts to accelerate IPv6 deployment. IPv6, the successor to the protocol currently used on the Internet, was designed in the late 1990s but has not seen deployment on a global scale. With IPv4 address space running out, the industry cannot afford to wait much longer.