Yahoo Shareholders Aim To Reignite Microsoft Deal

The Los Angeles Times reports, “Yahoo Inc. shareholders are so mad about the company’s failure to cut a deal with Microsoft Corp. that several said they would consider a proxy fight to oust Chief Executive Jerry Yang and Yahoo’s board of directors if that would bring the Seattle suitor back to the table.” An opposing board slate “would get ‘overwhelming’ support from shareholders, said Larry Haverty, portfolio manager with Gamco Investors Inc., whose funds own 1.2 million shares apiece in Yahoo and Microsoft.” The Times continues, “But time is not on their side. In an apparent effort to blunt the shareholder firestorm, Yahoo on Monday set its annual meeting for July 3, giving investors little time to nominate a slate.” On Tuesday, “several large Yahoo shareholders burned up the phone lines in a campaign to persuade Yahoo’s independent board members to reconsider Microsoft’s offer. They also made overtures to Microsoft, which withdrew its sweetened $47.5-billion offer over the weekend.”
The AP reported, “After fending off months of threats by Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc.’s directors still will have to fight for their jobs as the company’s own irate shareholders plot a mutiny. … ‘We are hoping to turn that (meeting) into ‘Independence Day’ for Yahoo’s shareholders,’ said Eric Jackson, president of Ironfire Capital.”
The Financial Times reports, “Hopes that Yahoo would be forced back to the negotiating table with Microsoft lifted its shares in heavy trading yesterday, with the stock rising 5.54 per cent by the close in New York.” The share price rebound “follows strong criticism of Yahoo from some of its biggest shareholders, who have argued that it was wrong to hold out so strongly for a price of $37 a share from Microsoft, which had offered $33 a share.”
The Christian Science Monitor reports, “After the collapse of Microsoft’s acquisition bid and the plunge in its stock Monday, Yahoo’s management is now under pressure to avert a shareholder revolt. Some shareholders simply decided to sell. One activist investor called for the overthrow of the current board. Others are pursuing shareholder lawsuit, with more expected.” The Monitor notes, “The possibility that disillusioned shareholders may sell or overturn the board, however, puts pressure on Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang to give them some hope of a turnaround. That might involve wooing a different buyer, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Or, Yahoo may continue to pursue a partnership with Google.”
James B. Stewart, a columnist for SmartMoney magazine, writes at the Wall Street Journal, “As a Yahoo shareholder, I was furious over its bungling of a potentially lucrative sale to Microsoft, especially after Yahoo shares plunged Monday on the news. Nothing in Yahoo’s official statement from Chairman Roy Bostock made me feel any better. It seemed especially disingenuous for Mr. Bostock to say ‘we are pleased that so many of our shareholders joined us’ in the view that Microsoft’s bid — its latest was $33 a share — had undervalued Yahoo. And just who might those supportive shareholders be? No names were mentioned. No one asked me.” He continues, “The droves of shareholders voting with their wallets on Monday, pushing Yahoo shares down to $24 and change, a 15% decline, would suggest that there weren’t all that many. At the very least, Yahoo owes its shareholders a detailed explanation why it believes Yahoo is worth perhaps $40 a share, or more.” Stewart comments, “It all depends on what Yahoo does now. In my view, the company has to abandon ideas like teaming up with Time Warner’s AOL and face up to some hard decisions. It should admit that its own search-advertising effort has failed and vigorously pursue a relationship with Google.”
Erick Schonfeld wrote at TechCrunch, “Here’s the latest Yahoo rumor that we’re chasing: The Yahoo board of directors met earlier today and authorized chairman Roy Bostock, not CEO Jerry Yang, to call Ballmer about re-starting negotiations. In fact, this rumor may have been behind the small rally in Yahoo’s stock today, which closed up 5.5 percent to $25.72 (still down from where it closed on Friday at $28.67). If this is true, it makes you wonder who is really in charge at Yahoo.” He continued, “Yang has been getting a lot of grief from angry shareholders for not taking Microsoft’s $33 a share offer, and instead holding out for $37 or $38. Now his story keeps changing on when he learned about the $33 bid. But when Ballmer balked and called off the deal, that may have been when Yang’s grip on power began to weaken. What happened next was curious. In Yahoo’s official press release on May 3 responding to Microsoft’s termination of negotiations, it was Bostock who issued the primary statement from Yahoo, not Yang.” Schonfeld noted, “Whether or not Yahoo’s board actually met today and authorized Bostock to restart negotiations is entirely speculation at this point, say our sources. But here’s one more interesting tidbit. Today, Yahoo board member Eric Hippeau was supposed to speak on a panel with me and others at the In-Call Media Summit in New York (where we both live). He didn’t show up. Another venture capitalist from Softbank took his place. When I asked around what happened to Hippeau, I was told by someone else at the conference who would have known that he is in Sunnyvale. So maybe the board did meet today after all.”
Microsoft’s Gates Says Ballmer To Make Decisions Regarding Yahoo Bid. The AP reported, “Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Tuesday that ‘key decisions’ following the company’s withdrawal of a $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo will be made by CEO Steve Ballmer.” Gates “was asked about the software maker’s plans after the Yahoo bid fell apart, including whether Microsoft would pursue another deal of the same size elsewhere. … ‘Well, the key decisions on that will be made by Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer, who took a look at Yahoo and decided that on our own he likes the stuff that we’re doing,’ Gates said, according to a pool report. ‘We need to show the innovation and it’s a very competitive space,” he added. “I wouldn’t rule out some partnerships but we don’t have anything imminent there.’”
Blogger Says Microsoft Deal With AOL Is “Obvious Choice.” Erick Schonfeld wrote at TechCrunch, “With Microsoft walking away from the Yahoo deal, there’s been a lot of talk about what it’s next best option would be. Going after AOL is an obvious choice. It has the ad inventory (aka pageviews) Microsoft needs, has its own collection of growing online advertising businesses, and has a very willing seller in parent Time Warner. … And AOL isn’t exactly hitting on all cylinders right now, so it could be a much cheaper, cleaner purchase.” He continued, “Of course, Microsoft is still talking to everybody at this point, except maybe Yahoo. Whether it truly intends to set its sights on AOL is unclear because it needs to talk to AOL at the very least as a strategic ploy to try to thwart any possible deal between Yahoo and AOL (which has always been a possibility in the background). But at least Wall Street doesn’t seem to think that a deal is imminent. Yahoo’s shares are up 4 percent from yesterday to $25 a share right now, while Time Warner’s shares are pretty much flat at $16 after rising about 6 percent last week. Maybe Yahoo’s talks with Google are going better than Microsoft’s talks with AOL.
Collapse Of Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Affects Advertisers . The AP reported, “The collapse of Microsoft Corp.’s pursuit of Yahoo Inc. is leaving advertisers pining for other ways to reach mass audiences on the Web and to counteract Google Inc.’s dominance of the online ad market.” Advertisers “can still distribute ads across smaller Web sites through networks that all major Internet companies run, but such an approach doesn’t have the same appeal as reaching Yahoo’s massive audience all in one place, something that would have been even more compelling once Microsoft’s Web sites were thrown in, too. That’s because advertisers can’t negotiate premium placements and coordinate promotions across the network the same way they can with a single site.” The AP noted, “Without a powerful new portal to suck up advertising dollars, online advertising power could continue to shift to the hot areas of the moment, such as mobile phones and social-networking sites like Facebook.”

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Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reported early Friday that the world’s largest software maker may be preparing to go straight to Internet pioneer Yahoo’s shareholders. An announcement was “likely” to come Friday, according to the report, though the newspaper said its sources cautioned that Microsoft may delay.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told employees in a company assembly Thursday that he knows how much he’d spend to buy Yahoo and accelerate his company’s Internet play.

“We’re willing to pay for that at some level, and beyond that level we’re not willing to pay for it. I know exactly what I think Yahoo is worth to me,” the executive said. “I won’t go a dime above, and I will go to what I think it’s worth if that gets the deal done.”

But he didn’t offer a figure, and he didn’t say whether Microsoft is considering raising its unsolicited bid, worth $44.6 billion at the time it was made in early February.

The offer is currently worth about $42.4 billion, or $29.48 per share, based on Microsoft Corp.’s closing stock price Thursday. Yahoo Inc. has rejected the offer, saying it undervalues the company. Microsoft’s board has been considering whether to raise the bid to as much as $33 per share, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Ballmer didn’t provide any new insight into the company’s efforts to buy the Silicon Valley pioneer during the meeting at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters, but he did indicate that an end to months of speculation was near.

“We ought to announce something in relatively short order,” Ballmer told employees.

His comments were first reported by Silicon Alley Insider, an online technology news site, and confirmed by a Microsoft spokesman.

Ballmer added that buying Yahoo is just one of many moving parts in the software maker’s strategy to compete with Google Inc. in search and Web advertising, and that if neither a friendly nor a hostile deal “look good,” he’s willing to walk away.

Microsoft’s board met Wednesday but reached no decision on a next step, the Journal reported. The software maker had given Yahoo until last weekend to agree to a deal or face the prospect of an ugly proxy fight.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is exploring a possible advertising partnership with Internet search leader Google Inc. or a merger with the online operations of Time Warner Inc.’s AOL as possible defenses if Microsoft tries a hostile takeover.

Impressed by a two-week test completed last month, Yahoo could firm up a long-term deal within a week, according to the Journal. Any alliance between Yahoo and Google would face intense antitrust scrutiny, however, because the two companies control more than 80 percent of the U.S. market for search advertising.

Yahoo and Google hope to allay those concerns by structuring their deal so their rivals, including Microsoft, could participate in an auction-based system, the Journal said.

Using search for analyzing social and cultural trends

The search engines have become an integrated part of our lives. Each and every day billions of searches are made all over the world, reflecting stories of work and leisure, strife and passion, and the interests of millions of Internet searchers.

If you could tap into this enormous amount of data, you could draw maps of fashion, cultural trends, political shifts and anything people are concerned about right now.

The search engine databases are kept under lock and key. The search engine companies hate the thought of loosing the trust of their users. Nevertheless, some aggregate data are available, and on this page your find links to some of the search trend sources found on the Web.

Google Zeitgeist and beyond

Google has a service called Google Zeitgeist that brings up weekly top 10 lists of the most popular searches in several countries and world wide.

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time.

Lycos has a weekly top 50 list, while Yahoo presents various search trends at Yahoo Buzz.

Blogs, bookmarks and folksonomies

Note also that the growth of social networking and bookmarking sites has given as a new wealth of search trend data.

There are actually companies out there that monitoring and analyzing fashion and trends on the basis of social media such as blogs and discussion forums

Some statistics are free, though. The blog search engine Technorati will, for instance, give you a list of the most talked about topics in the blogosphere right now.

Site popularity

There are actually no trustworthy numbers on what sites are the most popular at any given time. Alexa, which bases its data on the habits of its Alexa toolbar users, may give you a certain indication though.

For these and other web trend sources, see the categories on this page.

Popular search terms in search engine marketing

Reading lists of the most popular search queries is entertaining. Social scientists ought to love the stuff. So far, however, it is the marketing people who has made the best use of this search information.

The search trends tell them what people find interesting right now, making it possible to adapt product and service development to what’s fashionable or upcoming.

This certainly applies to search engine marketing experts as well. Do you want to know what kind of affiliate program to go for and what product to sell? Look at what people search for and make sites and web pages covering these topics.

Internetnews.com reports, “AOL plans to roll out open voice APIs today for developers and device makers to integrate the company’s AIM Call Out service into the hardware and software used to make phone calls over the Internet.” AOL “said that the Open Voice APIs will allow its VoIP service to run on softphones, the software that enables computerized calling, SIP-enabled devices, as well as cell phones with Wi-Fi connectivity.” The move “follows AOL’s opening of its hugely popular instant messaging program to developers, and echoes many of the announcements rival portal Yahoo has been making about opening its core services to developers.” The piece continues, “Just as with Yahoo, openness for AOL is a company mission. ‘Amongst all of AOL we’ve been challenged to open up,’ Brent Newsome, AOL’s director of voice services, told InternetNews.com. ‘Every product is working on bringing things out into the open.’”

Om Malik wrote at GigaOm, “If Yahoo is turning to Jajah for Voice on IM, then AOL wants to offer others an ability to integrate AIM Call Out service via its Open Voice APIs into softphones, as well as SIP-enabled hardware and cell phones with Wi-Fi connectivity. AIM Call Out is a pay-as-you-go outbound voice calling service built right into AIM.” He continued, “Jajah, AOL Open Voice, Ribbit and scores of others are taking a platform approach to VoIP, hoping that adding voice to applications will drive up minute volume and turn them into a viable business.”

TMCnet.com reports, “Many users are loathe to run multiple IM clients, so many switched from AIM to Skype because they could get IM, plus voice & video — all in a single client. Why bog down system resources with multiple IM clients? I will say AOL has done a good job of beefing up the feature-set of AIM, but one has to wonder if Skype’s momentum is unstoppable.” The piece continues, “In any event, Steve Murphy, Senior Vice President, AOL said, ‘By opening up our voice communications gateway to developers we’re furthering the mission of AIM which is to facilitate the world’s real-time conversations. We’re building on the popularity of the Open AIM program and opening up the AIM Call Out platform, enabling open standards voice communication services to proliferate in the marketplace.’”

Search giant Google wants to push forward with a new, improved form of image search that’s based on visual characteristics, not just text. Last week, two of the company’s scientists presented a paper outlining a system they’re calling VisualRank. They’ve told the New York Times it could be as important for image search as the now-legendary PageRank paper was for normal text search.

Currently, image search engines (notably Google Image Search) locate and rank pictures based on the text describing them on a web page. This can lead to some very hit-or-miss search results — typing in “mcdonalds”, for example, gives you a wide range of images, many of them with little visual relevance to the McDonald’s fast food chain. (Irrelevant, that is, unless it turns out you actually are looking for photos of fat giraffes.)

The new system proposed in the Google paper ranks images based not on text, but on the common “visual themes” found in each search result. In the McDonald’s example, the VisualRank system would see that the company’s famous golden arches are a common visual theme, and prioritize pictures that feature the arches prominently. Tests of this new system returned 83 percent fewer irrelevant search results than Google Image Search, according to the VisualRank paper. (In the “search graph” below, the two large images in the center are ranked the highest because they feature the common visual themes in a search for “mona lisa” most prominently.)

If Google can deliver on its promises, VisualRank could bring a sea change to applications like product search, where customers are often want to find and compare specific products, but may not know the exact words to describe them. There are already product comparison startups, such as Like.com, that use visual search. But Google’s plan to the image ranking process is much more ambitious, which is probably why Munjal Shah, chief executive of Riya (which owns Like.com), told the Times that Google’s goals are “largely impossible.”

Whether or not that’s true is a debate better left to computer scientists. But wagering against Google’s search technology has been a sucker’s bet in the past.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh revealed how the company is transforming itself into an open and social platform from the ground up. It is opening its Web platform to developers and moving closer to a Facebook-style social networking concept. Ari Balogh also said that while Yahoo already has open APIs for some services, it will expand the open API concept to other areas and make it more consistent for developers, while boosting the ’social’ aspect of its services for its members.

“We are taking open to a whole other place,” Balogh said. “We are rewiring Yahoo from the inside out with a developer platform that will open up the assets of Yahoo in a way never done before, making the consumer experience social throughout and provide hooks to developers.” He noted that Yahoo has 10 billion latent connections across its properties, such as mail, messenger and fantasy sports.

Balogh discussed the technical architecture–known as YOS, or Yahoo Open Strategy–including an application platform that will allow developers to create apps for consumers to keep their data protected and to chose what data to share and with whom. In addition, Yahoo will unify all profiles for users and developers, which will allow the company to leverage the 10 billion relations and 500 million users to create the social graph of relationships and to manage the event stream.

“We are not creating another social network. We will rewire the entire experience to make it social. We don’t think of social as a destination but as a dimension,” Balogh said. Along with Google and MySpace, Yahoo is a member of the OpenSocial Foundation, which is developing a specification for building social applications.

The underpinnings of Yahoo’s effort include development tools, an application platform, a social platform that unifies all profiles throughout Yahoo (again, like Facebook or MySpace, this is a social graph that lets users make connections and view events) and the total rewiring of properties to make all this possible.

Yahoo’s new architecture, called YOS (Yahoo Open Strategy) proves that the Internet is made of tubes (Source: Yahoo)

The heady plans are smart but, quite likely, come too late.

Just read Hints of iGoogle Turning Into Its Own Social Network on TechCrunch. That’s cool!

“Any developer who builds an OpenSocial app, for instance, can make it work as a widget (er, gadget) on iGoogle. So far, it’s been more of a personal home page. But now iGoogle is taking another step towards becoming a full-fledged social network in its own right.

It is a tiny step, but could be indicative of the direction iGoogle is going to take. Google has opened up a sandbox for developers where they can try building some new types of iGoogle apps not available to the general iGoogle user population. Most significantly, they can add activity streams (i.e., updates) and friends lists in new navigation panes on the page. Any change in a third-party iGoogle widget will be able to be reflected in the updates pane. (This has actually been a long time coming, since adding activity streams was always part of the OpenSocial plan). And they can also play around with larger “canvas” pages that users can click through to from each widget for a full-page experience. How very Facebook of them.”

Some Background: OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them, including features on sites such as Hi5.com, Viadeo, MySpace, Friendster^, orkut and Yahoo!.

OpenSocial is commonly described as a more open cross-platform alternative to Facebook Platform. After launching Facebook Platform in late May 2007, the fast-growing Facebook has been widely reported as a challenger to Google in establishing and leveraging a ubiquitous web operating system. Compared to Facebook, which is ranked second by page views worldwide, Google’s social network orkut is ranked sixth for the same month, with more than half its members living in India. Reports on competition between the two companies increased with Facebook scheduling an announcement of an online advertising initiative (named Facebook Ads) the day after Google’s social networking announcement was originally scheduled. The intiative includes ad serving and targeting programs (named Facebook Social Ads and Facebook Insights, respectively) in competition with Google’s market-leading AdSense and AdWords programs.

Next Steps:

• Sign up for the iGoogle Sandbox
• Read the iGoogle Developer’s Guide
• Check out iGoogle Gadgets FAQ
• Get Started with iGoogle Sandbox

Google just announced a cool addition to Google News. “As part of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information, we’ve been hard at work making quotations in news articles easy to search and browse. You can now more easily keep track of what your favorite politician, actor or sports star is saying. You can even search within their quotes for specific topics.”

If you search for a person’s name on Google News, you can see statements where that person has been quoted by a news source. For example, search on Google News for [Barack Obama's quotes on Iraq] and you’ll see something like this!

This is very impressive application of natural language processing in Google News — it now extracts quotations from news stories, even handling things like “he said” and “she said” and resolving them back to the speaker.

I think this is still is “real” beta. The quotes can be a bit more deep in history. It only shows recent quotes. No Abe Lincoln quotes, sorry (as of now).

I am impressed. What about you?

In their official blog, Google announces that they are experimenting with technologies to index the Deep Web, i.e. the sites hidden behind forms, in order to be ‘the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines’.

For that purpose, the engine tries to automatically get past the forms: ‘For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML’. Nevertheless, directions like ‘nofollow’ and ‘noindex’ are still respected, so sites can still be excluded from this type of search.

Among the possible wins for Google users is the ability to find pages within sites based on searches of those site. As the Google Webmaster blog explains:

For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made

The results of those crawls would then show up in your Google search results, potentially offering a faster, more direct way to reach the information you’re searching for.

Google’s all excited for Earth day, and just in time there’s a new version of Google Earth available. 4.3 offers up revamped navigation controls, 3-D photo-realistic buildings in major cities, and time-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises. Also new in Google Earth 4.3 is access to the street view movies found in Google Maps. Just click any of the camera icons and the familiar street view window will pop up. The sunrise and sunset movies are also quite impressive. Fly to a location you’d like to see and click the “sun” button in the toolbar. That will bring up a small timeline graphic and you can either hit play or drag the timeline slider to watch the day unfold.

The new beta version of Google Earth features revamped navigation controls and some slick new layers like 3-D photo-realistic buildings in major cities and time-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises.

The new navigation controls take some getting used to, but once you have the hang of it they offer considerable more control over panning and tilting. Also handy is the new “North” button which quickly orients your current view by rotating until north is at the top.

See the new features in action below:

Sources: Wired Blog, Google Earth Website