Archive for March, 2008
Yahoo! today announced the launch of Yahoo! Shine (http://shine.yahoo.com), a new website for women that aims to provide the information most relevant to their daily lives. The site offers nine categories ranging from Fashion & Beauty to Parenting, and will feature content from many of the most popular lifestyles publishers, including Conde Nast Publications and Hearst Corporation. Additionally, a new editorial team will develop original stories on a daily basis, and hand pick the best user blog posts to feature prominently on the site. Yahoo! Shine creates a single destination for the approximately 40 million women between the ages of 25 and 54 who already come to Yahoo! each month, making Yahoo! a more relevant starting point for this audience.
The new site will help create a better experience for women on Yahoo!, while providing Yahoo! advertisers with a single lifestyles destination to reach this coveted demographic. Yahoo! Shine brings together the resources of several existing Yahoo! sites, including Yahoo! Food and Yahoo! Astrology, and will incorporate content from Yahoo! Health. Bringing these resources together is an example of Yahoo! Media’s focus on building larger category sites for mass audiences, rather than focusing on niche topics and smaller audiences.
“We’re executing on Yahoo!’s starting point strategy by ensuring that women who start their day with Yahoo! are offered a more relevant experience,” said Scott Moore, senior vice president and head of Yahoo! Media. “Yahoo! Shine adds an important piece to our Media portfolio, which already includes sites that are number one in the News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment categories.”
Editorial Model
Lifestyles publishing veteran Brandon Holley serves as Yahoo! Shine’s editor-in-chief, overseeing a team of seasoned editors who each bring a unique point-of-view to their topic. The editors join Yahoo! from many of the leading print and online lifestyles outlets, including Lucky magazine, The Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal, and BluePrint magazine. Editors will program content in nine categories daily by featuring partner content, stories from a women’s blog network, and developing original stories. Yahoo! Shine’s nine categories are:
Fashion & Beauty, Parenting, Food, At Home, Healthy Living, Entertainment & Culture, Work & Money, Astrology, Love and Relationships
“You can count on us to bring attitude and personality, and find humor in almost every topic we cover, whether it’s a post on men who wear skinny jeans, how you can get back into your skinny jeans, or whether you’ll be taken seriously if you wear jeans to work,” Holley said. “Yahoo! Shine speaks to you as a friend, telling you the secrets and tips to simplify your life.”
Yahoo! Shine offers a blog platform for all users to share their thoughts and discoveries in a trusted environment. Editors will handpick entries from these blogs to feature alongside the partner and editorial content.
Like Yahoo!’s other category-leading media properties, Yahoo! Shine has partnered with the top content providers in its category. Yahoo! Shine’s partners will create original content and feature choice magazine content. Partners include:
– Conde Nast Publications and CondeNet - Glamour, Self, Bon Appetit, Lucky, Allure, Domino, Cookie, Style.com, Epicurious.com
– Hearst Corporation - Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, Real Age, House Beautiful, Daily Green, Country Living
– Rodale, Inc. - Prevention, Women’s Health, Men’s Health, Best Life
– Time, Inc. - InStyle
– Eating Well Media - Eating Well
“Yahoo! is an ideal partner for us because they are pioneering a unique way to present content online,” said Christopher Johnson, vice president, content and business development, Hearst Magazines Digital Media. “With more than 130 million visitors each month to Yahoo! in the U.S., Yahoo! will become a giant megaphone for us and allow Hearst’s network of bloggers to elevate their voices and be heard by a much larger audience. Increasing the visibility of our blog content is a key element in driving additional traffic and converting passive readers into loyal fans.”
“We’re delighted that Yahoo! has turned to so many of our magazines and websites for content for its new women’s website,” said Rick Levine, vice president, editorial operations, Conde Nast Publications. “By speaking to Yahoo!’s huge audience, this partnership will give our great editorial properties a significant growth opportunity.”
Building on Yahoo!’s Advertising Leadership
The female (age 25-54) audience, which Yahoo! has designated as “Chief Household Officers,” is a highly sought-after demographic for advertisers. It is made up of heavy Internet users, who are frequently the household purchasing decision-makers. Yahoo! Shine creates an opportunity for advertisers to reach this audience in an environment that is relevant and meaningful to women, and several advertisers have signed up to participate at launch. Yahoo! believes the site will be especially attractive to advertisers in the consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals and retail categories, where combined online advertising spend is expected to exceed $1.8 billion in 2008, based on competitive spending analysis done by TNS Media Intelligence.
Visit http://shine.yahoo.com or go to Yahoo! and search “Shine.”
March 31st, 2008
Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google today announced they have agreed to form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web. Yahoo!’s support of OpenSocial and role as a founding member of the new foundation are landmarks for the rapidly growing specification which will now offer developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.
The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.
“Yahoo! believes in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users,” said Wade Chambers, Vice President – Platforms, Yahoo!. “Our support builds on similar efforts with the OpenID community and will expand the opportunity for developers and publishers to benefit from an open and increasingly social web.”
“OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning,” said Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management, Google. “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”
The OpenSocial Foundation website at www.opensocial.org will serve as the portal for the community to find all information about OpenSocial and the foundation as they evolve. Developers and website owners can now visit www.opensocial.org for the latest specifications, links to other resources, and the opportunity to get involved.
Engineers from Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google will continue to work together and with the OpenSocial community to further advance the specification through the new foundation, continuing several core elements of OpenSocial since its announcement by Google, MySpace, and many others in November 2007:
- all specifications are available under a Creative Commons copyright license
- public community involvement shapes the specification’s direction
- an open source reference implementation called Shindig is being created and developed as a project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator, available at http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/
About OpenSocial
OpenSocial addresses an emerging problem for developers who are eagerly building applications people can enjoy with their friends: before OpenSocial, if a developer built a “favorite photos” application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site. OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology roots, providing common “plumbing” that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.
The result is a vast distribution platform for social applications, whether they are for sharing photos or playing games or arranging real-world meetings or any number of other activities – everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contacts.
Steady Evolution, Important Milestones
Millions of people around the world are beginning to see the benefits of the OpenSocial platform as new features appear on their favorite social networks. MySpace launched the MySpace Developer Platform, which uses the OpenSocial APIs, and began rolling out applications to its users. orkut has also started making OpenSocial applications available to its users, and hi5 will do so at the end of March.
Thanks to the Shindig reference implementation, most websites can have a proof of concept of OpenSocial applications up and running in days. That means websites need only to make this small time investment in order to make thousands of new social features available to their users.
Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, XING, and others. In time, OpenSocial will unlock more powerful and pervasive social capabilities across the entire web, as developers’ applications can easily reach users across any of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use.
March 26th, 2008
Yahoo! today filed an investor presentation that details the Company’s three-year financial plan and strategic initiatives which are expected to roughly double operating cash flow over the next three years from $1.9 billion to $3.7 billion and generate $8.8 billion in revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs (revenue ex-TAC) in 2010.
The financial plan was first presented to Yahoo!’s board of directors in December 2007, before the Company received the unsolicited acquisition proposal by Microsoft Corporation.
The presentation supports the unanimous determination by the Company’s board of directors that Microsoft’s January 31, 2008 unsolicited acquisition proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo!. The board cited Yahoo!’s global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments in advertising platforms and future growth prospects, free cash flow and earnings potential, as well as its substantial unconsolidated investments, as factors in its decision. Yahoo!’s board of directors is continuing to evaluate all of its strategic alternatives to maximize value for Yahoo! stockholders.
Yahoo!’s management today also reaffirmed its outlook for the first quarter 2008 and full year 2008, as previously provided on January 29, 2008.
Key sources of projected growth in revenue and operating cash flow cited in the presentation include $1.9 billion in added revenue ex-TAC over the next three years from display/video advertising, as Yahoo! expects its growth to outpace the currently anticipated market rate of growth in online display/video advertising. The Company also expects $1.4 billion in added search revenue, implying growth essentially in line with the anticipated market rate of growth in search advertising.
“Yahoo! is positioned for accelerated financial growth - we have a powerful consumer brand, a huge global audience and a highly profitable operating model,” said Jerry Yang, the Company’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “With industry-leading tools, technology, people and platforms, Yahoo! is poised to capture growth in display advertising where we believe growth will be greatest. Combined with our recent progress in search monetization, Yahoo! is well positioned to provide the broadest range of products to our advertisers while delivering the most compelling experiences to users.”
“This is a scale business and our scale is a tremendous strategic asset,” said Roy Bostock, Chairman of the board. “We are pleased to share with the market more details about our business and our expectations for Yahoo!’s financial performance, which provided context for our board’s unanimous rejection of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal. Yahoo! represents a truly unique strategic platform within our industry. The board of directors and management will continue to work closely together to ensure that any strategic path we pursue capitalizes on that uniqueness and value in a way that maximizes the benefit to our stockholders.”
Yahoo!’s investor presentation also reiterates its principal strategies, which are to enhance an already strong position as a leading starting point for users of the Internet and to be a “must buy” proposition for the most online advertisers.
Starting Points: In support of the Starting Points objective, which focuses on properties that users return to many times a day to start their Internet experience, the presentation discusses Yahoo!’s initiatives to make its front pages, Yahoo.com and My Yahoo!, as well as search, mail and mobile more open, social and relevant to users. The presentation highlights Yahoo!’s leading positions in key starting points, including the 305 million unique monthly users of its homepage and the 262 million unique monthly users of Yahoo! mail.(1)
Must Buy: The presentation also highlights the Company’s Must Buy strategic objective, which focuses on making it easier for advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad networks to do business with Yahoo! and with one another. Key initiatives include the development of a new ad platform designed to simplify online advertising buying and selling as well as improvements to the Panama search advertising platform. In addition to its leading position in display advertising distributed on its owned and operated sites, Yahoo! is also the second largest provider of sponsored search advertising online. Yahoo! also operates Right Media, the leading online advertising exchange, and is now ranked among the largest online advertising networks with premium partners including eBay, Comcast, AT&T and many more.
The presentation notes that, in addition to Yahoo!’s strong projected operating results over the next three years, the Company’s strategic assets in Asia, including its stakes in Yahoo! Japan, Alibaba Group and Gmarket, its strong cash position, and its early leadership positions in mobile Internet and emerging markets, combine to create significant equity value.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties concerning Yahoo!’s projected financial performance (including without limitation the statements and information in the quotations from management in this press release), as well as Yahoo!’s strategic and operational plans. Actual results may differ materially from the results projected. The potential risks and uncertainties include, among others, the implementation and results of the Company’s ongoing strategic initiatives; the Company’s ability to compete with new or existing competitors; reduction in spending by, or loss of, marketing services customers; the demand by customers for Yahoo!’s premium services; acceptance by users of new products and services; risks related to joint ventures and the integration of acquisitions; risks related to the Company’s international operations; failure to manage growth and diversification; adverse results in litigation, including intellectual property infringement claims; the Company’s ability to protect its intellectual property and the value of its brands; dependence on senior management and other key personnel; dependence on third parties for technology, services, content and distribution; general economic conditions and changes in economic conditions; and risks and uncertainties arising in connection with Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal to acquire Yahoo!, including the loss of key employees who pursue other employment opportunities due to concerns as to their employment security, increased difficulty for the Company in executing its strategic plan and pursuing other strategic opportunities, and the possibility of significant costs of defense, indemnification and liability resulting from stockholder litigation. More information about potential factors that could affect Yahoo!’s business and financial results is included under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in Yahoo!’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2007, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and available online at www.sec.gov.
This press release includes projected financial performance information for 2008-2010 from the Company’s three-year financial plan presented to its board of directors in December 2007. These projections are necessarily based upon a variety of estimates and assumptions which, though currently considered reasonable by Yahoo!, may not be realized and are inherently subject, in addition to the specific risks identified above, to business, economic, competitive, industry, regulatory, market and financial uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond Yahoo!’s control. There can be no assurance that the assumptions made in preparing the projected financial performance information will prove accurate. Accordingly, actual results may differ materially from the results projected.
All information in this press release is as of March 18, 2008, unless otherwise noted, and Yahoo! does not intend, and undertakes no duty, to update or otherwise revise the information contained in this press release.
Non-GAAP Financial Measures
This press release includes the following financial measures defined as non-GAAP financial measures by the SEC: revenues excluding traffic acquisition costs or TAC (revenues ex-TAC) and operating income before depreciation, amortization, and stock-based compensation expense (OCF).These measures may be different from non-GAAP measures used by other companies. The presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures are included in the Appendix to the Yahoo! Investor Presentation furnished as Exhibit 99.2 to the Company’s Current Report on Form 8-K dated March 18, 2008 and can be accessed through Yahoo!’s Investor Relations website at www.yahoo.com.
March 23rd, 2008
Yahoo! today announced that it has launched a new research lab in Haifa, Israel — its first in the region. The Yahoo! Research Israel Lab will be led by Dr. Ronny Lempel, a renowned information organization and retrieval expert who will report directly to Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, vice president of Yahoo! Research.
The Yahoo! Research Israel Lab, which opens today, will focus on boiling down complex technology problems into simple solutions to change the game in Web search. As a demonstration of its commitment to next-generation search, Yahoo! recently opened Yahoo! Labs - Bangalore and appointed eminent scientist Dr. Rajeev Rastogi to head the new India lab. Yahoo!’s arrival in Israel furthers the company’s commitment to discovering new technologies that deliver compelling experiences on the Web.
“Search is still in its infancy,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research. “At Yahoo!, we are working on the hard core science that can lead to search experiences that are significantly beyond the current art.” He continues to say, “Ronny Lempel is a great addition to the world-class team that we have assembled to develop a new approach to Web search. His expertise in search technologies and ties to local academia will help us draw on the best talent and knowledge from across the region and strengthen our worldwide R&D efforts.”
Lempel previously worked at the Information Retrieval Group at IBM’s Haifa Research Lab, focusing on research and development for enterprise search systems. Prior to joining IBM, he received his BSc., MSc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He has authored numerous papers and received several awards for his work on search engine technology, and has twice won the Best Presentation Award at the International World Wide Web Conference.
“Israel is fertile ground for incredibly talented technologists, researchers and engineers, and the Yahoo! Research Israel Lab provides the best opportunity to create the technologies that will underpin the next generation of search on the Internet,” Lempel said. “I look forward to building the Haifa team with the best talent this region has to offer.”
March 17th, 2008
Google announced today that it has completed its acquisition of DoubleClick, a company that offers online ad serving and management technology to advertisers, web publishers and ad agencies.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, “We are thrilled that our acquisition of DoubleClick has closed. With DoubleClick, Google now has the leading display ad platform, which will enable us to rapidly bring to market advances in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies, while improving the relevance of advertising for users.”
March 12th, 2008
Yahoo! today announced that it has amended the Company’s bylaws to extend the deadline for nominating directors to Yahoo!’s board from March 14th to 10 days following the public announcement of the date for Yahoo!’s 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. As the Company has not yet announced the date of this year’s annual meeting, the amendment will give stockholders who want to nominate one or more directors, including Microsoft Corporation, more time to do so. The amendment does not preclude any party from nominating one or more directors at any time prior to the new deadline.
Yahoo!’s board of directors remains committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for Yahoo!’s stockholders. To the extent that the extension of the nomination deadline has the effect of postponing the nomination of one or more directors by any party, it will allow Yahoo!’s board to continue to explore all of its strategic alternatives for maximizing value for stockholders without the distraction of a proxy contest.
March 10th, 2008
Yahoo! continues to enable the global mobile ecosystem with the unveiling of Yahoo! onePlace™ – a revolutionary mobile content management solution. Following the company’s achievements in reinventing mobile search and mobile communications, Yahoo! onePlace is designed to be an essential tool to enable consumers to better manage the wide selection of content available across the Internet.
“Over the last three years, we have aggressively executed on our mobile strategy to deliver innovative and indispensable services to consumers globally and become the starting point for the most users. With the introduction of Yahoo! onePlace, we are announcing the next essential component to our mobile product line up,” said Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo!. “Yahoo! onePlace is where users will be able to find what matters to them the most, no matter where their interests, passions and information come from. Yahoo! onePlace will provide mobile users with a rich and dynamic content experience.”
Yahoo! onePlace™ will bring together a consumers’ interests, passions and important information into a single location – creating a rich and highly personalized experience. Everything is instantly organized, dynamically kept current, and served to them the way they want. So now, the content they consume and the way they consume it will be hyper-customized to their specific preferences and tastes.
Yahoo! onePlace will be simple-to-use because it will be based on a familiar process of using bookmarks to instantly link to practically any piece of content (news feeds, web sites, videos, images, emails, search queries, etc.) from anywhere across the Internet. Once in Yahoo! onePlace, everything will be kept automatically updated (with the latest game score, stock price, etc) as well as assigned categories and tags – or placed into customized “collections” that consumers create – making it extremely intuitive for consumers to find and combine their content in the ways most useful to them.
Yahoo! onePlace will allow consumers to stay better informed on the topics they care about, with less work – for their daily interests (e.g., favorite sports teams or stocks), as well as those they only care about on a selective basis. For example, if a user is planning a holiday to Paris in June, he could create a “Paris” collection, and begin linking it to any information he thinks will be useful to him on his trip: weather conditions, city guides, restaurant reviews, hotel reservations, walking maps, songs of Edith Piaf, English-French dictionaries, winery recommendations, etc. Yahoo! onePlace will give consumers a single location to consume all of their information contextually, keeping it updated (so they know, for example, if their flight times have changed) and instantly accessible whenever and however they want it. The product will be configured to allow consumers to do the same for literally hundreds of different topics.
Yahoo! onePlace is designed to include the following features, which will allow consumers to:
- Centralized and open content management – Centralize and manage all the content they care about, from anywhere on the Internet, accessible from a single location and arranged to best meet their preferences. The product is also designed to allow consumers to link to any favorite content they’ve already personalized on the Yahoo! network (e.g., MyYahoo!®, flickr™, del.icio.us®), or at other popular websites (e.g., Digg®, Last.FM®, reddit™, Yelp®).
- Personalized views – Enjoy their content based on their specific needs:
- Collections – Group content in a way that makes sense. For example, create a collection related to an upcoming trip, or of favorite 80’s bands.
- Categories – Organize content according to commonly-used subjects (e.g., celebrities, local businesses, sports), making it easy to access and retrieve.
- Pulse – Stream updates relevant to users’ content, such as flight status changes, new songs by a favorite music artist, or a restaurant review.
- Favorites – Surface the content a consumer uses most frequently.
- Dynamic updates – See previews for selected sources that are kept fresh throughout the day – giving users a single location for a view of what’s going on across their world.
- Mobile RSS reader – Use a mobile RSS reader integrated into Yahoo! onePlace – providing a simple way to read and subscribe to their favorite feeds.
- Smart organization – Create a rich experience around a specific topic by grouping whatever content they find most useful.
Yahoo! onePlace is expected to launch, along with Yahoo! oneConnect™, in Q2 2008, joining Yahoo!’s award-winning mobile product portfolio, which includes Yahoo! Go 3.0, Yahoo!’s new mobile homepage and Yahoo! oneSearch™. After its release, Yahoo! onePlace is expected to become available across hundreds of devices and mobile browsers around the world.
March 6th, 2008
