Yang: The future is simple for Yahoo
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Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang Monday said Yahoo&#39;s goal for being users&#39; Internet home page is to keep it simple, and his pared-down first-time CES keynote appearance as the company&#39;s top executive reflected that.Yang&#39;s keynote on the first day of the annual consumer electronics techfest was a far cry from a splashy keynote Yang&#39;s predecessor Terry Semel gave at the show two years ago, in which Hollywood heavyweights such as Tom Cruise and Ellen DeGeneres helped him get his message across.Using only a few company cohorts to help him, Yang described the Yahoo portal as the starting point for people&#39;s Internet experience, the place that would connect them to a variety of services and devices.&quot;We continue to strive for the goal to keep the Web even simpler,&quot; he said. &quot;We want to drive home that you can come to Yahoo as your starting point and get everything you need done.&quot;Yang demonstrated a prototype for what a future Yahoo Mail inbox might look like, complete with links to third-party applications such as Evite and eBay built into a navigation bar on the interface.The inbox can be customized in a way that looks similar to what social-networking site Facebook does for its users. The demo also showed how Yang might invite some of his contacts to dinner and map out the location of restaurants they like.Keeping its message simple might not be a bad idea for Yahoo. The company faces a challenging time as it continues to struggle in online advertising against Google, remaining second to the search giant despite its first-mover advantage. Yahoo also is still in danger of being gobbled by a bigger fish, as rumors that Microsoft or another heavyweight may buy the Internet company continue to swirl.To help encourage more developers to build applications for its Yahoo Go mobile interface and its portal, Yang on&#160;Monday introduced face-lifts for both as well as plans to make both developer platforms more open.The new Yahoo mobile home page, which hasn&#39;t changed much in the past few years, is now customizable, with users able to choose &quot;content modules&quot; that will appear on their home page, said Yahoo executive vice president Marco Boerries.On the mobile side, starting on Monday, the Yahoo Go client will begin showing display advertisements to users, part of Yahoo&#39;s strategy to bolster its ad revenues. In addition to the new look of the mobile Web page, Boerries also introduced documentation that will let third-party developers build mobile widgets for Go.
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Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang told CES that Yahoo's goal for being users' Internet home page is to keep it simple.
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The president of a Japanese mobile carrier that owns a stake in Yahoo said Thursday he is in talks with Yahoo chief Jerry Yang about how to respond to Microsoft's takeover bid.
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Yahoo Inc.'s Jerry Yang, who started the company as a Stanford University student 12 years ago and took the helm as chief executive Monday, said he's gearing up for a long fight with Google Inc.
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It looks like an unlikely collaboration. Adobe rules in desktop publishing and imaging applications while Yahoo! was once the king of online search.
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Will Yahoo!'s facelift drive business?
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Yahoo Inc  Chief  Executive Jerry Yang said on Tuesday that 2008 will begin with  targeted job cuts and will require heavy investments to get  ahead in new advertising and mobile markets.
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Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion -- but how did a company that started so small come to be worth so much? That's a story that began in the early days of the World Wide Web, when people were struggling to keep track of the new world of multimedia it offered them.In those days people viewed the Web through NCSA Mosaic, a browser that helped popularize the Web; they could check the level of coffee in the Trojan Room coffee machine at Cambridge University using the first Web cam on the Internet, and they could read the headlines on the NandO Times, one of the first "new media" operations.Yahoo first appeared on the Internet in 1994 when Jerry Yang and David Filo were still at Stanford University -- something that was immediately obvious from the site's first address: http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/. It wasn't until later in 1994 that the easier-to-type http://www.yahoo.com came along, but even then it redirected to the Stanford server.But back in 1994 people weren't that concerned about clunky addresses. They'd been living with the text-based Internet for years and the Web with all of its richness had people hooked. Yahoo stepped in to solve an early problem: how could users keep track of the fast expanding World Wide Web.What Yang and Filo built was revolutionary for the time: a hierarchical index of the Web divided into subjects like "computers," "government" and "society and culture." (The service lives on today as the Yahoo Directory)Love at first sightFrom the early days it was clear that users loved Yahoo."David Filo and Jerry Yang should be given a Medal of Honor, then locked in a room and never allowed to get lives: they are already doing an excellent job of categorizing the Web with Yahoo's Hostlist," wrote one user in response to a Sept. 1994 Usenet posting asking for a directory of Web sites.Word of the service spread through the Internet, often from enthusiastic users passing on details of the resource, but sometimes with a little promotion by Yang and Filo themselves."We have a pretty comprehensive listing at the Yahoo Database," wrote Yang on Usenet in Sept. 1994. "It's an attempt to be organized by subject (although not very well) -- but we are working on it. Searchable too," he wrote.All the time Yang and Filo continued to live everyday lives, unaware they would become billionaires in less than a decade. A look at old Usenet postings reveals Yang campaigning for fair funding for college students while Filo was trying to trade World Cup tickets online.As 1995 began, Yahoo was serving up 200,000 pages per day from its index of about 25,000 Web sites, and was about to hit the big time. During that year Yang published a book about Yahoo and earned an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air. Both cofounders appeared on a PBS Frontline TV documentary about the Internet called "High Stakes in Cyberspace.""What Yahoo does is make your wasting your time easier. It wants you to get where you want to go to waste time faster so you don't have to waste time wasting time," is how Yang explained Yahoo in the documentary, according to a transcript of the show.The publicity came just as thousands of people started piling onto the Web and new sites were popping up faster and faster. As a result by the middle of June 1996 Yahoo had jumped to 9 million pages per day and in the third quarter of that year traffic for the three-month period hit 1 billion page views.Investment in the popular and fast growing site wasn't far behind its rising popularity. In April 1995 Sequoia Capital provided Yahoo with two rounds of venture funding just as Yang and Filo decided to put their studies on hold and start running Yahoo full time."We [hadn't] done anything on our research in the last few months," Filo told CIO magazine in a June 1995 interview. "We had to decide which thing to pursue, and we're not really interested in what our PhDs were in."An initial public offering and international expansion was next on the cards, and by the end of 1996 Yahoo had sites in the U.K., Germany, France, and Japan, and had launched the Yahooligans service for kids.Early competitionYahoo wasn't without competition back in those days. WebCrawler was getting popular and Lycos was also making a name for itself, but none of the search engines at the time fully satisfied people. So it was common to switch allegiances whenever a better service came along. In 1996 many Internet users did just that when sites like Inktomi and Digital Equipment's Altavista launched.But Yahoo managed to endure the competition, possibly because its directory often was a better place to find links that the early search engines.Microsoft was making a late start on the Internet, launching MSN as a dial-up Internet access service in the U.S. in 1995. It wasn't until a few years later that MSN was relaunched as a portal and still more years until Microsoft put its full weight behind developing Internet-based products and services.Like Yahoo, Google also grew out of Stanford University but didn't start to achieve recognition until the end of the decade. Within a few years, however, it had grown to become the leader in online search.Today Yahoo is one of the most powerful online media brands in the world. It has more than 500 million users in numerous countries and its name is recognizable to billions of people.
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Yahoo has not reached a decision about&#160;Microsoft&#39;s acquisition offer&#160;and is considering &quot;a wide range of potential strategic alternatives,&quot; Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said in an e-mail to employees on Wednesday.In the e-mail, which was addressed to &quot;yahoos&quot; and filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Yang said the Yahoo board is still reviewing the deal and will &quot;take the time it needs to do it right.&quot;&quot;Our board is thoughtfully evaluating a wide range of potential strategic alternatives in what is a complex and evolving landscape,&quot; he wrote in the e-mail, typed in all lowercase letters.Microsoft made its unsolicited bid for Yahoo last Friday, offering to pay $44.6 billion for the company, or 62 percent over Yahoo&#39;s closing share price Thursday. The deal would greatly expand Microsoft&#39;s search and advertising business and could help it to compete better with Google online.Yahoo is understood to be lukewarm on the offer. The company hopes a rival suitor will emerge with a counteroffer or that it can forge a deal with Google that will allow it to remain independent, according to Wednesday&#39;s Wall Street Journal newspaper, which cited unnamed sources.However, analysts have said it is unlikely another company could match Microsoft&#39;s sizeable offer, and a business deal between Yahoo and Google could raise antitrust concerns because of Google&#39;s already dominant market position.In the e-mail, Yang thanked the Yahoo staff for staying focused on their work amid the turmoil. The company has hired &quot;top advisors&quot; to assist it through the process and is focused on maximizing value for its shareholders, he said.
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Struggling Internet giant Yahoo brought back co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive Monday to replace Terry Semel as the company girds up to fight back the Google juggernaut.
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There will be platform independence, this time Yahoo! has announced its intention to support third-party widgets on its mobile platform, promising platform independence and rapid development. The announcement came in a presentation at the CES event, currently taking place in Las Vegas.â¦
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Yahooâs chief executive and co-founder plans to expand the  Internet stalwart to make it âa starting pointâ for consumers.
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Search firm Yahoo reveals its ambitions to create a "rich web experience" on mobile phones.
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As the big name CIO keynoting at this yearâs Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Rob Carter of Federal Express could have been forgiven for doing a deep dive on how his 7,000-person IT team is using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), mashups, Web video, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python), and other checkbox items from the cool-tools list. But Carter took things in a different direction: talking philosophically about how the Internetâs impact is accelerating changes in the way the world interacts and in the way IT works.
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Yahoo, Inc., world-class leader in online search queries, announced its plans to reveal desktop search feature in January, which will go through testing in the designated month.
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Bleeding market share, managerial talent and investor confidence, Internet giant Yahoo on Monday replaced chief executive Terry Semel with company co-founder Jerry Yang.
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Here's the note Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang sent to his troops Monday morning explaining how Microsoft's bid "substantially undervalues Yahoo."