Yahoo Shells Out $160 Million for MusicMatch
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Apple&#39;s iTunes Music Store may be the current 800-pound gorilla of the online music industry (as far as paid downloads are concerned), but now Yahoo - possibly the most visited site on the Internet - is getting into the fray, paying $160 million in cash
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Yahoo said it has paid $160 million to acquire Maven Networks, an Internet company that sells a system for managing advertisements in online videos.
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Yahoo has acquired Maven Networks for $160 million in a deal that will help the search provider boost its video advertising capabilities.Media companies including Fox News, CBS Sports, and&#160;Sony BMG use Maven&#39;s platform to manage, distribute, and earn advertising revenue from their online video content. The platform includes an advertising insertion engine, as well as inventory management and reporting tools. Companies use it to post videos on their sites and insert interactive ads into the videos.On Tuesday, Yahoo&#160;said it plans to contribute its display advertising sales force and technologies to Maven&#39;s platform to help publishers display more targeted ads in videos. The deal means that advertisers can buy video, search, and display ads through Yahoo, which believes that video is a fast-growing segment of the online ad market.Maven has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo, which has established a Cambridge, Mass., office with the acquisition.Yahoo makes the acquisition in the midst of an increasingly hostile&#160;attempt by Microsoft to buy the search company. In response to&#160;Yahoo&#39;s rebuttal of its buyout offer, Microsoft on Monday said that it thinks its offer was fair and that it might&#160;take the offer directly to Yahoo shareholders.
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Microsoft Corp on Friday said it had offered to acquire Yahoo Inc in a proposed cash and stock deal valued at $44.6 billion.
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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.
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Yahoo Launching Music Download Service This Year  After its $160 million aquisition of MusicMatch, Yahoo is expected to be releasing its own music download service at the end of the year. According to ZDNet, Yahoo has been in the development phase of its music download service since last year, working with ...
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Internet portal Yahoo is looking to boost its music offerings with the purchase of Musicmatch for 160 million dollars. The all-cash deal is intended to give Yahoo increased
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Yahoo said it was buying digital music group Musicmatch for about 160 million dollars in cash in a move aimed at boosting the Internet portal's online music offerings.
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NEW YORK: Internet company Yahoo says it will buy privately held music software company Musicmatch for about $US160 million in a bid to bolster its online music services.
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Microsoft Friday unveiled a bid of 44.6 billion dollars for Yahoo in an effort to merge the world's biggest software company with a major Internet player to take on the Google juggernaut.
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Microsoft&#39;s $44.6 billion offer to purchase Yahoo&#160;is a dramatic statement from a company that delayed acknowledging the importance of emerging Web business models for so long, it faced becoming an also-ran in the Web 2.0 economy.
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Microsoft&#39;s $44.6 billion offer to purchase Yahoo&#160;is a dramatic statement from a company that delayed acknowledging the importance of emerging Web business models for so long, it faced becoming an also-ran in the Web 2.0 economy.But the cultural implications of the move are so tricky that the deal could end up backfiring for both vendors if Microsoft doesn&#39;t take care to learn from its past and use Yahoo to transform its business and&#160;not just help bolster its unproven efforts in online advertising and hosted services.The unprecedented deal, which would put a sizable dent in Microsoft&#39;s wallet, would be the largest purchase ever for the company. If Microsoft is willing to spend that much money, it also has to be willing to change some old ways of thinking to make the most out of the investment, analysts say.To achieve this, analysts caution Microsoft to be careful not to view Yahoo as a one-trick pony, taken onboard only for its user base and infrastructure to bolster Microsoft&#39;s online advertising interests against Google. While this is certainly the primary reason for the deal, to make the most of it, Microsoft has to not only respect the strength of Yahoo&#39;s brand but also be willing to let go of some of its own traditional proprietary interests -- not just on the product side but in its culture as well.Microsoft has never been one to let go of its vision or proprietary interests too easily; when acquiring companies, it usually subsumes the products and services and brands them as its own.While this has worked in the past because Microsoft traditionally has shied away from acquiring big-name or big-ticket items --&#160;last year&#39;s $6 billion aQuantive deal&#160;was a notable exception -- it&#39;s not as simple to do this with a company like Yahoo, analysts said.In the areas of online search and particular services and as an online destination for users, Yahoo is a stronger brand than Microsoft. Microsoft must recognize this and be willing to give up some of its interest in new content and services branded, respectively, under MSN and Windows Live to make the deal successful, said Ned May, director and lead analyst for market research firm Outsell.&quot;The big question is, will Microsoft take this and recognize it for being a stronger property and migrate its efforts there, or will it try to push its own efforts out through Yahoo?&quot; he asked. &quot;Historically, there&#39;s no precedent for it to do anything but use [an acquired company] to get Microsoft&#39;s message out.&quot;Though Microsoft and Yahoo are different types of companies and the union itself makes much more sense, Ron Schmelzer, analyst and managing partner with Zapthink, likened the deal to Time Warner-AOL, in which AOL&#39;s brand was damaged, not enhanced, after all was said and done.But investing as much as the gross domestic product of some countries in one company could inspire Microsoft to &quot;change its stripes&quot; and rethink its own interests, he said.To make the deal a true success, Microsoft also has to prove that it can let go of its entrenched Windows OS and desktop software culture, which had been the anchor keeping Microsoft from moving more quickly against Google and Yahoo in online advertising and services in the first place, Schmelzer said.&quot;The application itself is moving away from the thing that sits captive on your desktop to the thing that&#39;s distributed on the Internet,&quot; he said. &quot;Microsoft has to rid itself of its &#39;80s and &#39;90s perspective -- which was great in the &#39;80s and &#39;90s, but now 80 percent of the value of the computer is not in the computer itself.&quot;Microsoft had been moving in this direction before Friday&#39;s news, but it has been burdened by its need to keep the customers of two of its biggest consumer products -- Windows and Office -- happy, as well as its enormous portfolio of enterprise and business customers. Instead of moving full bore into the Web, Microsoft had adopted a &quot;software plus services&quot; strategy as a nod to its software legacy and inability to move fully to a more services-oriented strategy because of it.Still, some think an entire cultural shift isn&#39;t necessary for Microsoft to make the most out of the deal. David Mitchell Smith, vice president and fellow at Gartner, said Microsoft can leverage Yahoo successfully without changing its usual way of doing things, by keeping the brand and merging the best parts of Yahoo&#39;s Internet business, such as its online content, advertising and search, with its online services efforts.&quot;I would expect to see the Yahoo brand come out of this very, very strong,&quot; he said. In particular, Microsoft has been making moves to drive more video and other multimedia content online through MSN, and that is one area where the company could give up its own identity in favor of Yahoo&#39;s, Smith said.Andrew Brust, chief, new technology for consulting firm twentysix New York, said that the combination of Microsoft&#39;s existing Web technology and the Yahoo brand would be &quot;nicely complementary,&quot; though he acknowledged the risks of such a union. Even so, &quot;risk aversion is not a good Internet strategy,&quot; Brust said. Taking a risk in this area as well as bringing &quot;some truly Internet-focused mindset into the corporate culture&quot; may be just what Microsoft needs.Others likened the deal to another risky one, HP-Compaq, which many feared would be a disaster because of product overlap and cultural differences. That deal eventually proved successful.However, it&#39;s important to keep in mind how much more of a role that culture and the cool factor plays on the Internet than it does in the world of traditional computer hardware, warned Outsell&#39;s May. He said Yahoo users may be put off by the notion of Microsoft as their new daddy and see Google as the lesser of two evils, which would defeat the notion of the Microsoft-Yahoo union in the first place.
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Yahoo! Inc., owner of the world&#39;s most-visited Internet site, will buy Musicmatch Inc. for $160 million to spur sales of music downloads and compete with rivals including Apple Computer Inc.
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Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) is buying online jukebox provider Musicmatch Inc. for $160 million in a deal designed to broaden the Internet giant's appeal with the growing audience of consumers who buy songs off the Web.
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Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for around $44.6 billion in cash and shares, to better compete with Google in the market for online services.
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Internet giant Yahoo! extended its reach in Net&#39;s growing multimedia market today when it announced the deal to acquire media player software house MusicMatch.
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Yahoo said Tuesday that it is acquiring digital music specialist Musicmatch for $160 million in cash. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said the buyout would help it expand its presence in the simmering