Yahoo Sells To Verizon In Saddest $5 Billion Deal In Tech History

Yahoo was once the king of the Internet, a $125 billion behemoth as big in its time as Facebook or Google are today. Now it’s being sold to Verizon for comparative chump change.

On Monday morning, Yahoo is expected to announce the end of the long process to extricate itself from a mess of its own making with a sale of its core business to Verizon for just under $5 billion, according to multiple reports. The transaction ends the independence of one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic pioneering companies. Yahoo’s seventh and final CEO, Marissa Mayer, will reportedly depart with severence pay worth more than $50 million.

The sale will unite Yahoo with another fallen star, AOL, the first web portal Verizon bought last year for $4.4 billion. The United States’ largest wireless provider is betting nearly $10 billion that combining the two formerly dominant websites will give it an edge in mobile content and advertising technology it can leverage across its more than 140 million subscribers.

But the biggest story today is how Yahoo squandered its massive head start and let each wave of new technology in search, social, and mobile pass it by. Yahoo remains largely the same company it was a decade ago — a portal that hundreds of millions of users rely on for everything from news and weather to key functions like email and games like fantasy football. As the attention of the world shifted to smartphone apps, Yahoo’s last advantage in the desktop world began to fade.

Yahoo began in 1994 as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” a list of websites curated by Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo. It grew quickly as millions of Americans began turning on dial-up Internet connections and needed a home page that would direct them to all their essential destinations. In 1996 it went public and rode the dot-com bubble to epic heights, reaching a peak of $500 a share (or $125 a share in today’s post-split calculations) in January 2000

Yet Yahoo missed the opportunity of a generation to convert its early lead and millions of users into more than just a portal. At the height of the bubble, it spent $4.5 billion to buy Geocities and $5.7 billion to buy Broadcast.com, but would later reportedly squander the chance to buy young versions of both Google and Facebook. Yahoo’s own search offering now holds only a fraction of the market and its eventual purchase of social network Tumblr hasn’t made up for the Facebook miss. (Yahoo wrote down Tumblr’s value for the second time last week.)

Over the last four years, Mayer, a former Google executive, tried to right Yahoo’s ship. But her tenure was marred by confused strategy and mismanagement. Revenue peaked in 2008, the year after the iPhone came out, and traffic has continued to fall as users find their attention drawn to younger, more relevant websites and apps.

The one thing that kept Yahoo afloat for this long is Jerry Yang’s risky $1 billion bet on Alibaba in 2005. That bought 40% in what would become China’s ecommerce king. Yahoo sold parts of that holding over time, but its current stake is still worth more than $30 billion at today’s prices.

However, the investment was so successful that it became worth far more than Yahoo’s flagging core business. In 2015, Yahoo’s management plotted a tax-free spin off of its Alibaba stake to unlock shareholder value, but scrapped the plan at the last minute when the IRS refused to grant its blessing. Since then, Yahoo has been evaluating “strategic alternatives” with a months-long auction process for its core business that has drawn constant headlines and speculation.

Experts have long pegged Verizon as the frontrunner, but others put in bids. Billionaires Dan Gilbert and Warren Buffett backed one offer, as did the parent company of Yellow Pages, and private equity firm TPG.

But in the end, it would be Verizon that snagged Yahoo’s technology and web properties like a bargain bin hunter, 24 years after inception. It’s an ironic end. While the opening of the consumer web made the portal an early online superpower, now Yahoo will be eaten by a company that enables more users to access the Internet every day, from anywhere, than Yahoo’s founders ever could have dreamed when they first launched.

By Brian Solomon for Forbes. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Machine learning powers a new Smart Bidding feature for AdWords and DoubleClick Search

Real-time bidding is an aspect of digital marketing that can seem overly complex for the average bear, so it was only a matter of time before AI entered the picture. This week, Google brought machine learning into the process to help make it easier.

Tapping some of the same artificial-intelligence technologies that have already appeared in Google Photos and AlphaGo, Smart Bidding is a new capability for conversion-based automated bidding across AdWords and DoubleClick Search to help companies determine their optimal bid for any given campaign or portfolio. It can factor in millions of signals, Google says, and continually refines models of users' conversion performance at different bid levels.

"Smart Bidding's learning capabilities quickly maximize the accuracy of your bidding models to improve how you optimize the long-tail," Anthony Chavez, Google's product management director for search ads, wrote in a blog post explaining the new service. "It evaluates patterns in your campaign structure, landing pages, ad text, product information, keyword phrases, and many more data points to identify more relevant similarities across bidding items."

Essentially, Smart Bidding tailors bids to each auction across Google's properties and allows buyers to factor in a wide range of contextual signals, including device and location. Focusing on device performance, for instance, advertisers can set separate cost per acquisition (CPA) goals by device. A telecom advertiser whose best leads come in via mobile, for instance, could set a higher target CPA for that platform compared with other devices.

New reporting features, meanwhile, show companies exactly how their bid strategies are performing and flag any issues requiring attention.

Current users of AdWords Smart Bidding include AliExpress, SurveyMonkey, and Capterra, Google says.

"Google is trying to maximize effectiveness of search marketing as well as its own revenue," said Greg Sterling, vice president for strategy and insights with the Local Search Association. "Bringing machine learning to bear on bidding should advance both objectives."

Article by Katherine Noyes

Financemagnates Exclusive: HY Markets Rebrands as HYCM, to Launch New Website

Article first published on Financemagnates.com

By Avi Mizrahi | Brokers (Retail FX) | Sunday, 17/07/2016|13:09 GMT

Henyep Capital Markets is rebranding its HY Markets brokerage under the name of HYCM, according to a message on the company’s website. The HYCM branded website with new tools and platforms will officially launch tomorrow, Monday July 18th, 2016.

The company notified its clients that following the launch of the HYCM site, they will be able to log in to the new website with their existing HY Markets usernames and passwords. HYT4 users can continue trading on the HYTrader 4 platform, while active webtrader users can access their accounts through a new multi-asset platform, PrimeTrader, accessible through the trade section of the client portal on the website.

Commenting to Finance Magnates, Marios Chailis, the marketing director of the firm, said that besides HY Markets the brands of PIPtrade and HY Investment will also come under the umbrella of the HYCM.com website. Additionally, he confirmed that the new multi asset web based platform was developed by the UK-based Star Financial Systems.

Headquartered in London, Henyep Capital Markets boasts over thirty years of operational experience. The group is authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority of the United Kingdom (FCA) and the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) within the Dubai International Financial Center.

History of Rebranding

During its many years in the business, Henyep Capital Markets has a history of renaming and rebranding. In 2010 Henyep Investment, a division of Henyep Group, changed its name to Henyep Capital Markets. And in early 2016 its DFSA regulated company, Henyep Investment Bank Limited, was renamed as Henyep Capital Markets (DIFC) Ltd. (‘HYCM DIFC’).

CEO Roger Bach commented back then: “HYCM DIFC has now entered its 10th year of successful operations within the DIFC; at this important milestone, and to further consolidate the Company’s position as a leading broker for retail clients, we have changed our name to reflect the global nature of our operations and breadth of financial products we offer.”

Some Guy Threw Molotov Cocktails, Shot Buildings And Burned Cars In A Series Of Attacks Against Google

Raul Murillo Diaz has been arrested for arson and is being investigated for two other incidents involving firearms and a torched Google car in a string of attacks against a Google building in Mountain View, California. The man was allegedly upset that Google was “watching him.”

According to a report from The Mercury News, Raul Murillo Diaz was arrested on suspicion of involvement in a string of attacks against a Google-owned building in Mountain View. From Mercury:

Federal prosecutors charged Raul Murillo Diaz, 30, with a single count of arson in a May 19 attack, according to an affidavit filed last week in U.S. District Court in San Jose. Investigators are seeking more information from Diaz about two other recent attacks, including the torching of a self-driving car.

Mountain View police arrested Diaz June 30 after a traffic stop near Google headquarters. Police said they found a weapons case and the makings of a pipe bomb in Diaz’s Volkswagen SUV, according to the affidavit.

Diaz later told officers that “he felt Google was watching him and that made him upset,” according to the sworn statement. 

The May 19th attack on the Google campus involved an attempt to burn a Google street view car with Molotov Cocktails (made out of bottle of Blue Moon beer, no less), leaving the vehicle undamaged but burning a patch of the parking lot.

Diaz is also suspected for an attack on June 4th that involved windows of a building owned by Google being shot out, with the same SUV being present from the May attack. A third attack on the morning of June 10th involved a hooded figure torching a Google car originally believed to be a self-driving prototype, but may have actually been a Google Maps street-view car instead.

Diaz allegedly kept journals tracking his suspicions of Google watching him. I wonder which search engine he used to look up “How to make a Molotov Cocktail”? Maybe he didn’t look it up, and that’s why he was using beer.

Story from Jalopnik

Digital Transformation: Engineering The New Reality

Hitachi Consulting has produced an eight-chapter e book, Engineering The New Reality, in which it explores the practical steps to addressing today’s greatest digital challenges through topics such as big data, smart cities, digital engineering, Internet of Things and energy efficiency.

Very interesting read, which basically emphasizes what a lot of people in the industry know: Organizations need to overcome their fear of failure and  Digital Transformation just might be what they need to get this done.

Check it out here