Verizon buys Yahoo for US $5 billion

It's an end of a long, grueling era for dot com pioneer Yahoo. The long suffering company was purchased for $5 billion in cash by Verizon who adds the search portal as another of its growing list of media properties under the AOL brand (which also owns Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget). 

Yahoo's diverse core internet business which is made up of web properties like Yahoo Mail, Fantasy Sports, the photo storage site Flickr ,Yahoo search and Tumblr as well as the company's advertising technology are now all part of Verizon.

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO said that, "Yahoo is a company that has changed the world, and will continue to do so through this combination with Verizon and AOL." Meyer, who was hired from Google in 2012, says she plans on staying on for the next phase of Yahoo's assimilation into Verizon.

Source: BBC

Yahoo Mail brings undo send to iOS app

Yahoo Mail has brought a lot of new features into its iOS and Android app, including bringing over Stationery to Android. But the one feature we know users will appreciate is being able to take back emails, much like what you can do with Gmail. There is now an undo send option for the Yahoo Mail iOS app. When you send out an email after tapping send, an “undo” option will pop up at the bottom of your inbox feed for about three seconds, so yes, you have to react fast. There is no word yet when this’ll make it into the Android app. But Yahoo does now allow Android users to disable the swipe to delete function and customizable spacing between emails in your feed to make it more condense or to see snippets of an email. You can check out the rest of the features here.

Yahoo rolls back initial integration of Tumblr’s sales team with its company

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

Yahoo might be giving back some of Tumblr’s autonomy as Yahoo yet again missed earning expectations and is trying to reorganize itself internally for a better future. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer initially promised that Tumblr would be a standalone entity when it acquired the company back in 2013 for US$1.1 billion. But she seemed to take back the idea when they combined Yahoo and Tumblr sales staff. It supposedly caused a bit of an issue with Tumblr staff as both sales teams targeted different markets.

The sudden change in plans make us question how Yahoo will be able to work moving forward and if this means Yahoo might even consider selling Tumblr off in the future. From Tumblr’s end, the official statement is it “has introduced a number of innovative ad products to maximize value for our advertisers and best meet their needs. To further support these efforts moving forward, we have returned to a dedicated direct sales team.”

Source: Business Insider | Via: The Next Web

Yahoo reportedly letting go of 10 per cent of its workforce

Yahoo is reportedly preparing to slash 10 per cent of it s workforce. A report from Business Insider states that up to 1,000 jobs affecting Yahoo’s media business, European operations, and platforms-technology group would be cut.

Yahoo had appointed management consulting firm McKinsey & Co, in November, to help with the reorganization of its core businesses. Yahoo lost one-third of their value last year as it become clear that a spinoff of its lucrative Alibaba stake, this is despite various acquisitions and plans to reinvent itself as a media company and mobile app provider.

Source: USA Today