The first wave of Web brands died during the Nuclear Winter of 2001-03: Excite, Lycos et al. were all fantastically strong brands and companies in the late 1990s, but they are all nowhere to be seen amongst the digital media elite. The main argument was that Excite and Lycos - purveyors of the first search engines - all fell in love with portaldom and turned their backs on search.
Search vs. Portaldom continue reading...
The following is a perpetual-work-in-progress. Once you start to compile a list of mergers and acquisitions, you realize why it’s nearly impossible to have a complete list. We are quite confident that the following is a very good, comprehensive list of the largest, more notable deals… but it is not - and no list will be - fully complete because there are too many countries around the world and too many industries to report (it is highly possible that the Wall Street Journal or Financial Post, for example, has such a list… but it would be thick and unwieldy).
We have included: continue reading...
You do not need a CFA to realize that Yahoo! is an undervalued company. Yes, the company once synonymous with the World Wide Web is now facing numerous challenges, but between investments in Alibaba, Yahoo! Japan, a myriad of recently acquired US-based properties (Flickr, Delicious, etc.), the company is worth more than $32B.
But, tell that to Wall Street investors and analysts who keep pegging Yahoo!’s growth (or lack thereof) to Google’s and end up favoring the search leader. continue reading...
Apparently, Flickr’s images, which Yahoo! bought back in is finally being indexed in Yahoo! images. That’s surprising. You’d think all things Web 2.0 would seamlessly mesh into one another, but apparently, not so.
I was always very disappointed (in hindsight) as a Yahoo! shareholder that YHOO did not integrate Flickr’s sharing capabilities with Delicious’ tagging and unleash the mutant that would spawn out of that into what went on to be YouTube (YouTube was after Delicious + Flickr for video) but seeing this explains why they never did. continue reading...
Om Malik asked me what I thought of Yahoo!’s decision to focus on Flickr and effectively fold Yahoo! Photos into Flickr.
What do I think? I have been focusing on YHOO/MSFT’s rumored hookup and following the stock all day. And all of this in between actually running a business. continue reading...
