Yahoo confirms departure of media chief Mickie Rosen

Mickie Rosen, head of global media at Yahoo, who was responsible for properties including Yahoo News, Sports and Finance, is leaving the company effective Sept. 1, Yahoo revealed Monday in a regulatory filing.

The change was announced just hours after Yahoo disclosed the resignation of three board members: Daniel Loeb, Harry Wilson and Michael Wolf, effective July 31, bringing the size of the company's board down to seven. "The remaining directors are committed to revisiting the board's size and composition," Yahoo said in a statement. However, the two events are believed to be unrelated.

The board members' resignations were disclosed alongside Yahoo's announcement of its repurchase of 40 million shares of Yahoo common stock owned by hedge fund Third Point, at a purchase price of US$29.11 per share. Loeb is CEO at Third Point; the hedge fund had nominated Wilson and Wolf as Yahoo board members.

In a separate filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Yahoo said that Rosen, who had served as senior vice president, global media and commerce since 2011, would receive severance benefits specified in her existing agreement with the company. A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment further on Rosen's departure or provide information about a replacement.

Yahoo's media division includes multiple site properties that are critical to the company's business, such as Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Video, which provides original, premium and third-party content that is distributed across Yahoo's network.

Since October, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has attracted more attention for a slew of small mobile acquisitions than for revamping Yahoo's media offerings. But video in particular is one of four key revenue opportunities the company expects to focus on in the immediate future, Mayer said last week during the company's second-quarter earnings call.

During the call, Mayer called video a primary area of investment over the next year, along with new products geared toward improving the company's display advertising revenue, which fell by 11 percent in the quarter.

Yahoo faces enormous pressure to reinvent itself and demonstrate its relevance to users who have flocked to rival Internet companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Some industry analysts have characterized the company as a sinking ship, but the departures of board members Loeb, Wolf and Wilson and media chief Rosen are not connected, said Erik Gordon, associate director at the University of Michigan's Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies.

"Loeb dumped two-thirds of his stock, and his guys left the board, because he thinks the chances of the stock price going up are too slim to justify the risk of having so much money in the company," Gordon said.

But Rosen left for her own reasons, including the fact that Yahoo's media team "are losing their independence," he said, adding that Mayer wants more direct control over the media business.

Yahoo's stock has risen more than 70 percent over the past year, though Mayer's tech-celebrity status and the company's stake in the profitable Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba have been key factors in its ascension, experts have said.

Yahoo buys Chinese startup Ztelic to boost R&D

Yahoo has made yet another acquisition, this time picking up Beijing-based data analysis startup Ztelic to boost its research and development efforts in China.

The deal, announced Thursday, is Yahoo's second acquisition in two days and its 19th since former Google executive Marissa Mayer was made CEO of Yahoo a year ago this week.

Ztelic developed a software product for analyzing and monitoring activity on social networks. Yahoo said it bought the company for the engineering talent, which has been the motivation for a few of its recent buys.
"As part of our investment in our R&D efforts, we're bringing on a talented team of eight developers and engineers from Ztelic," Yahoo said in a statement via email.

Ztelic was founded by Hao Zheng, who formerly was chief architect at Yahoo's R&D labs in China and who also worked at one time for games developer Zynga in Asia, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He's now returning to Yahoo, where he'll play a "critical leadership role" at its R&D center in Beijing, Yahoo said. Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed.

It's been a busy week for Yahoo. On Monday it reported its quarterly earnings, which showed a jump in profit but declining revenue. Two days later, it said it had bought Admovate, which makes technology to improve ad targeting on smartphones.

Yahoo buys Admovate to ramp up its mobile advertising

Yahoo has bought ad tech startup Admovate to grow its mobile advertising sales and provide a stronger channel for personalized display advertising.
Terms of the deal, yet another in a major buying spree for Yahoo this year, were not disclosed.
Four employees at Admovate, which has been headquartered in Mountain View, California, will be joining Yahoo’s display advertising team at Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, a Yahoo spokeswoman said in an email.
Through its technology, Admovate claims to enable advertisers to create and deliver personalized, hyper-local targeted offers through the mobile channel. “This is especially important for mobile ad experiences that engage consumers on smaller screens,” said Scott Burke, senior VP of display advertising and advertising technology at Yahoo, in a Wednesday blog post.
Admovate’s services would provide a much-needed boost to Yahoo’s display ad revenue, which fell by 11 percent for the quarter ended June 30, Yahoo reported Tuesday.
Following Marissa Mayer’s appointment last July as CEO of Yahoo, the company has gobbled up more than a dozen small tech startups, but Admovate stands out as an advertising purchase, and one that is not focused on consumer products.
Yahoo, which has struggled to compete against Google and Facebook’s mammoth advertising operations in recent years, introduced two new ad formats in April: stream ads, a form of sponsored advertising incorporated into the company’s newly launched news stream; and the Yahoo.com Billboard, providing richer content like movie trailers that let users buy tickets from within the ad.
In February, Yahoo reached a global advertising deal with Google to place more ads across its Web properties like Yahoo Sports and Yahoo News.
The company also operates its Right Media Exchange, an ad-buying platform for digital advertising companies, which includes differentiated ad networks, direct advertisers, data providers and global agencies.
The acquisition is part of the company’s efforts to invest further in these types of ad tech platforms, Yahoo said, to “make buying easier for advertisers and agencies.” The deal could yield new ad products for Yahoo’s global advertisers and partners in the coming months, the company said.

“We are investing more deeply in programmatic buying and mobile advertising,” Yahoo’s Burke said, adding, “Admovate’s personalization technology accelerates our capabilities in mobile advertising, and we gain an exceptionally talented technical team.”

Yahoo’s smaller acquisitions this year, which also include Xobni, GoPollGo and Astrid, may indeed be geared more toward acquiring talent than the products themselves, Mayer and CFO Ken Goldman signaled Tuesday during the company’s second-quarter earnings call.

“In lieu of hiring, we’ve acquired these companies ... for talent and expertise,” Goldman said. And, “We’re going to continue the pace of doing these smaller deals,” Mayer said, which she referred to as tuck-in acquisitions.

In the past 12 months, Yahoo has grown its dedicated mobile team by a factor of six, Mayer said, going from dozens of engineers to hundreds of engineers.

Beefing up its ad technologies, particularly in display, will be a focus at Yahoo during the remainder of the year, Mayer also said during Tuesday’s call.

Few additional details about Admovate’s products or services, which may not even have launched yet, are given on the company’s website.

“We’d like to thank everyone who supported us along the way: Our partners, our advisors and our investors,” the landing page reads. Admovate was founded just last year. 

Yahoo kills a dozen more products to sharpen its focus

Yahoo is slimming itself down again by axing 12 of its products, part of an ongoing effort to sharpen its focus on services it thinks people need in their daily lives.

The list includes AltaVista, the granddaddy of search engines, and Yahoo RSS Alerts. The other products, including Yahoo Axis, Citizen Sports and Yahoo Browser Plus, are less well known.

“Today we’re shutting down a few products so we can continue to focus on creating beautiful products that are essential to you every day,” said Jay Rossiter, executive vice president of platforms at Yahoo, in a blog post Friday afternoon.

Yahoo ditched numerous other products in April, such as Deals and SMS Alerts, touting similar goals around “sharpening our focus.”

Here’s the full list of services being killed off, in order of their planned closure dates:

Yahoo Axis, a browser plug-in (June 28)Yahoo Browser Plus, a service for Web app developers (June 28)Citizen Sports, a sporting news and stat service (June 28)Yahoo WebPlayer, a media player for websites (June 30)FoxyTunes, a plug-in for controlling different media players (July 1)Yahoo RSS Alerts (July 1)Yahoo Neighbors Beta, for helping people find out what’s going on in their neighborhood (July 8)AltaVista (July 8)Yahoo Stars India, a celebrity news aggregator (July 25)Yahoo Downloads Beta, an application for third-party downloads (July 31)Yahoo Local API, which gives developers access to local business information (Sept. 28)Yahoo Term Extraction API, for extracting terms and keywords from websites (Sept. 28)

With AltaVista soon officially no more, Yahoo is encouraging users to visit the regular Yahoo Search page. Earlier on Friday, it announced a new feature for setting up search alerts.

Yahoo is highlighting other products to help fill the gaps elsewhere. Citizen Sports may be gone, but Yahoo says people can still get the latest sports news on the Yahoo Sports homepage, play fantasy sports like Fantasy Football, and stay up-to-date on the go with its mobile Sports app.

In recent months, Yahoo has said it is focused on products and services geared toward daily habits, such as email, weather, sports, finance, and photos.

In some of those areas it’s not doing badly. Yahoo’s new mobile weather app, for instance, has a 4.5-star rating in Apple’s App Store, based on about 4,000 reviews.

During the company’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this week, CEO Marissa Mayer said she likes to think of Yahoo as a big startup.

“We are making investments, and we’re going to continue to make investments, because that’s what drives growth,” she said.

Yahoo recently paid more than $1 billion to buy social blogging site Tumblr.

Prism implicates Facebook, Yahoo and others in Europe, student group charges

The U.S. government surveillance program known as Prism, which reportedly collects data from major technology companies, has compelled a European student group to file a barrage of complaints against the companies, claiming the data collection runs afoul of European privacy laws.

 

The complaints were recently filed in Ireland against Facebook and Apple, in Luxembourg against Skype and Microsoft, and in Germany against Yahoo. The complaints are directed at the companies' European subsidiaries.

 

The Austrian student group Europe-v-Facebook.org said that while the Prism scandal is playing out in the U.S., "most of the involved companies conduct their business through subsidiaries in the EU in order to avoid U.S. taxes." This means that the companies must abide by European privacy laws, the group said.

 

The basis of the group's complaints concerns how the companies export their user data back to their U.S. counterparts. When a European company sends that data back to its U.S. parent company, that is considered an "export" of the data, the group said, which is only allowed if the subsidiary can ensure an "adequate level or protection" in the foreign country, the group said Wednesday in a statement.

 

However, "after the recent disclosures on the Prism program, such trust in an 'adequate level of protection' by the involved companies can hardly be upheld," the group said.

 

In their privacy policies, some of the largest tech companies say that they will share users' personal information to meet applicable laws, regulations, legal processes or enforceable government requests.

 

Since Prism's revelations have ripped trough the technology industry and the privacy landscape more broadly, companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft have called for greater transparency in disclosure of data on government requests for customer information.

 

Yahoo, for instance, has since disclosed some of its user data requests, but companies have had a harder time clearing the way to specifically reveal requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has been at the center of the Prism controversy.

 

"For European subsidiaries of the involved companies, American 'gag order' does not apply," the student group said Wednesday, adding, "in contrast to that, the companies are even under an obligation to tell the truth under European proceedings."

 

Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland must now decide whether it is legal for European companies to mass-transfer personal data to a foreign intelligence agency, the group said.

 

"We want a clear statement by the authorities if a European company may simply give foreign intelligence agencies access to its customer data," it said.

 

"If this turns out to be legal, then we might have to change the laws," it added.

 

In recent weeks, Europe's justice commissioner has pledged that Europeans' rights would not be sacrificed for U.S. national security.

 

The student group also seeks more clarity from the tech companies on how they handle users' personal data under European procedures.

 

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo could not be immediately reached to comment on the complaints.

 

In 2006, E.U. data protection authorities already decided in a case involving the payment processor Swift that a mass transfer of data to the U.S. authorities is illegal under EU law, the student group said.

 

Google and YouTube were not included in the first round of complaints, the group said, because they do not use European intermediaries.

 

"But since Google has data centers in Ireland, Belgium and Finland, we can take similar actions on a slightly different path," they said.

 

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Prism implicates Facebook, Yahoo and others in Europe, student group charges

The U.S. government surveillance program known as Prism, which reportedly collects data from major technology companies, has compelled a European student group to file a barrage of complaints against the companies, claiming the data collection runs afoul of European privacy laws.

 

The complaints were recently filed in Ireland against Facebook and Apple, in Luxembourg against Skype and Microsoft, and in Germany against Yahoo. The complaints are directed at the companies’ European subsidiaries.

 

The Austrian student group Europe-v-Facebook.org said that while the Prism scandal is playing out in the U.S., “most of the involved companies conduct their business through subsidiaries in the EU in order to avoid U.S. taxes.” This means that the companies must abide by European privacy laws, the group said.

 

The basis of the group’s complaints concerns how the companies export their user data back to their U.S. counterparts. When a European company sends that data back to its U.S. parent company, that is considered an “export” of the data, the group said, which is only allowed if the subsidiary can ensure an “adequate level or protection” in the foreign country, the group said Wednesday in a statement.

 

However, “after the recent disclosures on the Prism program, such trust in an ‘adequate level of protection’ by the involved companies can hardly be upheld,” the group said.

 

In their privacy policies, some of the largest tech companies say that they will share users’ personal information to meet applicable laws, regulations, legal processes or enforceable government requests.

 

Since Prism’s revelations have ripped trough the technology industry and the privacy landscape more broadly, companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft have called for greater transparency in disclosure of data on government requests for customer information.

 

Yahoo, for instance, has since disclosed some of its user data requests, but companies have had a harder time clearing the way to specifically reveal requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has been at the center of the Prism controversy.

 

“For European subsidiaries of the involved companies, American ‘gag order’ does not apply,” the student group said Wednesday, adding, “in contrast to that, the companies are even under an obligation to tell the truth under European proceedings.”

 

Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland must now decide whether it is legal for European companies to mass-transfer personal data to a foreign intelligence agency, the group said.

 

“We want a clear statement by the authorities if a European company may simply give foreign intelligence agencies access to its customer data,” it said.

 

“If this turns out to be legal, then we might have to change the laws,” it added.

 

In recent weeks, Europe’s justice commissioner has pledged that Europeans’ rights would not be sacrificed for U.S. national security.

 

The student group also seeks more clarity from the tech companies on how they handle users’ personal data under European procedures.

 

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo could not be immediately reached to comment on the complaints.

 

In 2006, E.U. data protection authorities already decided in a case involving the payment processor Swift that a mass transfer of data to the U.S. authorities is illegal under EU law, the student group said.

 

Google and YouTube were not included in the first round of complaints, the group said, because they do not use European intermediaries.

 

“But since Google has data centers in Ireland, Belgium and Finland, we can take similar actions on a slightly different path,” they said.