Tag: yahoo

As the search engine giant works to expand its smartphone and tablet based audience, its acquisitions continue.

Yahoo! has just revealed its most recent step in widening its audience of smartphone and tablet users in its purchase of the mobile marketing platform, Sparq.

This allows users to be able to more conveniently toggle among their smartphone apps.

This is far from the first of the acquisitions that Yahoo! has made recently in the mobile marketing area. In fact, this is only one of a growing number of small startups that are being absorbed by the search engine giant in its efforts to move into the smartphone friendly channel more effectively. The primary benefit of Sparq is that it allows its users to be able to switch from one app to another while using their smartphones. This could be highly appealing to marketers because this capability is believed to help to increase the app usage from the owners of mobile devices.

Sparq integration into Yahoo! could also help the company to use mobile marketing for monetization.

According to the founder of Sparq, Jesse Chor, who is also the company’s CEO, “We are uber passionate about mobile — we’ve been striving to build the best mobile platform possible, and are excited to continue upon that goal with Yahoo.” Chor went on to express that “Words cannot describe how ecstatic we are to be joining such an amazing team with such an inspiring mission. We see endless opportunity ahead.”

The earnings at Yahoo! haven’t been exceptionally good over the last while. During the last quarter of 2013, the company’s reports showed that its earnings had fallen by 91 percent when compared to the same time a year before. That said, one of the reasons that the earnings were as low as they were was that the company had spent a massive amount of money on the acquisition of startups. In fact, in the last quarter alone, there was $163 million spent by Yahoo! on purchasing other companies.

In December, the company took in a number of companies that could contribute to its mobile marketing strategy, including PeerCDN, a content-speeding startup, Evntlive, a startup for “virtual venues”, and SkyPhrase, a natural language software startup that has been compared to Siri.

The online blogging forum is now being purchased by the search engine giant in a recovery effort.

Yahoo! has announced in its latest technology news that it is purchasing the massively popular online blogging forum, Tumblr, for a cool $1.1 billion in order to breathe some life back into itself.

The CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer, is aiming to rejuvenate what was once the top search engine.

The company has managed to fall behind and Mayer is now making an aggressive acquisition to help to reverse this trend. The deal was first announced on Monday and is the boldest move that she has made with the company, since she left Google just under a year ago in order to lead the latest comeback effort at Yahoo! This is also the most expensive acquisition that the search engine company has made since the purchase of Overture ten years ago. That purchase made technology news headlines when Yahoo! forked over $1.3 billion in stock and cash.

This technology news will involve a payment all in cash, taking a chunk out of Yahoo’s reserves.

The company has been holding $7.6 billion in windfall, which it brought in when it sold half of its stake in Alibaba Holdings Group, the Chinese internet company. This means that the acquisition of Tumblr will take up approximately a fifth of the $5.4 billion that Yahoo! was storing in its accounts by the close of the first quarter of the year.

At the same time that Yahoo! made its acquisition technology news headlines, it also announced that the CEO of Tumblr, David Karp, would be maintaining his position “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business.” Karp first started that company six years ago. Both businesses hope that it will soon become a central player in a massive recovery for Yahoo! to become the most influential companies on the internet once more. This is a position that it has not held in 13 years, since it was surpassed by Google – with the help of Mayer, who worked there at the time.