Yahoo! has rejected the 10,247th buyout proposal to date from Microsoft. The New York Times reports that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and investor Carl Icahn made another offer to purchase Yahoo!'s search business on Friday night -- and gave the company 24 hours to respond. Because we've seen how well ultimatums work in the past. Unsurprisingly, The Yahoo! board rejected the offer.
Now are you ready for the funny part? In a detailed press release, Yahoo! explains that the board would prefer an outright sale of the company. The asking price? $33 per share -- or exactly what Microsoft offered several months ago. Yahoo! has seen its stock price fall significantly since that offer, and probably one of the only surefire ways to boost the stock price is to sign a deal with Microsoft or another company. But there's really no reason for Microsoft to pay $33 per share for a company that's stock price would only actually be worth that much money if and when Microsoft ponies up the cash.
There have been reports flying around Twitter and several prominent blogs that Twitter is making a move to acquire Summize, a popular Twitter search engine. In case this is the first you're hearing about Summize, here's a rundown of what it does. It can search Twitter for any string -- most importantly, an @name -- which makes it indispensable when Twitter's tracking function is down. Second, it aggregates and lists the most popular search terms, so you can get a sense of the Twitter zeitgeist.
It's too early to speculate about what effect the acquistion could have on Twitter itself, or how the resulting service would look with Summize's features integrated. We do love the idea of combining two services we use every day, though. Basically, we're keeping our fingers crossed that these rumors are true.
If you thought things were over between Microsoft and Yahoo!, you ain't seen nothing yet. Because now it's really, officially, super duper over. Yahoo! issued a press releases this afternoon making it clear that that not only will Microsoft not be purchasing all of Yahoo!, but Yahoo! won't be selling Microsoft even a part of its business. Not its search engine; not its email service; not even the key to replace the toilet paper and paper towels in the company restrooms (although honestly, we're not sure that was ever on the table).
According to the Yahoo! press release, Yahoo! board members decided that it would not be in the company's best interest to sell its search business. Microsoft, on the other hand, released a statement saying that such a partnership would have provided value for Yahoo! shareholders while ensuring a competitive marketplace.
Oh, and while Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal to buy all of Yahoo!, if Yahoo! decides to change its mind and come crawling back, Microsoft says its offer to buy just the search engine "remains available for discussion." So umm, yeah, maybe it's not really over yet.
WhitePages.com has announced a deal to purchase Snapvine, a company that provides voice applications for social networking sites. WhitePages plans to continue offering Snapvine's current services, including tools for "voice blogging," leaving voice comments on social networking sites, and adding voice comments to photos. But WhitePages also plans to roll out new services, including:
Free, private voicemail boxes
Email
SMS services
Last month WhitePages abandoned plans to buy Jangl, a similar service. The WhitePages web site includes phone numbers for about 180 million people living in the US. Using Snapvine, WhitePages will be able to let individuals replace their phone numbers on the site with personal voicemail boxes or click to call buttons thet lets people reach them via phone without actually giving away their phone number.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water (or at least use Flickr without fear that Microsoft would start requiring WGA validation), Microsoft released a statement saying it's not quite done with this whole Yahoo! thing yet. No, the company isn't putting another bid on the table for an outright acquisition of Yahoo!, but Microsoft isn't ruling that out either.
In a nutshell, Microsoft wants to make it clear that the company plans to expand its advertising and service businesses. And to that end, Microsoft has proposed some sort of an arrangement or partnership with Yahoo! Or maybe Microsoft wants to buy some, but not all of the search portal's properties. The statement doesn't really make it clear what Microsoft's after at this point.
A number of Yahoo! shareholders have expressed their disappointment with the way the Microsoft negotiations were handled (and the subsequent drop in stock price). So we could certainly see why Yahoo!'s leadership might be interested in some sort of a deal which could provide value for both companies, and more importantly keep shareholders from demanding Jerry Yang's head on a platter.
Condé Nast Publications (which owns Wired, Wired.com, and a whole bunch of major magazines) has agreed to purchase Ars Technica for an undisclosed sum.
According to TechCrunch, Ars will be placed under the Wired Digital umbrella under CondéNet, which was made whole with the 2006 acquisition of Wired.com, and may be combined with Wired and Wired.com. The sale will be announced some time in the next week, Mashable has confirmed.
Ars looks to be a good fit for Wired and Wired.com, especially given the similar styles of tech reporting available on on both networks. Both include traditional professional feature style reporting on technology and trends. Wired will benefit from the addition of the new writing staff and Ars will gain a new outlet from its reporting. We wouldn't be surprised to see their work appearing in other publications across the Condé Nast house. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and even GQ (all Condé Nast publications) could stand to benefit from Gear and Gadgets and some of the other ongoing reporting from Ars Technica.
While there's been a lot of speculation recently that someone was going to buy Plaxo, Comcast wasn't the first company that sprung to mind. We figured a company that already has ties to the social networking space like Google or Facebook would have made more sense. In a blog post on the subject, Plaxo CEO Ben Golub says Comcast has plans to "bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers." That means using Plaxo's technology to connect with your contacts across multiple devices. And since Comcast is already in the TV, phone, and ISP business, it should be interesting to see how this plays out. Perhaps your TV viewing habits will automatically be added to your social networking profile? Yeah, we hope not.
The Ask.com/Lexico deal seems like a more natural fit. We doubt Lexico's popular web sites like Dictionary.com will disappear. Rather, Ask will be able to increase its overall web traffic by bringing the new sites into the fold.
CBS is buying CNET. For $1.8 billion in cash. While that might seem like a drop in the bucket compared to some buyout offers we've seen recently, that's still a lot of cash flowing from an old media company to a new one.
CBS is no stranger to new media. The company purchased the internet radio service Last.fm last year. But according to a press release put out by CBS this morning, this acquisition will make CBS "one of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the United States."
CNET Networks owns a whole slew of internet sites, including ZDNet, GameSpot, TV.com, MP3.com, Download.com, and of course, CNET and News.com.
With all the talk of Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! leading nowhere, there's one important thing to keep in mind: Yahoo! never said it was looking for a buyer. Microsoft's takeover offer never quite got "hostile," but it was unsolicted nonetheless. So now that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has decided to take his ball and go home, we probably shouldn't be surprised that Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang released a statement saying "With the distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies" on other things, you know, like making the company as valuable as Yang and the shareholders told Microsoft it already is.
Kara Swisher at All Things Digital has written an interesting article choc full of information from those close to the negotiations. In a nutshell, she says that Yang was originally holding out for Microsoft to offer $40 a share, which was a good $10 or $11 higher than the value of the offer this week. Ballmer was reportedly willing to go as high as $33, while Yang was willing to come down to $37. But once Yang said that Yahoo! would respond to any proxy fight initiated by Microsoft by expanding its partnership with Google, things seemed to fall apart.
It's not clear whether Yahoo! will continue to seek more deals with companies like Google and AOL now that the Microsoft deal is no more. But this raises an interesting question: were Yang and company protecting their brand and their shareholders, or was this a dumb move from a company that's not as relevant as it once was?
OK, this is just getting silly. At this point, Microsoft has made its offer to purchase Yahoo!, been rejected, set a date in the sand, after which Microsoft would try to oust Yahoo!'s board of directors, and then let that date come and go without taking any action. And after all the tough talk, now it looks like Microsoft is finally starting to consider raising its asking price.
The problem is that Microsoft is thinking $32 or $33, which would be a nice boost from its current bid valued at $29.06 a share, while some Yahoo! shareholders are apparently holding out for $35 or more a share.
If this keeps up, we kind of expect Steve Ballmer to start shooting sptiballs at Yahoo! board members and shareholders, pulling their hair, and then threatening to take the kickball home with him so they can't play the game anymore. And then Microsoft will wind up paying $45 a share.
Microsoft has purchased Farecast, a travel pricing/comparison/booking service that competes with similar web services like Travelocity, Orbitz, and Kayak. What sets Farecast apart from other services is the site's focus on predictions. Based on trends over time, Farecast can help users predict whether prices will go up or down in the future.
The Seattle Post Intelligencer says Microsoft paid $115 million for the company. In a blog post, Farecast says very little about the acquisition other than that it "created tremendous opportunities." Farecast is already prominently featured on Microsoft's MSN Travel site. It's not clear if and how Microsoft will utilize Farecast and its technology beyond the travel site.
Yahoo! seems to have come up with the ultimate response to Microsoft's heavy-handed attempts to purchase the internet portal. The Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo! is in talks with Download Squad's parent company AOL over plans to merge the two companies' internet operations.
If the deal goes through, the two companies would combine their web and internet based services. AOL's old school ISP services would not be part of the deal, which would value AOL at $10 billion. Yahoo! would reportedly use some of the revenue from a merger with Time Warner/AOL to buy back a whole bunch of stock which woudl help the company fend off any further unwanted advances from Microsoft.
The upshot of a possible partnership or merger is that people will stop picking on AOL for copying Yahoo!'s homepage design. The downside is that a merged company could conceivably be called AOwho? OK, probably not. We for one welcome our new Yahoo! overlords anyway.
Oh, Microsoft, Yahoo!, when are you going to stop fighting and realize that you're in love with each other? Yahoo!'s board of directors has responded to a letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer demanding action within 3 weeks. In a nutshell, Ballmer told Yahoo! that if the company didn't accept Microsoft's buyout offer, Microsoft would lower its bid and try to replace the Yahoo! Board. So what does Yahoo!'s current board have to say?
I mean seriously, $31 per share? What's up with that. And have we mentioned that your stock is dropping, so your offer is worth less today then when you made the offer?
We keep launching new products like a new advertising platform that add value to our brand. And you're trying to buy us for $31 per share? Hmph.
You think you're the only one interested in taking us to the prom? We've got lots of suitors. Really.
Don't bully us.
All of which is to say that Yahoo! has not closed the door on a possible merger with Microsoft. But Microsoft's either going to have to follow through on Ballmer's threat to wage a proxy battle or raise its asking price.
OK, we know it's a long shot, but wouldn't it be great if Microsoft succeeded in its bid to buy Yahoo! and then renamed the company Microhoo? Because when you type "Microhoo" into Yahoo!'s search engine right now, one of the suggestions is "Microhoods." And given Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's recent letter to the Yahoo! Board, that seems like as accurate a description as any.
Essentially, Ballmer told the board that they've got 3 weeks to accept Microsoft's offer, currently valued at $42 billion in cash and stocks. If the board refuses, Microsoft will take the offer directly to Yahoo!'s shareholders and nominate a slate of board members to replace the current board.
The original offer was 62% higher than Yahoo!'s closing share price on January 31, one day before the offer was made. Ballmer says the goal was to facilitate a "speedy and ultimately friendly transaction." Since that hasn't happened, Ballmer indicates Microsoft might be willing to get a little less friendly, and suggests that Microsoft would drop its offer price if the company has to resort to a proxy contest.
AOL has picked up social networking site Bebo for a huge wad of cash. While we didn't really see this coming, the move makes a lot of sense. AOL's audiences tend to skew old (you know, except for the fine young folks who read AOL-owned blogs like Download Squad), while Bebo is big with the 13-24 set and has 40 million registered users.
While Bebo doesn't have the name recognition of Facebook or MySpace in the US, it's huge in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand. And it does have a considerable US audience as well. Perhaps most importantly, regular users click on an average of 78 pages per day, showing a high level of user engagement.
