Airware, a startup that is creating a software platform for commercial drones, said it had raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Google Ventures also participated. As part of the deal, Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon will join Airware’s board.

The Newport Beach, Calif., company said it would use the money to expand staff for its universal development platform as the market for non-military drones expands.

Airware founder and CEO Jonathan Downey said that uses of drones will be increasing for a wide range of purposes, from checking infrastructure to monitoring mining operations to preventing poaching.

In an interview, Downey said that he expects to compete with a range of ex-military efforts, but that the most successful companies will be those that provide a platform to allow for the widest range of innovations.

“This is going to be about a lot more than we know or can guess,” he said. “The industry is at its very beginnings.”

Dixon agrees. “Hardware is the new software,” he said about the investment in Airware, which he said he discovered after attending conferences about the fast-moving drones business, noting that the overall field of robotics has “overpromised and underdelivered.”

Airware came out of both the Lemnos Labs and Y Combinator incubators and had raised seed financing from First Round Capital, Firelake Capital, RRE Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Promus Ventures and several Y Combinator partners.

Because I get bored on Sunday nights, I opened up Yahoo’s recent regulatory filings for some light reading and, as usual, found some tasty information that the company had kindly dropped in for my erudition, but declined to call my attention to.

Namely, that the Silicon Valley Internet giant is paying not so very much for its mobile acquisitions, according to several documents the company has filed.

In fact, Yahoo’s average price paid for each of five of the 10 startups it has purchased since last fall is a tiny $3.2 million in cash.

For example, here’s last week’s 10-Q referring to three of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisitions — content curation app Snip.it, which Yahoo bought in January (funding amount unknown, but the $10 million acquisition price reported by some sites is clearly wrong, as you will see from the filing); recommendation app Alike (funding amount unknown), which was on February’s menu; and recommendation app Jybe (funding amount unknown), which the company picked up in mid-March:

The Company did not make any acquisitions during the three months ended March 31, 2012. However, during the three months ended March 31, 2013, the Company acquired three companies, all of which were accounted for as business combinations. The total purchase price for these acquisitions was $10 million and consisted entirely of cash consideration, primarily allocated to goodwill. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price over the fair value of the net tangible and intangible assets acquired and is not deductible for tax purposes.

The Company’s business combinations completed during the three months ended March 31, 2013 did not have a material impact on the Company’s condensed consolidated financial statements.

Going back further, Yahoo’s purchase of recommendation app Stamped last October (it had $3 million in funding) and video-chat app OnTheAir ($880,000 in funding) in December were also on the cheap — a bargain at $6 million total — according to its 10-K filed a few months ago:

During the year ended December 31, 2012, the Company acquired two companies, which were accounted for as business combinations. The total purchase price for these acquisitions was $7 million. The total cash consideration of $7 million less cash acquired of $1 million resulted in a net cash outlay of $6 million. Of the total purchase price, $6 million was allocated to goodwill and $1 million to cash acquired. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price over the fair value of the net tangible and intangible assets acquired and is not deductible for tax purposes.

The Company’s business combinations completed in 2012 did not have a material impact on the Company’s consolidated financial statements, and therefore pro forma disclosures have not been presented.

It will be interesting to see what Yahoo reveals as to the price, and how it will account for the late March acquisition of Britain’s news reader Summly, which AllThingsD reported was a loftier $30 million.

The Summly deal did not appear to have closed by the end of the quarter, so no purchase information has been released, although it will be soon enough, along with that of the more recent string of mobile buys by Yahoo: To-do app Astrid, social polling app GoPollGo, travel rewards app MileWise and mobile gaming studio Loki.

For those four tiny companies, which were doubtlessly also bought for very little, Yahoo did tout what it’s really after in a festive tweet on Friday.

Warm entrepreneurial bodies:

We recently added 22 entrepreneurs to our growing mobile team. Welcome to Yahoo! @astrid @gopollgo @milewise @lokistudios!

— Yahoo! Inc.(@YahooInc) May 10, 2013

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently met with top execs at Hulu, the premium video service whose big media company owners have been considering selling it for some months.

Sources said Yahoo is “in the process,” although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has not made any kind of formal bid. Other players whom sources said are considering purchasing all or parts of Hulu include: Former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, who now has a successful and well-funded multimedia and investment company called the Chernin Group; Guggenheim Partners digital arm, which is led by former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn; and Amazon.

Sources said Mayer also had an extensive getting-to-know-you meeting, which was apparently not held at Hulu’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., along with COO Henrique De Castro. The discussion is taking place in the wake of Yahoo’s failed bid — largely engineered by De Castro — to purchase a majority stake in France Télécom’s Dailymotion video service, after a top French government official said Yahoo could not own 75 percent of the company.

Had the deal — which was reportedly valued at $300 million — gone through, it would have been the most significant by Mayer since she took over at the company last July. Thus far, she has limited her purchases to small mobile startup.

While the meetings with Hulu are only preliminary, Yahoo has been to this video rodeo before, having seriously considering buying Hulu when it was previously being shopped by its owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. (News Corp. also owns this site.)

Of course, if Yahoo’s interest becomes more serious, Mayer will have to make important visits to top execs at those media giants, since they control the rights to critical content, and thus Hulu’s value.

As Peter Kafka noted in a previous post about Hulu’s possible sale, “much hinges on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year.”

Without those rights, Hulu by itself is a very pretty Web site and video platform, but not worth the billions it would be with very long-term television rights, content that attracts users. Currently, sources said its media owners are offering two to three years of rights, with a lot of flexibility over removing content from the site, which is not quite as attractive a deal (to say the least).

But video is a key component of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Along with mobile efforts, Mayer has explicitly told investors that video was a key to company under her tenure.

Coincidentally, today in an onstage interview at a Wired conference in New York, Mayer broadly addressed the video issue when asked a question about the topic, noting it was important across all of Yahoo’s properties.

“I think video is really important … video is something that we’re all innately designed and born to experience, everyone is born being able to watch and to hear,” she said. “Video is just this amazing format.”

Mayer would know that well, having been at Google when the search giant bought YouTube, ironically snatching it at the last minute from a competing bid by Yahoo, which was then led by Terry Semel. Since then, YouTube has become the most important and powerful player in the space by far.

Yahoo, despite being one of the largest video players on the Web, has mostly been a lackluster competitor in the arena, pinging over the years from creating original content to doing branded deals with media companies, but never establishing a major beachhead with consumers as Hulu did from scratch.

Short of a full acquisition, there may be a way for Yahoo to partner and invest in Hulu, instead of buying it outright that works for all sides — owners get a new owner to foot part of the bill and also increase distribution, and Yahoo can claim that it’s providing users with exponentially more content that would help Yahoo’s long-declining engagement problem.

Sources said News Corp. and Disney have mulled scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site, while Comcast has no control over Hulu’s fate, having given up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators.

But the strength of the Hulu brand is clear and it has had some success in building a more significant business. While a lot of its video offerings are free, about four million people are paying for a Hulu Plus subscription.

Still, Hulu’s strength might be lagging, especially given after talented founding leader Jason Kilar recently left. Last year, Hulu was a top 10 video site, according to comScore. No longer — in a report in March, it had dropped out of the top 10.

While this likely has more to do with methodology than real decline in Hulu ratings, it does show that while it’s the biggest thing Yahoo could buy or invest in, Yahoo itself has plenty of video views, many more than Hulu.

The question for Mayer then is how much of Yahoo’s multi-billon-dollar cash kitty she wants to bet on a big video play. She might also be considering buying several smaller ones, said sources, with Yahoo having also looked at some smaller video sites, including Blip and Grab Media.

A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment and Yahoo PR has not responded to a query for comment (if ever).

There’s no picture of the moment when everything changed for Kevin Systrom. But if there were, it would look something like this: A lanky, very tall, dark-haired man in his late 20s sits on a bench at the Caltrain commuter station in Palo Alto, Calif. A sepia tone and weathered patina might underscore the mood of weighty contemplation.

It was early April of last year, and Systrom was waiting for his business partner, Mike Krieger, to arrive from San Francisco. Systrom had just left Mark Zuckerberg’s nearby house and was still digesting the offer that the Facebook founder and CEO had made him: To buy Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Systrom and Krieger had launched just 18 months before. The price Zuckerberg offered was $1 billion — $300 million in cash and the rest in Facebook stock, an especially generous-seeming deal on the eve of his company’s much-anticipated initial public offering.

The offer was even more impressive given Instagram’s size and age. At the time, it had just 13 employees, operating out of a cramped space in the South Park section of San Francisco. Still, the small crew had managed to attract 30 million Apple iPhone users in just a year and a half by offering a service that allowed a person to quickly upload, prettify through the use of filters and publish images to the Web for friends to see. A version for Google’s Android mobile operating system had launched the week before, attracting another million users in a single day.

What’s more, although the app generated no revenue, it had attracted so much attention from venture capitalists that the startup had nearly closed an impressive new round of funding at a wildly high valuation of $500 million. Zuckerberg had just doubled that, leaving Systrom with a lot to think about on that train-station bench.

Click. If there ever was a money shot to take for Instagram and Systrom, that was it.

(Photo by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson, used with permission by Vanity Fair)

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According to sources, Facebook has moved well-regarded exec Emily White to a new job as director of business operations at its Instagram mobile photo-sharing unit.

In this capacity, she will work with Instagram head and co-founder Kevin Systrom to scale nascent efforts to expand partnerships, improve user operations and, presumably, come up with ways to make some money. The fast-growing service, which the social networking site bought a year ago in a billion-dollar mega-deal, has been popular with consumers, but it has not focused as much on its business operations.

(Update: Facebook confirmed the move and also released this statement from Systrom: “I’m excited to bring Emily White onto the Instagram team. As we continue to scale our operation to support over 100 million active users, her experience with partnerships and business operations will play a major role in our future success.”)

In fact, related to business, it has waded more into controversy — such as when changes to its terms of service suggested that Instagram could sell user photos to advertisers, a change that was quickly rescinded by Systrom. That said, it left the door open to selling advertising of some sort on the app.

White has a lot of experience in the online ad space in smoothing out and organizing ops, both at Google — where she previously worked — and at Facebook, where she started in the deal-making arena and later worked on mobile partnerships.

White — who has recently been courted by other Internet startups, reportedly including scrapbooking phenom Pinterest — is also on the board of women’s yoga and running gear retailer Lululemon. That’s good since part of her new job will be to get more big brands integrated into Instagram, which has already begun to do that with some initial level of success.

Systrom will continue to focus more on product development and overall strategy and vision, which he has done since Instagram was purchased last April.

(That photo above is of White, which she just posted on her Instagram account — natch!)

According to sources, Amazon paid about $150 million for Goodreads, the popular books recommendation service. But that number could close in on $200 million, if certain performance metrics are met.

And, while BusinessWeek ran a we-are-just-guessing story today that posited a self-described “overly simple, back-of-the-envelope estimate” of $1 billion, sources said that number is simply wrong.

I am still trying to determine how much of the deal was cash — most of it, said sources — and how much was stock.

The San Francisco-based Goodreads had raised close to $3 million from a range of angel investors, as well as True Ventures. The sale is a big win for the firm, which apparently owned between 20 percent and 30 percent of Goodreads.

The online retail giant bought the company to help its book-y social discovery efforts for customers.

Amazon declined to comment, but the Seattle-based company said previously that the deal should close in the second quarter. It’s not the first time Amazon has bought a social book site — in 2008, the company acquired Shelfari for under $10 million.

Yahoo has bought Summly, the mobile news reader app founded by a young British entrepreneur.

In a statement, the London-based company said it had bought the tiny outfit, which will close its app. The price was not disclosed (although I will try to find out soon enough). But the company had been seeking additional funding recently at a big valuation, in stark contrast to its small size (less than one million downloads), staff (five) and business model (zero revenue).

(Update: Sources tell me Yahoo paid just about $30 million for Summly, mostly in cash, with 10 percent in stock, for three employees.)

AllThingsD.com reported in December that Yahoo was looking closely at the startup, with CEO Marissa Mayer meeting with its founder Nick D’Aloisio. As we noted then, Yahoo was aiming at trendy mobile “acq-hires” to give the sleepy Silicon Valley Internet giant some sizzle and improve its moribund mobile offerings.

Mayer has been buying up a range of similar small mobile startups, largely for their teams of talented and innovative engineers. And, at a recent employee meeting, its M&A head Jackie Reses said the Silicon Valley company was looking at two significant purchases and a half-dozen smaller ones.

Said Yahoo: “Founder Nick D’Aloisio and the Summly team are joining Yahoo! in the coming weeks. While the Summly app will close, we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon. We’re not disclosing purchase price or other terms of the deal.”

Yahoo mobile head Adam Cahan wrote a blog post about the deal, as did D’Aloisio, who also tweeted news of it:

@summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!! Excited for the next chapter of Summly! Thanks to all who have supported me.

— Nick D’Aloisio (@nickdaloisio) March 25, 2013

News readers have been getting snapped up of late. CNN acquired Zite for $20 million in 2011, while we reported that LinkedIn was in the midst of buying Pulse for upwards of $50 million.

The 17-year-old D’Aloisio created the high-profile news reading app, which garnered much attention in the last year in the mobile space, which is probably what attracted Yahoo to it.

As I wrote:

D’Aloisio — who looks like he could easily be a member of One Direction if this tech thing did not work out — is perhaps a perfect storm for Yahoo, which is seeking to show that it can attract innovative, young entrepreneurs to the company, while also looking to strengthen its nearly bare mobile cupboard.

Summly is all that and a bag of (fish and) chips, with a very slick app for the Apple iPhone that has become one of the more popular in the App Store since it was re-launched last month. The company has said it has been downloaded 500,000 times.

It deserves the attention, as it is a pleasure to use — think an even hipper version of Flipboard with some more sass. The handsomely designed app summarizes news stories — all using a natural language processing algorithm — in only a few sentences and in under 400 characters. Users can then swipe through topics and stories quickly and click in to be directed to the full story on the original news site.

Summly originally started as a prototype app called Trimit, which soon garnered attention and seed funding from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s investment firm. In no time, it had a range of other investors, ponying up about $1.5 million, including trendy ones like Ashton Kutcher and tech types like Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

Since then, it has been striking content deals, including with News Corp. (which owns this site) and others, which seem to be attracted by its investor pedigree, its solid technology and — perhaps most of all — its media-darling founder.

To get an idea of the adorable hip factor involved, here’s a really clever video D’Aloisio did with actor Stephen Fry, who is also an investor in the startup:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

If truth be told, Jerry Yang never really disappeared from the Silicon Valley scene, even though he did leave Yahoo rather suddenly just over a year ago — resigning from the board and all other positions at the iconic company he co-founded with David Filo in 1995, and then going very quiet.

When I met him last week at the airy and newish office space of Ame Cloud Ventures, off Camino Real, he politely declined to talk about that Yahoo tenure and departure, although Yahoo and he are inextricably linked in the history of tech.

That’s because the former Chief Yahoo has moved onto the next stage of his career, which perhaps could be called Jerry 2.0 — a term he’d hate (and give me a hard time for using).

Still, in many ways, Yang has launched a new digital life by focusing on what made him interested in tech in the first place: Entrepreneurs.

“I feel like the thing I missed the most is what really early entrepreneurs were doing,” he said of his latest efforts, which have been well known among techies, even if Yang has never been one to toot his own horn much in general. “I’m not sure at all that I’m any good at this mentoring/investing business — that’s why I’m using my own money, and that’s why it’s not a career.”

Yet. Yang is calling his nascent investment business — he’s more than an angel, but not quite a VC — a “work in progress” that might morph into something more.

“There are no LPs — just me, myself and I,” said Yang. “I invest in things for the long term and have a long horizon and the flexibility.”

That said, via Ame — which means rain (雨) in Japanese and happens to be the acronym of the names of his wife and kids — Yang has already invested in about two dozen startups in which he has typically puts in $100,000 to $500,000.

Explaining the name, Yang said: “Without rain, there is no life.”

And it’s clear that Yang has been very busy dousing the startup sector with a wide range of interesting investments, including:

• dotCloud, an application platform for developers
• AeroFS, a private file syncing and sharing service
• Impermium, an Internet security offering
• Jetpac, a travel app for the Apple iPad
• Lex Machina, IP litigation data and analytics
• Tomfoolery, which is aimed at improving mobile enterprise apps

Yang said what informs his investment choices centers on the activity around mobility, sensors, cloud and big data that is enabling the next generation of computing.

“The main investing premise is the idea that devices are more and more network connected,” said Yang, who noted that data that is being collected is now at another order of magnitude than ever before. “The cloud has become the next-generation supercomputer, and the smartphone has provided the revolution to spur its use.”

To select from the companies he sees, Yang has only one young associate, Nick Adams, who codes, helps on deal mechanics, interacts with entrepreneurs and also has had extensive experience in Asia.

That has been important, since Adams also leads business development for China’s Cloud Valley, which is run by Edward Tian, one of Yang’s strategic partners there. It was with Cloud Valley that Evernote, the hot productivity app in which Yang is also an investor, partnered to create a business there.

Still, Yang is not completely alone. He has weekly meetings with another former Yahoo, Ash Patel — who started the $10 million micro-venture fund Morado Ventures, which means “purple” in Spanish, and has a lot of ex-Yahoos as investors — as well as individual angel and former Yahoo CTO Farzad Nazem.

The trio trade ideas and deal flow, sometimes making bets together and sometimes not. Most of all, they leverage their time in the tech sector, both good and bad.

“I might not have better ideas, but I think my experience is unique and helpful [to entrepreneurs] and there is a value to my network,” said Yang. “I think what I have to contribute, besides money and a network, is that I am very candid about the experience I have had.”

That is indeed the case, because it is clear that Yang has a lot of wisdom to impart from his long and eventful history at Yahoo, as well as his stature as one of the Internet’s most important pioneers.

And, having covered the often circumspect Yang for much of that time, I would have to say that these days he looks about as energized, excited and enthusiastic as I have ever seen him.

“I’m truly humbled by the talent that’s out there, and at the same time recognize it’s a very crowded space,” said Yang. “It is not a career yet, but I’m having a lot of fun, and we’ll see.”

Lost in the sauce of the national work-from-home debate of last week that engulfed all things Yahoo, was a fascinating tidbit that several employees passed on to me from a recent Friday FYI meeting at its Silicon Valley HQ.

At the gathering, CEO Marissa Mayer talked briefly about the new telecommuting arrangements for some staffers, including the controversial new work-from-home memo that HR head Jackie Reses had issued that day.

But when Reses — who also wears another corporate hat as head of M&A at Yahoo — spoke she mentioned to the crowd that Yahoo was working on two “significant” acquisitions and about six smaller talent “acqhires.”

“It was kind of odd to telegraph it in such a big forum,” said one employee of Reses’ comments at the meeting in late February.

The revelation was unusual, to be sure, but perhaps not a surprise, given the recent run-up in Yahoo stock, its healthy cash position and, most of all, its need to add meaningful growth to the current efforts at turnaround.

And while some of its recent buys have been interesting and focused on improving its moribund mobile efforts, they have also been very small. And, as one high-ranking exec there told me, they “don’t move the needle in the way we need to in bringing in senior talent or loads of users or serious revenue.”

Indeed, while Yahoo shares have benefited greatly from the impressive performance by Alibaba Group in China, which is clearly on a roll, many think that showing actual improvement in its core business will be critical in the months ahead.

While making changes to Yahoo’s homepage and email, as well as cutting products, has been done, it is not yet clear what the impact is; the changes are aimed more at holding on to consumers rather than exciting them with new offerings.

Yahoo could also create its own new products to wow the masses, but that has been harder for it over the years. (Remember Livestand? Yeah, not so much.) In any case, an innovation infusion of such a large magnitude will take some time, given Mayer has to get the right people into place to do so.

Thus, a big purchase of an exciting new company with prominent leadership seems more likely than not and sooner than later. While Mayer has not articulated her vision for the new Yahoo in anything more than general ways, what she buys will say a lot.

Thus, sources said that Yahoo has been looking at a range of such acquisitions, in a number of categories such as advertising tech, mobile monetization and, of course, consumer “daily delight,” which is a phrase Mayer has used a lot.

It would be bold if Mayer went all out and made a mega-buy that would shake up the competitive landscape. My first choice for that is Pinterest, the scrapbooking phenom that was just valued at $2.5 billion in a new funding round. Mayer has also shown a lot of interest in blogging superstar Tumblr, while at both Google and Yahoo, as well as Foursquare, the well-known location app. Of course, there is also the troubled gaming giant, Zynga.

All are very pricey and would face rival interest, but such a move would be akin to Facebook’s billion-dollar blockbuster purchase of Instagram. Many now think that was prescient and cheap, given how important mobile photos are to the current digital ecosystem.

The list of possible big deals goes on: Hulu (which needs a tasty content element to make sense) as a video play; Millennial Media or Jumptap for mobile advertising; Quora for social answers; Flipboard for social media consumption; Rubicon or PubMatic, for ad targeting; and many more.

But all of those begin at the billion-dollar or more range and I have checked with a number of these and come up peanuts. Still, there are a whole lot of choices for Mayer and Yahoo in the $200 million to $500 million price range.

Here, Yahoo has the financial strength to make at least two of these significant purchases that Reses mentioned, as well as developing a much better reputation for Yahoo to keep real talent interested.

As one prominent startup exec, who had told me he never would consider selling to Yahoo in the past, said recently: “They are no longer complete losers, although Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon are still cooler.”

Hey, it’s a compliment, even if it’s a back-handed one, so it will be interesting to see who finds Yahoo cool enough.

Longtime Yahoo techie Laurence “Laurie” Mann, who has recently been SVP of engineering operations at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, has been given the new job of heading its search efforts, according to sources inside the company.

The appointment by CEO Marissa Mayer, also announced in an internal memo last week, puts Mann in a key position at Yahoo, given the need to fix its troubled search partnership with Microsoft, which was struck in 2010.

That is likely to come under great pressure in the days ahead, given that its performance has not been as expected, although that did improve in Yahoo’s most recent quarter.

Still, despite the improvement, Mayer called attention to the overall problem at a recent appearance at an investment conference.

“One of the points of the alliance is that we collectively want to grow share rather than just trading share with each other,” she said. “We need to see monetization working better, because we know that it can, and we’ve seen other competitors in the space illustrate how well it can work.”

By competitors, Mayer meant Google, whose share of the search market is close to 67 percent. Microsoft has just above 16 percent now, and Yahoo above 12 percent, a near flipping of share from two years ago.

Mann, who came to Yahoo in 2002, had been one of the execs at Yahoo who worked on the original deal under former CEO Carol Bartz, vetting the terms of the agreement for the company. While he has a degree from Canada’s University of Regina in business administration and computer science operations research, he is better known at the company for his deal-making and negotiating skills than as a techie or product exec.

That will be important, given that the end of the performance guarantee that Microsoft has had to pay to Yahoo since the partnership began comes in April.

Sources at Microsoft said the company is likely to extend the agreement without major concessions, but that any efforts to end the overall deal will be difficult for Yahoo.

“There is what [Yahoo] wants, and what’s possible,” said one person close to the situation.

In his new job, Mann will be in charge of improving the situation, which he has had some experience with. Mann, said one source, “used to spends hours at night on the phone with Microsoft trying to get concessions from their lack of RPS achievement,” referring to revenue per search.

Whether that means he can fix the situation — either by extricating Yahoo from the deal or improving Yahoo’s search experience to boost revenue and market share — is unclear. Mayer herself has a lot of search product chops from her time at Google, so she is expected to play a dominant role in the arena.

Another important effort for her, obviously, is still recruitment, given that a number of her choices for top product and tech jobs at Yahoo have been longtime veterans who were in place when the company was experiencing its continuing downward slide.

Among her options is buying a small search company, trying to end the Microsoft deal and perhaps strike another one with Google, or even reenter the search business with innovative engineers.

That is a big job. When Mayer was hired last summer, it was thought that she would bring in talent to reinvigorate Yahoo’s top echelons from outside the company.

But, for the most part, that has not happened, and she has appointed a lot of Yahoo’s longtime veterans to important roles in the turnaround.

For example, Mayer brought back Jay Rossiter to run platforms, appointed Scott Burke to head advertising tech, and now has put Mann into a top job in search — all of whom report directly to her on her executive staff.

Hearst Ventures, the investment arm of media giant Hearst Corporation, said it was making a minority equity investment in Science, the Los Angeles area tech “studio.”

Privately held Hearst is the sole investor in the new funding, although the company declined to reveal financial terms of the investment.

But sources with awareness of the deal said it was close to $30 million for a stake above 20 percent.

Somewhat akin to a startup accelerator, Science is attempting to quickly create and scale a number of promising companies in a variety of areas, and has launched 13 so far.

Among the Santa Monica, Calif., tech studio’s recent efforts: Dollar Shave Club, a subscription-based products company aimed at men; Ellie, which sells high-end activewear for women; and Wittlebee, a clothes club for kids.

Hearst Ventures is operated by Hearst’s Entertainment and Syndication unit, which is run by Scott Sassa and George Kliavkoff. Kliavkoff will join Science’s board of directors.

“It’s clear to us that, while we have these brands that resonate with consumers, we think there are some learnings we can get from these guys that are hard to get in a big company,” said Sassa. “Being able to be nimble with insight and guidance is important for us.”

Kliavkoff also noted that this was a way to get immediate ownership in a range of promising companies. “We are writing one check and will have an immediate stake in more than a dozen great startups,” he said. “[Science] has been very thoughtful in starting companies in smart areas.”

In a statement, Hearst CEO Frank Bennack said: “Hearst is continually looking for smart investments that bring value and intelligence to the company — our investment in Science does both. We’re excited to partner with Science to continue its trajectory of success, gain meaningful industry knowledge and utilize Science’s platforms for current and future Hearst investments.”

Though quieter than most, Hearst Ventures have made many successful investments over 15 years, including in Netscape and Broadcast.com. More recently, it has funded such companies as Brightcove and Pandora, as well as HootSuite and BuzzFeed.

Science was founded in late 2011 — with $10 million funding from big-name investors including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and White Star Capital. Its CEO is well-regarded entrepreneur Mike Jones, who was most recently CEO of Myspace. Prior to Myspace, he had started and sold Userplane to AOL in 2006. In addition, well-known entrepreneur Peter Pham is chief business officer at Science.

“I am very proud of work that the Science team has accomplished since launching,” said Jones, in a quick interview tonight (short enough so that his wife would not get angry at me for ruining Valentine’s Day). “I am extremely excited about opportunities for Science companies going forward.”

More to come, but here is the very clever viral video that Dollar Shave Club did on its launch:

Even though it seems like a dog’s age, it has been only two years since AOL bought the Huffington Post at the Super Bowl XLV in Dallas (yes, papers were actually signed there).

Back then — after AOL ponied up $315 million, mostly in cash, to buy one of the Web’s most prominent news and opinion sites, along with one of the most famous women on the Web as its leader — the pair called it: “One plus one equals 11.”

Looking back today, it’s more like one plus one equals fireworks — given all the dramatic narrative that has ensued since the deal was struck. While it started off with a series of splashy joint appearances — hey, world, it’s the Tim and Arianna show! — some bumps in the road later resulted in a fair amount of tension between Armstrong and Huffington, which the two now say has passed.

That has included a big, ugly (but still riveting) fight among and between Armstrong, Huffington and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, another AOL property. Without reliving the messy timeline and ethical traffic accident, Arrington left after a lot of Sturm und Drang, verbally trashing Huffington on his way out the door, even though he later returned to the fold as a columnist.

(Bygones? Whatever!)

More importantly, while her role was conceived much more broadly and horizontally at the time of the acquisition, as a kind of overall content ruler at AOL, that clearly did not work out as envisioned and — perhaps as it should have been from the start — it has since been made very vertical.

That has essentially meant Huffington gets to rule over her fast-expanding empire of global sites under her name, with Armstrong footing the investment and tending to fixing the other parts of the company.

Thus, for now at least, all’s well that ends well. AOL’s stock has soared this year, after a series of shrewd financial and organizational moves by Armstrong, and Huffington is ever busy opening yet another international Web outpost.

I checked in with both on how they are doing, in separate video interviews that I did last week in New York, where AOL is located. And to remember how this Web marriage started, I’ve also included the the one I did two years ago in Dallas at the dawn of the relationship.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130117/two-years-after-dramatic-huffpost-buy-aols-armstrong-and-arianna-talk-about-the-sometimes-rocky-road-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121227/mike-lynch-punches-back-at-todays-hps-filing-whither-5b-writedown/ http://allthingsd.com/20121227/mike-lynch-punches-back-at-todays-hps-filing-whither-5b-writedown/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2012 01:32:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=281075

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch is still not backing down in his ongoing battle with Hewlett-Packard.

“Simply put, these allegations are false, and in the absence of further detail we cannot understand what HP believes to be the basis for them,” he said in a statement, as well as aiming at $5 billion in writedowns the company has taken related to the controversial deal. “We continue to reject these allegations in the strongest possible terms.”

Lynch’s latest volley was prompted by a regulatory filing HP made earlier today, noting that the U.S. Department of Justice was indeed investigating its acquisition of British software company, for which it is trying to write down about $5 billion in expenses due to alleged “serious accounting improprieties.”

HP had taken the case to U.S. federal authorities in the first place, but now it’s official.

This caused Lynch, who has been vociferously battling the Silicon Valley tech giant over the allegations and rejecting HP’s claims of fraud in the $12 billion acquisition, to respond again.

In his statement, he presented a laundry list of arguments about how HP is trying to fool investors by pointing the finger at him.

Here’s his whole thing, so you can read for yourself:

It is extremely disappointing that HP has again failed to provide a detailed calculation of its $5 billion write-down of Autonomy, or publish any explanation of the serious allegations it has made against the former management team, in its annual report filing today.

Furthermore, it is now less clear how much of the $5 billion write-down is in fact being attributed to the alleged accounting issues, and how much to other changes in business performance and earnings projections. This appears to be a material change in HP’s allegations.

Simply put, these allegations are false, and in the absence of further detail we cannot understand what HP believes to be the basis for them.

We also do not understand why HP is raising these issues now given that Autonomy reported into the HP Finance team from the day the acquisition completed in October 2011, there was an extensive due diligence process and Autonomy was audited as a public company for many years.

We would particularly make the following points:

* HP’s CFO Cathie Lesjak and her team, plus a number of outside advisors, had access to all Autonomy accounts and documents from October 2011 onwards, and raised no issues.

* Beginning in November 2011, HP and KPMG reviewed Autonomy’s closing balance sheet in detail, and Ernst & Young reviewed Deloitte’s audit work papers.

* Beginning in October 2011, HP studied in detail Autonomy’s tax structure and transfer pricing as well as its revenue recognition practices (led by Paul Curtis, HP’s worldwide head of revenue recognition).

* An independent, third-party valuation of Autonomy’s assets was carried out in January 2012.

* Quarterly business reviews were held with Autonomy management, Meg Whitman and Cathie Lesjak to discuss Autonomy’s financial performance.

* HP has continued to sell and account for hardware alongside Autonomy software in the same way that Autonomy did for the year since the acquisition completed.

* Regarding differences between IFRS and US GAAP accounting standards, which appear to have a role in some of the allegations HP has made, Autonomy’s accounting policies were made clear in Autonomy’s 2010 annual report.

We also note the statement in HP’s annual report that it received confirmation from the US Department of Justice on 21 November 2012 (the day after HP’s first public statement), that the Department had opened an investigation. We can confirm that we have as yet had no contact from any regulatory authority. We will co-operate with any investigation and look forward to the opportunity to explain our position.

We continue to reject these allegations in the strongest possible terms. Autonomy’s financial accounts were properly maintained in accordance with applicable regulations, fully audited by Deloitte, and available to HP during the due diligence process.

We remain deeply concerned about how this process has been conducted, and believe it is in everyone’s interest for it to be resolved as soon as possible.

RELATED POSTS:

• More From Mike Lynch: HP’s Autonomy Accusations Are Getting Weaker
• Mike Lynch Punches Back at Today’s HP Filing: Whither $5B Writedown?
• HP Confirms DOJ Is Investigating Alleged Fraud in Autonomy Deal
• Yes, There Are Layoffs Pending at HP’s Autonomy Unit in the U.K.
• Former HP CEO Shifts Blame for Autonomy Deal to Chairman
• Dell Passed on Autonomy Before HP Bought It
• Why Mike Lynch Is Playing PR Hardball With HP
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Asks Board to Explain HP Allegations
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Blames Accounting Standards in HP Flap
• The Red Flags That Were Obvious — To Some — In the HP-Autonomy Deal
• Oracle’s Ellison Vindicated in Autonomy PR Flap by HP’s $8.8 Billion Writedown
• Autonomy Founder Mike Lynch Rejects HP Charges, Alleges Mismanagement
• What Exactly Happened at Autonomy?
• HP Explains Its $8.8 Billion “Oops”
• HP Beats Street Amid Sales Declines, Takes $8.8 Billion Charge
• HP Names Microsoft Exec Robert Youngjohns to Run Autonomy
• Search Under Way at HP for Autonomy’s Next Chief
• Autonomy’s Mike Lynch Talks About Being HP’s Speedy Tiger Cub (Video)
• Britain’s First Software Billionaire Now Reports to HP CEO Meg Whitman
• Oracle Launches Exalytics Machine, Probably Ending Spat With Autonomy
• Autonomy: When All Else Fails, Blame the Bankers
• Mike Lynch to Oracle: Oh, You Mean Those Slides
• Oracle: You Have a Very Bad Memory, Mr. Lynch
• HP Reportedly Close to $10 Billion Buyout of Autonomy, PC Unit Spinoff
• Will Oracle and Microsoft Bid on Autonomy?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121227/mike-lynch-punches-back-at-todays-hps-filing-whither-5b-writedown/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121227/despite-latest-alibaba-ipo-rumors-yahoo-deal-creates-incentive-to-offering-by-end-of-2015/ http://allthingsd.com/20121227/despite-latest-alibaba-ipo-rumors-yahoo-deal-creates-incentive-to-offering-by-end-of-2015/#comments Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:38:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=280944

It seems like a month does not pass without another rumor about when Chinese Internet powerhouse Alibaba Group will have its much-anticipated IPO.

Today, in the latest loosely-sourced report, a newsletter quoted a Chinese-language site on a leaked memo that allegedly said the preparations would begin in the second half of 2013 for a public offering in late 2013 or early 2014.

Maybe not so fast, according to sources close to the situation, who note that incentives in a recent stock buyback with major shareholder Yahoo could drive a public offering to the end of 2015.

The timeframe is not a deadline, of course, but Alibaba benefits more if it does its IPO by then. Sources said the IPO will depend entirely on market timing and there is not a current plan to do so soon.

The news matters a great deal to Yahoo investors, especially because much of its market valuation is still made up of the remaining 22 percent stake it still holds in Alibaba, as well as its assets in Yahoo! Japan.

Yahoo completed the sale of half its stake in Alibaba earlier this year for $7.6 billion, netting the Silicon Valley Internet giant about $4.5 billion — most of which is being used for repurchases of shares.

As Alibaba noted at the time of that deal:

“Under the terms of the agreement with Yahoo!, Alibaba Group has the right to repurchase one-half of Yahoo!’s remaining stake upon a qualifying initial public offering in the future. Yahoo! originally acquired its stake in Alibaba Group in 2005 in exchange for US$1 billion and sale of its Yahoo! China business to Alibaba Group.”

Since then, Alibaba’s value has risen dramatically on a strong performance in its various units, including e-commerce giant Taobao.

At the time of its stock buyback with Yahoo, Alibaba’s value was $40 billion, which some think will rise strongly over the next few years.

That’s no guarantee, of course, and it depends how Alibaba’s business in China and elsewhere fares. That has not stopped some Yahoo investors, in fact, from flogging gigantic Alibaba IPO valuations, despite the fact that the company is mulling whether to keep it lower to avoid a Facebook-like debacle.

And while it’s clear the company is eventually headed for an IPO, those close to the situation said its management is not in any rush, especially with a recent influx of capital from investors such as Silver Lake, DST Global, Temasek and Yunfeng Fund.

“So many rumors have been floated on this IPO and we can expect a lot more until it actually happens,” said one source.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121227/despite-latest-alibaba-ipo-rumors-yahoo-deal-creates-incentive-to-offering-by-end-of-2015/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121226/yahoos-mayer-hoping-what-happens-with-big-advertisers-at-ces-doesnt-stay-in-vegas/ http://allthingsd.com/20121226/yahoos-mayer-hoping-what-happens-with-big-advertisers-at-ces-doesnt-stay-in-vegas/#comments Wed, 26 Dec 2012 22:05:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=280666

So far in the six-month reign of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, there has been a pile of attention paid to the flashy cultural changes (free food!), much-needed rehauls of key mainstays (Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, homepage), a focus on attracting entrepreneurial talent (Hey, we got Max Levchin to join the board!) and, of course, the frequent mention of mobilemobilemobile by the former Google product exec.

But on the topic of where the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s search and display advertising business is headed — which is, of course, its key revenue and profit generator — it’s pretty much been crickets.

No longer, it seems, according to multiple sources inside and outside Yahoo. Mayer is planning a series of appearances at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show — which is taking place in Las Vegas in less than two weeks.

That includes sitting for a high-profile fireside chat with Starcom MediaVest Group Global CEO Laura Desmond in front of several hundred ad clients on Wednesday, January 9; organizing a plethora of one-on-one meetings; and throwing a Yahoo dinner party, as well as angling for invites to key parties thrown by others, such as MediaLink’s power player dinner on Tuesday, January 8.

As I previously reported, the company is planning on having this much more prominent presence there in order to reset its sometime rocky relationship with advertisers.

And, not surprisingly, its big weapon at the giant annual confab will apparently be Mayer, who has not yet interfaced significantly with the company’s big ad clients since taking the top job in July. At CES, sources said, Yahoo is hoping the “Marissa Halo” — i.e. the excitement around the decidedly telegenic exec — will help boost its business.

It’s important, since big agencies and advertisers have privately been grumbling about the lack of outreach by Yahoo and also how much more active execs at rivals such as Facebook, Google and AOL have been.

More than one source close to Yahoo said the dissatisfaction was being heard loud and clear at the company. “[Everyone will] take it as an opportunity to vent (again), while Yahoo promises a new beginning,” said one exec.

New beginnings will again be the case, though, with new COO Henrique De Castro also in place. He’s been making a series of moves to rejigger the ad business at Yahoo since he got there earlier in the fall, also from Google, including shifting its sales process to a category model.

In addition, Yahoo execs have continued their noodling on whether or not to make significant ad tech purchases — with no major deals in place yet — along with improving the creaky performance of the company’s own owned-and-operated offerings.

It’s all in the hope that advertisers and agencies will reconnect with Yahoo after the nearly consistent CEO changes over the last year. For those keeping score, after Carol Bartz was fired in the fall of 2011, CEO Scott Thompson made his debut at CES in early 2012, touting Yahoo’s data prowess before being ousted only months later. He was followed by renewed efforts toward marketers by interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

And now there’s Mayer.

Interestingly, while many major ad players are looking for more specifics about how Yahoo will improve its mobile, search and data products to give better insights to advertisers, they also are simply wanting to hear Mayer’s plans for Yahoo.

“What I don’t see yet is what the vision for Yahoo is, articulating the bigger ideas than just presenting an assemblage of products,” said Rob Norman, chief digital officer of GroupM Global. “And what everyone would still like to see is what is the escape route from being a portal or even reemerging from what that means, so I am really interested in what she has to say.”

Added another top ad exec: “She really has not said anything yet about how she plans to capitalize on Yahoo’s strengths over the next year in the ad space. People are genuinely excited about Mayer, but the stakes are still high for her since everyone feels as if they have already given Yahoo a lot of extra chances.”

High stakes, indeed. But, then again, it is Vegas.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121226/yahoos-mayer-hoping-what-happens-with-big-advertisers-at-ces-doesnt-stay-in-vegas/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121217/tasty-foodydirects-gets-3m-as-former-goldman-banker-turns-entrepreneur/ http://allthingsd.com/20121217/tasty-foodydirects-gets-3m-as-former-goldman-banker-turns-entrepreneur/#comments Mon, 17 Dec 2012 19:01:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=278386

For a long time in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, Brad Koenig was one of Silicon Valley’s top investment bankers, shepherding deals such as Yahoo’s IPO and a plethora of others.

That’s no surprise, given that he was the managing director and head of global technology investment banking at Goldman Sachs. Goldman, as well as Morgan Stanley, led many of the big-name, big-money transactions for the digerati.

But no matter how you slice it, Koenig’s job was on the sidelines as a facilitator rather than as a participant.

No longer. After retiring in 2005 from Goldman and doing a bunch of advising work, Koenig decided to jump into the fray, putting his money into a new start-up called FoodyDirect.

Simply put, the service ships food from iconic restaurants, bakeries and other specialty food outlets, adding in a variety of information about the products and also making it easier for those businesses to ship.

Some of the offers being coordinated include well-known — among foodies, at least — fare from places such as Anderson’s Frozen Custard in Buffalo, N.Y.; Black’s Barbecue in Lockhart, Texas; Sable’s Smoked Fish in New York City; and Hancock Gourmet Lobster in Cundy’s Harbor, Maine.

I tried both Anderson’s and Sable’s and they arrived on time and fresh — as well as delicious — which is presumably the selling point that FoodyDirect pitches to merchants.

While many of these restaurants do this on their own, Koenig is hoping that the systems FoodyDirect creates are easier and more efficient, from packaging to shipping.

Of course, FoodyDirect faces a lot of competition — from big online retailers like Amazon to smaller ones like Gilt Taste — as well as an uphill battle to acquire frequent customers.

But Koenig believes in the concept so much — which he is doing with his brother, who has been in the restaurant biz for 25 years — that he invested his own money in the initial effort.

Now, along with more money from him, a bunch of angel investors and venture interest, FoodyDirect is getting $3 million more to see if the concept pans out.

Here’s Koenig talking about his new life on the other side of the table:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121217/tasty-foodydirects-gets-3m-as-former-goldman-banker-turns-entrepreneur/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121126/valley-cred-samsung-plans-to-open-new-start-up-accelerator-in-downtown-palo-alto/ http://allthingsd.com/20121126/valley-cred-samsung-plans-to-open-new-start-up-accelerator-in-downtown-palo-alto/#comments Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:28:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=272549

While it is one of the largest consumer electronics and mobile companies in the world, Korea’s Samsung has a relatively quiet profile in Silicon Valley.

In fact, while it has had a longtime facility in San Jose for two decades, its execs are not well known to many except the top echelons of the tech sector here and Samsung’s interactions with the entrepreneurial culture have been decidedly low key.

No longer, it seems.

Besides a previously announced new 8.5-acre campus in Mountain View for its U.S. research and development center, slated for completion in 2014, sources said the company is close to signing a deal for a prominent venue in downtown Palo Alto that will house a start-up accelerator.

The location that the company is now negotiating is the second floor of the former Borders Books space on University Avenue. The historical property has a splashy movie marquee, since it used to house the Varsity Theatre.

It’s not quite Oppa Gangnam Style, it is a big move for Samsung.

While it is unclear if the new office will focus on making investments in start-ups or incubating its own innovation, sources said it will be aimed at linking Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other players more closely with Samsung.

Sources said the move is being spearheaded by a relatively new hire by Samsung: David Eun, who became its EVP to lead a new push to create more media offerings in December. Previous to Samsung, Eun has been an exec at both Google and AOL.

Eun is well known in the Valley already, but a new location that will focus Samsung’s digital efforts should raise the company’s profile with the digerati here.

Also on the docket to do that is Samsung’s other new major facility. In September, right in the middle of its high-profile patent trial with Apple, the company announced that Samsung Information Systems America, its U.S. R&D Center, would expand and relocate to a new campus.

“The R&D Center will provide a state-of-the-art campus that can support the current rapid growth in the organization, and also provide the infrastructure to support Samsung’s open innovation and university collaboration activities,” Samsung said in a press release at the time. “Construction is anticipated to start in the second half of 2013 on the company’s two new six-story class-A office buildings totaling approximately 385,000 sq. ft. and two 5-6 story parking structures, with occupancy expected in 2014.”

In other words, Apple: Samsung is now officially in the house in Silicon Valley.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121126/valley-cred-samsung-plans-to-open-new-start-up-accelerator-in-downtown-palo-alto/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121125/furby-childrens-tablets-generate-top-buzz-in-toy-aisle/ http://allthingsd.com/20121125/furby-childrens-tablets-generate-top-buzz-in-toy-aisle/#comments Sun, 25 Nov 2012 22:30:18 +0000 John Kell http://allthingsd.com/?p=272379 A mix of retro toys like the new, tech-focused Furby and newer brands including the Skylander videogame and the freaky guys and ghouls of Monster High are generating the greatest buzz in the children’s toy aisle this holiday season.

Much of the toy industry’s success will hinge on how many customers the top toy retailers can lure to their stores with a mix of door-buster deals, exclusive merchandise, price-match guarantees and layaway programs.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121125/furby-childrens-tablets-generate-top-buzz-in-toy-aisle/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121123/mobile-thursday-smartphone-shopping-is-still-tiny-but-its-this-years-big-online-buzzword/ http://allthingsd.com/20121123/mobile-thursday-smartphone-shopping-is-still-tiny-but-its-this-years-big-online-buzzword/#comments Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:13:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=272070

In what has become an annual holiday tradition, those who keep track of these things have started in on touting just how digital the holiday shopper has become, whipping out all manner of buzzwords to do so.

Last year, it was Cyber Monday — this year, it’s turned out to be Mobile Thursday. What’s next? Social Network Saturday? Self-Driving Car Sunday? (We still have Black Friday, by the way, which is today.)

And, indeed, the Mobile Thursday phrase got some big laps around the track, with numerous online shopping surveys — coming out faster than you can buy that new tablet — using it in their flash reports yesterday and today.

This year’s anecdotal meme: Apple iPads go well with pumpkin pie.

What isn’t said so much is that it is still a very small number — though fast-growing — over the last few years, with overall sales reaching $500 million for Thursday, compared to about $1.2 billion on Monday, according to comScore.

Still, for now, no one seems to break out actual mobile sales figures, which are clearly still a fraction of the totals. But they are more than happy to tell you that people are certainly browsing on their mobile devices, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one who is tired of talking to the relatives about three hours into the day.

According to IBM’s Benchmark report, for example, online sales were up 17.4 percent over 2011 on Thanksgiving Day, noting that “big winners were retailers who connected customers with personalized deals across multiple screens including PCs, smartphones and tablets.”

Some stats from IBM about Thursday:

Mobile Traffic: The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site reached 25.3 percent, up from 66.2 percent over 2011.

Mobile Shopping: The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase increased to 18.3 percent, up 65.3 percent from 2011.

Mobile Email: Smartphone and tablet shoppers responded to email deals from retailers, with emails opened on mobile devices jumping 23 percent on Thanksgiving Day over 2011.

Couch Commerce: In the evening hours, consumers shifted from shopping through their smartphones at the dinner table to buying through their iPad on the couch. At the end of the day the iPad drove more retail traffic than any other device with traffic reaching 10.7 percent versus the iPhone at 9.1 percent and Android at 5.8 percent.

Social Shopping: Shoppers referred from Social Networks such as Facebook and Twitter increased in evening hours generating .63 percent of all online sales on Thanksgiving.

And today, Black Friday, IBM slightly upped those figures, noting that the iPhone was the preferred device to bring into a store to shop with — presumably irritating sales clerks everywhere.

Over at Fab, CEO Jason Goldberg was touting in a Betashop blog post that his mobile app sales were 40 percent of the retail site’s total for the day. It’s usually 33 percent, so it’s a small jump, which Goldberg attributed to a tweet by Apple promoting it. But how much did he sell? He’s not saying.

And eBay said it launched 20 mobile-only e-commerce promotions over its app, as did many other retailers.

Also, no surprise, the New York Times weighed in with the classic trend piece: “The Shrewd Shopper Carries a Smartphone.” Um, everyone carries a smartphone now, but it apparently gets more magical when you take it to Macy’s.

We’ll see if Mobile Thursday becomes Mobile Holiday Season, which would be a big deal — but it’s winning so far in the pundit stakes.

Until we get actual numbers, here’s a chart about the whole thing from eBay:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121123/mobile-thursday-smartphone-shopping-is-still-tiny-but-its-this-years-big-online-buzzword/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121121/will-the-marissa-mayer-premium-or-is-it-those-hedge-fund-dudes-piling-in-finally-get-yahoos-stock-to-20-a-share/ http://allthingsd.com/20121121/will-the-marissa-mayer-premium-or-is-it-those-hedge-fund-dudes-piling-in-finally-get-yahoos-stock-to-20-a-share/#comments Wed, 21 Nov 2012 20:38:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=263164

They like her, they really like her.

Wall Street, that is, in regards to new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, assigning the former Google exec a clear premium.

And whether it is deserved or not yet from a pure performance perspective — we actually won’t know for several quarters ahead — the shares of the Silicon Valley Internet giant over the past three months have gone up 22 percent. The rise has taken place pretty much on the promise that she will finally be the one to deliver what no other Yahoo leader has done.

And that is, besides making the company relevant and innovative again: Getting Yahoo’s stock past $20 a share again.

That’s within striking distance now. Shares are at $18.40 today, close to an all-time high for the year. The recent rise certainly isn’t taking into account the results of the recent lackluster third quarter, which continued to show the worrisome downward trends — even though partial asset sales of the company’s Chinese Alibaba stake successfully masked the problems — in growth, engagement and overall profitability.

But Mayer’s confident I’ve-got-this tones on the earnings call itself — especially in pushing a mobile strategy that has not been put in place as yet in any substantive way — won over Wall Street investors, who apparently like how she sounds and, thus, are intrigued with what she might do.

While this kind of perceptual game will only get Yahoo so far, moving out of the teens in share price would be an important benchmark for the company.

The stock was last at that level in August of 2008. At the time, in fact, $20 a share was considered very disappointing, taking place after Microsoft dropped its $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo a few months earlier. Indeed, $20 was a big comedown from when Yahoo shares were above $43 in 2006.

The lowest price Yahoo shares got in recent years were $9.39 in November of 2008, just before then CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang stepped down.

Now the stock is close to double that sad trough, fueled in part by some cosmetic moves to improve culture by Mayer — including free food, smartphones and a promise to end the slow-moving decision-making at Yahoo.

There has also been a start of the promised multi-billion-dollar stock buybacks by the company, although Yahoo has been cagey about how and when it is purchasing. Also helping, more recently, is that several big hedge funds are buying into the story of hope.

Following in the footsteps of successful activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point, who is now on the board and is a major Yahoo investor, others like him have now joined in the party in a bigger way. That includes David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital and Chase Coleman of Tiger Global Management.

The thoughtful Einhorn, who is a friend of Loeb’s, has been in and out of the stock before, buying it on hopes that now ousted CEO Carol Bartz would be Yahoo’s savior and selling it soon after it was clear she might not be. He came back in February with three million shares, sold them in May, but now has upped his stake to just over five million more under Mayer’s regime.

More substantively, Tiger’s Coleman has grabbed 25 million shares (interestingly, he’s also upped his stakes in Groupon and Facebook).

Obviously, they must believe Yahoo is set to move upward, which all depends on Mayer. She’s made one critical stock misstep early in her tenure, by announcing that she was considering keeping the huge cash windfall from its sale of Alibaba stock and not giving it back to shareholders in some form.

That dropped Yahoo’s shares to under $15, but Mayer walked back that mistake and the stock has been climbing since.

For the year to date, it’s up almost 14 percent — a nice rise — although that pales in comparison to Apple’s 39 percent rise, Amazon’s 37 percent rise and, most of all, AOL’s 136 percent leap.

The comparison to the massive stock run that AOL has had, after CEO Tim Armstrong — also a former Googler — cut costs, focused units, sold patents and bought back stock, is often made. It’s perhaps apt, but arguably Yahoo has much better and fixable assets than AOL.

More to the point, Yahoo’s price-to-earnings ratio remains unusually low — it’s 5.6, compared to the S&P’s 14.2 average — which means that the entire business is severely undervalued by Wall Street.

It is if Mayer can create real value by actually staging the comeback she is already getting credit for accomplishing. She certainly has a lot of levers to improve results, from the stock buyback to finally making a deal to sell its multi-billion-dollar stake in Yahoo! Japan to making expense cuts to buying some innovative small start-ups to creating products that aren’t, well, lame.

Most importantly, Mayer has to stop the decimation of Yahoo’s once mighty advertising business, which makes up the bulk of its revenue, as well as improve its search monetization by rejiggering its heretofore dysfunctional partnership with Microsoft. (But, as I wrote earlier this week, she will not be making new search engines with Facebook.)

A gander at this chart of Yahoo’s declining quarterly revenue should give you a good visual of the problem with the core business:

YHOO Revenue Quarterly data by YCharts

And, indeed, Yahoo’s sales have dropped 29 percent since 2007, with typically flat display revenue and declining search revenue, which was once Yahoo’s crown jewel. While operating margins have risen over the years, very few point to the company as an exciting growth story.

And it still isn’t, although investors are starting to consider it a possibility. We’ll see as Mayer makes more significant changes in 2013, hopefully underpinning the stock’s recent rise with a true story of financial strides.

But, for now, giddy shareholders probably should not get too far ahead of themselves. Not that you can stop them: Mayer fan Eric Jackson is calling for Yahoo’s stock to be over $40 again by end of 2013.

Whether the Mayer premium can do pull off that particular investor miracle or not remains to be seen.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121121/will-the-marissa-mayer-premium-or-is-it-those-hedge-fund-dudes-piling-in-finally-get-yahoos-stock-to-20-a-share/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121119/yahoo-is-among-those-mulling-a-tvguide-com-bid-for-about-20-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20121119/yahoo-is-among-those-mulling-a-tvguide-com-bid-for-about-20-million/#comments Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:36:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=271076

According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo is among the companies taking a serious gander at TVGuide.com, the online entertainment listings, video and news site and mobile app.

Earlier today, Deadline Hollywood reported that its owner, Lionsgate, was in “advanced negotiations” to sell the site for about $20 million to one strategic bidder.

That’s the approximate price, my sources said too, who noted that Yahoo is only kicking the tires to determine if the site would add to its online media efforts and that such a deal is not in a final state.

But TVGuide.com is right in the wheelhouse of Yahoo’s acquisition efforts under CEO Marissa Mayer. She said the Silicon Valley Internet giant was looking at smaller purchases to round out its product line, especially in the mobile area.

Thus, its M&A point person, Jackie Reses, has been looking at “everything in the world,” according to numerous sources, across a large spectrum of arenas. TVGuide.com is in the media space, obviously — another she’s looked at is Los Angeles-based Maker Studios.

Hollywood studio Lionsgate last reported that TVGuide.com has upward of 24 million unique monthly visitors, and also has almost seven million mobile app users.

Lionsgate bought the site and television network in 2009, which also is owned in part by J.P. Morgan’s One Equity Partners.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121119/yahoo-is-among-those-mulling-a-tvguide-com-bid-for-about-20-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121118/yahoo-and-facebook-not-in-search-alliance-discussions/ http://allthingsd.com/20121118/yahoo-and-facebook-not-in-search-alliance-discussions/#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2012 04:48:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=270663

Yahoo and Facebook are not currently in talks about forming a search alliance or building a search engine together, according to my sources, who scoffed about such a deal reported in a thinner-than-tissue-paper post by the Telegraph earlier today.

In addition, Yahoo is not anywhere near ending its search partnership with Microsoft, although new CEO Marissa Mayer has been in touch with the software giant about improving performance that has been less than lackluster over the course of its history so far.

Despite this, it would be nearly impossible for Yahoo to extricate itself from the long-term contract easily — though there are certain, but very difficult, outs. But sources tell me Microsoft would fight any attempt to end it earlier.

Thus, while Yahoo and Facebook have had a very good relationship of late, after the pair stopped warring over patents, and have also had success with its various sharing initiatives, a substantive search collaboration is not now in the mix.

Could the pair do more in terms of sharing among its users? Sure! Could they more tightly integrate services? Yep! Could they do something jointly related to advertising? Why not! But will they build a search engine together? Not likely.

Indeed, I am not even sure what such a thing means, since it would now be nearly impossible to execute, given Yahoo has outsourced its core search technology long ago to Microsoft and has been largely focused on improving search experience since then.

Of course, it’s no secret that Facebook is likely to enter the search arena in a more substantive manner in the future — CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has said so publicly — because people expect a better experience and users have been asking for years for improvements.

So watch that space, for certain, as it could also be very lucrative for the company and perhaps give search leader Google a bit more of a race.

But the social networking site is likely to work on its own in such an effort — as well as approach the space in much different ways. Hooking up with Yahoo would bring it almost nothing it might need to make it a success.

There are some interesting what-ifs to ponder with the idea of Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo forming some kind of Avengers-style effort to battle Google, especially if it had a mobile element. But that’s the movie version at this moment.

(Speaking of movies, I am sorry it took me so long to get to this, but I was seeing the final “Twilight” with some All Things Digital staffers. I can report that the sparkly vampires of the film are also not in search alliance talks with Facebook.)

One unusual phrase in the Telegraph article did catch my eye though, which noted that “board members expect the talks to lead to much more substantial collaboration based around Web-based search.”

Such a Facebook search tie-up rumor would certainly do wonders for a Yahoo stock pop tomorrow for all the hedge funds now piling into the Silicon Valley Internet giant, would that it were so.

But it’s not.

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