Yahoo will announce its $1.1 billion all-cash acquisition of the Tumblr blogging service this morning, said sources, likely just before the markets open.

That means: Very, very soon.

(Update: Looks like sooner than very soon — Yahoo officially said it promised not to screw up Tumblr at 5 am PT.)

But Wall Street likes the deal so far. Yahoo shares were up in pre-market trading this morning, close to 2 percent, to reach $27. The stock of the Silicon Valley Internet giant closed Friday at $26.52.

After the announcement of the news AllThingsD already told you about several times over the past few days, let the opinions begin over a range of the entirely unknowable right now, including:

Whether it is a good deal, or whether Yahoo has just bought themselves GeoCities 2.0; whether Tumblr’s tetchy young audience would bolt at the Yahoo ownership.

Whether Tumblr CEO David Karp — he of the sad-puppy-dog eyes and fantastically floppy hair — would wither or bloom under the leadership of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

And, of course, who got rich in the whole shebang.

Karp, for sure, garnering $250 million in cash.

So sit tight to get the final word and all the quotes praising the deal as the best thing since, well, Instagram got picked up by Facebook for a mere $1 billion. Apparently, $1.1 billion is the new $1 billion.

We will cover the news, of course, despite not being invited to Yahoo parties (and somehow we’ll survive).

mama_mia/Shutterstock

Today marks a year since Facebook’s rough-and-tumble IPO.

Since that disappointing day, Facebook has gone to great lengths to assure Wall Street that yes, it will one day be the social ad spinning, money-making machine that Wall Street hopes it will be.

The biggest potential, Facebook maintains, lies in what executives consider “long-term investments,” products with grand ambitions to change the way we interact with Facebook — if not the world — on a regular basis.

Therein lies the problem. Meaningful change won’t happen soon.

Consider Facebook Home, the mobile project years in the making that aims to shift the way we interact with our mobile devices, anchoring users within the Facebook experience. The potential for success with Home, if widely adopted, could be big. More time spent inside of Facebook’s products means more ads served by default — especially when Facebook finally brings ads to Cover Feed, one of the key features of Home.

And yet by many measures, Home has stumbled hard directly out of the gate. More than half of its user reviews on Google Play are scathing. And as of last week, just over one million people had installed the product, a trifling amount compared to the 1.1 billion users on Facebook’s network.

What Facebook really wants from Home is to catch on overseas. Create a mobile-focused product to capture developing world markets — where the phone is a person’s primary computing device — and you’ve got potential to spur growth. Home, however, runs only on certain higher-end Android devices, hardware that won’t be ubiquitous or cheap in developing countries for at least a few years.

Home isn’t the only long-term bet. Look at Graph Search, Facebook’s search product rolled out earlier this year. Almost immediately came calls saying “watch out Google!” from the public. Perhaps Google’s stranglehold on the search market could be upset by a social form of discovery.

But Graph Search is possibly in an even more nascent phase than Facebook Home; Graph Search has only been rolled out to a select amount of users, and Facebook has oodles of work to do if it wants to curb the way people make Web search queries and focus them on people, places and things inside of the Facebook network.

Granted, Facebook has made serious moves in the past year to spur profitability further, releasing a slew of new ad products, revamping its gaming platform partner ecosystem and pushing, however slowly, into online retail with Facebook Gifts. It has consistently hit its numbers in the company’s quarterly earnings calls. And as the Wall Street Journal’s Evelyn Rusli wrote, the company made significant internal shifts over the past year that have made more teams responsible for Facebook’s revenue.

And still, the needle hardly moves on Facebook’s stock ticker; it closed at around $26 per share on Friday, well below the $38 it opened at one year ago. For all of Facebook’s long-term posturing, the Street remains cautious.

“We don’t build services to make money,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his company’s S-1 prospectus before Facebook’s Nasdaq debut. “We make money to build better services.”

Hopefully, for the sake of the shareholders, Facebook can do both.

In that capacity, I learned to use the Bloomberg terminal that sits on some 315,000 desks in the financial industry and that makes the company all its money. And I learned early on that practically every move terminal users make is tracked and recorded. (Also, it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway, this website is owned by News Corp., which owns Dow Jones, which is a competitor to Bloomberg.)

In a Sunday editorial on Bloomberg View, the company’s equivalent of an Op/Ed page, Editor-in-Chief Matt Winkler wrote, “Our reporters should not have access to any data considered proprietary. I am sorry they did. The error is inexcusable.” He opens the piece by quoting from a section of his book, “The Bloomberg Way”:

“The appearance of impropriety can be as damaging to a reputation as doing something improper. Because we hold others accountable for disclosure, we expect the same of ourselves. While disclosing errors of judgment may be embarrassing, the sooner the lapses are reported, the sooner there is nothing more to say.”

This raises the question: How fully will Bloomberg News disclose what it admits to be an “error of judgment” that is “almost as old as Bloomberg News.” How many reporters used the Z function — a software command that displays whether or not a customer is logged in and which functions he or she has been using the most — over the many years it was available to them? Chances are that Bloomberg has the data on precisely how often it was used and by which reporters. It could with some effort call in a third party to perform a detailed audit on this, and then disclose the findings of that audit to clients and the rest of the world.

I’ve asked Bloomberg about this. Spokeswoman Lauren Meller didn’t have an immediate answer. If I get one I’ll post it here.

If you’re going to properly understand the controversy that has emerged about the company in recent days, you need to understand the basics of the terminal itself. Bloomberg is at its very heart a financial data software company. In executing a “function” on its terminals, which are seen as status symbols of the financial industry, you type a command, usually one to four letters, and hit the Go key, which replaces the Return key on the conventional keyboard. When looking up, say, the price and fundamentals of Apple shares, you type AAPL, hit a key labeled Equity to indicate the first four letters are intended to indicate a stock ticker symbol, and then hit Go.

During the year I worked there I never heard about the so-called “Z function” at the heart of the current controversy, but its existence isn’t surprising. If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s what it’s all about. All 2,000-odd reporters at Bloomberg News have these terminals on their desks and use them to conduct research, report, write and publish their stories, and to communicate within the organization and without.

The Z function, now disabled for newsroom employees, showed when clients were and were not logged in to the system. When someone hadn’t logged in in a while, an attentive reporter might see that as a tip that the person was changing jobs or had left a firm, and then the reporter would start asking questions. Stories about executives moving between firms tend to be popular among terminal clients. It also showed what other Bloomberg functions these clients had been using, but in a non-specific way that wouldn’t show what stock or bond or other matter they might be researching or which news stories they had been reading. Bloomberg reporters are also said to have had access to transcripts of customer service calls clients made seeking help with functions.

Bloomberg is and has always been a “big data” company. The newly fashionable idea that you can learn a great deal and thus improve a software application by analyzing the big mass of data gathered about how it is used and where users run into problems has been been at the core of Bloomberg’s operational philosophy from the beginning.

Employees know from the moment they join the company that the amount of time they spend at their desks is logged. Building security systems are linked to the terminal and an access badge. When you “badge in” at any Bloomberg office around the world, this occurrence is logged. If you’re a Bloomberg employee based in New York and happen to be visiting London or Tokyo, your arrival and departure times are tracked, as is the amount of time your terminal is idle, should you be out gathering news or taking a lunch break.

I never experienced this first hand, but I heard privately shared tales from colleagues about their annual performance reviews, and discussions would at times turn to how well they used the terminal to do their jobs. As I was first joining, a friend who had worked at Bloomberg for a while told me that during one such conversation, he was mildly scolded for using Yahoo Finance to look up some bit of financial data — terminals also have Web browsers — rather than the terminal itself.

I point out this conversation for a reason. In its quest to make its products better — certainly a logical goal — Bloomberg clearly tracks how often its clients use its many functions. If that’s true, then it logically follows that it tracks how its reporters do the same thing. Historical data on the use by reporters of the Z function exists and can be examined.

As an organization, Bloomberg News is journalism as re-imagined by Fredrick Winslow Taylor, the philosophical father of factory automation. Its reporters are routinely gauged on how often they log scoops that appear on the terminal’s news service. Taylor believed that by analyzing work, the “One Best Way” to get it done could be found. As the founding editor of Bloomberg News, Winkler always struck me as an avid student of “Taylorism.” Every bit of data that can be gathered is analyzed to make the news gathering process better and more efficient. Indeed, Winkler’s 360-page book seems almost Taylor-inspired.

Scoops and other distinctive stories are further categorized into a taxonomy using an internal nomenclature, and the best of those are singled out in what’s known as “Matt’s Note,” a weekly memo from Winkler. An MMWin, or a market-moving win, is a story that beats a similar story by a competitor by several minutes and that after publication causes the market to react in some way. A Follow is when a competitor writes a story that follows up on a Bloomberg scoop. And there are many others.

All of these are thought to be tracked and used to evaluate a reporter’s performance every year. That means there’s data on how many reporters used the Z function and about whom, and probably data as well correlating to the published stories that resulted.

With at least two large banks complaining, and now two government entities — the Federal Reserve in the U.S. and the European Central Bank — asking questions about all this, you can expect concerns about the lines between Bloomberg’s business and news operations to persist.

Groupon said it had revenue of $601.4 million, up eight percent, in the first quarter, and earnings of three cents. Those profits were in line with Wall Street expectations, but sales were better than the expected $590 million at the daily deals site.

The stock was up nearly 12 percent in after-hours trading to $6.21. Shares have risen 42.6 percent in the last six months, although that’s down 43.9 percent from a year ago.

There was no news of the search for a new leader for Groupon, which fired its CEO, co-founder Andrew Mason, in the quarter.

On a conference call later, co-CEO Ted Leonsis said that Groupon’s board had formed a search committee, but that it was “not in a hurry” to find a new company head.

But, in a statement, co-CEO Eric Lefkofsky said: “We are encouraged by our results, as our local revenues accelerated and our margins improved over the prior quarter.”

Anything up is good news for the suffering Groupon, which has been pilloried by Wall Street since its late 2011 IPO, although sentiment has improved since Mason’s ouster.

Gross billings, which is the amount consumers buy from Groupon overall, without subtracting payments to merchants, were up four percent, to $1.04 billion, on strong growth in North America. Sales were off internationally, though, by 9 percent.

International business, which has a bigger active customer base than North America, was the cause of much of Groupon’s declines, a problem execs have been trying to address with a new “One Playbook” strategy to consolidate systems.

On the conference call, COO Kal Raman called the situation “a tale of two Groupons.”

On a GAAP basis, Groupon had a loss of one cent, from two cents in the same period a year ago.

Groupon also said North American transactions on mobile devices accounted for 45 percent of the overall number, up from 30 percent last year, while email fell to less than 45 percent of the deals sold.

On a less happy note, Groupon said that its outlook for the second quarter would be below consensus.

Here’s the the Chicago-based Groupon’s official press release, as well as some tasty financial slides, so you can read it all for yourself:

GRPN

GRPN_1Q13_Earnings_Slides

Demand Media, the online content company, said it had earned nine cents on an adjusted basis in the first quarter, on revenues of $100.6 million, topping Wall Street estimates of eight cents on $99.6 million in sales. On a fully diluted basis, earnings were one cent a share, or $700,000, compared to a loss of two cents, or $1.8 million, in the three months compared to a year ago.

“Strong growth from our owned & operated content and media properties drove our Q1 results, highlighting the unique capabilities of our content discovery, creation and distribution platform. Further, we accelerated our paid content strategy with the acquisition of Creativebug, a premier online destination for arts and crafts instruction, which will provide our large eHow crafts audience with an expanded learning experience. In addition, we signed up over 400 resellers to our new gTLD tools and received more than two million expressions of interest for domains to be registered with new gTLDs,” said Richard Rosenblatt, chairman and CEO of Demand Media in a statement. “We are excited about the distinct long-term growth opportunities for both of our businesses.”

Demand’s eHow site seems to have driven a lot of the gains in the content area.

Demand shares rose in trading yesterday by close to two percent, to close at $8.58, also its stock is down 7.6 percent for the year.

The company did not mention the planned split of its registar and content business that it announced in the last quarter in the current results, which might be covered on the conference call the Santa Monica, Calif. company will have with analysts at 2 pm PT.

In its last earnings release for the fourth quarter, Demand said it was spinning off its domain registrar business from its media one in a bid to better clarify the company to investors.

Since it went public several years ago, there has been some level of difficulty for each part of Demand to easily explain itself to Wall Street, given the very different natures of its key — but very different — revenue units. In a statement at the time, Demand said that it was “our intent to spin off our registrar business and separate into two independent, publicly traded companies.”

The company noted that the two units “divergent strategic priorities and opportunities” would be better in the new configuration with a pure-play media company and domain services company. At the time, the company said the transaction was expected to take place in the next nine to 12 months, although it required a number of company and regulatory approvals to do the tax-free spin-off to create two different stocks.

In a different kind of transaction, Demand had talked a little more than a year ago to a private equity company about taking the company private. The effort was abandoned, in which Boston-based Thomas H. Lee Partners would have purchased Demand for a price of up to $1.2 billion, due to a number of challenges. Its current market valuation is now about $744 million.

Until we hear more about the spin-off plans from Demand execs, here’s the full release from Q1 to peruse:

1Q 13 FINAL RELEASE

For our readers who are not inclined to constantly hit the refresh button, here’s a quick look back at the Top 10 stories that drove AllThingsD this week:

1. Disney Shuts Down LucasArts
2. Here’s Why You Hate Your Cable Company
3. AT&T: Oh, Wait … About That Samsung Galaxy S4 Pricing
4. Samsung Says Apple’s Patent Damages Could Still Exceed $1 Billion
5. HD Voice Will Start Coming to AT&T Later This Year
6. You Still Can’t Resell Your iTunes Songs, Court Rules
7. Elissa Murphy, One of Yahoo’s High-Profile Tech Execs, Heads to Go Daddy as CTO
8. Henry Blodget Is Quietly Planning a Stunning Return to Wall Street
9. What’s Dell’s Bidding Process Really About? (Clue: It’s Not About Fixing Dell)
10. Windows Phone Gaining a Toehold in Some Markets

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

The sum would be the biggest payday for a takeover in at least three years, providing some relief to an industry that has been pinched by sluggish deal-making activity since the financial crisis.

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Zynga just filed a new 8-K regulatory document outlining revised compensation arrangements with its top tier of execs that ups the salary and bonuses, as well as restricted stock units, but ties them more closely to performance and the turnaround of the struggling social gaming company.

That is, except CEO and founder Mark Pincus, whose annual salary has been reduced to $1 and who will not receive any bonus or equity in 2013 — which is not an uncommon move for tech company leaders.

Said Zynga in its filing:

“The Company’s 2013 executive compensation program is designed to focus on two primary objectives: first, retaining and motivating our talented, entrepreneurial executive leadership team; and second, aligning our executive pay structure with company performance-based incentives. We believe that by focusing on both retention and performance, the compensation packages align with our strategy to build long-term value for our stockholders.”

The Section 16 execs impacted include: COO David Ko; general counsel Reggie Davis; Steve Chiang, president of games; Barry Cottle, chief revenue officer; CTO Cadir Lee; and CFO Mark Vranesh.

Interestingly, most of their salaries — which are about double their previous compensation — are now $500,000 for all, except Vranesh and Davis, who will earn $425,000.

Possible bonuses of zero to 200 percent of their cash salary, as well as the same level of stock grants from 970,500 to 1.8 million shares each, are tied to the performance of Zynga games, expanding the network and certain adjusted EBITDA levels. The RSUs vest over four years and nothing will be paid until February of 2014, after performance targets are met.

Zynga, whose stock has largely languished since its IPO in late 2011, has also suffered from a spate of executive turnovers, which has seemed never-ending and has added to Wall Street’s concern. Most recently, CTO Debra Chrapaty resigned to take a CEO job elsewhere; and, this week, the head of Zynga’s New York office and former CEO of OMGPOP, Dan Porter, left after that $180 million acquisition failed to garner the pop it promised.

Due to the many departures, Pincus rejiggered his exec lineup in November, giving the latest team members larger roles and focusing the San Francisco-based group on major areas of opportunity, such as real-money gaming and mobile.

Here’s the whole filing:

Form 8-K

I like a good dichotomy as much as the next person, which is why I decided to compare the shares of Yahoo with that of Apple over the recent time period.

That’s because in what amounts to a trading-places moment, despite their differences in focus, the pair have had almost polar opposite stock performances of late.

Yahoo, of course, is the famous Internet giant that has been trying to turn itself around for a very long time; Apple is the Silicon Valley phenom that has been wowing the sector for just as much time with endless innovative products.

Typically, that state of affairs has meant that Apple has enjoyed a rocket ship of a ride from Wall Street investors, while Yahoo has suffered. That’s certainly been true on a five-year basis, with Apple up 244 percent and Yahoo down 21 percent.

But in the last six months, it has been another story altogether. In that time, Apple has been sliding to its lowest price since September, down 35 percent. Meanwhile, Yahoo has surged nearly 50 percent in the time frame.

It’s the same story for the past three months, with Apple down 27 percent and Yahoo up 17 percent; and, the last month, with the Cupertino, Calif.-based device maker down 5 percent and the nearby Sunnyvale Internet portal up 11 percent.

It’s a classic story of hope, with investors counting on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to turn the tide at the long-suffering company, while they worry about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s ability to keep the hits coming fast and furious.

Perhaps most ironic? That part of Mayer’s appeal is her continued repetition of Yahoo’s mobile aspirations, although the results in that key arena are still negligible and decidedly nascent. Apple, despite the stock fall-off, still handily dominates mobile money-making and on a massive scale, although increasingly competitive Google Android devices continue to gain ground.

Despite a large uptick in the stock earlier today, Groupon’s fourth-quarter results caused its shares to plunge 23 percent in after-hours trading.

The Chicago-based company said its revenues were $638.3 million in the three months, just below expectation of $640 million and up 30 percent from a year ago.

But the fourth-quarter GAAP loss was 12 cents per share, or $81.1 million, which included a loss of seven cents from a non-operating item. That compares to a 12 cent loss a year ago, but was well over the two cent loss Wall Street had expected.

This comes after Groupon’s third-quarter miss, which puts the fate of CEO Andrew Mason into some question. He and several board members had a bit of a kerfuffle several months ago over this management abilities.

Still, on a conference call on the results today, Mason struck a positive tone on the poor results.

In addition, the company’s guidance was also disappointing, with first-quarter revenue between $560 million and $610 million. That’s much lower than the $650.3 million, that investors were estimating. Groupon also said it would have a possible operating loss in Q1 up to $10 million.

Groupon shares were down to $4.63 after the markets closed, after a nearly eight percent run-up earlier in the day.

Here is the company’s official press release on Q4:

GRPN

Demand Media said today that it planned to split its company in two parts, spinning off its domain registrar business from its media one in a bid to better clarify the company to investors.

Since it went public several years ago, there has been some level of difficulty for each part of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand to easily explain itself to Wall Street, given the very different natures of its key — but very different — revenue units.

In a statement, Demand said that it was “our intent to spin off our registrar business and separate into two independent, publicly traded companies.”

The company noted that the two units “divergent strategic priorities and opportunities” would be better in the new configuration with a pure-play media company and domain services company.

The transaction is expected to take place in the next nine to 12 months, Demand said. But it still requires a number of company and regulatory approvals to do the tax-free spin-off that will create two different stocks.

The move makes a lot of sense on many levels, given the company’s two divisions have not coalesced in any way that has made much sense to investors.

As part of today’s announcement, Demand also released its fourth-quarter earnings.

Minus traffic acquisition costs, the company’s revenue for the three months was up 19 percent to $96.8 million, on net income of 12 cents of adjusted earnings per share.

Here are Demand’s two press releases from today, including its Q4 earnings:

Spin Off Announce FINAL 02.19.13

4Q.12 Results FINAL 02.19.13

In a sign of the two companies’ changing reputations, Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. are seeing the difference in the percentage of analysts recommending their stocks narrow, according to Thomson Reuters data. Just a month ago, the percentage of analysts rating each at “buy” differed by about 17 points: 84 percent of analysts recommended Apple and 67 percent recommended Facebook. Three months ago, that distance was 25 percentage points. Now, 71 percent of analysts recommend Facebook and 77 percent recommend Apple.

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The Los Angeles-based Rubicon Project has hired two execs to fill top spots at the digital advertising company, in what looks like preparations for an eventual public offering.

Greg Raifman, the founder, chairman and CEO of Dragon Media, will become president, reporting to Rubicon CEO and co-founder Frank Addante. And SocialVibe CEO Todd Tappin will take over in the role of COO/CFO, reporting to Raifman.

Founded in 2007 and armed with more than $50 million in funding, Rubicon is one of the larger real-time bidding platforms that allows automated buying and selling of global online ads.

“Greg and Todd are extremely intelligent and capable executives who have guided significant, publicly traded companies,” said Addante in a statement. “Both Greg and Todd have great relationships within our industry as well as on Wall Street. Their presence will enable me to focus on our overall vision and product strategy so we can take best advantage of the opportunities we see.”

Tappin is replacing Brian Barnum, who will leave the company, along with Chief Revenue Officer Nick Hulse. The pair only arrived less than two years ago, presumably to also help professionalize the organization.

In addition to the other exec moves, general counsel Victoria Von Szeliski will add the title of EVP of culture and business affairs and will also be adding 100 employees this year via organic growth and acquisition.

Rubicon said Raifman — who recently served as the executive chairman of video ad-serving company LiveRail, as well as being founding and running ad-serving pioneer Mediaplex — will “manage the day-to-day operations of the Rubicon Project as he ramps the company’s buy-side automation initiatives.”

Tappin will be in charge of Rubicon’s operating and financial plan and also lead mergers and acquisitions for the company. Before running SocialVibe, a video real-time buying startup, he was founding CFO of Overture and helped sell the search automation company to Yahoo many years ago.

The exec roundelay — a not entirely uncommon thing for Rubicon over the years — is apparently part of a larger bid to eventually IPO the company. Rubicon had also been in recent preliminary discussions with several larger companies — Yahoo and Adobe — about being acquired. The ad tech space has heated up of late, with a range of startups, such as AppNexus, Pubmatic, Turn and others, looking to gain ground, get funding or sell out.

But with a large price tag and some strong growth over the last year, along with becoming profitable, Rubicon appears to now be aiming to remain independent. Over the last few years, the company has grown its business significantly — according to comScore, Rubicon Project reached 214.2 million monthly unique users.

Whether that is enough to keep up with powerful rivals such as Google is, of course, the big question, especially as the way publishers and marketers interact with the online ad market is changing quickly.

Yahoo reported its fourth-quarter earnings today, with earnings higher than expected, but with a continued flattish revenue.

The Silicon Valley Internet giant aid its non-GAAP net profits were 32 cents a share, compared to 25 cents in the same period a year ago. But GAAP net earnings per diluted share were 23 cents in the fourth quarter of 2012, compared to 24 cents last year.

Shares jumped just above four percent in after-hours trading to above $21 a share, given Wall Street analysts were estimating a profit of 27 cents per share in Q4.

Net revenue, without traffic acquisition costs, was expected to be $1.21 billion. It was $1.22 billion and which is essentially flat from a year ago’s $1.17 billion. Search revenue was up nicely, while display sales declined.

Overall the results showed a non-sinking but none-too-powerful ship and not very impressive given almost every other Internet company grew revenue significantly in comparison. For example, Google reported last week that core revenue was up 21 percent in the quarter.

Still, up is up, even if it is not up that much. “I’m proud of Yahoo!’s 2012 and fourth quarter results. In 2012, Yahoo! exhibited revenue growth for the first time in 4 years, with revenue up 2 percent year-over-year,” said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in a statement.

In other words, she’ll take two percent, given the nearly persistent revenue declines of recent years. It is progress, of course, even if investors are looking for more robust increases ahead.

Also of note: Yahoo said it repurchased 79.6 million shares at an average price of $18.24 for $1.45 billion in the fourth quarter, which most definitely was one of the reasons for its recent stock run-up.

Yahoo did not release information on consumer engagement and traffic in the Q4 report, which it had done until Mayer took over. As AllThingsD.com had previously reported, most metrics in the quarter were down significantly over last year.

The fourth quarter was the first that was entirely under the new regime of Mayer, who arrive at Yahoo in July from Google.

She’s gotten a big break from Wall Street, which has sent Yahoo’s stock up in recent months on the hopes of her turnaround plans.

Last week, Mayer said the long-suffering Silicon Valley giant would be returning “back to its roots,” as part of an effort to finally turn it around. It’s actually part of a bigger plan which AllThingsD.com had reported on previously, to focus Yahoo on being a center of content discovery on the Web, across multiple devices, with wide-ranging and “very friendly” partnerships with other companies.

More to come at the 2 pm PT, conference call with Mayer, which I will be liveblogging as usual.

Until then, here’s the official press release and deck from Yahoo:

YHOO_News_2013_1_28_General

Q4’12_Earnings_Presentation.vsFINAL

The culture-celebrating hijinks continue at Yahoo, it seems.

After free food and smartphones and even dressing up as a Yahoo purple banger, CEO Marissa Mayer now has a high-ranking exec dancing for employee enjoyment.

As part of an effort to improve participation in the annual Yahoo Employee Satisfaction Survey (YESS), Mayer instituted a punishment for the lowest participation rate of any division on her executive staff.

The culprit turned out to be Jackie Reses, EVP of people and development for Yahoo, which includes the unlikely combo of human resources and business development.

Thus, Reses apparently had to dance to the hit K-pop song “Gangnam Style” with her staff at the weekly FYI employee meeting at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ on Friday.

Despite having a rep as an intense New Yorker, said one employee, Reses has some “decent moves.” Others agreed.

Also decent was one of the top results of YESS, which showed that employee belief in the future vision of the company was up 32 points year over year.

That’s not a big surprise, given the upward trajectory of Yahoo’s shares of late. But, more to the point, it has a weak comparable in last year’s survey, which painted a picture of a deeply demoralized workplace. That’s because the 2011 YESS questions went out to employees the week that the company fired CEO Carol Bartz, with most of the responses gathered in the ensuing weeks.

Despite the improvement, this year’s YESS also still showed a lot of worry about whether Yahoo leadership can execute, and whether the company can achieve strong results over the long term.

[UPDATE: One reader said the Yahoo survey is now called YEES, the Yahoo Employee Engagement Survey. I could not determine if that name change had been made.]

That’s the question that at least one Wall Street firm was asking, in a downgrade of Yahoo stock today. In dropping Yahoo’s rank to “market-perform,” Sanford C. Bernstein analysts noted worries about its turnaround efficacy, a possibly jarring reorg of its advertising unit, and also whether the future sale of its assets in China’s Alibaba Group can save the day again, as it did for last quarter’s results.

“We think there may be upside from an eventual Alibaba IPO at a valuation much higher than $50B or a Yahoo! core turn-around, but it is hard to have high conviction in either given the facts we currently have,” said the report, in part. “In addition, there is manageable but real downside risk: reorganization (e.g., of the sales force) could be negative for revenues, management could decide to invest in growth now and cut excess later, and MSFT RPS guarantee could expire without a renewal.”

Those are all good questions for investors to ask, of course, although more have been caught up in the hype/hope ahead of actual performance gains.

Still, it’s no sweat to get caught up in digital execs being made to trip the light fantastic for their weak results. So, since I was not there to enjoy Reses’ performance, click here for an also fun-tastic JibJab Gangnam video I made of her.

Turns out, it was also among the few events global tech investment bankers had to fight over this year.

Outside of Facebook’s $16 billion offering, the tech world’s deal activity dropped across the board this year. Global mergers and acquisition volume in the industry slid 10% from the prior year to $198 billion and follow-on offerings dropped 31% to $16.2 billion, according to Dealogic.

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Earlier today in trading, shares of Apple briefly dropped below $500 for the first time since February, largely due to more rating cuts by Wall Street analysts.

The stock did manage to rally later, ending up on a slight rise of 1.8 percent to close at $518.83 for the day.

But the worries are increasing about the usually high-flying stock, which is down almost 26 percent over the last three months. (That said, Apple shares are up just above 28 percent for the year to date.)

Still, analysts are fretting, such as Citigroup, which had only recently initiated coverage with a buy rating for Apple at the end of November. Last night, it moved to a neutral rating and slashed the price target for shares from $675 to $575.

The biggest new worry is the sales of Apple’s latest device, with Citi’s Glen Yeung noting that “near-term supply chain order cuts, while inconclusive in nature, bring into question the strength of iPhone 5.”

Citi is one of several downgrades of late for Apple; today’s included dings from Canaccord Genuity and Pacific Crest Securities.

Now, without another product in the immediate pipeline and fears that the company’s competitiveness in the smartphone market is waning, the Cupertino, Calif., company is in the unique position of needing a new “wow” product in the months ahead to spur a rally.

There are some bright spots, though. Apple said it had sold two million iPhone 5’s over the weekend in China and a new Morgan Stanley report is indicating that iPhone and also iPad demand remain high.

But, while there has been swirl around a new take by Apple related to the television, many investors and also fans (see this great essay by Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire) are clearly hoping for even more.

Here’s something you haven’t seen in a while — Groupon shares rose more than 36 percent last week after Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global Management disclosed Monday that it had bought 65 million shares.

The well-known hedge fund and private equity firm, which has also bought a decent-sized stake in Yahoo recently, actually purchased the stock of the much-beleaguered daily deals company on November 9, according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the time, Groupon was at $2.76, down about 90 percent from its IPO a year ago.

That’s nearly a 10 percent stake overall for Tiger.

It seems to be part of a hedge fund party at Groupon. Paul Tudor Jones of Tudor Investments also disclosed a small buy of 150,000 shares last week — as well another from George Soros’ Soros Fund Management, which recently disclosed it had bought 2.5 million shares of Groupon.

Groupon stock closed at $3.95 Friday, a huge improvement — though still massively off its IPO price. Its market valuation is just $2.6 billion.

The Chicago-based Groupon had to be happy about the purchase, which give the company — as well as its CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason — some much needed breathing space. One source close to the situation noted that Coleman is considered to be a friendly and well-regarded investor.

And a reassessment of Groupon by Wall Street could also help. In a note on Monday, Deutsche Bank analyst Ross Sandler wrote that he was considering an upgrade of the stock, noting that the “everything is imploding” meme around the company was not accurate.

Still, slower growth and management changes, as well as continued troubles in its European business, remain worries. Groupon recently promoted Kal Raman, who had previously been SVP of global sales and operations, to COO to help stabilize leadership.

Still, the best medicine right now seems to be a little confidence from a rich guy, as you can see from this chart:

GRPN data by YCharts

And here’s Mason, in an video interview with me in August, talking about trying to bring back the company:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121124/can-the-hedge-fund-dudes-save-groupons-stock/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/holiday-shopping-buy-shares-of-facebook-says-cantor-fitzgerald/ http://allthingsd.com/20121119/holiday-shopping-buy-shares-of-facebook-says-cantor-fitzgerald/#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2012 21:06:43 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=270865 Mark Cuban ain’t so hot on Facebook these days, but the social giant is still capable of making true believers — analysts at equity research firm Cantor Fitzgerald, in particular.

The firm rated shares of Facebook at a “buy” in its latest research note published Monday, zeroing in on a target price of $28. The reason? Apparently Cantor analysts are convinced Facebook has got mobile monetization on lockdown.

“Facebook seems to be winning the mobile war, with its mobile engagement growth far outpacing that of peers, according to October data,” the company said in the note. “While many fear a rapid transition to mobile usage, where monetization is still nacent, we view increased mobile engagement as a key strength for Facebook and a longer-term differentiator.”

Another key factor in Cantor’s latest note: Facebook’s latest earnings call, which brought a taste of promising news on the mobile ad front. Namely, Facebook’s latest mobile ad product is bringing in more than $3 million daily, or upward of $1 billion annualized at this run-rate.

Other mobile products Cantor cites include Facebook Offers, AdExchange, Facebook Gifts, Promoted Posts and Mobile App-install ads. Most are new to the past quarter, so the jury is still out on their effectiveness.

It’s a bit jarring to all of a sudden see Facebook coverage optimistic on the company’s mobile prospects. It wasn’t that long ago that Wall Street seemed iffy on Facebook’s ability to shift the bulk of its ad revenue from the desktop over to mobile. Perhaps folks are starting to come around to Facebook’s continued insistence that it has mobile nailed. Or perhaps analysts are just filled with holiday cheer.

Alas, the Street is nothing if not mercurial. We’ll see if analysts are still singing the company’s praises come next fiscal quarter.

Oh, and shares of Facebook were trading off Monday afternoon, down around 2.5 percent to an even $23 per share.

FB data by YCharts

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121119/holiday-shopping-buy-shares-of-facebook-says-cantor-fitzgerald/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121114/facebook-shares-jump-as-employee-lock-ups-expire/ http://allthingsd.com/20121114/facebook-shares-jump-as-employee-lock-ups-expire/#comments Wed, 14 Nov 2012 16:22:52 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=269615 Facebook stock saw a 10 percent surge on Wednesday morning, up to a high of $22.09, as nearly 800 million employee shares became eligible for trading for the first time. It was widely expected that the stock would fall with the possibility of many employees finally being able to cash out.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121114/facebook-shares-jump-as-employee-lock-ups-expire/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20121112/demand-media-finally-breaks-away-for-good-from-lance-armstrong/ http://allthingsd.com/20121112/demand-media-finally-breaks-away-for-good-from-lance-armstrong/#comments Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:00:13 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=266861

In the midst of last week’s earnings call, after the company had released strong results, Demand Media CEO and co-founder Richard Rosenblatt made an unusual declaration about its once-tight affiliation with now-disgraced professional racing cyclist Lance Armstrong.

Said Rosenblatt about the Santa Monica, Calif., social content company to Wall Street analysts about the status of the relationship in the wake of Armstrong being stripped of his many Tour de France titles:

“Our relationship is with the Livestrong Foundation, not with Lance, and we are aligned in empowering people to live healthier lives, and we support the important work of the foundation. We have built a powerful destination, popular applications and a very engaged community. None of this has changed and we have seen no material impact on the consumer traffic or metrics.”

In reality, the once-close relationship between Demand and Armstrong ended a while ago, even though the athlete’s cancer-fighting charity has been a high-profile shareholder since early 2008. At the time, Demand struck a four-year exclusive deal with Livestrong to create a health and wellness site, and also got a perpetual license to the Livestrong.com domain name.

But Armstrong — despite appearing at the Web 2.0 conference in 2008 with Rosenblatt — eventually had little to do with the Demand brand.

And it is down to zero involvement now, after he recently stepped down as chairman of Livestrong, due to the doping controversy. That mess has caused a lot of the brands he was tied up with, such as Nike, to disassociate themselves from Armstrong himself, although not from the Livestrong Foundation.

That has also been Demand’s direction, especially given that the commercial Web site, which has become the No. 3 health property in the U.S., is one of the company’s strongest ones. That adds up to about 26 million monthly unique visitors, a gain of 97 percent since last year.

But with that success, why did Demand make the statement at earnings — as well as putting up a blog post recently clarifying that it had “no direct relationship” with Armstrong?

Apparently, according to several sources, Demand had to move to be as explicit has possible, not because of consumers, but because of advertisers.

“The advertisers did care about the affiliation,” said one source. “So it was time to say in no uncertain terms to them and shareholders that Lance Armstrong has nothing to do with Demand.”

Or, as the blog post in late October noted rather strongly:

“We don’t believe the struggles of one individual should detract from the millions of real people who have benefited from work that’s been done to prevent cancer and improve the lives of those unfortunate enough to have it.”

Or, as they say in bike racing, Armstrong had simply become too much of a wheel sucker.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121112/demand-media-finally-breaks-away-for-good-from-lance-armstrong/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121105/marissa-mayer-will-talk-about-where-she-is-taking-yahoo-in-first-media-interview-since-becoming-ceo/ http://allthingsd.com/20121105/marissa-mayer-will-talk-about-where-she-is-taking-yahoo-in-first-media-interview-since-becoming-ceo/#comments Mon, 05 Nov 2012 22:59:21 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=266832

Marissa Mayer — the typically press-loving Silicon Valley exec who has avoided much media interaction since she took over as CEO of Yahoo — will be doing her first sit-down interview at the end of the month at a Fortune magazine event.

In the chat, according to an invite for a November 27 Silicon Valley dinner for its Most Powerful Women franchise, “she plans to talk about where she is taking Yahoo and what excites her about the future of technology.”

Pull up your chairs, people!

Actually, Mayer has recently spoken most specifically about her plans for the long-troubled company, but it was more formally during Yahoo’s third-quarter earnings call, in which she outlined a mobile-heavy strategy and also a plan to make smaller acquisitions.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said then to Wall Street analysts, soon after which she bought a tiny mobile start-up called Stamped.

But Mayer has yet to sit down live with a journalist — she had agreed to appear for a sit-down stage interview at a recent TechCrunch Disrupt event, but she opted instead to be a demo judge, where the former Google exec said nothing about her new job at Yahoo.

Mayer will presumably be doing just that with Fortune editor-at-large Pattie Sellers, who helms the high-profile annual Most Powerful Women conference and also the magazine’s list that featured Mayer on the cover this year (see above). Sellers has also just written a profile of Mayer titled “Ready to Rumble at Yahoo,” which did not include her participation but did have quotes from one of her recent hires — Patricia Moll Kriese — at Yahoo.

But Sellers appears to be the only reporter that Mayer has spoken to on the record since she got the job, although her comments in one piece just after she got the job were mostly limited to the topic to her pregnancy. Sellers also announced the name of Mayer’s baby — Macallister — in another recent post.

Presumably, Mayer will talk about her new son with Sellers, but it will be interesting to see what she says about Yahoo, as well as on the future of technology. At an annual Churchill Club gadget event the techie did with Walt Mossberg and me in 2007, Mayer showed off a keyboard whose keys had embedded LCD screens, a wireless rabbit, an alarm clock that can jump off your nightstand and a T-shirt with a wireless signal locator in it.

Here is a video of her in full geek mode talking about that way back when:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121105/marissa-mayer-will-talk-about-where-she-is-taking-yahoo-in-first-media-interview-since-becoming-ceo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121105/demand-media-beats-wall-street-expectations-in-q3-with-strong-revenue-increase/ http://allthingsd.com/20121105/demand-media-beats-wall-street-expectations-in-q3-with-strong-revenue-increase/#comments Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:22:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=266601

Demand Media, the social media and content company, strongly bested Wall Street expectations for the third quarter.

Revenue for the quarter was $98.1 million, up 20 percent from the same period a year ago, and well above the $91.4 million expected. Earnings per share were four cents, compared to a net loss of five cents last year.

This is the fifth straight revenue increase for the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand, which had struggled last year as Google changed its algorithms and impacted many publishers across the Web.

Shares of Demand, which rose just above six percent today, were up another 6.4 percent in after-hours trading to $9.30 on the news.

Still, here are some interesting stats to note:

Page views on its owned-and-operated sites, such as eHow, were up 33 percent, although revenue per thousand page views was down 11 percent. It’s due to lower revenue from mobile growth.

Demand’s domain registrar business was also up 11 percent, although revenue was down 2 percent.

Here’s the whole release to peruse before the company’s 2 pm PT call with analysts — I will add more if Demand execs say something juicy:

DMD 9 30 2012 EX 99 1 Earnings ReleaseFINALBUSINESSWIRE.pdf

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121105/demand-media-beats-wall-street-expectations-in-q3-with-strong-revenue-increase/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121102/after-declaring-it-the-future-of-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-appoints-intonows-adam-cahan-as-mobile-kingpin-internal-memo-natch/ http://allthingsd.com/20121102/after-declaring-it-the-future-of-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-appoints-intonows-adam-cahan-as-mobile-kingpin-internal-memo-natch/#comments Fri, 02 Nov 2012 14:03:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=266148

Adam Cahan

A very important management shift at Yahoo got a bit lost in last week’s news of CEO Marissa Mayer’s first acquisition, a small mobile start-up called Stamped.

That would be the appointment of former IntoNow founder and CEO Adam Cahan to oversee all of Yahoo’s mobile efforts, as well as its Flickr photo sharing service.

According to an internal memo that Mayer sent out last week to employees, Cahan has been given the title of SVP of Emerging Products and Technology, with a spot on the exec staff, reporting directly to her.

Said the memo (in its entirety below):

“[Cahan] will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.”

Mayer’s promotion of the slick exec, who has been described by almost everyone I spoke to at Yahoo as smoothly political, is an interesting internal choice by Mayer. He only got to Yahoo recently, after IntoNow was bought by Yahoo for more than $20 million in the spring of last year.

IntoNow was a spinoff from the video advertising company Auditude, which was sold to Adobe for a reported $100 million.

The television indexing start-up had launched in early 2011 as an Apple iPhone app that recognized what was playing on the screen by analyzing the audio from satellite feeds and matching it to listings. The start-up had hoped to eventually license its technology as offer-measurement services for TV advertising and viewership.

As Liz Gannes noted in a post on AllThingsD:

“It’s similar to the Shazam mobile app that many people know and love, which IDs an ambient song by recording it and quickly matching it to an archive. IntoNow users can “check in” to a particular episode once it’s been recognized, like one would check into a restaurant on Foursquare. The goal is to enable conversations around the watercooler and on social networks by helping users connect around what they’re watching and discover new things to watch.”

Cool, although IntoNow’s technology was far more compelling than its consumer promise.

Now, Cahan will be charged with doing both of Yahoo in mobile — which is most likely to be accomplished via a series of small mobile acquisitions, presumably to be stitched together into a cohesive and successful whole.

At least that’s the idea.

Cahan is an experienced exec, having worked at a number of places before founding IntoNow, including MTV Networks, NBC, McKinsey, National Geographic Television and — wait for it — Google, in business operations.

(Being an ex-Googler, which Mayer is, seems to have its advantages at Yahoo these days, with Cahan as the latest example.)

He is most definitely a key hire, because Mayer spent a lot of time stressing how mobile was Yahoo’s No. 1 priority on its recent earnings call with investors.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said, noting a “focused, coherent” mobile strategy was the top initiative.

Mayer had to say that, of course, even if being a mobile giant is now mostly just wishful thinking at Yahoo, since most of the many efforts the company has made in the arena have been duds. Yahoo has also lost a lot of mobile engineering talent over the years, remaining largely a desktop offering, even as the area has increasingly become where consumers are getting their information.

A blog post by Cahan at Yahoo was widely quoted when the tiny Stamped — which is an online recommendations app — was bought for under $10 million last week by Yahoo.

In it, he noted:

“Most people are always within arm’s reach of their mobile phones. For many of us, it’s the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing we check at night. Mobile is at the center of how we connect with people, consume information, and pass the time, and we’re focused on making Yahoo! the most inspiring and entertaining way to do just that.”

We’ll see if Yahoo can be a significant mobile player, as Mayer has promised Wall Street. But Cahan has certainly been busy since he got the job, sources said, beginning with the rejiggering of Yahoo’s mobile teams, as well as visiting the Flickr office this week.

Until it all sorts itself out, please enjoy this Oct. 25 internal memo on Cahan and the Stamped acquisition:

YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT FORWARD

Hi All –

As we discussed in our strategy all-hands earlier this month, innovation and talent are essential to delivering against our vision to inspire and delight our users as a part of their daily lives. Many of the areas that require special attention are emerging technologies and Yahoo! products where we’ve not yet reinvented, re-imagined and rebuilt in order to keep pace with changes in user behaviors and platform shifts.

To aid our efforts, I’m promoting Adam Cahan to lead this effort as Senior Vice President of Emerging Products and Technology. Adam will be a member of e-staff and report directly to me. He will oversee our mobile efforts, enabled screens (CTV+IntoNow), and Flickr. Adam will be responsible for building a world-class team focused on creating innovative products and experiences that inspire and delight our users worldwide.

And he’s already making great progress! Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired a very talented mobile team, based in New York City.

Robby, Kevin, Bart, Paul and the entire team at Stamped are a natural fit for Yahoo!. Their experience building fun, useful, personalized mobile products aligns well with our vision to create the best everyday mobile experience for our users. The team will be a great asset for us as we expand Yahoo!’s mobile efforts and create another key center for mobile innovation in New York.

I’m excited that we’ve been able to move quickly and execute well in order to bring on such a talented team. Please join me in congratulating Adam in his promotion and welcoming Anthony, Bart, Geoff, Kevin, Landon, Michael, Paul, Robby and Travis to Yahoo!

Thanks,

Marissa

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121102/after-declaring-it-the-future-of-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-appoints-intonows-adam-cahan-as-mobile-kingpin-internal-memo-natch/feed/ 0