Buying Yahoo
Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm points out five groups OF potential suitors for purchasing Yahoo, and handicaps each of them. Not too surprisingly, Microsoft has the best odds at 4-1, but with a “strategic sense” rating of only B-. Maybe more surprising is that he set 5-1 odds for Comcast or AT&T with a rating of B. A private equity firm (unnamed) is given 7-1 odds but a strategic sense rating of A-.
Other potential suitors named are News Corp/ Myspace, or one of GE, Disney, or CBS – all with longshot odds and low strategic sense ratings.
Yahoo Buys Rivals.com
Yahoo may or may not be up on the block, as indicated above, but they have their own acquisition trail. Most recently, that included picking up Rivals.com, a college sports site. The official press release states
Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rivals.com, the leading online destination for college and high school sports and recruiting information. The acquisition will significantly expand the community offerings and open publishing capabilities of Yahoo! Sports, which has the most engaged sports audience on Internet. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The Senior VP/head of News & Information said that this “exemplifies Yahoo!’s mission to connect people with their passions, communities and the world’s knowledge.”
It seems to me a rather niche purchase for Yahoo, but they do have Yahoo! Sports. Though Deep Jive Interests and CNBC (linked above) are wondering whether it’s worth it.
Google Loses More Engineers
Employee flux is typical, especially in large companies. But Google just lost two top engineers to Benchmark Capital. The engineers, Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, were part of the popular Google Maps application, amongst others. They each received a Google Founders’ Award in 2006. Now, they’ll be EIRs, or Entrepreneurs in Residence at Benchmark, being paid to think up ideas. Nice. Benchmark appears to be beefing up the number of EIRs lately.
Embed Yahoo Pipes-Powered Maps
If you’ve been playing around with Yahoo Pipes at all, you may know that they recently added automatic Yahoo! Maps output tied to certain Pipes modules. Any time there’s some sort of geocoded data created by your Pipe, a map will be displayed.
Now, you can take the map output of your Pipes and embed it on your website using Javascript. There’s also a post on the official Pipes blog about how you can badge a Pipe’s results using Javascript.
Inspecting Your Del.icio.us Innards
While looking up some APIs and mashups at Programmable Web, I came across extisp.icio.us. Enter a del.icio.us username and it returns a large tag cloud based on your bookmark tags. I was surprised to see what topics were of more “importance” to me. (No, it’s not pr0n.) It’s just a bit of fun, and you may be surprised by your del.icio.us bookmarks as well.
