An Elephant Leaves the Room at Yahoo - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Doug Cutting, one of Yahoo’s top search and infrastructure software experts, will leave the company later this month and join the Silicon Valley start-up Cloudera.

Posted: August 12th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
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Microsoft Unloads Razorfish To The French For $530 Million

More than two years after buying advertising network aQuantive for $6 billion, Microsoft finally unloaded the digital advertising agency that came with that deal. It sold Razorfish to French advertising conglomerate Publicis Groupe for $530 million in a combination stock-and-cash transaction. The price was 1.4 times Razorfish’s 2008 sales of $380 million.

Microsoft has been shopping Razorfish around all summer. It was reportedly hoping to get $600 to $700 million, but the advertising recession didn’t help. Microsoft settled for a slight discount to that.

Posted: August 10th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
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Slide And RockYou Reboot: They’re “Distributed Media Companies” Now

Slide has fired its ad-sales team and is now selling “immersion” experiences and virtual goods. RockYou, meanwhile, is no longer a “widget company.” It’s a “distributed media company.”

Go ahead and snicker. Last we checked, both companies had huge reach and millions of users, as well as tens of millions of dollars in the bank. The cash gives them time to tinker. And with that many users, if/when they get it right, revenue will soar.

Posted: August 5th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
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