For those that have been on the internet since the early 90’s, it is safe to assume that you amassed several email addresses from the service providers that sprung to life during the internet’s infancy.
AOL. Hotmail. Live.com are just a few.
If you continue to use these older email services, will it reflect poorly on you? Does it say something about your ability to change and adapt or embrace newer technologies?
This video ponders this idea and provides some suggestions to move ahead and was inspired by a Lifehacker.com article by Jeff Somers that can be read here.
Verizon already bought a company that your grandparents probably use for email… AOL. So what is appealing about Yahoo at this point for Verizon?
Reportedly, the offers that have come in have been between $3 billion and $5 billion for a range of assets that include not only the search and media businesses, but real estate and IP. Yahoo’s “Excalibur” patent portfolio contains 2,600 technical patents and Yahoo optimistically values it at upwards of $1 billion.
But after months of small movements in this saga, and years of steady decline at Yahoo, in a way, it’s not at all a surprise to hear that Verizon may end up getting Yahoo at the end of it.
If Verizon intends to keep expanding, new growth won’t come from adding more customers each quarter or through acquiring a competitor. The company will have to make more money off its existing customers through alternative means, because its traditional avenues for increasing revenue—voice, messaging and data—won’t cut it. Verizon already offers unlimited voice and text plans to most of its customers, and while data usage is increasing, competition is gradually driving down the per-gigabyte prices.
Why is owning AOL and Yahoo a viable direction for Verizon? Verizon can’t buy another telecom company and fighting the other wireless providers down to the lowest prices isn’t appealing (and they aren’t winning that game anyway). And how does their cash flow look?
The company made almost $18B last year and they have enough cash to swing a $3-5B purchase. But is it really a wise investment? Is there anything in those Yahoo patents that is such a game changer from what they already own thanks to AOL?
Verizon is following Comcast’s lead with NBC and buying companies that creates content, so they can make money off of ads however:
Of course, even with AOL and Yahoo assets, Verizon has a long way to go (paywall) to catch up with the online advertising leaders. Verizon with AOL currently holds a mere 1.8% of the $69 billion digital ad market in the US. Yahoo has about 3.4%. Google and Facebook together claim about half of it. Looked at another way, though, there’s plenty of market share to steal, which can’t be said of its traditional business.
What becomes of the rest of Yahoo? The Yahoo we know would be over and there will be a chunk left over that manages the valuable Alibaba asset moving forward. Update on what assets are not being sold:
Yahoo’s stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan aren’t part of the acquisition. These stakes are worth tens of billions of dollars alone. As of Friday July 22nd, Yahoo’s 15 percent stake of Alibaba represented $31.2 billion, and its 34 percent of Yahoo Japan was worth $8.3 billion. Yahoo’s patent portfolio, which is worth around $1 billion, isn’t part of the sale either. Yahoo’s Sunnyvale headquarters are part of the acquisition, a source told TechCrunch.
IBM news continues to be dominated by Watson Health. Nothing new was announced this week, but analysts are catching up with the news and highlighting the trends.
Oracle and EMC continue their less-than-graceful transition to the cloud. Oracle is looking at lower cost (from their own hardware) Open Stack framework, while EMC also focuses on bringing a more flexible cloud solution to market.
And just because… Verizon buys AOL (for their content like Huffington Post and TechCrunch…probably).
IBM
6 tends to watch with IBM Watson Health:
The text message-based therapy startup Talkspace will use IBM’s Watson to analyze customers’ text messages and attempt to draw insights about their personality that will help match them to the best possible therapist on the platform.
Does the IBM Emptoris and Coupa Announcement Raise More Partnership Questions Than Answers?
“…Together with IBM, we’re announcing a new joint solution that seamlessly combines IBM Strategic Supply Management with our Coupa Procure-to-Pay (P2P) and Coupa Open Business Network solutions. IBM and Coupa have partnered previously on joint ventures, and this new solution deepens our partnership.”
Ariba is able to price its modules so aggressively because of supplier fees. Ariba mandates its hosted P2P tool users also use the Ariba network for all connectivity with suppliers, even in cases where suppliers are connected to other networks that then connect to Ariba’s in the same transaction stream (e.g., sending a PO via Ariba but invoicing via OB10).
This isn’t new news, but this is the first time I have seen Fitbit directly mentioned with Watson Health. It is a good article and it says what you probably think it should, but this is an interesting quote:
Secondly, healthcare data security has to be significantly enhanced, given the rampant incidents of data breaches that we have witnessed recently at large enterprises such as Anthem and Premera. Criminal attacks now target healthcare as one of the most lucrative sectors in the black market for personal data.
IBM introduces new BlueMix Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings:
IBM (IBM) announced the introduction of new services on Bluemix. Bluemix is a Cloud Foundry-based platform that enables developers to build, deploy, and manage apps across the cloud space. The new services will complement 100 services already available in the Bluemix portfolio. They’re expected to facilitate the development of cloud offerings for mobile, supply chain analytics, Internet of Things—or IoT, and intelligent infrastructure solutions.
IBM responds to letter from U.S. Senator questioning use of H1-B visas
Jillian Fertig reported Monday that IBM was not meeting state requirements as far as employment numbers and that employees claim the company is laying off American workers and replacing them with foreign workers. Because those concerns have been raised in both Columbia and at the Dubuque, Iowa location, Fertig has been in regular contact with Senator Grassley’s office.
IBM rainbow chip breakthrough uses pulses of light to transfer data at 100Gbps
Being able to send 100Gbps of data is equivalent to sending half of a HD movie from a Blu-ray disc per second, and IBM’s new chip would in theory make it possible for data to be transferred much faster and used for many commercial purposes, including making services like Google, Facebook, Spotify and Microsoft Office Online work much faster.
Still, even if Oracle can define $7 billion of its revenue as “cloud” this year, it would still represent less than 20% of last year’s $38.3 billion in revenue. Having its own true cloud, built on an open source infrastructure like OpenStack, would accelerate the move to true cloud economics. So might buying a profitable, growing OpenStack cloud provider like Rackspace(NYSE:RAX), but that’s purely speculation
The incredible rags-to-riches story of Oracle founder Larry Ellison
“The very first version was Oracle Version 2,” he admitted at a customer conference last year. Their ploy worked. Oracle’s first customer was a big one: the CIA. It later became the most popular database ever sold. That success paid off for Ellison — according to the Wall Street Journal, he was the highest paid executive in the US before he stepped down as CEO in 2014.
In Google Versus Oracle, Obama’s Administration is Torn
It’s a complicated and very technical issue, something that is not necessarily the forte of the Supreme Court. The fight over what is defensible as copyrighted work or not is far from resolved at any level, this is just the most high-profile manifestation of it. If the Supreme Court does take the case and rule on it one way or another, it could have a lot of long-term implications for how patents and trademarks on API code are treated. If Oracle wins, expect plenty more claims of ownership and a lot of litigation to come, at least in the short term. If Google wins, there will be less of that. That’s why Google’s argument includes the idea that without that code, the company wouldn’t have succeeded, meaning that innovation would be slowed if Oracle were to win.
Why ‘Project Horizon’ spells long-term gains for EMC
According to Clarke, Project Horizon is a “big departure” for EMC from the extensive ECM platform it has become associated with over the past few years. “With one of the largest portfolios of ECM capabilities, its platform has often been criticized as being too complex and expensive to implement,” Clarke claims. “By contrast, Project Horizon is built on Pivotal Cloud Foundry and will offer a choice of cloud deployments.
Above all, Furrier suggested, “They need to take care of their current situation — they need to get out of the box business.” In the current competitive market, Furrier advocated that EMC “build an OS for the data center and enterprise,” despite the disruption this might cause. Furthermore, Furrier put forward the notion that “EMC has to become a utility platform with a business model that can compete in the current era.” The “game-changing moves” that EMC needs to make, said Furrier, should be “real-time, API-based” and include “unlimited compute.”
EMC: Rise of third platform could spell end for businesses unwilling to adapt
As alluded to by Goulden, the rise of the Information Generation and their preference for third-platform apps and services poses a major challenge for enterprises, which will need to adapt the way they work to the way this group of users likes to consume services.
By buying AOL, Verizon is getting much more than the 1990s dial-up Internet company that first introduced many Americans to the Web. Today AOL provides online video services, content and ads to 40,000 other publishers. It brings in $600 million in advertising. It has news sites such as The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget.
Teradata Investor Issues Fourth Letter Urging Board to Sell
The memo, published on Wednesday, reiterated that the software and services company should be part of a bigger enterprise. Matrix cited Teradata’s May 7 earnings report, which showed that first-quarter sales of $582 million missed analysts’ average projection and gave a full-year adjusted profit forecast at the low end of estimates.
