Tag Archives: Yahoo

Yahoo Is Selling TechCrunch

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TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday, The Verge reported.

Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, MacWorld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday. Founded in 2005, TechCrunch has experienced many shakeups in ownership after AOL acquired the site in 2010.

When Verizon acquire AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017, the company folded TechCrunch, Engadget, Yahoo Sports, and other sites into a new devision called Oath, which later became Verizon Media. In 2021, Verizon sold its medallion division to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion, and it was renamed Yahoo!

“Yahoo decided to sell TechCrunch because, in the end, our DNA is simply different from the rest of its portfolio.” TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos writes in the announcement, noting that Yahoo will still have a “small interest” in TechCrunch.

TechCrunch reported: If you haven’t heard the news, TechCrunch has a shiny new home. After years under the ownership of Yahoo — which, in turn, is backed by Apollo Group — the brand is now in fresh hands.

It’s new parent company: Regent, a dynamic and private equity firm with a diverse portfolio spanning media, retail, and manufacturing. Regent was founded 12 years ago by Michael Reinstein, a personal one-time startup founder who quickly realized he might have a brighter future as a PE executive and who has an undeniable passion for TechCrunch.

While the financial terms remain undisclosed, one thing is clear: Regent is acquiring an iconic brand. TechCrunch isn’t just a tech news site; its the most influential voice chronicling innovation in Silicon Valley and beyond. Getting featured in TechCrunch has long been a right of passage for startups, but our mission extends far beyond the industry insiders who make up our core readership. 

We aim to give absolutely everyone a front-row seat to the future of technology. Whether your a founder, an investor, or someone who is curious about how tech is reshaping the world, we help you to see what’s next by reporting the news, then putting the pieces together to share the bigger picture.

Reuters reported: Yahoo has signed a deal to sell its 20-year-old news website, TechCrunch, to media investment firm Regent, the companies said on Friday.

TechCrunch, a popular online platform providing news and analysis on global tech companies, startups and entrepreneurs, was among the media assets of Verizon Communications, including Yahoo.

In 2021, private equity firm Apollo Global Management acquired media assets for $5 billion, subsequently rebranding the combined assets under the Yahoo name.

Regent has been actively expanding its tech news site portfolio, with recent acquisition of Foundry, the parent company of leading publications such as PCWorld, Macworld, InfoWorld, CIO, and TechAdviser.

Adieu Yahoo!

Security, Yahoo,

Dear Yahoo,

I’m sorry but I’m breaking up with you, and I’m afraid that it’s you, not me. We’ve been together for over ten years, from the early days of Flickr and Yahoo Groups, but you’ve hurt my feelings twice now and I think you’ve been cheating on me. It’s been fun but it’s not going to work out. There’s no longer any trust between us.

I’ll get my stuff out of your properties and return the keys as soon as I can. Goodbyee!

P.S. If anyone else wants to break up with Yahoo!, here’s the link https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user.

Yahoo Directory is Retiring

Yahoo,

Yahoo Directory logoIn a recent Progress Report, Yahoo announced that it will be retiring a few of their products. The one that is getting the most attention is the Yahoo Directory. Is it strange that I feel nostalgia for a piece of the internet that I haven’t actually used in years?

Yahoo Directory is something I remember from when I was in college. It was the resource that made finding information on the internet a whole lot easier. I remember being excited that there were actual categories in place. Yahoo Directory made writing a paper, that had the requirement of finding at least one or two sources from “the internet”, a lot less time consuming. This was back before Google’s search engine even existed.

The announcement about Yahoo Directory’s impending retirement says:

Yahoo was started nearly 20 years ago as a directory of websites that helped users explore the internet. While we are still committed to connecting users with the information they’re passionate about, our business has evolved and at the end of 2014 (December 31), we will retire the Yahoo Directory.

There are two other product changes to be aware of. Yahoo Education will close on September 30, 2014. Yahoo explains this decision by noting that the needs of the current users of Yahoo Education “are already well served by alternate online resources”.

The Qwiki app will shut down on November 1, 2014. Those of you who want to download the content you’ve created with Qwiki can start by clicking a link on Yahoo’s Progress Report and logging into your Qwiki account.

Two Million Passwords Stolen by Hackers

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Trustwave logoOn November 24, 2013, researchers at Trustwave discovered that hackers have obtained up to 2 million passwords for websites like Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter (and others). Researchers learned this after digging into source code from Pony bonnet. It appears that information about this has only been made public very recently.

Here’s some quick stats about some of the domains from which the passwords were stolen:

* Facebook – 318,121 (or 57%)
* Yahoo! – 60,000
* Google Accounts – 54,437
* Twitter – 21,708
* Google.com – 16,095
* LinkedIn – 8,490
* ADP (a payroll provider) – 7,978

In total, Pony botnet stole credentials for: 1.58 million websites, 320,000 email accounts, 41,000 FTB accounts, 3,000 remote desktops, and 3,000 secure shell accounts.

According to Trustwave, around 16,000 accounts used the password “123456”, 2,221 used “password” and 1,991 used “admin”. Now is a good time to go change your passwords into something strong and secure.

Doing so won’t make it entirely impossible for hackers to crack it, but it could make it more difficult. Trustwave noted that only 5% of the 2 million passwords that were stolen had excellent passwords (meaning the passwords had all four character types and were longer than 8 characters).

iGoogle Officially Shut Down… For Now

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iGoogle
iGoogle

They talked about it for over a year. People were confused why the personal homepage was shuttering. But is the page really gone, or just hiding?

iGoogle Shut Down

On November 1st, iGoogle – the webpage that allowed you to add RSS feeds, widgets and more – went offline. It was over a year in the making when Google announced they were shutter the service.

iGoogle launched in 2005 as an Ajax driven browser. You could create your own widgets using the Google Gadgets API. Of course, you could add RSS feeds for news from your favorite web sites.

Yahoo Capitalizes

Yahoo was one of the original creators of a customizable home page. If you were an IT administrator back in 2000, you saw the majority of employees that either wanted or had Yahoo as their homepage.

If you do a search for iGoogle, you will get www.yahoo.com/igoogle – pointing to the newest version of Yahoo’s customizable home page.

Is iGoogle Really Dead?

While Matt Eichner said it is no longer relevant 16 months ago, it might still be a part of future Google’s plans. Since Google is pushing more into their social network Google+, could iGoogle eventually reform into some type of page within Google+?

Chrome also has bounced back and forth on homepage ideas. It could easily add an iGoogle-esque option. all without having to type in iGoogle.

Of course, Google is moving to HTML5 and the Ajax driven iGoogle just wasn’t in the plans.

AltaVista is Shutting Down

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AltaVista logo Remember AltaVista? I was quite surprised to learn that it was still in existence. Many of us have moved on to other search engines since AltaVista was created. If you are feeling a sense of nostalgia about AltaVista, you should probably go use it soon. Its days are numbered.

Yahoo! acquired AltaVista in 2003. Yahoo! has announced several of the upcoming product closures. AltaVista will shut down on July 8, 2013.

The announcement suggests that people visit Yahoo! Search “for all your searching needs”. That’s one alternative to AltaVista. I suspect that most people are probably using Google for their “searching needs”. Bing is another option.

Typically, when a company shuts down something that had been offered for years, there is some public outcry from the people who are currently using it. Most of the news I’ve read about AltaVista expresses surprise that it has survived for this long.

Flickr Offers a Free Terabyte of Space

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Flickr LogoFlickr looks a lot different today than how it used to. Yahoo! (which owns Flickr) has given Flickr a makeover that includes a brand new design. What once showed you small thumbnails of photos, with a lot of white, empty, space surrounding them, now features the photos much more prominently.

To me, it seems like Flickr’s new look resembles that of Facebook, or perhaps Pinterest. The photos are bigger, filling up the screen. Users now have a homepage that includes an activity feed that combines your friends’ recent uploads with the activity on the photos that you have uploaded. I wasn’t thrilled with the new design at first, because it takes me a long time to “re-learn” how to use social media when it visually changes. Eventually, I figure the new design will grow on me.

In addition to the very obvious design change, Flickr also announced that users will get a free terabyte of space. Their blog says:

At Flickr, we believe you should share all your images in full resolution, so life’s moments can be relived in their original quality. No limited pixels, no cramped formats, no memories that fall flat. We’re giving your photos room to breathe, and you the space to upload a dizzying number of photos and videos, for free. Just how big is a terabyte? Well, you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.

In December of 2012, Flickr released a Flickr iPhone app. Today, it announces the release of the Flickr app for Android users, which can be found at the Google Play store.