Can Yahoo get its “cool back”? As that is what it is trying to do according to CFO Ken Goldman and one of the ways it might try and achieve that is to buy Tumblr.

Tumblr would give it much better and badly needed access to the key 18-24 year old demographic.

It desperately needs to create or buy something to make itself relevant again and while deals like adding Twitter to its service will help it on along this path it will not solve its problems. Read More »

Yahoo! will integrate Twitter into its news frontpage, continuing its battle to be relevant in the social age. Certain tweets will now be included amongst the aggregated news headlines, although it’s not yet clear how they will be selected.

It is somewhat ironic that Yahoo! chief exec Marissa Mayer is bringing Twitter into the fold, as her previous employer, Google, had a major fall out with it.

Read More »

As its legacy continues to grow, last year will forever be the year of London 2012, one of the greatest events ever to grace the sporting world. It also happened to fall within what the industry is calling ‘The Social Era’ of sponsorship.

So what have brands learnt from it? And what does that mean for sponsorship and the rest of 2013 – already dubbed ‘The Empty Year’?  Read More »

Yahoo has finally woken up and done something about mobile as it buys news app Summly, which was created by London teenager Nick D’Aloisio, for a reported $30m (£20m), as it struggles to turn itself and its lacklustre business around.

Summly, which neatly summaries news stories for quick reading on mobile devices, was created two years ago by 17-year-old D’Aloisio.

It delivers snapshots of stories, giving users a simple, elegant and fast way to find the news they want. For publishers, Summly technology offers a new approach to drive interest in stories and reach a generation of mobile users that want information on the go. Read More »

Facebook COO and board member Sheryl Sandberg has long been an advocate of a very modern form of feminism. It’s the type of feminism that demands a lot of women, or as Sandberg put its in her new book, encourages them to ‘lean in’ to their careers.

Sandberg feels that while women are ambitious, they are often too happy to put things off in their careers, and thus end up not becoming leaders. She believes that too often women defer career progression, and hold themselves back, because they may want a family, and do not own success when it does come their way. Read More »

In services like Pinterest, Flickr, and Instagram (not to mention Facebook and Twitter,) photos have become a critical frontier in the battle for web dominance, particularly in the social  space.

While Instagram is dominating in mobile, an  interesting war is raging between Yahoo’s Flickr, and  online pinboard Pinterest. They may different style services, but fundamental comparisons can be made, and are very revealing about the directions the web is going in.
Read More »

Yahoo caused a bit of a stir this week with the news that head of HR Jackie Reses had sent an internal memo announcing that, as of June, flexible working arrangements would be banned completely.

The move is all part of the efforts by Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer to reshape the one time web leader anew and that means getting staff back into the office. Read More »

Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer has a problem on her hands. Two out of three of Yahoo’s biggest sources of traffic, namely email and search, are declining rapidly, according to new private ComScore numbers reported by AllThingsD. That only leaves its prime location homepage as one major area that is growing. Considering Mayer’s goal is to take Yahoo back to its roots “as a consumer internet company” that could prove to be a huge problem. Read More »

After a tough introduction to life as a public company, Facebook is determinedly looking at ways to boost revenue, particularly in the critical mobile space. Having turned on carrier billing in the UK, US and Germany, they have today put the service live in France.

This means that users can now purchase items within the HTML5 environment such as virtual gifts and game credits, and have the cost added directly to their mobile phone bill. Instead, of having to go through premium rate SMS or credit cards services, purchases can be made in just two clicks.

Read More »

There are only 41 shopping days left until Christmas. Yes, really. This also means it’s about that time of year that industry movers and shakers get together over a crystal ball. Always keen to get in early, here are my top social media predictions for 2013. I know we’ve said this before, but next year social media will move beyond ‘engagement’. It has to. What else? Well we saw something start to change at Yahoo, under Marissa Mayer, but will that result in a renaissance?

Yahoo’s fortunes as a whole mirror those of Google’s social platform Google+ and next year will really have to be do or die as far as it is concerned.

We’ve said it many times, but it did happen this year. 2012 was the year of mobile, we saw that clearly illustrated in the US election, and 2013 will be the year of even more mobile thanks to 4G.  Read More »