Inside Yahoo

An intriguing look at an Internet pioneer and global powerhouse Reaching sixty percent of all Net users, Yahoo! is one of the most popular Internet portals and one of the most successful companies in the world today. Inside Yahoo! takes readers on a fascinating journey through the thoughts and motivations behind the company. Revealing stories of on-again, off-again management, the race for innovation, and the constant focus on survival, this book will engage readers on many different levels. With access to Yahoo's top executives, author Karen Angel describes the complementary, but different styles that have made Yahoo! one of the few surviving business models in the struggling Internet sector. An informed and astute narrative traces the company's transformation from a twenty-something brainstorm to a sophisticated community to a onetime Wall Street darling that managed to ride-out the recent market shakeout. Along the way, readers will follow in the steps and missteps of this unique company and see how it keeps reinventing itself to keep ahead of a changing marketplace.

A page-turning narrative about Marissa Mayer's efforts to remake Yahoo as well as her own rise from Stanford University undergrad to CEO of a $30 billion corporation by the age of 38. When Yahoo hired star Google executive Mayer to be its CEO in 2012 employees rejoiced. They put posters on the walls throughout Yahoo's California headquarters. On them there was Mayer's face and one word: HOPE. But one year later, Mayer sat in front of those same employees in a huge cafeteria on Yahoo's campus and took the beating of her life. Her hair wet and her tone defensive, Mayer read and answered a series of employee-posed questions challenging the basic elements of her plan. There was anger in the room and, behind it, a question: Was Mayer actually going to be able to do this thing? MARISSA MAYER AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE YAHOO! is the inside story of how Yahoo got into such awful shape in the first place, Marissa Mayer's controversial rise at Google, and her desperate fight to save an Internet icon. In August 2011 hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb took a long look at Yahoo and decided to go to war with its management and board of directors. Loeb then bought a 5% stake and began a shareholder activist campaign that would cost the jobs of three CEOs before he finally settled on Google's golden girl Mayer to unlock the value lurking in the company. As Mayer began to remake Yahoo from a content company to a tech company, an internal civil war erupted. In author Nicholas Carlson's capable hands, this riveting book captures Mayer's rise and Yahoo's missteps as a dramatic illustration of what it takes to grab the brass ring in Silicon Valley. And it reveals whether it is possible for a big lumbering tech company to stay relevant in today's rapidly changing business landscape.

For anyone paying attention, the beginning of the end for Yahoo! began with decisions made by the first team of executives while the company was on its way up, which set the stage for horrific decisions made by subsequent generations of Yahoo! leadership. Most decisions were either pure incompetence or just lack of vision by CEOs from 2001 to the present. Twenty-one years after its incorporation and sixteen years after its stock peak, Yahoo sold for 96% less than its value on January 3, 2000, when it had closed at an all-time high of $118.75 per share, resulting in a market capitalization of $120 billion. Wall Street valued Yahoo!, at that time in business less than six years, higher than it did Disney, News Corporation, and Comcast combined. Also on that day, the iPhone was more than seven years away from launch, Google was four years from its IPO, Amazon was hemorrhaging money, and Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school! At the end of 2016, the top seven businesses on the list of the highest-valued companies in the world by market capitalization include Apple at #1, Alphabet (Google’s Parent Company) at #2, Amazon.com at #5, and Facebook at #7. Those companies combined are valued in excess of $2 trillion more than the price Verizon paid to acquire Yahoo! Yahoo!’s story is one of missed strategies, failed opportunities, and poor execution. Early decisions to de-emphasize search features, undervalue Google, and overplay Yahoo’s hand in the Facebook negotiations haunted the rest of the company’s existence. In addition, factors outside of Yahoo’s control—most notably how irrational expectations of Wall Street created an environment where short-term decisions were made at the expense of the long-term good. The story of Yahoo! is a cautionary tale not intended for the faint of heart.

Written by Charles Freedman, a senior Flash developer at Yahoo!, this book provides you with all the information you’ll need to know about APIs in order to build amazing map mashups. You’ll find in-depth coverage of Yahoo! mapping tools and technologies and a variety of techniques for working with the APIs. Yahoo! Maps Mashups explores each API flavor, guiding you through the simple yet comprehensive sets of API calls so that you will gain a strong understanding of the capabilities of each map technology through its respective API.

Yahoo! took the world by storm in the 1990s as a one-of-a-kind, searchable list of interesting web sites. But ten years later, it has expanded into a department store overflowing with useful and innovative tools and services-from email, blogging, social networking, and instant messaging, to news, financial markets, shopping, movie and TV listings, and much more. Today's Yahoo! keeps you connected with every aspect of your life and every corner of the Web. Yahoo! Hacks shows you how to use, expand, personalize, and tweak Yahoo! in ways you never dreamed possible. You'll learn how to: Fine-tune search queries with keyword shortcuts and advanced syntax Manage and customize Yahoo! Mail, using it as your universal email client to access all your other accounts Explore your social networks with Yahoo! 360, blogging your life, keeping up with friends, and making new contacts Store, sort, blog, feed, track, and otherwise share photos with Flickr and RSS Make My Yahoo! your Yahoo!, and personalize Yahoo!'s many properties Roll your own Yahoo! applications with Yahoo! new Web Services API and Perl, PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, or the programming language of your choice Visualize search results and topics, mash up images from around the Web, and remix other web content List (or hide) your site with Yahoo!, and integrate Yahoo! Groups, Messenger, contextual search (Y!Q), or other Yahoo! features Whether you want to become a power searcher, news monger, super shopper, or innovative web developer, Yahoo! Hacks provides the tools to take you further than you ever thought possible.

In Citizenship and the Diaspora in the Digital Age: Farooq Kperogi and the Virtual Community, Toyin Falola examines how the members of the Nigerian diaspora create a virtual community and instrumentalize the digital age to speak about the nation and its failures, possibilities, and promises. This book depicts individuals' relationships with society and how the world's progressive shift toward technology and globalization does not disregard the concept of society and its members. As a result of this shift, people have been migrating to new places without giving up their citizenship in their home countries. This book explores how migrants are focused on the idea of a virtual community, examines how citizens' roles have evolved through time, and displays society's essential principles in this light. Furthermore, it evaluates social commentaries enhanced by the dynamics of the digital age, such as societal issues like education in Nigeria, the question of democracy, challenges facing the country, and the development of a national language. Many of these societal challenges are examined in this book from the perspective of Farooq Kperogi, who has conducted extensive studies and published on the above themes. This is balanced against emerging facts, Nigerians' positions, and disregarded realities. Kperogi's relentless writings on Nigeria make him a preeminent figure whose positions are valuable to the understanding of modern Nigeria.