Yahoo despite much improvement in its performance is seen in limelight for more than few reasons. This time it is in news to acquire Maktoob, Online behemoth in Arab world. The acquisition price was said to be in the range of $ 75-80 million but what surprises the most is the sudden acquisition interest of Yahoo in emerging countries.
Yahoo in past had done many acquisition including some very successful ones like Flickr and Delicious. Its recent search deal with Microsoft leaves it without any search business thus it can leverage its whole strength for other online services.
The company at the same time has conveyed that its main focus area is still Web in addition with mobiles. These words were told by Matthias Kunze, Managing Director of Yahoo! Mobile for Asia-Pacific to BusinessWorld – “From an audience perspective, I would assume that five years from now, more and more people will access the Internet on the mobile [phone] than the PC.”
Yahoo currently has 28 telecom operators as partners in the Asia-Pacific region with many big telcos under its fold. The company earns its revenues in two ways – advertisement revenue as well as revenue-sharing schemes with partner mobile operators that offer Yahoo mobile products to their subscribers. Yahoo is certainly going after mobile business in a big way as it is currently sitting on a better position in that space and thus could at least challenge Google.
Its tie-up with many hardware vendors like Nokia is also a big positive as hardware companies provides it a leeway to capture majority share in mobile market. The mobile Ad spend is also on rise and mobile marketing would alone be worth $ 1.3 billion in US.
Yahoo launches new features:
Yahoo seems to be rolling up its sleeves in gaining greater foothold in Online arena. It has added new features to its mail,messenger and search services.
Yahoo Mail & Messenger:
Yahoo would be increasing attachment size in yahoo mail to 25 MB from present 10MB. Yahoo mail would now have various additional social feature like getting status updates of contacts from different social networks and chatting with varied contacts in mail page itself. It has also included multi-select and drag-and-drop functionality for mail. Yahoo Users will also be able get status updates from their contacts on social media sites like Twitter, Flickr and many more.
Mobile:
It has also redesigned its Mail’s mobile version. Yahoo has also allowed attachment downloads in mobile version apart from accessing content from the phone’s folders.
Search:
Yahoo users can now organize, save and share their search results with Search Pad.
These varying service additions along with revamped homepage signifies big revamping for some of its other products too.
