Sunday, 1 April 2018

Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo!
Yahoo! logo.svg

Type of businessSubsidiary
Type of site
Web portal
Traded asNASDAQYHOO (1996–2017) [1]
FoundedJanuary 1994; 24 years ago
HeadquartersSunnyvale, CaliforniaU.S.
Area servedWorldwide
OwnerVerizon
Founder(s)
Products
Revenue$1.31 billion 
Employees8,500 (2016)
ParentIndependent
(1994–2017)
Oath Inc.
(2017–present)




AdvertisingNative
RegistrationOptional
Current statusActive
Yahoo!  is a web services provider that is wholly owned by Verizon Communications through Oath Inc., and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The original Yahoo! company was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s.
It was globally known for its Web portalsearch engine Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! DirectoryYahoo! MailYahoo! NewsYahoo! FinanceYahoo! GroupsYahoo! Answersadvertisingonline mappingvideo sharing, fantasy sports, and its social media website. At its height it was one of the most popular sites in the United States. According to third-party web analytics providers, Alexa and SimilarWeb, Yahoo! was the highest-read news and media website, with over 7 billion views per month, being the sixth most visited website globally in 2016. According to news sources, roughly 700 million people visited Yahoo websites every month. Yahoo itself claimed it attracted "more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages".
Once the most popular website in the U.S., Yahoo slowly declined, starting in the late 2000s, and in 2017 Verizon Communicationsacquired most of Yahoo's Internet business for $4.48 billion, excluding its stakes in Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Japan, which were transferred to Yahoo's successor company Altaba.
International presence
Yahoo Search also provided their search interface in at least 38 international markets and a variety of available languages. Yahoo! has a presence in Europe, Asia and across the Emerging Markets.
Search technology acquisition
Seeking to provide its own search engine results, Yahoo! acquired their own search technology. In 2002, they bought Inktomi, a "behind the scenes" or OEM search engine provider, whose results are shown on other companies' websites and powered Yahoo! in its earlier days.
In 2003, they purchased Overture Services, Inc., which owned the AlltheWeb and AltaVista search engines. Initially, even though Yahoo! owned multiple search engines, they didn't use them on the main yahoo.com website, but kept using Google's search engine for its results.
Starting on April 7, 2003, Yahoo! Search became its own web crawler-based search engine, They combined the capabilities of search engine companies they had acquired and their prior research into a reinvented crawler called Yahoo Slurp. The new search engine results were included in all of Yahoo's websites that had a web search function. Yahoo! also started to sell the search engine results to other companies, to show on their own websites. Their relationship with Google was terminated at that time, with the former partners becoming each other's main competitors.
In October 2007, Yahoo! Search was updated with a more modern appearance in line with the redesigned Yahoo! home page. In addition, Search Assist was added; which provides real-time query suggestions and related concepts as they are typed.
In July 2008, Yahoo! Search announced the introduction of a new service called Yahoo! Search BOSS ("Build your Own Search Engine"). This service opens the doors for developers to use Yahoo!'s system for indexing information and images and create their own custom search engine.
In January 2010, Microsoft announced a deal in which it would take over the functional operation of Yahoo! Search, and set up a joint venture to sell advertising on both Yahoo! Search and Bing known as the Microsoft Search Alliance. A complete transition of all Yahoo! sponsored ad clients to Microsoft adCenter (now Bing Ads) occurred in October 2010.
On March 12, 2014, Yahoo announced a partnership with Yelp to integrate its reviews and user-contributed photos into Yahoo! Search (as Bing had previously done).
In November 2014, Mozilla signed a five-year partnership with Yahoo, making Yahoo Search the default search engine for Firefox browsers in the US.
In April 2015, the Microsoft partnership was modified, now only requiring Bing results on the "majority" of desktop traffic, opening the ability for Yahoo to enter into non-exclusive deals for search services on mobile platforms and the remainder of desktop traffic. The amendment also gives either company the ability to terminate the contract with four months' notice. In October 2015, Yahoo subsequently reached an agreement with Google to provide services to Yahoo Search through the end of 2018, including advertising, search, and image search services.

Languages

Tumblr

Tumblr

Tumblr
Tumblr Logo.svg

Type of businessSubsidiary
FoundedFebruary 19, 2007; 11 years ago[1]
HeadquartersNew York City
Founder(s)David Karp
IndustryMicrobloggingsocial networking service
Employees411 (as of June 2017)[2]
ParentYahoo! Inc. (2013–2017)
Oath Inc. (2017–present)


Alexa rankDecrease 54 (November 2017)[3]
Tumblr   is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007, and owned by Oath Inc. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs. Bloggers can also make their blogs private. For bloggers many of the website's features are accessed from a "dashboard" interface.
As of November 1, 2017, Tumblr hosts over 375.4 million blogs. As of January 2016, the website had 555 million monthly visitors.
History
Founder and former CEO David Karp
Former CTO Marco Arment
Development of Tumblr began in 2006 during a two-week gap between contracts at David Karp's software consulting company, Davidville (housed at Karp's former internship with producer-incubator Fred Seibert's Frederator Studios, which was located a block from Tumblr's current headquarters). Karp had been interested in tumblelogs (short-form blogs) for some time and was waiting for one of the established blogging platforms to introduce their own tumblelogging platform. As no one had done so after a year of waiting, Karp and developer Marco Arment began working on their own tumblelogging platform. Tumblr was launched in February 2007, and within two weeks the service had gained 75,000 users. Arment left the company in September 2010 to focus on Instapaper.
In early June 2012, Tumblr featured its first major brand advertising campaign in conjunction with Adidas, who launched an official soccer Tumblr blog and bought placements on the user dashboard. This launch came only two months after Tumblr announced it would be moving towards paid advertising on its site.[19]
On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo and Tumblr had reached an agreement for Yahoo! Inc. to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. Many of Tumblr's users were unhappy with the news, causing some to start a petition, achieving nearly 170,000 signatures. David Karp remained CEO and the deal was finalized on June 20, 2013. Advertising sales goals were not met and in 2016 Yahoo wrote down $712 million of Tumblr's value.
Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo in June 2017, and placed Yahoo and Tumblr under its Oath subsidiary.
Karp announced in November 2017 that he would be leaving Tumblr by the end of the year. Jeff D'Onofrio, Tumblr's President and COO, would take over leading the company.



Skype

Skype

Skype
Skype's logo, featuring the word 'skype' in blue and white
Screenshot of Skype
Screenshot of Skype 11 for Windows desktop on Windows 10 in light mode
Original author(s)Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn
Developer(s)Skype Technologies
Initial release29 August 2003; 14 years ago
Stable release(s) [±]
WindowsUWP12.1809.217.0 / 15 March 2018; 16 days ago[2]
Windows, desktop8.18.0.6 / 15 March 2018; 16 days ago[3]
macOS8.18.0.6 / 15 March 2018; 16 days ago[3]
Linux8.18.0.6 / 15 March 2018; 16 days ago[4]
Android 6 and later8.18.0.8 / 21 March 2018; 10 days ago[5]
iOS & watchOS8.18 / 22 March 2018; 9 days ago[6]
Development statusActive
Operating systemWindowsmacOSLinuxAndroidiOSWindows PhoneHoloLensXbox One
Available in108 languages
TypeVideoconferencingVoIP, and Instant messaging
LicenseFreemium




Skype   is a telecommunications application software product that specializes in providing video chat and voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, the Xbox One console, and smartwatches via the Internet and to regular telephones.[9] Skype additionally provides instant messaging services. Users may transmit both text and video messages, and may exchange digital documents such as images, text, and video. Skype allows video conference calls.
Skype implements a freemium business model. Much of the service is free, but Skype Credit or a subscription is required to call a landline or a mobile phone number. At the end of 2010, there were over 660 million worldwide users, with over 300 million estimated active each month as of August 2015. At one point in February 2012, there were 34 million users concurrently online on Skype.
First released in August 2003, Skype was created by the Swede Niklas Zennström and the Dane Janus Friis, in cooperation with Ahti HeinlaPriit Kasesalu, and Jaan TallinnEstonians who developed the backend that was also used in the music-sharing application Kazaa. In September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion.
In September 2009, Silver LakeAndreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, which attributed to the enterprise a market value of $2.92 billion. Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Skype division headquarters are in Luxembourg, but most of the development team and 44% of all the division's employees are still situated in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia.
Skype allows users to communicate over the Internet by voice using a microphone, by video using a webcam, and by instant messaging. Skype-to-Skype calls to other users are free of charge, while calls to landline telephones and mobile phones (over traditional telephone networks) are charged via a debit-based user account system called Skype Credit. Some network administrators have banned Skype on corporate, government, home, and education networks, citing such reasons as inappropriate usage of resources, excessive bandwidth usage and security concerns.
Skype originally featured a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. Skype has been powered entirely by Microsoft-operated supernodes since May 2012. The 2013 mass surveillance disclosures revealed that Microsoft had granted intelligence agencies unfettered access to supernodes and Skype communication content.
Throughout 2016 and 2017, Microsoft redesigned its Skype clients in a way that transitioned Skype from peer-to-peer service to a centralized Azure service and adjusted the user interfaces of apps to make text-based messaging more prominent than voice calling. Skype for Windows, iOS, Android, Mac and Linux received significant, visible overhauls.

History
Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark. The Skype software was created by Estonians Ahti HeinlaPriit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn. The first public beta version was released on 29 August 2003.
In June 2005, Skype entered into an agreement with the Polish web portal Onet.pl for an integrated offering on the Polish market. On 12 September 2005, eBay Inc. agreed to acquire Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA for approximately US$2.5 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration.
On 1 September 2009, eBay announced it was selling 65% of Skype to Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for US$1.9 billion, valuing Skype at US$2.75 billion.

Skype phones

On 29 October 2007, Skype launched its own mobile phone under the brand name 3 Skypephone, which runs a BREW OS.
Skype also offers a Skype Wi-Fi Phone, which is a wireless mobile phone that allows users to make Skype calls, using a wireless Internet connection. The Skype Wi-Fi Phone has an on-screen menu that lets Skype users see who is online and available to talk, similar to what is seen on a PC. It can also be used to talk with non-Skype users. SkypeOut minutes can be used to call any phone for a low price and no monthly fee. The Skype Wi-Fi phone does not contain a web browser and so can not access hotspots that require web-based login or authentication.






Yahoo!

Yahoo! Yahoo! Type of business Subsidiary Type of site Web portal Traded as NASDAQ :  YHOO  (1996–2017)  [1] Founded Janua...