Acquired and Shutdown By Yahoo

An Interactive Image Platform Luminate -  Acquired And Shut Down By Yahoo

Another acquisition today from Yahoo to beef up its advertising and media business. It is buying Luminate, a startup founded by LiveOps, Netscape and Yahoo alums that has created a platform for interactive, tagged images — or, as we have called it in the past, an AdSense for images.

Terms of the deal, which was announced on Luminate’s homepage, have not been disclosed.

Luminate, founded in 2008 as Pixazza, had raised just under $29 million in funding, from investors that included August Capital, Google Ventures, Nokia and Ron Conway among others. Founders who are no longer with the company include Lloyd Tabb, now leading Looker.

It’s not clear yet how Yahoo may use the tech it is acquiring — it included crowdsourcing and image-detection technology — but one thing is more clear: Luminate is no more.

James Everingham, the company’s CEO, writes that the service stopped working this week. If you are a Luminate publisher — there are 10,000 of them, he notes — the JavaScript snippet will no longer run anything on your site.

“If your site(s) have individually earned over $10, you will be receiving a final payment for each site by September 30, 2014. If you are a Luminate Direct advertiser, you will be refunded the remainder of your balance by September 30, 2014.”

All Luminate publishers, advertisers and experts will be able to login and access account information until October 1, 2014.

This is Yahoo’s 33rd acquisition, and one in a string focused on building out its media business. Other recent purchases in the same vein have included Flurry and RayV.

Yahoo Japan Launches Service to Manage Your Digital Presence After Death

Yahoo Japan launched a new service uniquely designed to serve the country's large population of elderly people, by tidying up their digital footprints after they die.

Called Yahoo Ending, the service enables users to close their Yahoo Japan account, and have a final message sent to up to 200 pre-registered email addresses of family and friends, once their death has been confirmed.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Will Make 'Look Back' Videos for Deceased Users

In addition to erasing any data in the account, Yahoo Ending — which costs 180 yen (about $1.77) per month — can stop automatic bill payments made through the Yahoo Japan wallet service.

Loved ones can also visit a special bulletin-board page for the deceased, and post memorial messages. Prior to death, the service even helps users search for a cemetery, and can estimate the cost of funeral arrangements.

There are multiple U.S. services that handle a person's digital footprint after death, but as third-party operations, a lack of trust could make some hesitant to adopt these services. With Yahoo Ending, however — which is operated by a company the user already trusts with his or her data — such concerns will likely be allayed.

For its part, Facebook has been monitoring the post-life digital-presence space, and even modified its policies in February to offer memorial videos of deceased members. Similarly, although not specifically targeted at the deceased, Google's Gmail service offers a tool called Inactive Account Manager, which lets users automatically delete their account after a set time-out period.

In an interview with The Japan Times, Yahoo Japan spokesperson Megumi Nakashima said future updates of the service may go even further, allowing the deceased to manage their post-life affairs on non-Yahoo Japan services.

"For example, we are thinking of partnering with credit-card companies," Nakashima said, "so that the user can configure Yahoo Ending to tell such companies to close out the user’s account."

Yahoo to Flurry

Yahoo to buy mobile analytics startup Flurry

Yahoo will buy mobile analytics startup Flurry to beef up a fast-growing mobile advertising business that still lags Google's and Facebook's in scale.

Six-year-old Flurry uses analytics to help target ads at consumers by monitoring activity on more than half a million apps on some 1.4 billion mobile devices around the world, Yahoo said in a statement on Monday.
The startup provides information to help marketers and brands more easily reach their desired audiences, Yahoo said.
Yahoo did not cite a price tag, but a source familiar with the matter said the internet company is paying several hundred million dollars. Tech blog Re/code earlier reported that rough amount.
Flurry will operate much as before after the acquisition closes, and its team will remain in their current locations, Yahoo added.


Yahoo is trying to revitalize a stagnant online advertising business as chief executive Marissa Mayer marks her second anniversary at the internet company.

The former Google executive has revamped many of Yahoo's web products but its ad sales are still weak while rivals such as Google and Facebook continue to post strong, double-digit revenue growth.

Like its rivals, it has been investing in its mobile advertising platform, as users increasingly access the internet from smartphones and tablets. Its mobile advertising revenue more than doubled in the second quarter.

But mobile advertising typically commands lower rates than online. Revenue in Yahoo's display advertising business decreased 8% to $436 million in the second quarter. The average price per ad decreased 24%, while the number of display ads sold increased 24%.

















Conclusion: Another acquisition by Yahooo this year.  A lot more to come

Yahoos Map App

Yahoo Is Building A Maps App:-

  

A Yahoo Lab is closing in on a maps app that would show you the most beautiful path from point A to point B, Wired reports. Two Yahoo researchers and one University of Torino researcher used crowdsourced data to determine which routes are the most "emotionally pleasant," they wrote in a paper published last week.

The project, based in Barcelona, began by showing pictures of streets in London to people, asking them to choose which ones seemed the "most beautiful, quiet, and happy." The researchers then compiled routes through the city only using the more highly rated sites. What they found were paths that users agreed were truly more enjoyable to traverse. Interestingly, adding a little beauty to a route usually only tacked on a few minutes of travel time.

Lets hope this plays on better......