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BoomTown

Monday, June 30, 2008

Yahoo Board and Investors Burn, While Everyone Else Fiddles

Could Ross Levinsohn and Jon Miller reinvent Yahoo? What about OpenTable’s Jeff Jordan? Or various and sundry Google or Microsoft execs?

It could happen.

That specific scenario of putting someone like the two former Internet execs in charge of the troubled Web giant is one of the many being bandied about, as Yahoo shares tumble and the company heads toward a potentially ugly annual meeting everyone involved desperately wants to avoid.

In fact, Yahoo’s board and major investors are talking today about various options for the company, including Yahoo’s receptivity to a sweetened deal with Microsoft and also other ways to pull the asset-rich company out of its stock doldrums.

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Saturday, May 3, 2008

MicroHoo: BoomTown’s Favorite Email Haiku Analysis

BoomTown gets a lot of emails from Web players, big and small, commenting or, more typically, griping on whatever tech topic is hot that day.
And yesterday, after Microsoft (MSFT) abandoned its takeover bid for Yahoo (YHOO), it was like Christmas in July–our mailbox was packed.
But one stood out above all, from a person who shall [...]

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Ross’s Revenge!

Who in the Internet sector hasn’t enjoyed the always amusing stylings of Mr. Ross Levinsohn, the high-profile former head of Fox Interactive Media a.k.a. “The Guy Who Bought MySpace for News Corp.”?
Today, he added another song to his silky smooth repertoire as the “Internet guy who dissed Yahoo.”
In a nice scoop, TechCrunch reported that Levinsohn [...]

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Thursday, February 14, 2008

Rupe-a-Dope

BoomTown is suffering from Rupert Murdoch déjà vu.

Back in July, I actually wrote a post about the head of News Corp. (owner of Dow Jones and this site) in which the first sentence was: “MySpace and Yahoo should merge.”

I was referencing a very interesting comment that Murdoch made in an interview in June of 2007 with Time’s Eric Pooley.

In it, he floated the idea of trading a 25 percent stake of Yahoo for MySpace.

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Thursday, December 27, 2007

Ross Levinsohn Speaks!

On our recent trip to sunny Southern California, we had a lively lunch in Brentwood with the ever-sassy Ross Levinsohn.
In the dullish panoply of Internet moguls, Levinsohn stands out as one of the more colorful characters, no small thing since he comes from a big company, News Corp. (owner of this site), where he played [...]

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Friday, December 21, 2007

I Love L.A., Part 2

So, I am back in Los Angeles today, part of my ongoing quest to make sense of the wrenching changes facing the entertainment industry in the face of the continuing pummeling by the digital tidal wave.
I just had a bracing lunch with Ross Levinsohn, former Fox Interactive Media head and newly minted investor, where we [...]

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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Another Day, Another Ad Network!

Exactly how many online advertising networks can dance on the head of a pin?

One more, I guess!
At the Reuters Media Summit in New York yesterday, Fox Interactive Media President Peter Levinsohn revealed plans to take its MySpace online ad network out for a walk across the whole of its own group of sites and also [...]

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Friday, August 10, 2007

Yahoo Rumor Patrol: MySpace, Nope! Google? Maybe So.

Things have quieted down at Yahoo of late–thankfully for new CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang, who seems to be doing a good job at calming the waters at the company that has been in turmoil over the last year, due to management upheaval and lackluster financial results.

In mid-July, Yang said he would be busy making a long-term strategic plan, which would include major changes if need be. “There will be no sacred cows and we need to move quickly,” he said.

No sacred cows, indeed. According to rumors circulating around the company, Yang and other executives at Yahoo are even considering something as massive as offloading some of its search monetization business to rival Google.

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About Kara

Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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