Where is Yahoo going? Does the company have a killer plan to hush its critics?
Those were the main questions I wanted CEO Marissa Mayer to answer in her first-ever keynote address at International CES.
She took the stage at this week’s big technology trade show in Las Vegas, giving a carefully planned talk on what’s next for Yahoo.
The short version: the company is starting to figure out what to do with some of the acquisitions made under Mayer’s stewardship—yet there are still miles to go before Yahoo sleeps.
Part of the spiel was just elaboration on stuff we already knew. Mobile is a major theme for Yahoo. Further, Mayer called it a massive platform shift for the company.
And some of Yahoo’s recent acquisitions have played heavily to the mobile scene. Since Mayer took over as CEO in 2012, the company has snapped up notable startups such as Stamped, Tumblr, and Summly.
Tumblr’s David Karp sprinted on stage Tuesday to talk about where his crew fits into the mix. Acquired last May, Mayer said New York-bred Tumblr is now also the publishing platform being used by new Yahoo digital magazines announced at CES.
Karp said that as mobile gadgets put creative power in people’s hands, more original content accumulates on Tumblr. He said postings in 2013 from Tumblr’s mobile app tripled. Brands are also using Tumblr more, he said, to create marketing content spread through the social network. “These ads can find a really big, big, big audience,” Karp said.
While on stage, he announced that sponsored posts on Tumblr will be powered by Yahoo advertising, adding technology such as gender and geographic targeting under the hood. “This means eliminating the guesswork for marketers seeking to match the right ad to the right user,” Karp said.
Other parts of Yahoo are turning mobile devices to their advantage as well. Mayer noted that Yahoo already has a big hand in many of the things people commonly do on their mobile devices, such as checking news, sending e-mail, and sharing images. As these devices assume a bigger role in our lives, they will learn more about their individual users. Yahoo plans to make such contextual knowledge part of info searches.
To that end, Mayer announced Tuesday that Yahoo acquired Aviate, a Palo Alto, CA-based developer of personalized homescreens for Android phones. “Imagine your phone could deliver the right experience at the right time instead of you having to search for it,” she said. With Aviate’s technology, that could include suggestions on music or map apps when users get their cars, or fitness apps when they arrive at the gym.
For all the bright optimistic talk of Yahoo’s plans, some matters were not addressed head-on. What Mayer did not discuss was the outbreak of malware, recently reported by CNET and others, spread via some Yahoo ads, or the prior Yahoo e-mail outages. Granted, the company previously released statements on such troubles, and every tech company runs into glitches at some point. But CES could have been a chance for Mayer to speak openly on the problems.
Last fall’s redesign of Yahoo Mail also raised a noted amount of confusion and outrage among users, as reported by ZDNet. The revamp stuck in spite of the outcry, though Yahoo did some damage control to clarify how some of the e-mail functions changed.
None of that made it into Mayer’s keynote. Instead, she talked up the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption activated last Friday for all Yahoo e-mail users. “The SSL protocol applies to ads as well,” she said, “effectively making us the largest secure publisher on the Web.” Mayer said it was
