Yahoo's Mayer shines spotlight on video

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - As Marissa Mayer approaches her one-year anniversary as chief executive of Yahoo, she's hewing closely to the struggling Web portal's traditional advertising model--and eyeing more video programming of every stripe as central to the strategy.

"We're working on various methods in terms of how we can increase our video views, and watching," Mayer said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Thursday. "It's clear to me that our video business is something that's growing a lot. It's something that we'd like to accelerate."

Yahoo is currently bidding to acquire Hulu, the online hub for TV programming owned by Walt Disney Co and News Corp, sources with knowledge of the situation have told Reuters.

Mayer would not comment on the bid for Hulu.

The Web pioneer was looking at buying French video site DailyMotion but had to abandon the effort after objections from the French government.

Yahoo also has a growing menu of original video programming, such as the critically-acclaimed Burning Love TV reality show spoof, and it recently acquired the rights to the archive of Saturday Night Live television programs.

Online video commands higher ad rates than other types of Web content and has become a fiercely competitive arena as it is increasingly viewed as a bulwark against the steady decline in prices for online display ads.

On Thursday, Instagram, the mobile photo-sharing app owned by Facebook Inc, introduced a new feature that allows users to create 15-second videos. Facebook itself is reported to be readying an online video ad format. Google Inc's YouTube, the world's No.1 online video destination, is expected to generate $5 billion in revenue this year, according to RBC Capital Markets.

Mayer took the top job at Yahoo after a tumultuous period in which the company had churned through several CEOs and many of its top executives and engineers jumped ship.

She has revamped key products such as mail and the Yahoo home page, implemented morale-boosting measures like free food, and jumpstarted acquisitions. On Thursday, Yahoo closed its $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, a blogging service that is one of the Web's most popular hubs of user-generated content.

Yahoo's stock has surged roughly 70 percent since Mayer became CEO. But Wall Street analysts say much of the gain has come from stock buybacks and from Yahoo's Asian assets, including a 24 percent stake in Chinese e-commerce giant and potential IPO debutante Alibaba Group.

PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY

Yahoo's biggest near-term goal and most important yardstick by which to measure its progress will be the rate of increase in the amount of time users spend on its websites, Mayer said.

"Yahoo's ability to generate revenue for a thousand pages is reasonably good," Mayer said. "The challenge for Yahoo at the moment is traffic. How do we grow traffic? How do we gain usage? Because that ultimately will drive up revenue."

While rivals such as Google have experimented with new revenue streams, including subscription music services and online retailing, Mayer said Yahoo remains squarely focused on advertising.

"I believe in ads, I like ads. We may try some other things but Yahoo is an ad company," Mayer said, but added that it does not mean Yahoo will cut on its own original programming.

The company's headcount has decreased by about 1,000 employees during her first year, through a combination of attrition and ramped-up performance management, with staffers now getting reviewed on a quarterly basis instead of every year, she said.

But Mayer said the company was aggressively pursuing new talent: job applications recently peaked at 10,000 a week, more than twice the level of a year ago.

At the same time, Mayer has moved to cut back the thickets of bureaucracy that she said had sprouted across the company over its 18-year history.

Mayer installed a system called PB&J, short for Process, Bureaucracy and Jams. That has eliminated roughly 700 irksome or unnecessary procedures within the company, such as forcing employees to undergo a special orientation for the company gym.

"I understand that we are geeks and we may not be that coordinated but I think we can all figure out how to use a treadmill without an orientation," Mayer said.

Some industry-watchers assumed the PB&J moniker was an homage to the so-called "peanut butter manifesto," in which former Yahoo executives warned of problems plaguing the company.

Mayer said the real story was much simpler.

"Most days for lunch I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich," she explained. "So sitting there I was like 'Can we call it something simple and fun like PB&J?' And we kind of backed into process, bureaucracy and jams. But it works."

Follow Reuters Summits on Twitter @Reuters_Summits

(Additional reporting by Poornima Gupta and Edwin Chan. Editing by Jonathan Weber and Edwina Gibbs)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/yahoos-mayer-shines-spotlight-video-150750346.html

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It's one delicious drone -- the Burrito Bomber

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What to consider when assessing alternative investments | Investing ...

The financial crisis of 2008 was the impetus many investors required to look beyond the traditional asset classes of publicly-traded equities and bonds and into the world of alternative investments. Others, battered by the volatility in the stock market, chose to liquidate their equities in favour of significantly adding to their bond holdings.

After all, bonds are generally considered to be the conservative part of a portfolio, providing dependable income while preserving capital along the way. And, for the past four years, those bonds holdings have provided excellent total returns, appreciating considerably as interest rates made their historic decline towards zero.

But bonds in the past six weeks have been subjected to enormous volatility. As a result, many pundits are declaring that the 30-year secular bull market in bonds is over, and predicting a bond bear market (i.e., steadily rising rates) that will last into the foreseeable future.

With the writing so clearly on the wall, investors once again have a choice to make: Do they stick with their bonds and simply wait for increasing rates to impair their portfolio, like death by a thousand cuts? Do they reallocate to equities at a time when many observers see storm clouds on the horizon? Or do they revisit the universe of alternative investments, whether real estate, private equity, managed futures, hedge funds or structured products?

While alternative asset classes and investment strategies dramatically vary in their attributes during different economic scenarios, the elements that must be assessed when considering adding these investments to a portfolio are quite portable.

Some are quantitative, while others are more qualitative in nature. Here are those that seem to come up more than others during this process.

Liquidity

With a few exceptions, most alternative investments require investors to shoulder at least some degree of illiquidity, whether monthly, quarterly or even over many years.

If there is a portion of your portfolio that you have no plans to access for many years (or even during your lifetime), giving up some liquidity in exchange for lower volatility and more predictable returns may well be worthwhile.

This is not to say that large percentages of your assets should be invested in funds that tie up your money for years at a time, but rather that than a ?liquidity at any cost? approach will work against you in these uncertain times.

Recognizability

If you?ve ever owned a rental property or run your own business, you are already an alternative investor. Real estate and private equity are two of the most recognizable alternatives, and are often the perfect way to ease your way into this space.

If you recognize your investments as something understandable, you will be more comfortable with them as you move away from stocks and bonds.

Complexity

There is a world of difference between the words ?simple? and ?easy? when it comes to investments, because many of the simplest models are the most difficult to execute.

For example, an alternative private debt investment fund is very simple: lend money to borrowers, take a management fee and pay the difference to investors. To run such a fund profitably, however, is very difficult and requires significant experience and expertise.

Even though you must always satisfy yourself that investment managers have the necessary skills, it is often a good start to find strategies that are not overly complex. Complex strategies (such as those that use structured products, which are designed to provide attractive tax-efficient and predictable returns) may be suitable for you, but your comfort level might be higher with models that are more easily defined.

Transparency

Many institutional investors following the financial crisis mandated rules requiring they be advised in real time of their specific holdings in alternative investment vehicles. This allows them to judge what risks they are taking across their entire portfolio and ensure they are not offside on any aspect of their investment policies.

While individual investors would generally not be able to benefit from this sort of disclosure, they can benefit from the spirit of this approach by avoiding opaque investment strategies that provide investors little information about what they actually own.

There will be times that investment managers require a degree of secrecy in order to capitalize on opportunities. With this important caveat, investing in ?trust me? strategies is not for first-time alternative investors.

It is not without a degree of trepidation that most investors approach alternative investments for the first time. But because these individuals are running out of suitable options in their traditional investments, they must find a way to overcome these reservations in order to benefit from the many positive characteristics that alternatives provide.

David Kaufman is president of Westcourt Capital Corp., a portfolio manager specializing in traditional and alternative asset classes and investment strategies. He can be contacted at?drk@westcourtcapital.com.

Source: http://business.financialpost.com/2013/06/21/what-to-consider-when-assessing-alternative-investments/

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RIP Snapjoy: The Dropbox-Acquired Photo Service Is Shutting Down

Snapjoy, the online photo storage service that Dropbox acquired in December, has some bad news today for its users: it is shutting down. The company noted the information in a blog post, as well as in an email it's currently sending out to users (I am among them: I'm copying the text below).

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/wY5pjh4GI-Q/

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Building the Animatronic Terror That Trounced a T-Rex

Jurassic Park III may not be your favorite movie in the series. But that doesn't mean its effects weren't fantastic. In fact, the somewhat random third entry in the series boasted the biggest animatronic 'saur yet: the Spinosaur. Stan Winston Studios recalls the details of that behemoth's construction, and it's wild to watch.

Jurassic Park III's Spinosaur wasn't only more formidable than the T-Rex that had come before it; it was the biggest, heaviest animatronic dinosaur Stan Winston Studios ever managed to build, and though it might not have the same pop culture clout as it's predecessor, it's still an incredible accomplishment. Who needs CG, right?

Source: http://gizmodo.com/building-the-animatronic-terror-that-trounced-a-t-rex-542507847

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Paula Deen Defended Southern Attitude Towards Race In Fall 2012 (VIDEO)

On Friday afternoon, the Food Network announced that it was dropping Paula Deen from its network after 14 years on air, after the National Enquirer reported (and The Huffington Post confirmed) that the chef had aired a series of arguably racist comments while being deposed for a lawsuit. But the deposition wasn't the first time that Paula Deen has voiced questionable views on race.

Last fall, I visited the New York Times headquarters to see Paula Deen talk with Times reporter Kim Severson on a variety of topics. When I wrote it up, I focused mostly on her comments about her diabetes, because Deen's endorsement of the diabetes drug Victoza was still hot news. But I also briefly mentioned a strange segment of the talk in which she talked about Southern attitudes toward race. Today, all this talk of her recent racist comments spurred me to revisit the video of the TimesTalk. It's really shocking stuff. Watch the video at the top of this entry for our race-related highlights.

Severson first broaches the topic of race relations after showing a clip from Deen's appearance on "Who Do You Think You Are," in which she visits a large plantation a distant ancestor of hers named Billy had owned. (Along with 30 slaves.) That prompts Deen to talk about the Civil War and the Antebellum South.

Though she ultimately says that the abolition of slavery was a "terrific change," she also takes some time to defend the practice. She says, back then, "black folk were such integral part of our lives, they were like our family," and, for that reason, "we didn't see ourselves as being prejudiced." (The first person plural here raises the question: did Paula Deen herself live in the Antebellum South? Is she a vampire?) It's also worth noting that she takes care not to refer to slaves as "slaves." She generally calls them "these people" or "workers."

And her defense of contemporary race relations is just as bizarre. She thinks the race relations in the South are "good... pretty good." OK. "It will take a long time for it to completely be gone. If it'll ever be gone." Fine. But here's where it starts to get weird. "We're all prejudiced against one thing or another," she continues. "I think black people feel the same prejudice that white people feel." Hmm...

By far the strangest, most awkward moment of the whole talk, however, is when she talks about a black employee of hers named Hollis Johnson. She says that he's become very dear to her in the 18 years she's known him, which is plenty sweet. But then she says points to the jet-colored backdrop behind her and says he's "black as this board." She proceeds to call out to him in the audience and ask him to come on stage, telling him, "We can't see you in front of that dark board!" The audience roars with laughter. Severson, shocked, says, "Welcome to New York." And Paula, characteristically, responds, "Welcome to the South."

Or the South as Paula Deen sees it, at least. Which, from now on, will be on view in her cookbooks and the soon-to-open Paula Deen Museum, but not on the Food Network.

You can watch the whole TimesTalk here, or listen to a podcast of it here, if our clips whetted your appetite. Most of the discussion of race is between 44:00 and 50:00.

Also on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/21/paula-deen-racism_n_3480720.html

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Would this have been legal? | Kiwiblog

June 13th, 2013 at 11:00 am by David Farrar

Tom Pullar-Strecker at Stuff reports:

Chorus made an expensive gamble in rejecting a deal that would have seen it paid just under $14 a month for wholesale copper broadband connections, according to sources close to the failed negotiations.

Chorus? share price has been on the slide since the Commerce Commission proposed slashing the regulated price of wholesale copper broadband connections by about $12 a month to $8.93 in a draft decision in December.

But the company is understood to have chosen to take its chances persuading the commission to set a higher price or on government intervention.

It is understood all major telecommunications retailers agreed on the compromise price and Communications Minister Amy Adams, who would have had to regulate it over the head of the Commerce Commission, was informed.

The compromise was brokered by the Telecommunications Forum, whose chief executive, David Stone, declined to comment.

I?m not ?lawyer, and welcome comment from lawyers who work with competition law. But I thought competitors couldn?t all sit down together and try to negotiate an agreed price level.

It didn?t eventuate in this case, but I think the possible precedent is somewhat alarming. The Commerce Commission is the appropriate body for pricing of monopoly utility services, not a private gathering of retailers with no input from consumers.

Tags: broadband, Commerce Commission, TCF

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 13th, 2013 at 11:00 am and is filed under Internet, NZ Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Source: http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2013/06/would_this_have_been_legal.html

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