Yahoo and Microsoft, which held a protracted series of fruitless merger and partnership negotiations last year, have restarted discussions, this time over a possible advertising agreement, a person briefed on those discussions said on Friday.
Conversations between the two sides have been scant since Carol Bartz was named Yahoo’s chief executive in January.
MEETINGS
But they have started anew recently, and Bartz met with Steven Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, last week, said the person briefed on the discussions, who only agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because the talks were confidential.
Yahoo and Microsoft declined to comment.
The discussions are in the early stages and may not lead to any agreement, the person said.
They have centered on ways for the companies to pool their advertising efforts, including a possible partnership under which Microsoft would sell search ads for Yahoo, and Yahoo, in turn, would sell display ads on Microsoft properties, this person said.
After merger and partnership talks collapsed last year, Microsoft continued to make sizable investments in its search business to compete better with Google.
Those investments included the hiring of a string of top search executives and engineers, some of whom had previously worked at Yahoo, including Qi Lu (陸奇), a well-regarded technologist who took charge of Microsoft’s overall online business, including search.
Microsoft is expected to release the results of its latest research and development efforts in search technology this summer when it plans to introduce a major overhaul of its search engine.
Microsoft executives are enthusiastic about the capabilities of the new service.
But they readily admit that it does not address one of the principal challenges the company faces in competing with Google: Microsoft’s audience and its base of advertisers are tiny compared with Google’s.
COMPETITOR
That makes Microsoft’s search business, in which advertisers bid against one another in an auction, less lucrative than Google’s.
A partnership that would pool Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s users or advertisers could go a long way toward addressing that problem, and could help create a more powerful No. 2 competitor to Google in search.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day