Buying Yahoo Is A No-Brainer For Alibaba. Today at the China 2.0 conference at Stanford, Alibaba Groups’s Jack Ma replied to a pointed question about buying Yahoo with, “We are very interested in Yahoo.
Our Alibaba group is important to Yahoo and Yahoo is important to us … All the serious buyers interested in Yahoo have talked to us.” Those “serious buyers” most likely include Alibaba Group investor Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft, Hellman & Friedman and Andreesen Horowitz, who have all reportedly reached out to Yahoo’s board. Is Ma’s interest enough to spark consumer and shareholder interest in Yahoo? “Any and all interest [is] welcome,” one shareholder told me, “but Ma has real smarts.” On the surface Ma is certainly the type of CEO that Yahoo needs post-Bartz, diplomatic, cunning, and a man of (relatively) few words.
Alibaba Group’s recent funding from Silver Lake valued it at $32 billion, while Yahoo is at a 16 billion market cap. Is the rest of Yahoo worth $3 billion? Would the Yahoo board take an offer from Ma? Intel acquires mapping company Telmap. Chip maker dropping support for MeeGo Intel has announced that it has moved to acquire Telmap, an Israeli company that specializes in location-based products and services for mobile devices. The buyout is aimed at bolstering Intel's consumer services division, providing an additional incentive for developers to create content for the chip maker's AppUp application portal. AppUp general manager Peter Biddle suggests the Telmap acquisition will enable Intel to provide developers with an alternative to Bing and Google for location-based search, mapping and navigation content within apps.
Services based on Telmap technology will be offered without the licensing agreements required by Google and Microsoft. "Developers can provide an in-app experience without someone getting in between them and their users," Biddle told AllThingsD. The Telmap acquisition was announced at Intel's AppUp Elements developer conference, where the company also admitted it will be dropping support for the MeeGo OS. Why CNN Acquired Zite [INTERVIEW] In tablets generally and the iPad particularly, consumers have found a device conducive to reading news.
![Why CNN Acquired Zite [INTERVIEW]](http://cdn.pearltrees.com/s/pic/th/why-acquired-zite-interview-15205966)
It's no surprise then that a growing number of newsreading apps have appeared, from individual, branded apps such as The Wall Street Journal for iPad to independent apps such as Flipboard, Editions and Zite, which are designed for consuming content from a variety of sources. Zite was acquired by CNN Tuesday. In an emailed statement, CNN's general manager of digital, KC Estenson, suggested that Zite will continue to work with a wide array of media partners and that its technology will also be leveraged "to help CNN's websites and apps serve more personalized content, making our current digital services even better.”
Zite would continue to operate as an independent company on a day-to-day basis under existing CEO Mark Johnson, the statement said. Still, we were left with many questions. Why Zite? Estenson: We saw in Zite a best-in-class product. Johnson: Absolutely not. Estenson: Yes.