Marissa Mayer steering Yahoo down mobile path
24 Feb 2015
Marissa Mayer's two-year tenure as Yahoo chief executive officer has seen numerous acquisitions, including a $1.1-billion Tumblr buyout, the $300 million Flurry acquisition and over 40 more in under two years.
Mayer had also given the company a goal, which it did not have before she joined. The company was now focused on mobile and social media, removing other parts of the business that did not align with the new goal.
Yahoo Weather, Sports, Games and other mobile apps had all been updated to top review scores, which showed the new investment in mobile. The mobile team had grown from 50 to 500 employees, mostly due to the acquisitions of talent.
Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, hosted its first developer conference with a large focus on a mobile developer suite that offered various analytical tools from its acquisition of Flurry, alongside integration of Yahoo ads.
"If we think we can help developers make apps better, everyone wins," Mayer said at the conference.
Considering that is was possible with Flurry to view 1.6 billion smartphones and offer information on user movement inside an application, it beat Google and Facebook's own analytics services.
Over the past two years, Mayer had also ensured mobile advertising and search worked.
Meanwhile, insidetrade.co reported that Yahoo took a step closer toward repositioning itself into a 'Mobile First Company' after announcing a New Mobile-Application Development Suite at its first ever Mobile Developer Conference in San Francisco. Shares of Yahoo! were up 1.7 per cent rising to $44.42, before closing a notch lower at $44.37.
In this suite, Yahoo! had incorporated its own advertising services complete with features it obtained with the acquisition of mobile app-analytics and advertising startup Flurry Inc. The suite comprised Flurry Analytics with Explorer, Yahoo App Publishing, Yahoo App Marketing, Yahoo Search in Apps and Flurry Pulse.
With the new tools mobile app developers can add marketing spots, including search and video, along with native ads, and help them generate higher revenue from their offerings.
The suite also allowed improved tracking and understanding of mobile app users, and provided new ways of sharing data with other software developers.
The suite comprised software programs, which included a new analytics dashboard as also a service for searching within apps, which was now available for free.
