Marissa Mayer Is Revitalizing Yahoo

How is new CEO Marissa Mayer going to revitalize Yahoo? By making it more like Google, the company she just left.

According to AllThingsD‘s Kara Swisher, Mayer has instituted a few changes already at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, CA, headquarters. Among them: establishing a weekly all-hands meeting on Friday afternoons, and making all the food in its URLs Cafe, which previously priced egg white muffin sandwiches at $3.65 and teriyaki chicken paninis at $5.31, free.

Of course, it’s easy to say that all of this has been borrowed directly from Google, but these kinds of offerings have become standard at many Silicon Valley offices — the fact that Yahoo has, until now, lacked them has likely been a sore point for some of its engineers. Both Facebook and Twitter, for instance, serve up free snacks and daily catered meals to employees.

They’re small changes, yes, but they’re likely to improve the morale of a company whose public image and internal image has deteriorated over the last seven years.

In addition to the new meeting and food policy, Swisher reports that Mayer is also planning “major changes” to workspaces “to make [them] more collaborative and cool,” and improving the swag offered in its stores. She’s also pushing to improve Yahoo’s core products, including e-mail, Flickr and search.

Several of Swisher’s sources said that “big splash tech or product deals… perhaps via an acquisition” may be announced “in the days ahead.”

Yahoo could not be reached for comment.

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Google Fiber Is The Most Disruptive Thing The Company's Done Since Gmail

Remember how blown away people were when Gmail launched in 2004?

Google Fiber feels like the same leap of innovation. It's been a long time since we saw anything like this from the search and advertising giant.

Back when Gmail launched, the other free email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail were offering less than 5MB of storage -- that's five megabytes. Google trumped them all with 1GB of free storage. With so much storage, there was no need to trash anything. You could archive it and keep it forever.

Better yet, Gmail's search meant you could easily find any email you wanted, even from years ago. There was no reason to put things into different folders, use flags, or any of the other tricks we used to keep track of mail on other platforms. Threaded conversations, while hated by some, were nonetheless a new and innovative way of keeping track of email chains with multiple parties. 

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Gmail also paved the way for Google's gradual move into business apps -- most Google enterprise sales still lead with Gmail. Apps is more of a nice but not entirely necessary add-on.

Google Fiber is like Gmail on many levels:

• It exposes how slow the incumbents have been to innovate. Google Fiber makes the cable-based ISPs look pathetic. It promises to offer speeds up to 1,000Mbps downstream and upstream, for only $70 a month. That's theoretically fast enough to download a high-definition movie in under a minute, although speeds could still be constrained by bottlenecks on the distribution servers or elsewhere in the network. Comcast's best home package offers 50Mbps downstream and 10Mbps downstream. All Google Fiber customers also get 1TB of free storage. If they buy TV service for an extra $50 a month, Google will throw in a $200 Nexus 7 tablet to be used as a remote control. Google is also giving away -- for free -- a package that offers 5Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. Google even thumbed its nose at the incumbents with a slide showing how slowly Internet access speed has been growing compared with compute power and storage (see above) -- which is exactly what one would expect to happen given the lack of competition most broadband ISPs face in most parts of the country. 

• Google used its hardware expertise. Google was able to get prices so low, in part, because it designed and built all the hardware for the system itself. This is a good reminder that although Google wasn't a consumer electronics company until recently, Google has actually been designing hardware for its data centers for more than a decade. It was this data center efficiency that allowed Gmail to offer way more free storage than competitors back in 2004.

• It paves the way for new business areas. For Google, the main business purpose of Fiber is to give people faster Internet access, so they'll spend more time online -- where they're more likely to use a Google product and click a Google-sold ad. But just like Gmail unlocked an enterprise business, Fiber could unlock a whole new business as an ISP and TV provider. This isn't a loss leader -- Google CFO Patrick Pichette said yesterday that Google intends to make money on it. 

This is what Google products used to be like before they started chasing Facebook with one social experiment after another.

It had been a long time since Google blew me away with any of their new. Yesterday, they did.

Now, we just need Google to roll out Fiber to the rest of the country.

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Apple Buys Samsung’s Android Security Partner

Amid fierce smartphone competition between Samsung and Apple that has spilled into a multinational patent battle, it looks like Apple may have opened yet another front on the M&A side: it is buying mobile security company AuthenTec — which had only just signed a deal with Samsung for Android devices — for $356 million.

AuthenTec, among other things, makes fingerprint sensor chips that are used for security and identification purposes; these are embedded in computing devices. The news was first reported by Reuters; the full announcement was filed with the SEC.

Just earlier this month AuthenTec had inked a deal with Samsung to cover security and device management services to cater to the “BYOD” trend — that is, workers taking their own handsets into their enterprise environment. The AuthenTec service would let IT managers quickly secure and authenticate those devices.

Reuters reported the deal as $356 million — $8 per share of the company. But that’s actually a pretty cheap price, considering that before the company went public it had raised some $600 million (yes, million) in funding.

If we had been listening between the lines (so to speak), we may have even heard a clue to this deal earlier this week, when Apple reported its Q2 results.

In those results, CEO Tim Cook made several references to how well Apple was doing in the enterprise segment, citing “rapid adoption” of the iPad in particular, with the number of iPad tablets more than tripling among Fortune 500 companies. “The iPad has become an indispensable tool worldwide to help employees across the industries do their jobs more effectively.”

Cook also said that the iPhone was becoming “the standard device for the employees,” with the number of iPhones sold into Fortune 500 companies more than doubling in the past year.

We have heard some of that anecdotally ourselves. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, told me this week that among the enterprise customers of Box’s 6-7 out of every 10 work in primarily iOS environments.

It’s not clear whether this deal will mean a continuation of existing deals, such as the agreement with Samsung (others include HBO for the HBO GO app, and HP), or whether Apple will use this as a way of cutting off the use of the technology by its competitors.

The 8-K has some details on Apple and AuthenTec’s intellectual property, and well as future R&D. It says that Apple is paying $20 million in an IP and tech agreement to “acquire non-exclusive licenses and certain other rights with respect to hardware technology, software technology and patents of the Company.” But there is also a clause for licensing IP on a “non-exclusive basis” for $115 million.

As for development, the 8-K notes that Apple will pay an additional $7.5 million for product development work. Any new IP that comes out of that becomes the property of Apple.

We will have to wait and see exactly what Apple intends to do with this purchase, but it’s likely to mean a stronger set of enterprise-friendly features, and possibly some security and authentication services that can be used for the whole of the iPhone user base.

Security has become a very strong focus with smartphones: the more wireless we become the more of our lives we put into the cloud, with those devices becoming a key way of accessing it. With the introduction of mobile wallet services — something likely to be on Apple’s radar — the importance of securing our devices will become even greater.

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