marissa mayer

Yahoo considering purchase of news summarizing app Summly

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is looking at buying Summly, an app created by boy genius Nick D'Aloisio to summarize news articles, according to a report from All Things D.

Mayer met with the teenage D'Aloisio in recent weeks, unnamed sources told All Things D. The app uses an algorithm to pull out relevant information from news articles and turns them into neat paragraphs that fit on an iPhone screen, while also linking to the full article.

CNET has contacted both Yahoo and Summly for comment, and we'll update if we hear back.

Summly would be an attractive … Read more

Yahoo shakes up board, adds PayPal cofounder Max Levchin

Yahoo has just injected its board with a whole lot of Silicon Valley firepower by adding PayPal cofounder Max Levchin.

Also serving as the chairman of boards at Kaggle and Yelp and as a director at Evernote, Levchin is a Silicon Valley all-star. He was PayPal's CTO until eBay bought the payment services company, after which he started the social media company Slide. Levchin sold Slide to Google in 2010, and is now leading HVF, a company that focuses on big data.

His appointment was coupled with the departure of two board members, Weather Channel CEO David Kenny and … Read more

Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer's ascent to the top chair at Yahoo this summer made journalists everywhere giddy. The celeb CEO's many faces--geek, business shark, mother, savant, debutante--make her a fascinating subject for profiles and speculation.

After a seemingly endless parade of Yahoo CEOs proved unable to paste together the crumbling Web giant, the tech world responded to Mayer's appointment with largely pleasant surprise. The 20th engineer at Google and Stanford grad maintains a reputation for extreme intelligence blended with canny people skills, both welcome at the fading Yahoo, which has long struggled to decide whether it wants to be … Read more

Yahoo's Mayer keeps focus on 'huge opportunity' in mobile

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer last night spoke before an invite-only crowd at Fortune's Most Powerful Women event. And although she offered up some details during her interview, she sidestepped any opportunity to fully outline her company's plans.

Not surprisingly, Mayer focused much of her discussion on mobile. The mobile market is growing rapidly, and shareholders are responding favorably to Mayer's claims that the space is integral to Yahoo's future growth. At a recent earnings call, Mayer spent a generous amount of time discussing mobile and why she believes Yahoo is well-positioned to capitalize. She did it … Read more

Facebook denies report of search alliance with Yahoo

Facebook issued a statement Monday denying the report that its COO, Sheryl Sandberg, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer are in talks to partner on search solutions.

"People expect a better search experience on Facebook. We are working on improvements to better meet those expectations but are not in talks to enter into a new search partnership," a company spokesperson said.

This story came from The Sunday Telegraph, alleging that Mayer and Sandberg were plotting an alliance around search, citing unnamed sources at the board of directors level.

The statement didn't address whether the two former Google executives … Read more

Facebook and Yahoo reportedly seeking search partnership

Last updated: 10:30 a.m. PT, Nov. 19 with Facebook's statement.

Yahoo and Facebook in a grand search alliance? This news from unnamed sources came from The Sunday Telegraph, reporting that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg have been talking about the two companies working together on a search engine.

Some industry watchers are throwing cold water on the report. Kara Swisher of All Things D, who has a good track record covering Yahoo's ups and downs, said that her sources indicated that the two Silicon Valley companies are not currently in … Read more

Yahoo underperformers may see pay cuts, pink slips

Here's some holiday news sure to cheer up the folks at Yahoo: CEO Marissa Mayer is canceling the company's annual "rest week," when everything shuts down between Christmas and New Year's. Also, she is putting the final touches on a plan which basically grades employees on a curve. The bottom fifth will find their pay getting cut and some may wind up getting pink slips. The news, first reported by AllThingsD would be the follow-up to a September company meeting when Mayer said that employees would be judged on a new set of metrics.

'Age of Marissa' to kick in with Yahoo Mail overhaul?

After months waiting for Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer to put her stamp on the company, we may be getting close. A report out late today from All Things D suggests that Yahoo is readying "a major overhaul" of Yahoo Mail for December that will sport "a cleaner, 'more Gmail-like' design."

Not much more is known. Even the original rumor was unclear what this might translate into when it came to the look of the redesign. Given all the attention Mayer devoted to mobile during the course of the company's recent quarterly earnings call, that … Read more

Ross Levinsohn: Marissa Mayer needed 'clean slate' at Yahoo

Ross Levinsohn, in his first interview since departing Yahoo, told Bloomberg he left the company in part because CEO Marissa Mayer needed a "clean slate" and the ability to choose her own team:

In talking to Marissa I think we agreed that you need a clear path, and I think I was pretty well entrenched with the guard that was there. I felt like it was right for her to have a clean slate going forward and if I stayed it probably wasn't the right thing to do. I took a good run at trying to be … Read more