Yahoo Picks Up 30% Stake In Local Info Company INMC

Yahoo has picked up appoximately 30% stake in Info Network Management Company, a Chennai headquartered phone directory search service. Yahoo will appoint one director to INMCs board. The amount invested has not been disclosed, nor has Yahoo mentioned whether it is a cash deal, or a stock deal. [Via release]

About 
According to their website, INMC was set up in 1998, and launched a portal Indiastudentinfo.com. The tele information business, Call Chennai, was established in 2005. The company is a part of the Unicard Group of Companies, which consists of Unicard Marketing, Unique Farms and Holidays, apart from INMC. 

Revenues and Targets
INMS claims to have generated revenues of Rs. 4 crores in 2007-08, and plans to achieve double that revenue by the end of the 2008-09 fiscal, and Rs. 24 crores by 2009-10. The company employs around 450-500 people, and plans to increase headcount to 2000 by the end of next year.

Operations
Call Ezee is present in 14 cities in India, and plans to expand its network to 26 cities by 2010. They claim to generate 10,000 calls per day, which appears to be very low - an average of 715 calls day per city, or just around 60 calls per hour per city if you assume a 12 hour call center.

More on synergy, business model and competition

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Yahoo Layoff Reports: 40-60 Jobs Cut In India; Finance, Toolbar, HotJobs

Official word in from Yahoo: ”We got the notification on the layoffs yesterday, and have completed the process.” Yahoo has declined to comment on specifics. 

Original Story: Wednesday was or is layoffs day at Yahoo, depending on where you are based. The company cut around 1500 jobs worldwide, and India appears to have been affected too. I haven’t yet heard from anyone who has been laid off, but there are updates on twitter from some who have retained their job. A roundup of the reports, some of which are unconfirmed (we’ve contacted Yahoo India for a confirmation). Here goes:

– Bangalore job cuts: 3% jobs cut in Bangalore with 4 months severnce according to an unconfirmed SAI report. Around 40 jobs according to the Indian Express, 50 jobs according to ToI, and 60 as per Manorama Online.

– A possibly unrelated move, but ToI reports that Yahoo India’s Chief Information Officer Vishwanathan Krishnamurthy has quit.

– Finance outsourced: “Entire Finance group will be outsourced to an Indian vendor. Some will stay an additional 6 months for transistion.” Via SAI

– Toolbar engineering moved to Bangalore: “Yahoo toolbar entire engineering and QA team in US are got, all moved to Bangalore. Via SAI

– HotJobs team has been wound up: some have been redeployed, and some have been asked to leave. Via ToI

You can follow the Yahoo layoff updates on Twitter here…many of them are from people who’re looking to hire, or offer best wishes and support.

Update: Read Jerry Yang’s letter to the yahoos.

Report: Arun Sarin For Yahoo Top Job; CEO For A Sale?

Update: have updated the SAI link below. 

Looks like it’s time for Arun Sarin to descend from the Himalayas…WSJ reports that Sarin, the former CEO of Vodafone, is being considered to take over from Jerry Yang as the CEO of Yahoo. FT adds that Sarin hasn’t yet agreed, but he is considering Yahoo, among other options. Sarin was at the helm of an Interent company - Infospace. More on Infospace here.

Sarin is an interesting option - at Vodafone, he spearheaded the companys entry into new markets and new products. I don’t think that’s the role he will play at Yahoo. Jerry Yang, who has had a tumultuous tenure at Yahoo, and has been criticised by shareholders for not accepting Microsofts offer of a buyout when he had the chance. It’s possible that Sarin will not be a CEO for a change, but rather, a CEO for a sale. 

Sarin had stepped down as the CEO of Vodafone five months ago, after spearheading its entry into emerging markets, including India. Vodafone acquired a controlling stake in Hutchison Essar, in an $11 Billion deal. 

Do read this interesting, albeit anonymous, mail on Sarin’s management style, published at SAI.

Yang Steps Down, As Yahoo Looks For A New CEO

An uneasy year so far for Yahoo has perhaps worsened with co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang stepping down, and the search for a new CEO…maybe even a CEO who will be able to negotiate a sale for the troubled company. Yang had replaced Terry Semel as CEO in June 2007.

The real trouble for Yahoo began when Microsoft made a public, and almost boisterous $44.6 Billion, $31 per share bid for Yahoo in February this year. At that time, Yahoo was trading at around $19 per share. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, blasted Yang for being hostile towards the Microsoft deal, as Yahoo declined the offer. After the deadline for negotiations to be concluded lapsed, Microsoft withdrew the offer in May. Icahn, who owned almost 5% of Yahoo, tried to garner support for renegotiations with Microsoft, despite the announcement of an advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo, around Yahoo Search.  Eventually, Icahn settled for three board seats at Yahoo - including one for himself. 

However, a recent threat of an anti-trust lawsuit against the Google-Yahoo deal made Google withdraw. Read their blog post on the same here. That’s when Yang again sent out feelers to Microsoft, saying Yahoo willing to re-negotiate the deal though this time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer declined.

BoomTown reported that Yang was stepping down - they published an internal mail sent out by Yang to Yahoo employees, here. Yang will return to his previous role as Chief Yahoo.

None of this is good for Yahoo - such an uncertain environment for a company impacts growth as potential partners may defer deals, and employees may look for more secure environs.

PatentWatch: Yahoo Files For Behavioral Targeting Patent In India

In May 2008, Yahoo filed for a behavioural targeting patent in India. According to the filing, the advertisements delivered to a particular user are selected based the users short-term and long-term behaviour, which is determined from information collected on the users online activities and linked to specific interest categories. “A first long-term score, models awareness with respect to a given category. A second long-term score and the short-term score are response-oriented scores that model the user’s interest in making a response with respect to a given category, such as by purchasing a product or service within the category.”

Technology aside, behavioural targeting is used to make advertisements to relevant to users, and this often has an impact on the click-throughs. Greater relevancy is what Google also pitches - both in terms of search results, as well as advertising.

View the patent filing here.

Yahoo India Launches Social Net SpotM In Closed Beta

Yahoo India has lauched SpotM, a social network targeting the Indian market. SpotM is currently in closed beta, and open only to invitees. Ashish Sinha, a Yahoo employee, had mentioned two features of the social networking site on his blog:

– The ability to keep some friends secret from others
– Also the ability to have anonymous conversations.

The mention of these features has since been deleted. We’ve emailed Yahoo India for more on SpotM. Not sure if this is going to help Yahoo acquire new users in India, since Orkut and Facebook are fairly popular, and there are a large number of other social networks vying for that network; Reliance Entertainment has pumped in BIG money into promoting their social networking property BIG Adda, while Indiatimes has launched but just sat on itimes.com . We’ve heard of a revamp of HT Media owned Desimartini.com as well, MySpace has an India site; Rediff perhaps has intentions of converting Sociali into a social network, while Network18 also has community features around its content aggregator in.com. So the social networking space in India, to put it mildly, is crowded.

That doesn’t mean that Yahoo doesn’t have an opportunity, though. Social networking users, historically, have been fickle. It doesn’t take time to switch from one to the other.

Update: A Yahoo India Spokesperson has declined comment, saying that:

“As a global company, Yahoo! encourages each market to innovate for their local audience based on local user needs. Yahoo! India is in the early stages of working on an invitation-only communications experiment for users in the Indian market. We will share additional details about this product if and when we launch it publicly.”

Update: We’re told the news first went live on Twitter and Facebook. Here’s the first tweet from last week.

Disclosure: I own an inconsequential number of shares of Network18