Posts Tagged ‘carl icahn’

2008 – After battle upon battle between Microsoft, Google and shareholders (including Carl Icahn), Jerry Yang finally announced to all he was stepping down. The previous days, Yahoo had hit it’s lowest share price, $8. With that, the failed Google affiliation (due to antitrust issues), and a very despondent group of investors, Jerry felt it best to step back in his roll.

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Other Historical Events in Technology

• USB 3.0 Specification is released
• Apple vs. Carl Sagan
• Veronica is released

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It was the system that would rival the Wiki world. Google launched a Beta of their online knowledge system called “Knol”. It was a lot like Wikipedia, except this system would have online advertising. The advantage (at least that some would call): contributors had an opportunity to actually make money off their knowlegde.

Knol stands for “A unit of Knowledge”. It was in Beta until January 2009

Other items in Tech History this week:

• IBM Goes Open Source – Sort of.
• Google and Digg were rumored to be in talks
• Carl Icahn joins Yahoo’s Board of Directors
• Trans Atlantic TV Broadcast with host Walter Cronkite.

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This was a pivitol week on the Yahoo Proxy battle as everything was approved to go. Carl Icahn was given the green light to lobby shareholders and possibly win control to ready for a new Yahoo. The previous week, we saw all the reports of Carl Icahn making the statement: Jerry Yang must go. This week was no different.

In the meantime, Microsoft made one more offer. This time it wasn’t for the whole company – it was only for the search engine. $35 a share for Yahoo Search. This was significant because this was the same bid Microsoft did back in February for the whole company.

Other great items in the Week in Tech History Quickcast – TI/99 restructures, Jacques Cousteau was born. We also saw Commodore, new Intel and AMD processors and the Ruputer was introduced. All this on the Geekazine Quickcast.

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It was an interesting week of poising as Yahoo and Carl Icahn butted heads over the impending proxy battle for sale of Yahoo to Microsoft. Yahoo was doing everything in it’s power while Icahn made some general statements about CEO Jerry Yang. As the week went on, the mud started to fly.

Yahoo started the volley – but not by Yahoo’s choice. A court document was unsealed in where it outlined the plans for Yahoo to create a plan to pay workers if a takeover happens. Yahoo was going to provide “100 percent equity acceleration for everyone.” A claim that Yahoo might not be able to cover, depending on how the proceedings went.

In the meantime, Carl Icahn stepped up his campaign by making public his plans for Yahoo. It included a reorganization of the Board of Directors, but up until then, it was just a general statement. This week he basically said that CEO Jerry Yang needed to step down.

Yahoo made a statement later in the day and set their Shareholders’ meeting for August 1st, 2008. This would give both parties to wheel and deal for a happy medium.

This was one of many events in the Week in Tech history. Check out all the events in the podcast.

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May 24, 2008: they claim it was meant as a joke, but people didn’t take it with a grain of salt. The couple put their baby up for auction. 1 euro was the price, which at the time was about $1.57 US.

eBay – who already had a policy of no sale of human beings – took down the listing and suspended the account. What was worse was the child was taken and the parents were investigated for child cruelty. Eventually the charges were dropped and the parents got their little bundle of “Buy it now” back on July 4th.

Other events of WITH: T. Boone Pickens puts in a ton of money into Yahoo after Carl Icahn issues a proxy battle. We also found out about the first idea of a moving sidewalk. Abbyword was released. Apple and CBS were sued over “Mighty Mouse”, AOL buys Bebe and the infamous 5 cent email tax.

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On May 15th, 2008 – Carl Icahn stepped up to the plate and officially announced his bid to proxy Yahoo so he could work with Microsoft on getting a deal out.  A couple days prior, Eric Jackson decided to pull his bid for proxy and the rumor started to fly that Carl Icahn was going to take over the fight.

Of course we saw how that went – Icahn got a seat on the Yahoo board, and Yahoo stayed with Yahoo.

Other items of note – ZDTV starts, HP and EDS acquisition and the Ethernet Standard is formed. Of course there is a lot more in the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:03 — 13.8MB)

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It was a year ago Sunday that started what I called the soap opera “As the MicroYugo turns”. Microsoft put on a bid for Yahoo of $31 a share – 44.6 Billion in cash and stock. Of course the news went on til August as Yahoo said no, then Carl Icahn stepped up, Yahoo gave him a board seat, Jerry Yang stepped down as CEO and finally in January of 2009 Yahoo replaced him with Carol Bartz. However, did you know that the day before the announcement, former CEO Terry Semel broke all ties with Yahoo?

Some other items of note you’ll hear on the Podcast – It’s Timothy McVey day! The LaMaccia Loophole, Craigslist hitman and Yahoo buys Geocities. The first version of Tetris is released, Commodore 264 and 364 – and Microsoft Vista is released to the General public.

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