It was certainly a surprise to Ms. Bartz, when she was informed about the decision over the phone on the 6th of September!

Bartz had been heading the company for nearly three years. When she had taken over, Yahoo! was bad shape and she had to face many challenges. Although she managed to overcome some of the problems, the general consensus was that her style of functioning was not good enough and she had not been able to achieve as much as was expected of her. It was also felt that she was not taking the competition from Facebook seriously enough.

During her tenure at Yahoo! Bartz did not succeed in bringing the company’s stock back up anywhere near the price it was trading at when Microsoft tried to buy it out.

YHOO share price between 10 Jan 2009 and 07 Sep 2011

After the news of her termination was publicised, Yahoo! stocks went up 6% in after-hours trading. The share price had been more or less flat during her regime in spite of a 60% rise in the overall Nasdaq Composite Index. Yahoo!’s performance was also poor compared to fellow search provider, Google.

Comparing YHOO and GOOG share prices between 10 Jan 2009 and 07 Sep 2011

That said, Yahoo! did post a profit of over a million dollars last year even though comScore reported that visitors were spending 33% less minutes on Yahoo! sites since Ms. Bartz took over.

Yahoo!’s Chief Financial Officer, Tim Morse, has been asked to take over her duties until a suitable replacement is found. In a memo to employees, Carol Bartz expressed her sadness at having to leave the company and wished all her colleagues all the best.

As of now, Yahoo!’s future is once again up for speculation. It is believed by some that they may even be willing to be bought over for the right price.

Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School are just two of the many colleges to have done so.

The idea behind this move is to prepare their students to make use of these ever growing networks to reach and engage with their target audience in innovative ways.

Companies such as AT&T, Citigroup, Panasonic etc. have already started hiring employees as social media directors, to develop and manage marketing strategies through the social media.

These companies strongly believe that the social media offer a novel opportunity to interact with their customers and also to learn what they want.

Different colleges are offering different types of courses based on the social media and quite expectedly they are much in demand.

The Champlain College was among the first to offer such a course, and they did that way back in the year 2000.

Apart from teaching students to use the social media, they are also taught to understand the psychological and sociological aspect of the social media.

Some of the schools actually make the students conduct campaigns for the various companies, and study the effect of the campaign, on the performance of the company, before they are certified to have passed the course.

The study was carried out across 2,948 professionals in North America and Canada.

The main aims of the study were to find the top social media resources used for business info, which departments drive the most corporate social media initiatives, the top business social media initiatives, how well companies can actually measure their success and rating of the top social media sites for business use.

The results provide an insight into how businesses use the social media at work.

It was found that webinars and podcasts are the most popular social media resources for business professionals and were used by 69% of the participants of the survey.

Ratings and reviews of business products and services were used by 62% of business social media users, as were company profiles on social media sites.

Facebook is the most popular social networking site for business owners too. 83% of business to consumer (B2C) businesses maintain one or more profiles on Facebook, while only 45% do so on Twitter. Business to business (B2B) companies, on the other hand, have profiles on both sites in more or less equal proportion – 77% on Facebook and 73% on Twitter.

Participants using social media in their day-to-day jobs visit company or brand profiles on social sites 62% of the time and 55% of them search for business information on the social sites.

Consultants and marketing communications professionals in small and micro companies use social media for business information most often, while, surprisingly, IT professionals do so the least.

The average company is planning, developing or running 7 different social media initiatives. 71% of these companies and 65% of staff have less than 2 years experience in social media business.

Since building brand awareness and reputation and reputation are top priorities, it does not seem like a very good idea for businesses to restrict employee access to social networks, which is reportedly the case with almost 90% of companies.

The rumors began after eBay CEO, John Donahue, said that Skype was a great stand-alone business, indicating that though the VoIP service is doing well, (its fourth quarter revenue increased by 26% over the third quarter, and it has over 405 million users worldwide with 30 million users being added every quarter) it was still not integrated into their core business, 4 years after they bought it for an astounding $2.6 billion.

eBay, on the other hand, is not doing too well during the current economic crisis. Their net profits fell to $367 million in the last quarter of 2008, compared to $531 million during the same period in 2007.

Jack Murphy an analyst for investment bank William Blair says “It’s important that eBay has opened the door to a buyer by talking about Skype as a stand-alone business. It would be best for eBay to get whatever cash they could for it and focus on their struggling core market business.”

According to Jim Friedland, senior Internet equity analyst at Cowen and Company, the highest offer eBay can expect for Skype is $1.6 billion.

According to industry sources companies such as Google, Yahoo!, AT&T and Verizon could all be potential buyers as they can easily integrate the VoIP service with their core business.

It is especially believed by some that buying Skype could be the logical next step for Google, as it already has various communication facilities such as Gmail, Google Chat and the Android mobile platform. Owning Skype could enable Google to offer a cheap VoIP-based mobile solution.

There are others who feel that Microsoft may be more likely to buy Skype as they are looking to increase their user base to boost search.

eBay, however, has neither confirmed nor denied any of the rumors.

A recent story run on TechCrunch says that according to trusted but anonymous sources, AOL is planning to sell Bebo as its performance has been far below expectations.

Both AOL and Bebo have denied this, saying “there is no truth to this rumor”.

According to sources, when AOL bought Bebo last March, Bebo was marketed as a clever startup that was able to win over ad agencies and clients by presenting itself very well. Ad agencies convinced their clients that they must get on to Bebo, which was growing more popular by the day in the relatively new social network market.

When AOL saw this, they obviously felt that it would be a wise move to buy Bebo, and accordingly they did so on March 13 2008 for $850 million.

Time, however, proved that Bebo did not perform as well as expected. While Bebo is popular in the U.K. with 10.5 million users, its worldwide user base is just 22.6 million.

Facebook’s meteoric rise in popularity is the biggest factor contributing to Bebo’s failure. That, and the fact that singular social networks are no longer as popular as they were, due to the growing popularity of the open social platforms is partly responsible for this. The current economic climate makes the performance of the company look even poorer. While Facebook is believed to have earned $250 million last year, and MySpace much more than that, Bebo has managed only $20 million.

A spokesperson at Bebo, however, rubbishes the rumors of a possible sell off by AOL, saying that Bebo has launched a new tool, Social Inbox, just last month. It is doing very well and will allow users to read emails from various sites and also access other social services like Twitter and Flickr. It will also integrate AOL’s instant messaging service. AOL is also reportedly planning further expansion with Bebo.

Only time will tell whether the rumors turn out to be true or not.

In the last few days there have been some stories doing the rounds that this deal would be revived in a round about manner. It was suggested that Microsoft would lend money to some executives and investment bankers, who would then buy out Yahoo! at the price of about $13 per share, which is just a little over the current market price, and then sell it back to Microsoft. Sources at both the companies have rubbished these stories for now.

Acquisition rumours may have been fuelled by a comment by Steve Ballmer, in an interview with the Financial Times, where he said, “now is a good time for the software company to buy.”

However, in an interview with the Fox Business Network last week, Steve Ballmer told Brian Sullivan that the attempt to acquire Yahoo! was “a thing of the past”. He made it very clear that the deal would not be revived, while still keeping his options open about a partnership in any other form.

During the unveiling of the next Windows operating system, Windows 7, Steve Ballmer also admitted that the current financial crisis had affected the IT industry adversely, and it was realistic to expect that fewer people would be buying technology at the moment. While he sidestepped questions about the possibility of layoffs at Microsoft, he did acknowledge that it was important to conserve cash resources and be prudent about expenditure.

In the meantime, Yahoo! has just named Carol Bartz, who was the chairman of Autodesk, as its new CEO. This announcement has once again raised speculations that the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal may go through under her leadership.

Jaiku was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland. The Helsinki-based company released the service on the Web in July 2006. Google has just announced that they have acquired Jaiku. The financial terms of the acquisition and their intentions are unclear at present.
According to the founders of Jaiku, “Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users. Jaiku’s technology and talented team are a great addition to Google’s current application and mobile teams.”

While Google’s acquisitions in the social media space have been erratic and mostly unsuccesful, this acquisition might not join the likes of Orkut or Dodgeball. Instead, if their acquisition of mobile social networking site Zingku is anything to go by, Jaiku’s mobile and SMS-posting technology was probably what Google was after.

Comparisons with Twitter have been favourable for Jaiku due to its mobile component and the blog-like posting method. Users can inform their friends about their activities through Twitter-style micro-blog posts as well as their exact current location via a cool mobile-enabled “presence” feature. However the number of phones supported is quite limited and posting via SMS requires a European number.