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Adobe to Buy Video Ad Firm TubeMogul for Around $540 Million

by Rajdeep April 4, 2024

written by Rajdeep

Adobe to Buy Video Ad Firm TubeMogul for Around $540 Million

Photoshop software maker Adobe Systems Inc said on Thursday it would buy advertising company TubeMogul Inc for about $540 million (roughly Rs. 3,618 crores), net of debt and cash, giving it a bigger presence in the rapidly growing online video market.

Adobe’s $14 per share cash offer represents an 82.5 percent premium to TubeMogul’s Wednesday close.

Shares of TubeMogul, which allows advertisers to buy video ad space using its software, jumped to $13.95 in early trading on Thursday.

The deal will help Adobe add an ad buying platform to its digital marketing unit, which offers tools for businesses to analyze customer interactions and manage social media content.

Advertising technology firms such as TubeMogul, Rocket Fuel Inc and Tremor Video Inc face fierce competition from online advertising giants Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google.

Up to Wednesday’s close, TubeMogul’s shares had fallen nearly 44 percent this year.

Facebook, Google and Twitter Inc have all been betting big on video over the past year, a format where advertisers are willing to pay a premium for a few seconds of users’ undivided attention.
“Whether it’s episodic TV, indie films or Hollywood blockbusters, video consumption is exploding across every device and brands are following those eyeballs,” said Brad Rencher, Adobe’s executive vice president of digital marketing.

Adobe said the acquisition would not have an impact on its adjusted earnings in the year ending December 2017.

[Source:- gadgets.ndtv]

April 4, 2024 0 comment

Internet

Yahoo Expected to Confirm Data Breach of Several Hundred Million User Accounts: Report

by Rajdeep April 4, 2024

written by Rajdeep

Yahoo Expected to Confirm Data Breach of Several Hundred Million User Accounts: Report

Yahoo is reportedly expected to confirm a massive data breach of its services with an official statement.

According to sources close to the situation cited by Recode, several hundred million Yahoo user accounts have been exposed.

It was earlier reported in August that a hacker by the name of Peace put up for sale a cache of 200 million stolenYahoo user account credentials. Yahoo had then said it was investigating the situation.

The hacker had listed an advert on the TheRealDeal marketplace claiming that about 200 million Yahoo accounts are up for sale for three Bitcoins (roughly Rs. 1,07,000). The data included usernames, decrypted passwords, personal information of users and other email addresses.

The confirmation of the hack comes right near the completion of Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo’s core business for $4.83 billion (roughly Rs. 32,500 crores). Yahoo will be rolled into Verizon’s AOL operations. Meanwhile, industry observers say CEO Marissa Mayer is likely to step down after the sale closes early next year.

Yahoo’s confirmation of the hack is likely to be the final nail on the coffin for the once-popular Internet company. It is still unknown as to how this will affect the deal with Verizon.

[Source:- gadgets. ndtv]

April 4, 2024 0 comment

Internet

Yahoo 2014 Hack Steals Personal Information From at Least 500 Million Accounts

by Rajdeep April 4, 2024

written by Rajdeep

Yahoo 2014 Hack Steals Personal Information From at Least 500 Million Accounts

Computer hackers swiped personal information from at least 500 million Yahoo accounts in what is believed to be the biggest digital break-in at an email provider.

The massive security breakdown disclosed Thursday poses new headaches for beleaguered Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer as she scrambles to close a $4.8 billion (roughly Rs. 32,500 crores) sale to Verizon.

The breach dates back to late 2014, raising questions about the checks and balances within Yahoo – a fallen internet star that has been laying off staff and trimming expenses to counter a steep drop in revenue during the past eight years.

At the time of the break-in, Yahoo’s security team was led by Alex Stamos, a respected industry executive who left last year to take a similar job at Facebook.

Once more unto the breach
Yahoo didn’t explain what took so long to uncover a heist that it blamed on a “state-sponsored actor” – parlance for a hacker working on behalf of a foreign government.

The Sunnyvale, California, company declined to explain how it reached its conclusions about the attack for security reasons, but said it is working with the FBI and other law enforcement. Yahoo beganinvestigating a possible breach in July, around the time the tech site Motherboard reported that a hacker who uses the name “Peace” was trying to sell account information belonging to 200 million Yahoo users.

Yahoo didn’t find evidence of that reported hack, but additional digging later uncovered a far larger, allegedly state-sponsored attack.

“We take these types of breaches very seriously and will determine how this occurred and who is responsible,” the FBI said in a Thursday statement.

Most accounts ever stolen
The Yahoo theft represents the most accounts ever stolen from a single email provider, according to computer security analyst Avivah Litan with the technology research firm Gartner Inc.

“It’s a shocking number,” Litan said. “This is a pretty big deal that is probably going to cost them tens of millions of dollars. Regulators and lawyers are going to have a field day with this one.”

Yahoo says it has more than 1 billion monthly users, although it hasn’t disclosed how many of those people have email accounts. In July, 161 million people worldwide used Yahoo email on personal computers, a 30 percent decline from the same time in 2014, according to the latest data from the research firm comScore.

The data stolen from Yahoo includes users’ names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, scrambled passwords, and the security questions – and answers – used to verify an accountholder’s identity. The company said the attacker didn’t get any information about its users’ bank accounts or credit and debit cards.

Security experts say the Yahoo theft could hurt the affected users if their personal information is mined to break into other online services or used for identity theft. All affected users will be notified about the theft and advised how to protect themselves, according to the company.

Yahoo also is recommending that all users change their passwords if they haven’t done so since 2014. If the same password is used to access other sites, it should be changed too, along with any security questions similar to those used on Yahoo.

The Verizon impact
News of the security lapse could cause some people to have second thoughts about relying on Yahoo’s services, raising a prickly issue for the company as it tries to sell its digital operations to Verizon.

That deal, announced two months ago, isn’t supposed to close until early next year. That leaves Verizon with wiggle room to renegotiate the purchase price or even back out if it believes the security breach will harm Yahoo’s business. That could happen if users shun Yahoo or file lawsuits because they’re incensed by the theft of their personal information.

Verizon said it still doesn’t know enough about the Yahoo break-in to assess the potential consequences. “We will evaluate as the investigation continues through the lens of overall Verizon interests, including consumers, customers, shareholders and related communities,” the company said in a statement.

Delay of sale
At the very least, Verizon is going to need more time to assess what it will be getting into if it proceeds with its plans to take over Yahoo, said Scott Vernick, an attorney specializing in data security for the law firm Fox Rothschild.

“This is going to slow things down. There is going to be a lot of blood, sweat and tears shed on this,” Vernick said. “A buyer needs to understand the cybersecurity strengths and weaknesses of its target these days.”

Investors evidently aren’t nervous about the Verizon deal unraveling yet. Yahoo’s stock added a penny Thursday to close at $44.15. But the Verizon sale represents a sliver of Yahoo’s total market value, which primarily consists of a stake in Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba Group currently worth $42 billion (roughly Rs. 2,80,434 crores).

[Source:- gadgets. ndtv]

April 4, 2024 0 comment

Internet

Google to Buy Cloud Software Company Apigee for $625 Million

by Rajdeep April 4, 2024

written by Rajdeep

Google to Buy Cloud Software Company Apigee for $625 Million

Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Thursday it is acquiring cloud software company Apigee Corp in a deal valued at about $625 million (roughly Rs. 4,158 crores), the tech giant’s latest effort to claim a greater share of the lucrative cloud business.

San Jose-based Apigee’s software helps companies’ digital services interact with apps used by customers and partners.

The service is critical for businesses transitioning to the cloud, Diane Greene, who runs Google’s cloud computing division, said in an interview. “They are a leader in this application programming interface area,” she said.

Cloud computing is the increasingly popular practice of using remote internet servers to store, manage and process data.

Apigee specializes in managing so-called application programming interfaces, or APIs, the channels through which digital services connect when a company logs a purchase for a customer or places an order with a supplier.

Google will pay Apigee shareholders $17.40 for each share, a 6.5 percent premium to the stock’s Wednesday close.

Apigee’s shares were slightly above the offer price at $17.43 on Nasdaq in afternoon trading on Thursday.

The company, whose customers include AT&T, Burberry Group Plc, Vodafone Group Plc and the World Bank, went public in April last year at $17 per share.

Greene, a former VMware CEO, has pushed to raise Google’s profile in corporate computing since she joined last year.

During her tenure, Google has streamlined engineering efforts and appointed new leadership for its cloud efforts, improving traction with clients, Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said during the company’s latest earnings call.

Greene predicted that the Apigee acquisition would redouble Google’s momentum.

“Our customer lists are extremely complimentary,” she said. “There’s some overlap and some areas where we are going to be able to help each other once [the deal] closes.”

The Apigee deal comes a day after Google and online storage company Box Inc said they would partner to enable Box’s corporate customers to integrate Google’s suite of word processing, spreadsheets and other productivity tools, known as Google Docs.

Google, Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp, IBM Corp and others are vying for a share of the fast-growing corporate cloud computing business.

Apigee, with high-profile clients in a strategically important area, will help Google close in on the competition, said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy.

“Google has fallen behind both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services in enterprise cloud computing, and this move is intended to strengthen that position,” he wrote in an email.

[Source:- gadgets.ndtv]

April 4, 2024 0 comment

Internet

Hacked Dropbox Data of 68 Million Users Is Now for Sale on the Dark Web

by Rajdeep April 4, 2024

written by Rajdeep

Hacked Dropbox Data of 68 Million Users Is Now for Sale on the Dark Web

Email and password data for more than 68 million Dropbox users is for sale in the darknet marketplace.

The data set, which is from a 2012 breach, includes users’ email addresses as well as obscured passwords. The nearly 5 gigabytes of data represents one of the larger user credential leaks in recent years. Its price is reportedly being set at two bitcoins, the equivalent of about $1,141 US dollars, by a data trafficker on the darknet website TheRealDeal. There are no reports that the dataset has been successfully sold yet.

Dropbox quietly announced the 4-year-old breach last week when it sent out a note to affected users informing them that they would be proactively resetting their passwords. They informed users that their accounts were being reset because the company had been notified about a possible threat. But the full extent of the massive breach was reported by Motherboard and confirmed by an unnamed senior Dropbox employee several days later.

Dropbox was aware of a security breach in 2012 and told its customers, but says that the true scope and size of the hack was new information until last week. Patrick Heim, head of trust and security at Dropbox, said that the company felt it had taken sufficient preventative measures by proactively resetting passwords. Heim added that at this point, there is still no evidence that the users’ passwords have been successfully decoded and sold.

Hacked user credentials can be very valuable among data traders. Email and password data is typically bought and sold on the darknet, a tier of anonymous and largely untraceable Internet access that is often used for illegal activity such as drug or firearms trading. Large numbers of stolen user data can be integrated with software that automatically cycles though email/password combinations in order to hack into different websites. Given that many people reuse the same passwords on multiple websites, this can be a very effective method. Dropbox actually points to an employee’s reused password hacked from another website as the cause of the 2012 Dropbox breach.

But the stolen passwords from Dropbox were all either hashed or salted. Both are methods of obscuring passwords should they fall into hackers’ hands. Hashing converts passwords into a fixed number of random characters while salting adds a secret value to the end of each password. Hashing and salting can help to keep passwords safe in stolen databases, but the danger with hashing and salting is that both techniques can be eventually decrypted, especially for passwords obtained from several years ago. However, at this time there is still no confirmation that any of the passwords have been successfully decoded and sold. It’s one reason why the reported value of the data, at two bitcoins, is so low.

“The value in bitcoin is a really good indicator of how valuable the hack really was,” said Bryan Seely, a cybersecurity expert and hacker at MGT Capital Investments. “Given how low the price is, I’d say the situation probably isn’t too bad.” Hackers set a stolen medical database containing 34,000 patient records at a price of 20 bitcoins, or $13,173 U.S. dollars, this July.

Dropbox has several high profile clients that use Dropbox Business, a premium tier service that offers features like unlimited data storage and extra security. It’s used by companies like Hyatt, Hewlett Packer and Spotify. Dropbox Business was not launched until after the 2012 breach, so these clients are unlikely to have stolen data.

The hack points to the fragility of passwords as a security measure online. “Passwords are outdated, they’re annoying to users, they annoy IT teams, they’re hard to remember,” said Malcolm Harkins, the chief security and trust officer at a security company called Cylance. Harkins added that new security measures such as multi-faceted authentication are far stronger methods. At Dropbox, which offers two-step verification login for users, rate of enrollment for the extra verification measure has increased nearly tenfold since news of the hack.

Tyler Cohen Wood, cybersecurity adviser at Inspired eLearning, agrees, adding that users should take a degree of personal responsibility for their user data. “If you haven’t changed your passwords since 2012, you might want to rethink your own personal password policy and change them more frequently,” he said.

Despite this, he added, companies have a duty to fully disclose breaches. “It is always best to report potential compromises of accounts and passwords to users right away so that they can take action immediately,” he added.

[Source:- gadgets.ndtv]

April 4, 2024 0 comment

Internet

When Yahoo Refused to Buy Google for $1 Million

by Rajdeep April 4, 2024

written by Rajdeep

When Yahoo Refused to Buy Google for $1 Million

After several futile attempts to revive the company’s old appeal, Yahoo has now announced that it is selling most of its core services to US telecommunications giant Verizon. This marks as the end of an era for a company that once defined the Internet. Yahoo was at its most successful in the 90s, but its failure to keep up with the emerging trends contributed to its downfall. The other major factor that caused this fate was a series of missed opportunities by its executives. In 1998, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin had approached Yahoo, with an opportunity to buy its PageRank system for as little as $1 million. The duo wanted to focus on their studies at Stanford, but Yahoo showed no interest as it wanted users to spend more time on its own platform.

PageRank is an algorithm designed by Brin and Page that ranked websites for the order they are displayed in Google search results. It is named after Larry Page, and is a way of measuring the importance of websites. While PageRank helped in showing up search results of relevant third-party sites based on keywords, Yahoo did not want users to leave their platform at all. It had directories that were designed to answer questions, view email, shop and even play games on its platform – something that seemed to work well for them at that time.

However, as time progressed the online world soon began to realize the importance of third-party online advertising revenue. Google built its own pay-per click service called AdWords back then, and is now the key reason for Google’s rags to riches story. In 2002, Brin and Page went to Yahoo once again, this time to raise funds worth $3 billion. However, then Yahoo Chief Terry Semel refused the offer as it looked to again build its own search engine to compete with Google. Yahoo acquired search engine Inktomi and ad revenue maker Overture in its mission to build the search engine that would topple Google.

However, Yahoo failed miserably in execution, and fell to its own demise. While Yahoo’s absorption into Verizon’s AOL Internet business is now the new reality, Semel and his board of directors must surely lament all the wrong and over-ambitious decisions they made in the past. If Yahoo had agreed on the deal with Google co-owners in its nascent days, Yahoo’s fate would possibly hold a different story.

Google aka Alphabet is now one of the world’s most valuable companies, with its worth nearing $500 billion. In comparison, the latest deal reveals that Yahoo’s core business was worth just $4.83 billion.

[Source:- gadgets.ndtv]

April 4, 2024 0 comment

Internet

Snapdeal Says Invested $300 Million in Supply Chain, Logistics in Last 1.5 Years

by Rajdeep April 4, 2024

written by Rajdeep

Snapdeal Says Invested $300 Million in Supply Chain, Logistics in Last 1.5 Years

E-commerce major Snapdeal has pumped in $300 million (about Rs. 1,990 crores) over the last 18 months to strengthen its supply chain and logistics and facilitate the increase in shipment volumes.

The city-based firm has seen 1.9 times increase in shipment volumes from 1.29 lakh daily shipments last year to 2.5 lakh this year.

“We have seen a significant increase of 1.9 times in shipment volumes. This is on account of increase in assortment on Snapdeal from 12 million to 35 million over the year. We have also expanded our seller base which helped increase shipments,” Snapdeal Chief Customer Experience Officer Jayant Sood told PTI.

He added that reports by PwC and RedSeer Consulting suggest that Snapdeal’s promised delivery time is the shortest across India.

“The number of sellers on our platform has increased three fold from 1,00,000 at the beginning of 2015 to more than 3,00,000 in 2016… We have invested $300 million towards logistics and customer experience,” he said.

He added that the company has 2 million sq ft of warehousing space across 63 sites and 45 cities.

Sood said the seller expansion has also led to a huge increase in the goods available on its platform.

“Unlike other competing marketplaces, which have their own sellers under various arrangements, we have no such conflicting interests. This makes Snapdeal more attractive for sellers,” he said.

He said the company has seen 60 percent month-on-month increase in FMCG sales, while the books category grew by 300 percent. Also, there is a strong increase in uptake in the home decor category.

“This blend of expansion of high frequency categories drives high repeat usage, which is enabled by reliable experience each time,” he added.

Besides, sharp focus on repeat users and initiatives like same day refunds is helping Snapdeal “chart a distinct course”, he said.

April 4, 2024 0 comment

Education

£15 million cash boost for new nuclear college

by Rajdeep April 4, 2024

written by Rajdeep

National College for Nuclear architect's impression

The Government has announced £15 million in funding to set up the National College for Nuclear headquartered in West Cumbria and Somerset.

The college is one of five National Colleges that will create the workforce of tomorrow by delivering high-level technical training to thousands of learners across England

Set across two hubs – one at Lakes College, Lillyhall and one in Somerset – the college aims to train over 7,000 learners by 2020

The college, which is set to open its doors in late 2017, will meet the demand for highly skilled workers in the nuclear sector and will offer courses designed by employers for a range of highly specialised careers.

Skills Minister Nick Boles said: “This is the investment in high-tech skills that businesses are crying out for.

“We have made it a priority to work with employers to deliver high-quality, technical education and clear routes to employment that deliver economic growth and create opportunities for our young people, and enable our existing workforce to upskill and retrain for the jobs of the future.

“The National Colleges have been designed with employers, for employers. They will produce the skills needed now and into the future to ensure the UK remains innovative and at the forefront of pioneering industry.”

The National College for Nuclear is being funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), with additional support from the Heart of the South West Local Enterprise Partnership for the Southern Hub.

Sellafield Ltd and EDF Energy will lead industry input into the nuclear college, working alongside Lakes and Bridgwater colleges, plus higher education providers, University of Cumbria and University of Bristol.

Colin Reed, Sellafield Ltd human resources director and board chairman for the National College for Nuclear, said: “The announcement means that work will now begin on developing the curriculum which will help to train the next generation of nuclear workers.

“It is expected that new qualifications will be available in 2017 that reflect the needs of the nuclear sector and address the skills challenge facing the industry and its supply chain.”

April 4, 2024 0 comment

Internet

Jabong Parent Gets EUR 300 Million in Funding From Rocket Internet

by Rajdeep April 4, 2024

written by Rajdeep

Jabong Parent Gets EUR 300 Million in Funding From Rocket Internet

Global Fashion Group (GFG), parent company of online fashion portal Jabong, has secured a funding of EUR 300 million (about Rs. 2,282 crores) from Rocket Internet.

While the German tech startup investor Rocket Internet will underwrite around EUR 100 million (about Rs. 760.7 crores) of the financing, it will invest around EUR 85 million (about Rs. 646.7 crores), including the conversion of an existing investment at the terms of the financing.

The transaction values GFG at EUR 1 billion post the transactions, Rocket Internet said in a statement.

“The financing will provide GFG with the necessary capital to continue to execute its strategy of building out its leading position in the online fashion sector in emerging markets,” GFG Chief Executive Officer Romain Voog said.

During the first quarter of 2016, GFG reduced loss from operations meaningfully compared to the year-ago period, resulting in an improvement of the adjusted EBITDA margin by over 10 percentage points.

“This is in line with GFG’s plan to deliver an accelerated path to profitability across its regional businesses while continuing to capture the significant market opportunity available,” he said.

Founded in 2014, GFG combines six regional brands – Dafiti in Latin America, Lamoda in Russia and CIS, Namshi in the Middle East, The Iconic in Australia, Jabong in India and Zalora in South-East Asia.

“We continue to be very excited about the prospects of GFG, which has successfully built out leading market positions in key emerging markets. We are looking forward to continuing to work with the GFG team as well as Kinnevik and the other GFG shareholders to support GFG,” Rocket Internet CEO Oliver Samwer said.

Rocket Internet also has investment in FoodPanda in India. Jabong MD and CEO Sanjeev Mohanty said the funding will help the firm enhance business operations.

“We have had success over the past few months, with Jabong recently recording its best month in terms of revenue… GFG sees good progress with Jabong in India and this trust will help us strengthen our operations in the country,” he added.

Jabong narrowed down its gross loss to Rs. 46.7 crores for 2015 on the back of lower level of discounts from Rs. 159.5 crores in 2014. In India, fashion is one of the largest and fiercely contested categories in e-commerce space.

Launched in 2011, Jabong offers more than four lakh products. It was merged with GFG in 2014.

April 4, 2024 0 comment

Internet

Skylo raises $103 million to affordably connect the Internet of Things to satellite networks

by Loknath Das January 22, 2020

written by Loknath Das

Skylo-network

One of the biggest opportunities in the new space economy lies in taking the connectivity made possible by ever-growing communications satellite constellations and making that useful for things and companies here on Earth. Startup Skylo, which emerged from stealth today with a $103 million Series B funding announcement, is one of the players making that possible in an affordable way.

The funding brings Skylo’s total raised to $116 million, following a $14 million Series A. This new round was led by SoftBank Group (which at this point carries a complicated set of connotations) and includes existing investors DCM and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Skylo’s business is based on connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including sensors, industrial equipment, logistics hardware and more, to satellite networks using the cellular-based Narrowband IoT protocol. Its network is already deployed on current geostationary satellites, too, meaning its customers can get up and running without waiting for any new satellites or constellations with dedicated technology to launch.

Skylo has completed tests of its technology with commercial partners in real-world usage, including partners in private enterprise and government, across industries including fisheries, maritime logistics, automotive and more. The company’s main claim to advantage over other existing solutions is that it can offer connectivity for as little as $1 per seat, along with hardware that sells for less than $100, which it says adds up to a cost savings of as much as 95% versus other satellite IoT connectivity available on the market.

Its hardware, the Skylo Hub, is a satellite terminal that connects to its network on board geostationary satellites, acting as a “hot spot” to make that available to standard IoT sensors and devices. It’s roughly 8″ by 8″, can be powered internally via battery or plugged in, and is easy for customers to install on their own without any special expertise.

The company was founded in 2017 by CEO Parth Trivedi, CTO Dr. Andrew Nuttall and Chief Hub Architect Dr. Andrew Kalman. Trivedi is an MIT Aerospace and Astronautical engineering graduate; Nuttall has a Ph.D in Aeronautics from Stanford; and Kalman is a Stanford professor who previously founded CubeSat component kit startup Pumpkin, Inc.

[“source=techcrunch”]

January 22, 2020 0 comment