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Yahoo has picked up a new app and brought some former employees along for the ride.

Announced today, Yahoo has acquired Jybe, an iOS app that recommends books, movies, and restaurants based on a user's personal tastes. Jybe's service and app kicked off about two years ago.

The Jybe team consists of five people who used to work at Yahoo. The team will join Yahoo's platform organization to focus on targeting and personalization, according to the company.

"This will be a 'coming home' for the team -- all five are former Yahoos," Yahoo said in … Read more

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is working on buying a controlling stake in video-sharing site Dailymotion, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

Unnamed sources told the Journal that Yahoo is in talks with France Telecom, the company that owns Dailymotion, to buy as much as 75 percent of the site. The site may be valued at about $300 million.

It's far from a done deal at this point, according to the Journal's sources, but Yahoo could use a boost in the video-sharing space, which is mainly dominated by services like Google's YouTube.

Although Mayer purchased a recommendations startup … Read more

Yahoo has lost another top executive to another company, and more are likely to follow suit, says AllThingD's Kara Swisher.

James Carroll, who had served as senior vice president of Yahoo's consumer and global platform group, is taking on a key role at domain-hosting firm Go Daddy, say Swisher's sources. Formerly employed by Microsoft, Carroll was "responsible for Yahoo's content, social and membership platforms and the international delivery of all Yahoo products and services worldwide," according to his LinkedIn profile.

Carroll is a familiar face to Go Daddy CEO Blake Irving. Irving was formerly Yahoo's chief product officer … Read more

Silicon Valley firms are presenting a rare united front in an effort to end a political logjam that has blocked high-tech immigration reform.

In an unusual show of support that underscores how important the topic has become, executives from Facebook, Google, eBay and other major tech companies sent a letter today to President Obama and congressional leaders asking them to fix immigration law by the end of 2013. The current system is broken, they say, blaming visa shortages, long waits for green cards, and difficulties bringing spouses and children to the United States.

"Because our current immigration system is … Read more

Best Buy, seen as a trailblazer for its progressive telecommuting policy, is now putting limits on the ability of its non-store staff to work from home.

Just a week after Yahoo told its workers that they could no longer work from home, Best Buy ended its Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) program, which allowed employees to set their own hours and work from anywhere as long as they got the job done. Telecommuting is not completely ruled out as an option for the company's 4,000 non-store employees, but workers will need to seek managerial approval first.

The change … Read more

To whip the one-time dominant Yahoo portal (remember when those were a thing?) back into shape, CEO Marissa Mayer and company have been laying down the law. All Yahoos now must make it into the office, as telecommuting and work-from-home arrangements will officially become a no-no by June.

The new policy is meant to improve collaboration and communication, but it's also been dinged for being antithetical to the spirit of Silicon Valley, where world-changing work often originates from garages and coffee shops. … Read more

When Yahoo told workers last week that they could no longer work from home, there was no shortage of punditry opining on the merits of the decision.

Richard Branson, who has never worked out of an office, blasted the idea, calling it "a backwards step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever." Blue Jeans, a videoconferencing company, bought a billboard on Highway 101, just north of the San Francisco International Airport, tweaking Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, that reads, "Call us Marissa! We can help."

While there are plenty of benefits … Read more

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is honing the product focus of the company she has been running for seven months, eliminating several products that were deemed insufficiently popular with the company's 700 million users. Yahoo is discontinuing development and support of its mobile app for BlackBerry and Yahoo Clue, a tool introduced in November 2010 that shows detailed search trends, for example.

Mayer has described Yahoo's core business as personalizing content and its goals as increasing user engagement, boosting the company's international audience, and broadening its demographic base. Products that don't fit into that agenda won't … Read more

Back in the day when social media platforms didn't exist, there was nothing as spontaneous and fun as chatting with your friends online via instant messenger. If you find yourself trying to stay in touch with Yahoo friends and want to stick to the original and reliable IM, then Yahoo Messenger for Mac would be a good choice.

The user interface of this popular IM client looks neat and is quite functional. The seamless integration of Yahoo weather, news, and mail directly in the Yahoo Messenger for Mac will be much appreciated by the people in the Yahoo ecosystem, … Read more