Posts Tagged ‘Yahoo’

VivaKi’s Kenny says digital advertisers are happy with Microsoft-Yahoo deal

Friday, July 31st, 2009
Kenny, seen here in Boston as chairman/CEO of Digitas, in 2007

Kenny, seen here in Boston as chairman/CEO of Digitas, in 2007

Local digital advertising executive David Kenny — the managing partner of VivaKi, which is the digital unit of Publicis Groupe (known better locally as Digitas) — is making the media rounds in the wake of the Microsoft-Yahoo search advertising deal announced earlier this week.

Kenny weighed in on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal in a New York Times blog and, according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Kenny was also among a number of digital ad executives whom Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz met with back in June. The WSJ said they discussed how a possible Microsoft-Yahoo deal could add value to VivaKi’s clients. “I didn’t feel they were lobbying, but felt they were generally asking my opinion,” Kenny told the Journal.

In AdAge, Kenny was quoted as saying that the deal is “a net positive for marketers.”

“Anything that creates a credible platform and more innovation in search is going to be good for consumers and, therefore, good for advertisers,” he told AdAge.

Breaking News: Fluent Mobile launches iPhone app, Semilab restructures, Yahoo shuts down Maven

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Staff writer Galen Moore breaks the news that Post Office Square-based Fluent Mobile, founded by a former UMass professor, has launched  its news aggregating iPhone app. 

The application is a news search engine and aggregator designed to find only news content that is optimized for reading on mobile devices …

Adler said he started Fluent to apply some of the search capabilities developers discovered while building CourseAdvisor, an online course catalog tool for students. Adverplex, a second company Adler helped found, is still a going concern, he said.

Meanwhile, one cube over, staff writer Rodney Brown breaks the news that Hungarian chip-maker Semilab has merged its three US subsidiaries into one company called Semilab USA.

Semilab USA has 57 employees, with about 21 in Massachusetts, according to [CEO Chris] Moore. Semilab, founded in 1990, makes technology used to measure primarily materials used in the manufacturing of chips. It serves three major customer areas — academic and institutional research, semiconductor manufacturers and photovoltaic and solar cell manufacturers.

TechCrunch, citing an unnamed customer, has the news that Yahoo has shut down Maven Networks, which it acquired less than a year and a half ago.

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