The comments come as Jack Ma, chief executive officer of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, China’s biggest e-commerce company, reiterated today he is “interested” in buying Yahoo and is awaiting a decision by the Sunnyvale, California-based company.

Yahoo! Inc., the US Web portal exploring strategic options after firing Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz last month, isn’t necessarily up for sale, co- founder Jerry Yang said.

“The intent going in is not to put ourselves up for sale,” Yang said at the All Things Digital Asia conference in Hong Kong today. “The intent is to look at all options. There’s plenty of options for the board, and plenty of options for our shareholders to realize value.”

The comments come as Jack Ma, chief executive officer of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, China’s biggest e-commerce company, reiterated today he is “interested” in buying Yahoo and is awaiting a decision by the Sunnyvale, California-based company. Yahoo ousted Bartz after the Web portal failed to keep pace with growth at Google Inc. (GOOG) and Facebook Inc.

Since then “multiple parties” have expressed interest in the company, according to a memo last month by Yang. When Yang was CEO in 2008, Yahoo spurned a $47.5 billion offer by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Yahoo now has a market value of $20 billion.

The US Internet company has “plenty of options” and its board is “excited” about the ongoing review, Yang said today.

“We’re waiting for Yahoo’s board to tell us what they want to do,” Jack Ma said at the same venue within hours of Yang’s speech. “We’re waiting for answers. If we don’t do it soon, it’s not good for all of us.”

Crowded Field

The intentions of Yahoo, rather than financing, present the biggest problem for Alibaba’s plans to acquire the US company, Ma said.

Alibaba is working with private-equity firms on Yahoo, Ma said without elaborating. Yahoo has drawn an increasingly crowded field of potential bidders for the company. KKR & Co. and Blackstone Group LP are among the private-equity firms considering possible bids for Yahoo, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

In addition, Alibaba Group, whose biggest shareholder is Yahoo, has discussed a plan with Silver Lake and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies to make a joint bid, people familiar with the matter have said. Another group that is interested in a possible offer includes Providence Equity Partners Inc. and former News Corp. executive Peter Chernin, people said.

Silver Lake is working with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Microsoft to put together a proposal to buy Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal reported on its website today, citing people familiar with the matter it didn’t identify.

Alibaba Collaboration

Linda Sims, spokeswoman for Canada Pension in Ontario, and Dana Lengkeek, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, didn’t respond to voice messages left after hours seeking comment on the report.

Yahoo’s collaboration with Alibaba is continuing and that remains unaffected by the strategic review, Yahoo Asia Managing Director Rose Tsou said at the same event in Hong Kong.

In 2005, Alibaba Group sold a stake of about 40% to Yahoo for $1 billion and ownership of Yahoo’s Chinese unit. The Hangzhou-based company now operates e-commerce businesses including Alibaba.com and Taobao.com, in addition to Yahoo’s local website.

Alibaba is the “main driving force” for action on Yahoo and the company is “ready to buy back” Yahoo’s stake, Ma said.

“The board is actively looking at the full range of options available to return the company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation,” interim CEO Tim Morse said on a conference call earlier this week.

Yahoo recently agreed to extend a revenue-per-search pact with Microsoft in the US and Canada through 2013. The accord had been set to run out in the first quarter of next year.

Microsoft may have concerns about its search-engine partnership, Yang said today. The alliance “may not have gone the way they wanted,” Yang said without elaborating.

Google Inc. has talked to at least two private equity firms about potentially helping them finance a deal to buy Yahoo Inc.'s core business, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Google and prospective partners have held early-stage discussions but haven't put together a formal proposal and Google may end up not pursuing a bid, this person said. It's unclear which private equity firms Google has talked to.

Any deal tying two of the biggest Internet companies would be sure to attract antitrust scrutiny.

Federal antitrust lawyers in 2008 thwarted a Web-search advertising partnership between the companies. A year later Yahoo signed a 10-year search partnership with Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft is now considering financing part of a bid for Yahoo by a private equity firm, people familiar with the matter have said.

Yahoo declined to comment.

Yahoo's board of directors fired Chief Executive Carol Bartz in September, and the company has since been shopping itself to potential buyers such as private equity firms. Such firms could take Yahoo off the public markets and try to turn around its business. Yahoo hasn't been able to increase revenue even as the Internet ad market grows by more than 20% annually.

Google is interested in selling some advertising across Yahoo's websites--something Yahoo largely does on its own today--according to people familiar with the matter.

Any deal involving Google could also bring other opportunities, such as bring Google's social networking service Google+ to Yahoo's audience of nearly 700 million unique visitors a month, these people said.

Yahoo also has relationships with many "premium" content publishers such as ABC News, which provides video and other content for Yahoo sites and for which Yahoo currently sells ads. Google is interested in having deeper business relationships with such publishers, one of these people said.

Google's interest in participating in the Yahoo sale discussions could also be partly an attempt to bid up prices to make matters more difficult for competitors such as Microsoft, said a person familiar with the matter. Such a tactic is standard competitive practice.

Google wants to help sell the ad space across Yahoo sites as Yahoo has struggled to get good prices for it, people familiar with the matter said. Yahoo's display-ad business—which includes graphical, interactive and video ads—is a $2 billion annual business.

Yahoo has faced challenges in selling display ads due to competition from social network Facebook Inc., video site Hulu LLC and others. Yahoo generates more than 30% of its display-ad revenue by selling lower-priced display ads for less-desirable real estate on its sites through its automated exchange, called Right Media, which matches buyers and sellers of ads.

Google has its DoubleClick ad exchange, which is attracting a growing number of advertisers and websites at the expense of Right Media. Industry experts said Yahoo's ad space is "undermonetized," meaning it could generate more money if Yahoo invested more in its technology or potentially placed the inventory on DoubleClick, among other things.

Google executives in the past have talked to Yahoo about such a partnership, said people familiar with the matter.

For now, Yahoo is trying to put together a partnership with Microsoft, AOL Inc., and other publishers of online content to pool ad space together into one marketplace to challenge DoubleClick, people familiar with the matter have said. It's unclear whether the partnership will come to fruition, or how long it would take to complete.

Google has long been the No. 1 player in Web search. But in the display-ad market, Google is a smaller--but growing--player. In the U.S., Facebook is expected to generate more than $2 billion in net revenue from display advertising this year, with Yahoo generating $1.6 billion and Google generating $1.1 billion, according to eMarketer

Posted in Technology - Technology

That is the equivalent of sending 3 months of HD video in one second

Finally, someone has reached fiber optic speeds so fast we can’t even think of how they could possibly be useful. Two separate research teams using different methods have topped the 100 terabits per second mark through a single optical fiber. That’s enough data flow to download three seamless months worth of HD video in a single second.

The researchers used two different tricks to up their data rates, one altering the light itself, the other by carving up new channels within the fiber. The first approach, via NEC, notched 101.7 terabits per second over 100 miles using a novel scheme that stuffs pulses from 370 different lasers into the single pulse that reaches the end receiver.

Each laser emitted a slightly different frequency of light in the infrared spectrum, with things like amplitudes and polarities tweaked to make each of them different. So even though all 370 slivers were packed into the same pulse, each could code its own packet of information that could then be unpacked separately at the other end.

The other approach, from a team at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, was even faster. A standard fiber cable contains a single light-guiding core, so the researchers decided--logically enough--that seven cores would work even better. Their seven-cored cable can transmit 109 terabits per second (or 15.6 terabits per second per core), drastically improving capacity.

But don’t expect to see those kinds of speeds hitting your PC any time soon. For one, neither of these technologies is particularly easy to integrate into the current infrastructure, and difficulty notwithstanding there isn’t a real commercial need for these high capacities--they simply far outstrip commercial data demand.

But traffic is growing at a rate of something like 50 percent per year, thanks to TV-on-the-Web offerings like Netflix and Hulu, as well as cute puppy videos and Rebecca Black. One day we’ll need those data rates no doubt. In the meantime, these technologies will likely find work as short haul, high volume connections in places where their capacity can be put to use, such as server farms at Amazon.