As Microsoft awaits a response from the Yahoo board on its $44.6 billion hostile takeover bid, Redmond showed that it is moving forward with new online advertising technologies it has already acquired.
At an event on Tuesday, Microsoft’s adCenter Labs demonstrated seven new advertising concepts including contextual video ads, image categorization and advertising analytics. Microsoft acquired aQuantive, an online advertising and technology firm, last year for $6 billion, its largest acquisition ever — until the Yahoo bid.
Previewing the demo, CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts Monday, “We’re in the course of building an online business, and an online business is typically advertising funded. That’s a new muscle, a new set of skills that we’re building.”
At Tuesday’s event, Tarek Najm, a technical fellow at Microsoft, said, “Solutions to today’s challenges must be capable of handling and understanding the complexity of vast amounts of data. To address that challenge, we are developing advertising algorithms that can anticipate and understand consumer behavior faster than the speed of thought.”
Meanwhile, things heated up on the acquisition front. The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and his board of directors are pinning their hopes of avoiding becoming part of the “evil empire” on negotiations with Google, which has suggested that Yahoo outsource its search advertising to Google. The Journal said such a deal could boost Yahoo’s cash flow by 25 percent.
But such a move would bring plenty of antitrust scrutiny down on Google, which would then run the risk — currently borne by Microsoft — of being seen as a monopolist. “The idea would be that Google is bailing out Yahoo and Yahoo would owe something to Google,” Barak Orbach, a law professor at the University of Arizona, told the Journal.
Regardless of the outcome in the high-finance machinations for Yahoo, Microsoft…