Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yahoo search delivers superior search results for tech related queries despite supposedly using Bing
Plus the best finance page.
And fantasy sports.
Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
131–140 of 144 posts
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're also returning like $6 billion/year to their shareholders via dividends -- if they had just hoarded that cash, their share price would obviously be much higher.
Isn't share price influenced by future dividends? Why would preventing dividends and hoarding cash (reducing expected future earnings of shares) drive up share price?
It’s a bit more complicated than that, it’s also a bit more complicated than what I’m about to say.
Functionally speaking when a company issues a dividend of $x the stock price S will drop to S-x on the ex dividend date. This makes sense as the company now has $x less per share. The shareholder is at a wash as well. They had S before and now they have S-x+x. No value was created, money was simply moved.
Given the above you can more or less value dividends using discounted cash flow. A ~3% dividend is CSCO’s case isn’t worth paying more (increasing the share price over) on its own because the cash used to buy the shares is worth ~5.5% today according to the risk free rate.
In fact if one were considering the dividend alone then the company should be worth less. Obviously factoring in future growth, etc… the market has landed on the current price.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#133> Yahoo will own a stake in the new company and will be one of Vespa’s biggest customers for a long time to come. what's usually going on in scenarios like this is either: the subsidiary is in growth mode and needs access to public capital markets to raise large amounts for building infrastructure (and sharing the expenses with others) to compete, or what has been built is going into profitability mode and the profit…
A third option is very simply about focus. Yahoo experienced this itself under Verizon, wasting years on useless 5G-oriented initiatives, a completely irrelevant focus for Yahoo itself. If the focus of a company's leadership isn't aligned with what benefits a subsection of that company, spin-out is a good way for that subsection to gain an aligned focus without detracting from the parent company's goals.
Vespa's been a technology built with search & ad-serving in mind, while Yahoo's other recent moves have been ad-tech layoffs alongside acquisitions in sports, finance & tech journalism, so the focus shift makes some sense here.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the Dangerous Wildlife War between India and the home of the proper vikings. Was there an other side to this war? The most dangerous animal you're likely to come across (realistically, without getting photoshop involved) in an average Indian street would be a monkey. I've also come across many varieties of snakes, from time to time, but they're generally chill and just want to be left alone. The monkeys are ruthles…
Oh, absolutely not. They had no idea, and it wasn't really a thing outside of a few minutes of pranking one engineer visiting us + a bit of photoshopping for fun. The only ones to ever get in touch about this whole thing was, 1) The Y! corporate blog who wanted us to make a lighthearted a fun write-up about the polar bears, which I cannot seem to find online anymore, and 2) a random local from Trondheim, Norway who s…
I didn't know about the angry email. That makes the story even more fun.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're also returning like $6 billion/year to their shareholders via dividends -- if they had just hoarded that cash, their share price would obviously be much higher.
Isn't share price influenced by future dividends? Why would preventing dividends and hoarding cash (reducing expected future earnings of shares) drive up share price?
Diab0lic's comment is true about future dividends - but my point is that comparing today's share price to the share price in 2000 and implying they haven't done much misses the fact that they've paid out something like $54 billion in dividends since then.
This will be wrong but true enough to make my point; With a market cap today of ~$215 billion, had CSCO not paid out dividends, their market cap would be $215 billion that represents current cash and the discounted value of future cash + the $54 billion that would also be in cash -- for a total of $269 billion. That's enough to add ~$15 to their share price.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#136This is really exciting news!
What is perhaps a bit unusual is that the Vespa team has existed for a very long time. Even before the project got its name (2004/2005?). If memory serves it will be 20 years this year or next year since the first bits of what became the Vespa platform were developed. Some of the people working there have worked together since 1998-1999.
I think much of the reason for the longevity of the team is that it was kept somewhat separate from the rest of Yahoo! so they could maintain focus.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yahoo search delivers superior search results for tech related queries despite supposedly using Bing
superior search results as in better than Google? superior in any specific way or just generally more relevant results?
Superior technical results relative to Google
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#138vespa tech was one of the big reasons yahoo was attractive as an acquirer for del.icio.us. unfortunately they promptly withheld it afterwards.
That's a name I haven't heard in awhile. I thought the concept of it was amazing and tags were the solution to everything. Remember machine tags? Oh how things have evolved. Not to mention the naming trend companies took on for a decade afterwards.
machine tags were stupid. tagging was about humans labeling the important aspects for retrieval. not a replacement for all metadata, or for faceted search.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
any ideas what do cloud providers like pinecone user underneath ?
I'm from Pinecone. We use proprietary indexes. We could've used HNSW but decided the high memory consumption (ie, costly at scale) and slow index updates (ie, data gets stale) won't cut it for production use cases.
Oh I read a lot of HNSW stuff on your/Pinecone blog series. (Great learning resource btw, well done!) So I assumed you were using HNSW already. It's a news to me that you don't use it.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#140Has anyone tried using the GPU acceleration features? Curious if it works well with speeding up vector search.