Yahoo Interested in Buying New Companies

Yahoo has had a rough time for the past few years and the company has only recently started showing some optimistic signs. Under CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo has gotten a lot more focused and has shed off a lot of dead weight. Spurred by great financial results in the first quarter, things are looking up, but there are still questions of whether Yahoo has what it takes to compete with the big boys. In her first visit to the UK, Bartz said the company was ready to start acquiring some small ones and push for growth focusing on original content.

Yahoo has been closing down, selling or out-sourcing businesses and products for more than a year now, so it’s a good sign that it is seriously thinking about buying startups and small companies with interesting products. Bartz didn’t say how much money Yahoo would spend on this, though the pocket probably doesn’t go too deep.

One area that could be of particular interest to Yahoo is that of location-based services. That market is very hot right now and most players are building something to compete in it. The CEO declined to comment on the rumored Foursquare acquisition, but said that Yahoo was interested in location and would buy companies in the field, for the right price.

When asked about Facebook’s increasing dominance of the web, Bartz said that Yahoo had a lot of room to grow alongside the social network, with a focus on original content and not on social interaction or user-generated content. She did say that, in terms of time spent on the site, Facebook was likely to overtake Yahoo and probably Google too by the end of the year. Yahoo has been integrating Facebook features within its services for a few months now, well before Facebook debuted the new social API tools.

And, not to let Facebook be the only one to brag about numbers, Yahoo has put forward some interesting stats regarding one of its most used products, Yahoo Mail, the largest email service provider in the world. Yahoo Mail users send 100 billion emails every month. That’s small in comparison to the 500 billion spam emails that are blocked every month. And things are growing, Yahoo will buy 160,000 new servers this year alone to handle all the traffic.