14 DAY TRIAL // Google is moving to be the one thing we wake up in the morning to check our dreams with, as for what they mean and so on, the place to see what breakfast has less calories and which route to work is the shortest and, thanks to Street View, less jammed. With the speculations about it taking over Yell Croup Plc, the publisher of the United Kingdom's Yellow Pages phone books, it seems to me like making a move to be the one thing on our mind when thinking about contacting somebody.
"The rumor that Google may bid for Yell has been around before, and I'm not surprised to hear it has surfaced again", Jimmy Yates, a London-based trader at CMC Markets, said. "Yell has lost almost half its value in the last 11 months and certainly looks more attractive now as a takeover candidate", he continued.
As a result of these speculations, Yell rose as much as 4.4 percent, valuing the company at 2.6 billion pounds or 5.1 billion dollars, as its stock climbed 5.50 pence (1.7 percent) to 331.25 pence on Friday at 8:37 A.M., in London. Rumors spread, among others, by "The Independent" newspaper in the U.K. contained inside information like the fact that a 500 pence-per-share bid was made by Google, but this has not been confirmed by the Mountain View based company or by Yell.
According to Bloomberg.com's Simon Thiel, Yellow Book, the largest independent yellow pages publisher in the U.S., accounts for about half of Yell's sales. And the takeover rumors are very interesting exactly because Yell, who has spun off from the former phone monopoly BT Group Plc in 2001, is actually competing with phone companies, such as AT&T, and search engines, such as (you've guessed it!) Google. Whether the deal will go through we'll find out soon enough, but in the meantime think about having the Yellow Pages as a Google option and Skype as a built-in feature for the Google phone, as was rumored in November last year. How does it sound?