Company: Yahoo!, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA
Company Description: Yahoo is focused on making the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining. By creating highly personalized experiences for our users, we keep people connected to what matters most to them, across devices and around the world. In turn, we create value for advertisers by connecting them with the audiences that build their businesses. Yahoo is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California,
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Most Innovative Company of the Year - More Than 2,500 Employees

Nomination Title: Yahoo!, Inc

Tell the story about what this nominated organization achieved since January 1 2013 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Yahoo has emerged from its past as a major player and innovator in the digital landscape.

At CES 2014, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer discussed the company’s vision to make the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining. “We have been hard at work re-imagining Yahoo’s core businesses across search, communications, media and video – all powered by two powerful platforms, Flickr and Tumblr” Yahoo acquired Tumblr in 2013.

Yahoo launched new products and improved existing properties, innovating for the daily habits of users around the world.

In the last year alone, the Company launched

•two digital magazines: Yahoo Food and Yahoo Tech, both led by all star teams, providing immersive, rich content geared to the end user.
•a new version of Yahoo Sports optimized for iOS 7;
•Yahoo News Digest for iPhone and iPod touch; delivering the most important news of the day, 2x/day to a mobile device.
•Yahoo Smart TV; the next evolution of Yahoo’s Connected TV platform offering personalized viewing from TV, Video on Demand, and Web services, with complementary content.
•Aviate Listening Space; Yahoo acquired Aviate, a product that learns one’s digital habits and helps anticipate the information and Android apps one needs. Yahoo plans to make the Aviate technology a central part of its Android based experiences in 2014 and beyond.
•Yahoo Games Network and Yahoo Classic Games; and
•Yahoo Screen integration with Roku.

In the advertising space, Yahoo introduced the new Yahoo Advertising -- a suite of web, mobile, and video ad products across native, audience, and premium display. Yahoo also launched Yahoo Gemini, the first unified marketplace for mobile search and native advertising, and Tumblr Sponsored Posts.

Partnering for Innovation
•Yahoo partnered with Yelp to showcase user reviews, business information, and star ratings. Yahoo was the technology provider for the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge with Yahoo Sports.
•In collaboration with Western Union, Yahoo! en Español launched Nuevo País, Nueva Vida, a new web site on Yahoo! Noticias designed to simplify the immigration experience for millions of Hispanics living in the U.S.
•Yahoo partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to Advance Personalization and Mobile Technologies with a living laboratory for research called Project InMind..
•Yahoo Partnered with SynapSense® to Improve Energy Efficiency and Sustainability in its Quincy Data Center
•Yahoo also stands to greatly benefit from their 2012 investment in Alibaba, slated for an IPO this year.

Results

“The response has been tremendous. This fall, for the first time ever, Yahoo surpassed 400 million monthly mobile users, about half of their 800 million total monthly users.”

“I am really pleased by our first quarter performance, marking our best Q1 revenue ex-TAC since 2010. Buoyed by our 9th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in Search revenue ex-TAC and our first quarter of Q1 year-over-year growth in display revenue ex-TAC since 2011, Q1 was an early and important sign of growth in our core business,” said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. “And, with mobile pivotal to our future growth, we’re delighted to now see more than 430 million monthly mobile users accessing Yahoo’s new products.”

Yahoo is back and better than ever!

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Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader of this nominated organization:

Marissa Mayer is CEO of Yahoo.

Previously as a VP at Google, Marissa Mayer led the product management and engineering efforts of Google's local, mobile, and contextual discovery products including Google Maps, Google Maps for Mobile, Local Search, Google Earth, Street View, Latitude and more. At 36 years old, she was also the youngest member of Google's executive operating committee. During her 12 years at Google, Marissa led product management and design efforts for Google web search, images, news, books, products, toolbar, and iGoogle. She started at Google in 1999 as Google's 20th employee and first woman engineer.

Marissa received her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence.