Yahoo Labs was set up in 2005 as an incubator for technology-based research and experimentation. Unfortunately, the company experienced significant financial hardships, which resulted in the Lab going through some heavy cuts last year.
Marissa Mayer was brought in to re-focus the fledgling company, and she quickly established an emphasis on the recruitment of top talent in the industry.
To date, Mayer has spent more than $1.2 billion on taking over various start-ups, most notably of which includes the acquisitions of Tumblr Inc. founder David Karp and Nick D'Aloisio, the teenage founder of the news reading app, Summly.
Now that she has a few big names on the Yahoo roster, Mayer is shifting her focus to the re-establishment of Yahoo Labs as a place for Silicon Valley’s top talent to come and develop their concept technologies.
So far this year, the Lab has hired 30 researchers with PhDs to work on product development. The goal, according to Mayer in an interview, is to hire 20 more by the end of year.
“The lab is still here — it's been reduced in size,” Mayer said. The company is investing “heavily to build it back up,” she added.
Giving the department some legitimacy is Chief Scientist Ron Brachman, a former scientist at the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPAhich helped create the Internet in the 1960s. He is tasked with overseeing the Lab, which will work on technologies ranging from mobile to content personalization to predictive analytics and more.
Job openings listed on Yahoo's website include a research scientist specializing in mobile, a senior principal scientist in personalization and a research scientist in pricing and marketplaces.
Along with bringing in top talent, Ms. Mayer also intends to put engineers back at the center of the company. This is best evidenced by taking a look at the roster of Yahoo’s technology council, which is made up of eight leaders, and includes o-founder David Filo and Chief Architect Amotz Maimon, both of whom play critical roles in the approval of new products.
“If I don't sign off and say it's excellent from a product standpoint, and if David Filo or Amotz don't sign off and say it's excellent from tech-council standpoint, it doesn't happen,” Mayer said.
Yahoo has been one of the more interesting technology companies to watch over the past year. At Marissa Mayer’s introduction, many experts were questioning whether or not she would be able to make the changes necessary in order to turn the company around.
And while some of Yahoo’s acquisitions can certainly be debated on the grounds of whether or not they were smart purchases, there’s no getting around how Wall Street feels about the company — Yahoo’s stock has risen 75% in the past year.
Story via Bloomberg.com
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