Vodafone snaps up Broadband services in Spain & Italy

The giant mobile phone firm, Vodafone, has expanded its interest in the European broadband market by spending £537 million on businesses in Spain and Italy. The UK-based telecoms firm is buying the divisions, which provide fixed-line telephone and broadband services from Sweden's Tele2.

The combined Spanish and Italian units have about three million customers and Vodafone said “it would benefit from "attractive high growth" in broadband use in the two countries.” The deal meant it immediately had the infrastructure it needed in place, the company said. (source: BBC)

In an effort to try and keep up with the pace in innovation in the fast growing global online market, Yahoo! is using India as a test-bed for new ideas. The internet search engine group is also targeting fast-growing Asian economies for user and advertising sales growth in an effort to narrow the financial gap with Google.

Terry Semel as chief executive left Yahoo! after a disappointing share price and a feeling that its management was losing ground to Google. He was succeeded by Jerry Yang, the company’s co-founder. Yahoo! has refocused on its core display advertising and search businesses. David Filo, co-founded Yahoo! with Mr Yang at Stanford University in 1994, and said: “We all agree we were trying too many things before. We are taking a fresh look, questioning everything. It’s good to step back after 13 years and see where we want to go in the next ten.”

Yahoo! claims about 500 million users worldwide, but nearly two thirds of its revenue comes from America. With a population of 1.1 billion (India), it has only 40 million internet users, most of whom access it through cybercafés, but the number is rising quickly, particularly through mobile phones, Yahoo! says that it has 24 million active users in India, its largest operation outside America. (source: Timesonline)

Personally, I think that Yahoo will have to do more than this to try and close the gap with rival Google. Google has something that is unique and no other internet search engine will be able to catch them in the growing global online market.