Marketing Biz: LinkedIn Acquires SlideShare, Yahoo CEO Lies & Bing Gets a New Look

Happy Star Wars Day. The force did seem to be with us this week. LinkedIn acquired SlideShare, both SEOmoz and AVOS landed new rounds of funding and Bing did some spring cleaning. But the dark side did rear its ugly head as Tumblr’s President departed and Yahoo’s CEO was caught lying on his resume.

SlideShare and LinkedIn sitting in a tree…

What does this mean for SlideShare the company? I will continue to run SlideShare and our team will continue to do what we’ve been doing, which is to develop new features and make the site even better. Over time you will see some integrations that take advantage of the great fit between SlideShare and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn buys SlideShare for $119 million, which seems like a bargain after the billion-dollar Instagram purchase. LinkedIn has struggled for ways to expand their reach but now has a very strong content generation asset. This is a smart move at a bargain price.

Yahoo’s Board Will “Review” Resume Discrepancy of CEO

Yahoo just released a statement that its board will “review” today’s revelation that the bio of its CEO Scott Thompson contained an error related to his educational achievements and will make “appropriate disclosure” about what happened.

What’s to review? He lied. It doesn’t really change anything. It’s not like Thompson suddenly becomes unqualified. But it’s another black eye for Yahoo, who seems hellbent on making themselves a tech pariah.

WHERE Ads is now PayPal Media Network

The boundaries between the physical and digital world have disappeared and the purchase funnel has become a purchase pretzel! No longer is there ecommerce, offline commerce, m-commerce – there is simply commerce.

The PayPal Media Network offers advertisers the ability to reach their consumers across all of these touchpoints and mediums to drive a variety of responses, be it foot traffic to a retail location via mobile to check out a sale or redeem an offer, online when they are deep into research or post transaction when they may be looking for complimentary products or services. We are enabling brands to be omni-present for consumers, and connect with them at the right time, the right place, and with the right message.

I love the phrase ‘purchase pretzel’ and believe PayPal is moving swiftly into an explosive field. Companies that can offer services that converge around local, mobile and commerce are poised for incredible growth.

Bing Gets a New Look

Starting today you will notice a fresh, de-cluttered experience designed to help you find the results you want faster. Over the past few months, we’ve run dozens of experiments to determine how you read our pages to deliver the link you’re looking for. Based on that feedback, we’ve tuned the site to make the entire page easier to scan, removing unnecessary distractions, and making the overall experience more predictable and useful. This refreshed design helps you do more with search—and gives us a canvas for bringing future innovation to you.

You can’t say Bing isn’t trying. In the face of a 900-pound gorilla (Google) and rising losses (one billion a quarter), Bing continues to iterate. The new interface is far more spartan and monochromatic. Will it matter? Probably not.

The Search Agency Continues International Growth With Canadian Acquisition

The Acquisition Agency’s Toronto offices will become The Search Agency’s Canadian headquarters, and will operate under The Search Agency brand. The acquisition will also enhance The Search Agency’s core service offerings, and will leverage The Acquisition Agency’s expertise in affiliate management, media buying and planning, SEO and SEM and other online lead generation campaigns.

The Search Agency is acquiring The Acquisition Agency. There’s a Yo Dawg joke in there somewhere, right? The acquisition solidifies The Search Agency’s place in AdAge’s Top 10 Largest U.S. Search-Marketing Agencies, ahead of Covario, who moved up 5 places and saw the largest growth in year over year revenue.

Chad Hurley And Steve Chen’s AVOS Closes Its Series A Funding

The round is led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Google Ventures, with participation from Madrone Capital and Kai-Fu Lee’s Chinese incubator Innovation Works.

Alas, Chad and Steve are keeping mum on the exact terms of the deal, saying it’s really more about the non-monetary resources that their new investors bring to the table than it is about a need for money.

This rings true since Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have money to spare from their YouTube exit. What they’re doing isn’t clear to me. They ‘saved’ Delicious but it looks like Bit.ly might be the one to figure out how to build a discovery engine on top of crowdsourced content.

Tumblr president quits amid questions about experience

“People familiar with the situation” told the Journal that Maloney’s skills as a general manager became less relevant as the company increased in size to 100 employees and brought other department executives into the fold.

The headline makes it seem like he stormed out or was forced out. But that doesn’t seem like the case here. Those who excel in start-up environments often don’t in larger organizations. Despite the dire headlines, that’s okay.

Moz’s $18 Million Venture Financing: Our Story, Metrics and Future

After 5 years of organic growth (from our initial funding in 2007) and two tough, failed attempts at financing (in 2009 and 2011), I’m excited to announce that SEOmoz has raised $18 million in venture capital from Foundry Group and Ignition Partners. Brad Feld from Foundry and Moz’s COO, Sarah Bird will be joining the board as Gillian Muessig steps down to pursue new goals.

The SEO Inbound Marketing Software company lands some venture capital to take on the growing tool market. CEO Rand Fishkin has been a great advocate for the search industry and it’s good to see generous people succeed. (Okay, love-fest over.)

Number of “.brand” TLD applications may exceed 1,200

In an interview with Domain Incite, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom revealed that some 1,268 user accounts had been created when registration closed on March 29, up from the 839 reported on March 25.

I fail to see how these new gTLDs are going to bring anything but confusion to users and brands. How do you feel about the new gTLDs?