Despite hiccups, Yahoo’s planned sale to Verizon appears to be moving forward — but some portions of the company will be left behind and renamed Altaba Inc.
Yahoo is hanging on to its 15 percent stake in Alibaba and its 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, and those assets will survive as an investment company under the new name Altaba Inc., as the rest of Yahoo integrates with Verizon. The assets had previously been nicknamed Remain Co.
Only five board members will remain at Altaba: Tor Braham, Eric Brandt, Catherine Friedman, Thomas McInerney and Jeffrey Smith. The rest of Yahoo’s board, including CEO Marissa Mayer, will step down from the newly formed company. Mayer may be tapped for a role in Yahoo’s integration at Verizon, but her position has yet to be announced.
The news of the name change comes in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing is an indication that Verizon is moving forward with its purchase of Yahoo, which disclosed multiple security breaches last year affecting more than 1 billion users. Verizon reportedly considered asking for a discount on the $4.8 billion deal after the breaches were disclosed, and a discounted price may still be announced before the deal closes. It’s also possible that the deal might be cancelled outright. (Disclosure: Verizon owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch.)
Yahoo — or, should we say Altaba now? — also acknowledged in its SEC filing that the security breaches may imperil the deal with Verizon. The company noted “risks that Verizon may assert, or threaten to assert, rights or claims with respect to the Stock Purchase Agreement as a result of facts relating to the security incidents disclosed on September 22, 2016 and December 14, 2016 and may seek to terminate the Stock Purchase Agreement or renegotiate the terms of the Sale Transaction on that basis.”
More clues about how Yahoo’s cybersecurity problems will impact the sale are expected to come during Yahoo’s earnings call later this month.

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Abhishek Singh graduated from NYU’s ITP program and clearly he learned a lot about the future of computing. During his tenure there he quickly fell in love with hardware startups and, with a little grit and programming work, he created Peeqo , a robot that responds only in GIFs. That’s right: this is a robot that replies only in animated video clips.
God help us.
“I’ve always been fascinated by robots and I built this as part of my thesis at ITP. One of the reasons I wanted to build this bot was because I feel a lot of the conversation on social robotics today centers around their inability to express emotion or to be relatable,” he said. “I love GIFs as much as every other person and they’ve become a universal language of sorts on the internet and beyond, capable of depicting almost anything from emotion to information. Often a GIF just says it better.”
Like R2-D2’s cheeps and chirps, Peeqo has a limited human vocabulary but is a surprisingly rich communicator. He does standard Google/Alexa stuff – loading up Spotify, turning off your lights – but almost every interaction is followed by a clever GIF. You can play music on him and even start his camera so he can record your existential howl as you realize GIFs are now a form of rich communication.
“Peeqo sits at the intersection of three things I really love – building things, animated movies and GIFs. I definitely drew a lot of inspiration from Disney and Pixar during the design process to reach his final form,” said Singh.
Singh is the founder of Svrround , a 360-degree video startup. He is open sourcing Peeqo and he built the robot after integrating the engineering, software, and hardware education he received in school. He calls Peeqo the “love child of Amazon Echo and a Disney character.”
It’s clear that as we wander further into the uncanny valley robots like Peeqo will become commonplace. While I can’t imagine Alexa responding with a Whiplash GIF it’s easy to imagine a world in which your desk robot yells at you to get back to work when it senses you’re back on Reddit. You can see the DIY build here and check him out here. He’s completely open source so you’ll be able to cry about the death of the 21st century mind in the comfort of your own home after you assemble your own Peeqo out of grief, horror, and 3D printed plastic.

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After announcing the date and location of this year’s Google Cloud Next conference last October, the company has announced today that early bird registration is now open. Those who want to take advantage of a whopping $500 discount must register before January 17 for $999.
The conference will take place from March 8 to March 10, 2017, in San Francisco, CA, and the company says that attending it is a must for Google Cloud developers. According to the event’s website , the conference is:
Those attending the conference can expect to hear from Google’s main leaders. Some already confirmed keynote speakers are Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence at Google Cloud, Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, and Sam Ramji, VP of Compute and Developer Services at Google Cloud will also be sharing their vision on stage.
Besides that, more than 250 technical sessions are planned for the 3-day conference. The schedule contains activities regarding Big Data & Machine Learning, Application Development, Infrastructure & Operations, Collaboration & Productivity and Mobility & Devices. Google Cloud Certified Professional exams are also to be held with flexible hours.
Finally, you can add bootcamp sessions to your schedule by paying more $500 for one bootcamp or $800 for two. According to Google, those are interactive-rich sessions with demonstrations and hands-on coding labs.
Source: Google Blog

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