Marissa Mayer, Former Yahoo CEO Launches New Mobile App

Former Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer began her comeback to the tech scene on Wednesday with the launch of a new mobile app called Sunshine Contacts that is aimed at helping people organize their contacts.

The startup created by Mayer after her departure from Yahoo in 2017 unveiled its app, which “automatically creates a comprehensive set of your personal and professional contacts from disparate places like your phone, online address books, and email,” according to the company.

“The essential technologies that help us stay connected to those who matter most are antiquated,” said Mayer, co-founder and CEO of Sunshine, which was previously known as Lumi Labs.

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“At Sunshine, we believe there’s an immense opportunity to make the mundane magical. It’s been an extremely challenging and rewarding problem to tackle and we’re just getting started.”

Sunshine, based in Silicon Valley, has raised $20 million in capital and plans to launch a series of other applications.

The Sunshine Contacts app, which is free and available for the Apple iOS operating system, aims to help users create more organization of their personal and professional contacts.

“If you are like most people, the contact cards on your phone are messy: they haven’t been updated in years, there are tons of duplicates, many are incomplete, some have out of date information,” according to the Sunshine website.

With the app, “Your previously, static messy contact cards are then magically organized and updated with the latest info.”

Mayer left Yahoo in 2017 after failing to engineer a turnaround of the once-dominant internet company, and finally negotiating a sale to telecom giant Verizon.

Yahoo was sold for less than $5 billion, capping a long decline from when it had a peak market value of some $125 billion in 2000.

She was named CEO at Yahoo in 2012 after more than a decade at Google, becoming one of the few women to head a major Silicon Valley tech firm.

Mayer’s Sunshine co-founder is Enrique Munoz Torres, a former head of search and advertising at Yahoo and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

BizWatch recalls that on October 15th, 2020, Yahoo announced that its 19-year-old service platform Yahoo Groups will shut down on December 15, 2020, after a steady decline in usage.

BizWatch also recalls that Verizon, which took ownership of Yahoo in 2017, made this announcement known via the Yahoo Groups website and emails sent to Yahoo Group users. Yahoo agreed to sell its core assets to telecom giant Verizon for $4.8 billion, ending a 20-year run by the internet pioneer as an independent company

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