In the middle of the slow summer months, this has been one hectic week: Earnings and other news have kept the information flowing at a much faster pace. I have been taking notes and wanted to share these interesting tidbits, which have gotten lost in the noise.

Yelp calls for help!

You might not have paid attention to Yelp’s quarterly earnings reports, but the company has decided to abandon the display-ad formats that are disrupting the app experience. According to Jefferies analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald, this is “an almost 100% margin business and therefore the impact to profitability is very significant.” They calculate that nearly “$10M of the $30M hit to the Rev/Adj. EBITDA outlook for the back half of the year will come from turning off brand inventory.” Ouch! But in the long run this will be good for Yelp, as they are focusing on customers and the app experience. I sincerely hope more companies put customer experience first. Are you listening, you calcifying media companies?

Yelp earnings revealed that the company is struggling to hire salespeople and is blaming it on the ridiculously hot labor market in the Bay Area. What’s causing the problem? High-flying unicorns (a euphemism for private companies with valuations that are at or north of a billion dollars) are offering more-attractive options, salaries and perks compared to companies like Yelp, which as a public company has to maintain some sort of sanity and has stagnant stock. But Yelp isn’t alone in its suffering! The whole Bay Area is seeing inflation in salaries, perks and real estate costs, which are increasing the cost of building startups.

Set-top box vs. streaming devices

Add this to your “cord-cutting is for real” folder!

In a recent report, research firm Infonetics pointed out that the demand for streaming dongles such as Google’s Chromecast, Roku HDMI sticks and Amazon’s Fire TV is red hot. Infonetics predicts that about 27 million of these will be sold by 2019: Set-top boxes as we have known them might be on their way out! Perhaps that is why Cisco is exiting the set-top box market and is selling what it calls “customer premise equipment business” to Technicolor of France for about $600 million in cash and stock. This is the old Scientific Atlanta business that Cisco bought in 2005 with much fanfare for a whopping $6.9 billion. [Infonetics]

Trump-d

You can’t have enough money — or rather, the only way to have money is to ask for more money. I came to that conclusion after reading this report in the Wall Street Journal about Donald Trump’s filings with the election commission. Since Feb. 2014, he has received $1.9 million in income for seven paid speeches. He also got $110,228 in pension funds from the Screen Actors Guild, starting in July 2011. [WSJ]

Eggflation

Eggflation? You better believe it. The price of eggs in the U.S. is up sharply, due to a directive from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in response to avian flu. In April 2015, five million chickens were ordered to be killed on an Iowa farm. That number is now up to 48 million birds, and it is impacting farms in the Midwest and the Western states. Nearly three-quarters of those chickens were egg-laying chickens. [Vice]

7 billion mobile strong

Not all news is bad news: There are now 7 billion mobile subscribers, thanks largely to heavily populated countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Asia has 3.7 billion mobile subscribers, with China and India alone accounting for 2.3 billion subscribers. However, in India, 90 percent of subscribers are using old 2G technology. To be clear, in India (and other countries), people buy more than one SIM card, and as a result many research firms count each as a “subscriber.” According to TeleGeography, “Between Q1 2014 and Q1 2015, Asia added 194 million subscribers, or over 60% of net new global wireless subscribers.” China has 162 million LTE subscribers. [TeleGeography]

Facebook’s Mobile Bonanza

The number of mobile-only Facebook users now makes up over 40 percent of monthly active users, compared with 25 percent a year ago. It’s no surprise then that $2.9 billion, or 76 percent, of advertising revenue comes from mobile users. [Facebook Quarterly Reports]

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