Most of your post is just sarcastic personal attacks, but I'll respond to the actual questions concerning the company.
You have no idea why IBM holds their position or not. The both of us can only speculate. The fact that IBM holds 10% of this company (something like 5 million shares) means it's impossible to unload those shares on the open market, given that the volume in this stock is maybe 100 K a day. Of course, they could promote the stock to try to dump it (like posters on this board admit happened last year -- real nice -- but that's a separate story, and IBM wouldn't be caught dead engaging in stock promotion).
In addition, it may be that the shares are restricted. That part isn't clear to me.
In any case, Yippy has a license to use some software (Clusty and Velocity) from several years ago. They got Clusty, the search engine, as part of the deal, and it appears Yippy did essentially no development on it other than changing the icon that appears at the top of the search page. My own personal use of the site shows the results it pulls up are actually not very relevant, especially when compared with what you get using Google or Bing. Try it out for yourself if you don't believe me.
You can even find references to 'Clusty' in the source code or images if you browse around for a while. It's pretty obvious to me they did a shoddy job in trying to do anything (i.e. innovate) with Clusty. Your argument is that Clusty and a license for Velocity inherently makes it worth $130 million, or so, but it's sort of obvious this isn't correct considering IBM bought the entire company, not just a license to use a portion of Vivisimo's software from 2010. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
IBM took what they wanted from Vivisimo, and integrated Velocity into their platform, which they've now been selling competitively for years. A Google search will reveal lots of references to it. They got the entire team of software engineers from Vivisimo, and made their existing product better.
In contrast, what I've seen from Yippy is a clunky search engine product, a faulty toolbar company acquisition with a toolbar you can't even download, and vague references in the financial reports about "EASE". EASE is a system to allow single sign on -- it's unrelated to Velocity, which is an algorithm for clustering search results. We know Yippy has only a few employees, including recent hires, but who is doing the programming of anything for this company? I particularly LOL'd about the reference to Obamacare in their financial reports. Laughable that the CEO is using the financial reports as a political mouthpiece, and also making excuses as to why millions have been spent but no real identifiable development team exists (other than some contractors, the number of which is also unknown).
If the "contractor-only-because-of-Obamacare" model is so great, why don't we see most successful companies using it?
Years of time have passed since acquiring Clusty and a license for Velocity, and Yippy has no viable product from it. Millions of dollars in shareholder money have been wasted, and we're almost to 2014 with no visible product. Given the latest PR regarding "a Fortune 100 company billed in the six figure range," I'm looking forward to whether something materializes or not. Time will tell.
I also find your argument of "insurance policy" a non-starter. As I understand it, your argument goes like this: 1) A 3rd party company makes an offer for Yippy, 2) IBM calls a vote and offers a larger offer, 3) 3rd party company loses.
So knowing this, why would a third party company make an offer in the first place? It seems like the stable situation under this sequence of events you've imagined is just that no one offers anything for Yippy. IBM keeps its 10%, and nothing happens. Why would a company offer money for Yippy knowing that their acquisition will automatically be blocked by an offer from IBM, under your proposed behavior of all companies involved? Seems to me you are engaging in quite a bit of wishful thinking.
Also, in terms of valuation, there's a big difference between acquiring an entire company and acquiring a license to use it's software in its own products. That's like saying because I bought a copy of Windows 8 for $300, and Microsoft values its Windows 8 division at $3.2 billion, that my copy of Windows 8 is now worth $3.2 billion, and thus I should expect to become a billionaire overnight. Your analogy to a house is just completely faulty; I don't see why you even made an argument that can be refuted so simply. A license is not the same thing as buying a company. The valuations are on totally difference scales.
So assuming *no depreciation*, i.e. that what Yippy bought for $5 million in 2010 or so, is still worth $5 million, this company should be worth 5,000,000/75,000,000 shares =~ 6.67 cents per share.
This is all my opinion, of course.
Looking forward to disclosure of Yippy's actual agreement with this Fortune 100 company
YIPI
Welcome to the Cloud
To the moon.
