Yahoo! Reportedly Mulls Sale of HotJobs

Updated from 1 a.m. EDT

Yahoo!(YHOO) is trying to shed its HotJobs and Yahoo Small Business operations, according to peHub, a Web site owned by ThomsonReuters.

"They've been approached by (major buyout firms) but they're proactively looking to sell to a strategic investor like a Careerbuilder or Monster.com," peHub reports, citing one source familiar with the situation. Hotjobs, an online job search engine, competes with Careerbuilder and Monster.com.

Yahoo! bought HotJobs for $436 million in cash and stock back in 2001, peHub notes.

Yahoo Small Business provides products and services that enable customers to establish their businesses on the Internet.

Yahoo! has been looking for buyers for the two properties for two to three months, peHub says, citing a source.

Meanwhile, a seprate report says Yahoo! is in final stage talks to acquire Xoopit, an email-productivity startup.

The price range for the deal is about $20 million, says one person familiar with the matter, reports the Wall Street Journal's Digits blog. The deal isn't not yet final.

Xoopit is software that allows users to take the photos, files and videos that users send to them in email and post them to social networking sites and blogs, the Journal notes.

A Yahoo! spokeswoman declined to comment for the newspaper, while representatives for Xoopit couldn't be reached for comment.

The Xoopit software, which is an add-on to the Firefox browser, was initially geared towards Google's(GOOG) Gmail, but the company has since built a version for Yahoo Mail as well, according to the Journal. Yahoo! is interested in Xoopit as part of its strategy to turn Yahoo Mail into a platform that links to other popular Internet services, people close to the deal said.

The Internet giant reported second-quarter results Tuesday, beating analysts' revenue and earnings estimates despite seeing its sales dip 13% from a year earlier.

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