SoftBank pays $1.6 billion for a perpetual Yahoo trademark licensing, according to TechCrunch. A totally different celebration was likely going place just a few blocks down the street at Verizon’s official offices in Midtown when firework volleys launched out into New York City port Friday night. The telco, which owns TechCrunch for a few more weeks pending the Apollo acquisition of our parent company Verizon Media, announced overnight that it had signed an agreement with Z Holdings, a division of Japan’s SoftBank Group, to sell trademarks in the Japanese market around the Yahoo brand and related tech infrastructure for $1.6 billion. SoftBank’s online assets in Japan are owned by Z Holdings, most notably Yahoo Japan, whose web portal remains the country’s most visited news website./nRead More