yahoo

Why Yahoo is finally taking a step in the right direction

Although news of layoffs and cost cutting is never a good sign for tech companies, there are some instances when such news arrives that may actually be a sign of good things to come.

According to The New York Times, Yahoo may be preparing to lay off hundreds of people in the coming weeks and focus on three parts of its business-- becoming a "starting point" for the most consumers on the Web; extending its advertising offerings to sites across the Web; and opening up Yahoo's technology infrastructure to third-party developers and publishers.

So what does this mean for me and you? It means that Yahoo may finally be taking a step in the right direction and realizing that the Google onslaught it has been forced to endure over the past few years will only get worse if it doesn't act now.

And based on what I saw from the company at CES, there are some signs that things may turn around.… Read more

Yahoo! mulling over layoffs of up to 20% of its workforce

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Yahoo! is set to cut 1,500 to 2,500 jobs (up to 20% of its 12,500-strong workforce). A list of those to go has allegedly been compiled and turned into management:

The "list" is reportedly the product of a Q4 project in which all group heads were asked to look at redundancies and create their own lists of potential cuts. All the group-level lists have now been turned in to corporate.

Some are suggesting that the cuts will primarily hit Yahoo!'s European operations (arguably the most expensive place on the planet to cut jobs due to severance packages). … Read more

Flock adding e-mail and Picasa integration with next update

Flock's set to release its first big update since going 1.0 back in November (note: you can download that version here). The new version (1.1) will feature a handful of useful updates to some of the built-in services, along with integration for Web mail and Google's Picasa.

Between the two, I'm most interested in Web mail integration. For folks who aren't using a software e-mail client like Outlook, Thunderbird, or Apple Mail, the only other options are to keep a browser tab open and keep an eye on things or use a standalone software … Read more

Yahoo throws weight behind OpenID standard

In one of the most significant moves yet in the growing push toward service interoperability on the Web, tech giant Yahoo announced Thursday that it is supporting the OpenID 2.0 standard for a universal Internet log-in.

No matter what your views of Yahoo's current stability may be, this is undoubtedly a big victory for OpenID. Not so long ago, the protocol was considered a dot-com/futurist pipe dream. OpenID was created by Web 2.0 guru Brad Fitzpatrick, who founded LiveJournal and was brought on board at Google last year as one of the most prominent players in … Read more

Proximic signs ad deals with Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com

Content-delivery network Proximic, which has a unique contextual matching system, now has ads to sell that can help bloggers and others monetize their sites.

The company was set to announce on Wednesday that it has signed deals to syndicate the product catalogs of the Yahoo Shopping Network and eBay's Shopping.com. This dumps nearly 50 million ad units into Proximic's advertising network.

Proximic, which launched in October, differs from Google AdSense and other keyword-based systems in that it automatically reads and matches relevant content according to "interconnected patterns" in documents that seem to be based more … Read more

Yahoo! ripening for an acquisition

An analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein pegs the value of Yahoo!'s cash and stock holdings below the value of its actual business. No wonder word on the street is that Microsoft is mulling over an acquisition.

At $24.09, Thursday's closing price, Yahoo has a market capitalization of $32 billion. When Mr. Lindsay looks at the company's $2 billion in cash, along with its holdings in Yahoo Japan, Alibaba (the Chinese e-commerce firm) and other entities it doesn't run, he comes up with a value of $13.24 a share. That leaves a value of $10.51 a share for the actual business of Yahoo, making the value of Yahoo's core business about $14 billion, or 7 percent of Google's $200 billion market value.

What is Yahoo! to do?… Read more

Yahoo's Ian Rogers calls for music standards on the Web

Ian Rogers, Yahoo's VP of Video and Media Applications, didn't get much chance to speak on the five-person panel I saw at Billboard Live. However, he gave a very interesting presentation at Aspen Live, a conference for music industry types sponsored by talent agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA), and he's paraphrased the talk in its entirety--complete with slides--on his blog.

Most of his arguments ring true to me: scarcity has been replaced by abundance, and spending incremental dollars on improving quality (while difficult and highly subjective) will provide much better returns in the long tail era … Read more

Microsoft looking for the Limelight?

Microsoft has said it plans to continue its acquisition spree this year and it is off to a good start, having announced plans on Tuesday to buy Norway's Fast Search and Transfer.

There's no shortage of rumors of who is next on Steve Ballmer's shopping list. Earlier this week, there were separate rumors that Microsoft was interested in Yahoo as well as accessories maker Logitech.

Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider added another potential name to the list, saying Friday that he's heard that Microsoft might be interested in Limelight, a publicly traded company that runs … Read more

Yahoo tool eases music playback from personal Web pages

If you often link to music files from your personal Web page or blog, and have some control over the code on that page, Yahoo's got an interesting tool for you. With a few lines of very simple Javascript code, you can add small "play" buttons that link to specific songs. When users click those buttons, the Yahoo Media Player launches, letting visitors play the song without leaving your page. There was a previous iteration of the Player, but it worked only on Yahoo Music and linked only to music files from Yahoo's own site.

How does it work? Judge for yourself--these are two songs from old bands on which I played bass (so I have at least a plausible claim to partial copyright). I simply followed the instructions here and here (to insert album covers). Click on the small arrows (after the page break) and they'll play right within the Yahoo Media Player at the bottom left of the page. (Worked for me on Firefox on Windows XP, your mileage may vary!)

Click the 'Read More' button below to listen to the tracks.… Read more

Linux Magazine's top 20 companies for 2008

There are some notable omissions from Linux Magazine's list of the top-20 companies for 2008 (MuleSource, MySQL, etc.), but it's an interesting list because it doesn't read like a standard list of open-source companies. Or, rather, it takes a more expansive, "Long Tail" view of what an open source company is.

Hence, the list includes the usual suspects like Alfresco (correctly reading that Alfresco is a serious threat to Sharepoint's growing dominance), Mozilla, Ubuntu/Canonical, Red Hat, and rPath, but also Google, Yahoo!, and...Microsoft.… Read more