Yahoo Comes Full Circle With Retreat From Search

Source:http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=8207337
by jano
Yahoo Inc. invested billions of dollars in its Internet search engine during the past six years before realizing it made more sense to entrust the job to an outsider — hearkening back to a conclusion the company's co-founders reached shortly after they started their Web directory in the mid-1990s.The latest shift in direction will put rival Microsoft Corp. in control of the search results and the ads that appear alongside search results on Yahoo's highly trafficked Web site, assuming the proposed partnership is approved by antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe.The 10-year deal announced Wednesday blows up a search expansion undertaken under Yahoo's former chief executive, Terry Semel, who resigned under shareholder pressure two years ago. The repudiation of Semel's strategy returns Yahoo to a philosophy embraced by co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo in the company's early days.

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Microsoft’s sweet Yahoo deal to take on Google !!!

Source:http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6736245.ece
By Jano
Not long after Carol Bartz took over at Yahoo in January she dropped the “F Bomb”. Explaining what was wrong at Yahoo, the tough-talking executive said there were “a lot of people running around telling engineers what to do but nobody is f*****g doing anything”.If anything, that endeared Bartz to potential critics. After years of bloodless management, here was a woman fired up to get Yahoo moving again.She arrived as the floundering internet giant was showing co-founder Jerry Yang the door. Shareholders were furious that Yahoo had rebuffed a $33-a-share offer from Microsoft and today the shares are worth less than half that.It had lost its way defending against the software giant and was falling ever further behind Google. Bartz was going to give Yahoo “some friggin’ breathing room” so it could “kick some butt”. Seven months later it’s Bartz’s butt that is getting the kicking. She is accused of selling off Yahoo’s crown jewel for a song.Microsoft finally reached a deal with Yahoo last week to, in effect, take over its search business. It will make Microsoft’s Bing search service Yahoo’s search engine, handing the Windows software giant almost 30% of the search market and is the end of an era in internet search, reducing the field to two key players: Microsoft and arch enemy Google.Microsoft will pay Yahoo 88% of the search revenue generated from its sites in the first five years of the agreement, the companies said. But for Yahoo, once the leader in online search, it is the end of the road.

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Google sill in love with Youtube

Source:http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/31/google-still-loves....By Jano
The video-sharing site loses money and has failed to attract quality studio programming. So why does Google continue to pump money into it?YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley (left) and product manager Salar Kamangar YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley (left) and product manager Salar Kamangar You would think Google’s executive triumvirate — CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page — would be worried about YouTube. Almost three years after they forked over $1.65 billion in stock to acquire the video-sharing site, YouTube last year delivered only an estimated $240 million in revenue and is deeply in the red.YouTube is the largest video platform in the world. Users upload 20 hours of video to it each minute, at tremendous cost to Google (GOOG). The company doesn’t break out YouTube’s expenses, but analysts believe it spends tens of millions of dollars each month just on network capacity to host all those videos.And, oh, what videos! Four years after its inception YouTube remains a repository for “long tail” content that appeals to niche audiences: clips of cats on skateboards, babies laughing, and kids lip-synching. (There are occasional mass-audience moments, like the clip of Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent, viewed 71 million times.) Gallery: See YouTube’s greatest hits But despite Google’s repeated efforts, YouTube has failed to create an environment for professional video content, where many advertisers are clamoring to put their money right now.Instead, Google’s executives have watched rival Hulu, a joint venture of GE’s NBC, News Corp.’s Fox, and now Disney’s ABC, catapult to success among consumers and advertisers alike. With its sharp media player and an interface that feels comfortingly like traditional television, Hulu has become the second-most-watched video site (after YouTube) since it launched in March 2008 and began hosting episodes of Saturday Night Live and The Office. YouTube’s attempt to capitalize on professional content? A tab on the site marked “Shows” that is home to programs like Bewitched. Really.

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Mozilla Firefox Hits 1 Billion Downloads

Source:http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Mozilla-Firefox-Hits-by Jano
Mozilla Firefox, the open-source challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, passed the 1-billion download mark on July 31, with a Web site and Twitter feed marking the occasion. Although Firefox has managed to seize an increasing percentage of the consumer market since its original rollout in 2002, its gains have been somewhat slower in the enterprise, where a variety of factors have kept Internet Explorer as the browser of choice for many IT administrators.Mozilla's Firefox browser hit 1 billion downloads on July 31, with the open-source foundation using the occasion to trumpet itself as a viable alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.On August 3, Mozilla plans to launch a Web site to mark the achievement; details of the site content are under wraps, but the foundation plans on highlighting "how global and diverse our community has become," according to a posting on a corporate site. Mozilla also set up an account on Twitter counting towards that 1-billion mark.Resource Library:Navigating The Recession For Competitive Advantage With IBM's Dynamic Warehousin Stripping Complexity from SMB IT: Virtualization Does It Data in Action: Effective data management for smarter outcomes Integrating SharePoint with Lotus Notes: Drive SharePoint Adoption While Managin At the moment Firefox hit that milestone, the browser was being downloaded some 24 times per second.Since its original release in 2002, Firefox has slowly managed to gain market-share in the consumer market. A report by research firm StatCounter in early July found that the various versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer held 54.4 percent market share, down from 65.8 percent in March 2009, while the next-to-newest version of Firefox, 3.0, held a 27.6 percent market share.

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Microsoft Released Silverlight 3 !!!

Report By Jano
Microsoft has rolled out Silverlight 3 with a lot of new stuff including the Smooth screening feature. Silverlight is a browser plugin that enables rich media experience, audio playback, vector graphics and animation. Silverlight 3 was released a day early, as it was supposed to be out officially on July 10. Currently, Silverlight 3 supports Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3 and Safari 3/4 browsers - no support for Opera and Chrome browsers.Microsoft's Silverlight is a direct rival of Adobe Flash and is available for download from Microsoft's Silverlight site.This new Silverlight 3 RTW (3.0.40264.0) version brings along a number of features, including Smooth Screening, GPU hardware acceleration, H.264/AAC/MPEG-4 Video support, and out-of-the-browser experience without any additional plugin downloads. Thousands of other API features are enumerated by Tim Heuer, program manager for Microsoft Silverlight. Microsoft touts that Silverlight 3 brings streaming of high-definition video in full screen with stutter-free live and on-demand video. For a demo of Smooth Screening, head to this special link for checking out the Smooth Screening experience of playing HD video at any point of time, instantly. The third version will allow streaming of 720p HD content over the web with an ability to Pause and Rewind the video.The GPU hardware acceleration support will allow this framework to make the best of the available graphics in the user's system. Apart from that, version 3 is a mash up of streaming video and offering Rich Internet Applications experiences. Developers would be able to create Silverlight based apps so that videos can be seen even if the browser is shut off.

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