Yahoo.com is down again for the second time in as many weeks. Which is news because Yahoo never goes down. Except recently. And they’re probably so busy dealing with that outage that no one noticed that Halloween is over, and so they should probably stop promoting it on Yahoo Shopping.

Will the last person out please turn the lights back on?

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Halloween’s Over Yahoo, So Turn The Lights Back On

Oh Quora! You’ve done it again. This time with the utterly fascinating “What startups have been started by former Yahoo employees?” thread which provides a pretty comprehensive list from AClevertwist.com to Ycombinator.com (Quick, some ex-Yahooer start a Z-word startup!) of startups founded by former Yahoo employees, which, as we’ve already pointed out, are a force to be reckoned with.

Inspired by the sheer scope of Yahoo defector startups (Hunch! Ycombinator! Tunerfish! Tinyspeck! Onetruefan!) we and the folks at Pearltrees are working on the above visualization, which currently runs through “M.” So go ahead, click on one of the nodes and explore the ever expanding house that Y! built.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Startups Started By Former Yahoo Employees [Graphic]

Yahoo’s top engineer who heads up mobile app development for the company, Sandeep Gupta, just resigned, I have learned. It is another blow to Yahoo’s mobile ambitions. Gupta is a rock star mobile engineer who previously worked at Apple in charge of the iPod software and UI teams. At Yahoo, Gupta was in charge of creating all mobile apps for phones and tablets. He led the teams which launched the iPhone apps for Flickr, Fantasy Sports, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Messenger, as well as Yahoo! Entertainment on the iPad.

Gupta’s title was Senior Director, Application Development, according to his LinkedIn profile. It still lists Yahoo as his current job:

I currently lead the Application Development efforts at Yahoo!. I am responsible for all aspects of development including UI, Engineering, QA and Program management for both mobile and tablet devices. I work with the executive team to shape and define Yahoo’s Mobile applications, and then execute on them, conforming to a defined schedule. To this end I assembled a best of class team to deliver best of breed applications for Yahoo.

Yahoo’s mobile team has seen a series of high-level departures since Carol Bartz took over as CEo, starting with former mobile chief Marco Boerries and chief scientist Marc Davis.

Photo credit: Flickr/Marc Davis.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Exclusive: Yahoo Loses Top Mobile App Engineer, Sandeep Gupta

One thing you can say about the Flickr team – there’s some fight in ‘em. They apparently were not super pleased with our coverage of their annual (and unofficial) Grant-Pattishall Award given each year to the Yahoo engineer who “who breaks Flickr in the most spectacular way.” I’m not sure why, I think the award is fun.

So now they have a new award, called the Bogan-Martin Award: “The Bogan-Martin Award is given yearly to the Flickr staff member who inadvertently generates the most spectacular media overreaction to a personal comment or inside joke.”

So who won? Daniel Bogan this year, who was also this year’s winner of the other award. And last year was Chris Martin. Both winners names link to previous posts we’ve done. Suggesting that we’re the media that is engaging in the spectacular overreaction.

Ok, Flickr. You won this round.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

The Flickr Bogan-Martin Award For “Media Overreaction”

One thing Silicon Valley doesn’t have enough of are solid product visionaries. The problem is the really good ones tend of start their own companies. Or whoever they work for locks them up so tight that no one can pry them loose. But there’s one guy I’ve kept my eye on for the last few years, Eckart Walther, who seems to be in play. I wonder for how long.

I first met Eckart when he was at Yahoo as a group vice president of product management for search – that was back in the day when Yahoo was still the no. 2 search engine behind Google and had no plans to relinquish that title. Prior to Yahoo he was at Tellme (acquired by Microsoft). And way back in the day, at Netscape. Most recently he parked himself at LiveOps doing God-knows-what.

He’s left LiveOps and has quietly taken a position at Accel Partners as an entrepreneur in residence. That means he’s being paid to sit around and think a lot, and occasionally join a meeting or two. I randomly saw this on his Facebook feed this evening and haven’t had a chance to talk to him about his plans. But he’s likely to either be starting a new company or looking for his next job at a startup.

Keep an eye on whatever he does next, it’s likely to be something worth watching. Follow him on Twitter at @eckartwalther.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Product Guru Eckart Walther Goes Free Agent As EIR At Accel Partners

“Can Tim Armstrong make AOL king of content by 2010?” – Blog headline

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” – Macbeth

There’s something about the idea of “New York Internet Week” that I’ve always found inherently funny; like “Saudi Arabia Bring Your Daughter To Work Day”, or Greenland being called Greenland.

Ironically for a city that’s always been so adept at branding itself, New York has always struggled to articulate its place in the worldwide web, and Internet Week is the clearest manifestation of that identity crisis. Name an industry that the Internet is disrupting: newspapers, publishing, advertising, banking – and you’ll find its heart in Manhattan. Despite the best efforts of Mayor Bloomberg and, uh, Dennis Crowley to paint New York as the place to do business in Web 3.0, the fact is that billions of advertising and investment dollars continue to flood west, never to return. And yet New York, bless it, continues to try to stay relevant – for one week a year at least – to the industry that’s bleeding it dry.

Witness the Webbies – the awards ceremony that congratulates New York based celebrities who have learned to tweet – witness the awkward panels filled with mismatched home-grown personalities (“Julia Alison meets Jeff Jarvis“) and witness (if you can’t avoid it) the week-long parties where thousands of identically unique hipsters cram into lofts to drink booze sponsored by one or all of the east coast’s four successful start-ups.

Even when they invite west coasters to get involved, the effort manages to come off more weird than wired: I was flown to town, on the kind of handsomely subsidised meal ticket only New York can offer, to moderate a panel on “Internet dating in a web 2.0 world” for an audience of feature writers from women’s magazines. This despite the fact that asking me to help navigate the minefield of online dating is like asking Rudolf Hess to give guided tours of Dachau. Nice try, New York.

And yet. While it’s easy for me to mock New York Media’s bewilderment over the Internet (see!), there was a marked change in atmosphere during this year’s Internet Week, compared to last year’s. A definite uptick in confidence, not all of which can be put down to the fact that Dennis made it on to the front cover of UK Wired. No, the change in attitude in New York towards the Internet can more fully be attributed to one word: content.

New York is a content town and, thanks in large part to AOL and Yahoo, content is once again king. Speaking at Disrupt last month, AOL’s Tim Armstrong boasted that AOL “is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media”. Yahoo is taking a similar – if less clearly defined – approach, purchasing Associated Content for somewhere in the region of $100m and now, if rumours are true, eying up the Huffington Post. For the New York media crowd, this is great news – great news for journalists who are being laid off left right and centre, great news for newspapers and publishers who smell lucrative content syndication deals and great news for pro blog networks who might finally see an exit. If content really is king, then New York is its ready-made kingdom.

And yet. And yet.

The way that the likes of Tim Armstrong use phrase “content is king” conjures up a noble image. An image of professional journalists and highly-skilled writers, possibly wearing crowns, slaving over hot typewriters to produce 1000 words of crisp copy for an eager online audience; or perhaps of sharply-written web video, a la College Humor’s original programming, or the New York Times’ daily video podcasts. For ‘content’, New York media folks read a web 3.0 of professionally produced news, analysis, entertainment – the antithesis of web 2.0′s user generated horse-shit. No wonder they’re salivating.

But that’s a very east coast – with its proud history of newspapers and publishing – interpretation of the word. Over on the west cost (and note: I’m using that term in its laziest sense to cover all Internet companies including those who, by accident of birth, have offices back east), “content” means the precise dictionary definition of the term: “something contained, as in a receptacle”; generic filler to pack inside an empty box to make it attractive to advertisers. Low-paid, illiterate swill, commissioned by the ton to provide SEO ad inventory. Just consider Associated Content and how it describes its goals post- Yahoo acquisition…

“Associated Content is now a part of Yahoo! – the world’s largest online company, with more than 600 million unique visitors a month. Yahoo! plans to leverage our content to extend its leadership and build upon their global properties to deliver personally relevant content in a scalable and efficient manner.

I mean, kudos to the company for not using the words ‘writing’ or ‘journalism’ to describe what their crowd-sourced hacks do, but it’s still hard to imagine a more mercenary way to describe the craft of writing. These are not writers, or journalists; these are self-confessed generators of content in the much the same way that horses are self-confessed generators of glue.

At least the Huffington Post employs real writers – assuming your definition of ‘employs’ doesn’t require there to be payment or any meaningful editorial support and if your definition of ‘writers’ includes the authors of stories like “Sex Tapes Of The Past Decade: A Look At The Noughties’ Naughtiest” and “Indonesia’s First Celebrity Sex Tape Scandal” and “Kendra Wilkinson’s Sex Tape RELEASED, NSFW Preview” – all examples from the past few weeks.

Even the web editions of respected offline brands are going the same way. The editorial focus of Forbes Online – a mish-mash of celebrity slideshows and tacky lists of ‘Americas best paying blue-collar jobs‘ and ‘hottest summer convertibles‘ – couldn’t be more different from its print counterpart which still has ambitions to be a serious news magazine. (Truth is, today’s Forbes Online is a pale shadow of even its own glory days: this is the online publication which saw Adam Penenberg break the Stephen Glass story).

Of course, the relationship between editorial content and advertising has always been strained, in a cant-live-with-it-cant-live-without-it way. But in traditional media – for the most part – the lines were respected: editorial staff did their job, advertising staff did their job and somehow the relationship chugged along.

In new media, however, editorial content exists to serve only one purpose; as a hook on which to hang advertising. When an Internet company commissions content, their measure of success is quantitative not qualitative: does the block of words pack in enough high-buzz keywords to rope in a hundred thousand or so Google searchers? And can it be spread out over enough pages to provide half a dozen ad impressions for each of those users? If so, great: now they just need the users to click on one of those ads and GTFO, which probably explains why so much online content peters out within 30 seconds of the headline.

Jeff Levick, president of global advertising at AOL, sums up the company’s editorial policy thus: “we have insights into our audience, and can produce content they want, which leads to engagement, which leads to what advertisers want. Therein we see the critical difference between the old media attitude towards content and the new media alternative.

The old model favoured originality: break a story that no-one else has covered or write a fresh new take on the world and the audience would come, bringing with them advertising and sales. Under the new model, originality and exclusivity are the kiss of death. SEO-driven advertising depends on knowing what people are already looking for, and delivering content that satisfies that desire; nothing more nothing less.  SEO-driven content is the opposite of journalism and creativity, just like New York’s interpretation of the phrase ‘content is king’ is the opposite of Silicon Valley’s.

It’s a depressing truth, but an important one for anyone in New York media – or elsewhere – gets too excited about the idea of a content revival. Before Harry Potter, no-one knew they were looking for books about wizards; before the Washington Post broke their most famous story, no-one knew they were searching for information about a robbery at the Watergate building, or the subsequent money trail to the White House. Put simply: if Ben Bradlee were an editor at one of today’s Internet companies, instead of the Washington Post in the 1970s, he’d almost certainly have spiked the first Watergate exclusive in favour of a slideshow of cats who look like Nixon.

“We know there’s a market for that shit. I’ve seen the numbers!”

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: Content Is King! Rest In Peace, Content

In case you still had any doubts that Yahoo and AOL are pursuing the same strategy when it comes to building a media brand online, all you have to do is listen to the two executives running the respective content businesses of each company. Yahoo Media VP James Pitaro and AOL Media president David Eun were both on a Future Of Media panel together in New York City today, but they sound like they work for the same company.

Mimicking the line his boss told us at Disrupt a couple weeks ago, Eun says, “Our strategy is to become the largest producer of high quality content” on the Internet. AOL is trying to achieve this goal by employing its own journalists (more than 500 on staff, thousands on contract), and filling in the rest with crowdsourced articles and videos through its Seed and Studio Now story assignment platforms. Eun says AOL must “find an equilibrium” between the professional journalism and the outsourced, high-volume variety.

Now listen to Pitaro as he explains how Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Associated Content, which crowdsources articles, photos, and videos from 380,000 contributors, fits into the company’s overall content strategy. “We are trying to strike a balance,” he says, between what is produced by Yahoo’s own growing salaried editorial team and the “pro-am” stuff from Associated Content. “To truly scale, you need content from the crowd,” he says.

But it’s all backfill to “round out the coverage,” says Pitaro, when Yahoo needs to assign topics like “lacrosse or local politics.” So are Yahoo and AOL becoming content farms like Demand Media? Eun doesn’t like that label. He prefers to think of it as “companies trying to produce content at scale” and using technology to do so. Both Yahoo and AOL want to create the best quality content they can, and as much as they can, using the tools at their disposal.

Pitaro explains how Yahoo got back into the original content game to begin with: “Yahoo traditionally was about content aggregation. We started building an editorial team with Yahoo Sports four years ago. Very quickly they started to break news and we saw the value of that. The leagues started taking us more seriously and started to want to license us their content. Then what we decided to do was extend into the blogging arena. So we started league specific blogs.” Yahoo began assigning articles “specifically in response to audience needs, whether it was identified through search data, clickthrough data,” or manually by editors. About 18 months ago, Pitaro expanded from sports to news, finance, and entertainment. But, “we can’t do all things,” he notes. Yahoo sales chief Hilary Schneider told the audience at the CMSummit yesterday she expects original content to go from 10 percent to 20 percent of what’s on Yahoo properties, not including the crowdsourced fare.

Arianna Huffington was also on the panel. She was asked about my story on Friday about Yahoo’s interest in the Huffington Post for a content deal and perhaps beyond that as a potential acquisition candidate. She confirmed the two companies are negotiating a new “deeper partnership,” but says there are no acquisition talks right now. (To be clear, that is consistent with my original post, which says the current talks are only about the partnership, but Yahoo’s intentions may go beyond that). Pitaro wouldn’t comment other than to say Yahoo and HuffPo have a “fantastic relationship” and “we are always looking at different opportunities with the Huffington Post.”

What was more interesting was the discussion around paywalls, which the Wall Street Journal has in place and the New York Times is planning. Huffington ripped into Rupert Murdoch, saying his complaints against Google News is all “bark with no bite.” Murdoch could have blocked Google’s access to the Wall Street Journal a long time ago (although he is blocking access to the Times of London). Nevertheless, Huffington ended the panel with a prediction: “Paywalls are not going to work.”

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Yahoo Media Chief Sounds Like AOL’s: “To Truly Scale, You Need…

That's a pretty big accolade and, indeed, Crowley has written a long explanation about how the cover story and shoot came about. He says "not to nerd out, but this is the stuff that Little Denny College dreamed big about back in 1997 (for real)... so I'm pretty happy with it "

As you can see, the photographer made him wear some makeup "but I think my luscious lips and forearms are photoshopped," says Crowley.

Not everyone is happy with Wired's angle, but more of that parade-raining later. Meantime, here's Crowley's take:

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Wired UK Crowns Foursquare King, But The Local Peasants Revolt

It’s Sunday afternoon in San Francisco, and while my American friends are out in the sun, celebrating some holiday or other – is this one Memorial Day or Labor Day or Arbor Day? – I’m confined to my hotel room, finishing the final edits of my book manuscript.

Specifically I’m editing a chapter that begins with me being thrown out of a Starbucks in Chicago for swearing on my cellphone. It was a strange – not unhilarious – episode, and one that caused me to consider the contrasting American and British attitudes towards profanity…

“The concept of ‘appropriateness’ is much more real to Americans than it is to Brits, despite us being the ones who are supposed to be stuffy and formal. I’ve noticed it a lot with swearing: while Brits of both genders will be quite happy, among friends, to use the word ‘fuck’ – as a verb, a noun and adjective or an adverb – a surprising number of Americans blanche at the idea. Rather they’d talk about ‘dropping the F bomb’ as if four letters were capable of levelling Nagasaki.”

And so it was this past week at TechCrunch Disrupt when Yahoo’s Carol Bartz now-infamously told Mike Arrington to “fuck off”. The remark was clearly something Bartz had prepared in advance, and at a British conference it would have been about as notable as a speaker wearing jeans rather than a suit. But in America the idea that a CEO – a female CEO no less – might resort to comedy foul language is headline news. Literally.

The swearing had the desired effect of course; becoming the meme of the conference – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing – and distracting from the real story: that the CEO of the third most visited site on the web was unable to concisely describe what her company actually does.

Mike highlighted this ridiculousness in a follow up post, putting the swearing controversy into perspective and focussing on the  difference between Bartz’ answer to the question “what is Yahoo?” and Tim Armstrong’s much snappier response for AOL. While Bartz rambled, Armstrong simply said “AOL is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media”.

In Bartz’s defence, Armstrong’s answer was just as meaningless, skirting what AOL is and instead describing what he hopes it will one day become. Armstrong’s answer was accurate in the same way that I could accurately answer the question “Who is Paul Carr?” by saying “Paul Carr aims to be the multi-millionaire author of a slew of best-selling books, written between bouts of pornographic sex with Scarlet Johansson.” If wishing could make it so, Tim.

The truth is, while we may criticise her for her on-stage performance, “what is Yahoo?” is simply not a question that Carol Bartz is able to answer right now. No-one asks Google what it is, even though it does a million different things, because it does one thing – search – better than anyone else in the world. No-one asks Facebook what it does, because it does one thing – connecting friends – better than anyone else in the world. Yahoo doesn’t have that one thing – so while it might be everything, it’s also nothing.

So what should Yahoo’s one thing be?

Not search, obviously. That ship sailed long ago. It also shouldn’t be a portal, or a destination, or any other meaningless construction. Yes, a lot of people have Yahoo as their home page, but those people – by and large – simply don’t know any better. Carol can enthuse as much as she likes about her highly-personalised homepage widgets, but the next generation of Internet users won’t care. Facebook – or whatever comes next – will be their homepage; their content destination and everything in between. There’s nothing more personalised than friendships.

How about mobile? The company recently announced a partnership with Nokia, which sounds exciting but really only serves to underline how non-core mobile is to Yahoo’s competences. Also ‘mobile’ isn’t a service, or a product – rather it’s a way to deliver services or products.

Chat? Flickr? Blogging? Forums? No, no, no. Facebook has won that fight: Flickr might be the photo sharing choice of tool for the technorati, but for the vast majority of Internet users – particularly the young Internet users who Yahoo needs to lock in to guarantee its future – a photo simply doesn’t exist unless it’s uploaded to Facebook. Likewise chat, blogging, forums and all other aspects of user generated content are all ground that Yahoo has already lost, and can’t possibly win back.

What does that leave?

Ask any commentator, or entrepreneur or Investor and they’ll tell you that the hot business to be in right now is curation. There’s simply too much information – much of it user generated – flooding on to the web, and users are crying out for someone to sift and package it all in an intelligent and trustworthy way. That’s what Gilt Groupe or Groupon do for businesses, that’s what services like Quora do for information, that’s what our Twitter friends do for everything else. But while Gilt and Quora and even Twitter are still veritable newborns, Yahoo has been curating content – using real-life, professional human beings to sift through information – since the antediluvian days when Jerry Yang and David Filo posted their first link on “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web“

The days of employing humans to curate links are over but  there remains one area in which Yahoo’s legacy of curation, audience, trusted brand and significant human resources could come together to do something better than anyone else in the world…

News.

Seriously.

Yahoo’s news product is excellent. Like Google, Yahoo offers a first-rate news aggregator – but unlike Google, the company actually has its own journalists contributing reporting to the mix. The result is a hybrid between aggregation, curation and traditional journalism, which makes Yahoo News arguably the most balanced online news source there is. Moreover, the company has spent years perfecting the use of online video for both news reporting and analysis. Take a few minutes to watch Yahoo Finance or Yahoo Sports and you’ll see some of the best (in terms of both production quality and content) programming available online; easily a match for the best that traditional broadcasting can offer.

And yet right now news and video languish in Yahoo’s overall portfolio; just one more thing that the company offers.

If Yahoo is seriously looking for the one thing that it could be the best in the world at, then news – specifically multi-media news – is a serious contender. CNN might have been the last generation’s “Most Trusted Name In News” but they just don’t have the innate understanding of the web that a company like Yahoo does. For most traditional broadcast or print news outlets, the concept of mixing together original reporting with aggregated content from other sources and the curational wisdom of the online crowds is utterly beyond their comprehension. The closest CNN has got to content aggregation is The Situation Room, while, when it comes to interactivity, even the mighty taxpayer-funded BBC hadn’t got much beyond reading out the occasional viewer email on screen.

Yahoo on the other hand understand innately how people use the web – they have billions of users whose behaviour they track; they know curation and aggregation; they’ve proved they know news and they certainly know video. By combining these resources, and then delivering the results through their hugely visible platform (yes, including mobile), they could blow CNN – and everyone else – out of the water.

At dinner the other night, I joked with a friend (who happens to work at Yahoo) that we might one day see a Yahoo journalist asking a question in the Whitehouse. That need not be a joke. Yahoo has the resources to hire hundreds of journalists – real journalists, not just the hungry children who churn out posts for Associated Content – and set them to work covering serious stories. Then it can integrate that coverage even more tightly with its news aggregation product, and at the same time expand the company’s flagship finance and sports video programming into politics, global affairs, entertainment and everything else that’s going on in the world. Mix in user-generated curation, courtesy of their billions of annual visitors, and you have the makings of a very large and very trusted online news and content network.

Put another way, Tim Armstrong may say that “AOL is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media”, but Yahoo is in a position to actually make that happen.

But of course that’s just one idea. There are a dozen other possible roads that Bartz could take Yahoo, and thanks to the company’s sheer size she can still afford to take the time to explore them all. The critical thing is that she stops trying (and failing) to explain the dozens of things Yahoo does now, and instead settles on the one thing that Yahoo is going to do next. If she can do that then Yahoo might still be thriving in three years time.

If not then it’s — what’s the word, Carol?

Fucked.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: Never Mind The Bollocks – Why Carol Bartz Can’t Say What…

When it comes to social games and virtual goods, Silicon Valley is relatively new to an industry that Asia has been building since the early 2000s. Zynga, apparently, wants some of that Chinese talent. DigiCha has a great catch about three job listing that were put on Beijing Craigslist– and then promptly pulled down. The three jobs were Chief Technology Officer, Human Resources Manager and Software Engineer. Given that two of those are management, I’m guessing they’re not hiring just one software engineer. DigiCha’s Bill Bishop expects the announcement to be made Thursday.

Online gaming has been hot in China, and the Western tech scene is taking notice. One of Zynga’s biggest competitors, Playfish, already has an office there.

This is different from the Yahoo, eBay, Google round of Valley startups expanding into China, because this time there are already a host of strong Chinese publicly-traded competitors waiting whether they are scrappy upstarts like Giant or giants like Tencent and Shanda. And this time a lot of these companies are going after the talent in China, as much as they are going after the huge Chinese market. Chastened by how badly the dot com bubble crop did, it’ll be interesting to see if the Web 2.0 generation can do any better.

All this means the market for gaming talent in China is getting tighter amid all the interest, and Chinese startups can’t be happy about that. But when it comes to management positions at least there’s one big multinational anyone can poach from: Google. I’ve heard from more than a few sources that Google’s Beijing staff was none-to-happy about the search company leaving them out of the loop earlier this year when it threatened its pull-out of the market.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Is Zynga Opening Offices in Beijing?

The online advertising industry saw growth accelerate in the first quarter, with the combined advertising revenues of the four largest players (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) jumping almost 15 percent to $8.8 billion. This compares to 10 percent annual growth in the fourth quarter, and negative growth the first two quarters of last year (aka, the Great Advertising Recession of 2009).

Overall growth would have been even stronger if AOL didn’t have such a rough quarter. It was the only one of the four companies to show a decline in advertising revenues, down 19 percent. Google’s ad revenue was up 21.5 percent, Microsoft’s was up 8.8 percent, and Yahoo’s was up 3 percent (although the display portion was up 20 percent). As a result of AOL’s poor showing, the combined $8.8 billion total was down 2.6 percent from the fourth quarter’s $9 billion

I keep track of these numbers every quarter for these four companies, which turns out to be a good proxy for overall online advertising revenues since they represent a majority of the industry’s revenues. The numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network. Google’s licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For Microsoft and AOL, I include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements.

Below is a table with all the numbers:

Online Advertising Revenues (in millions)

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Online Advertising Revenues Jump Almost 15 Percent In First Quarter

MasterCard’s customer rewards program just got a major upgrade. As part of a deep, three-year partnership with NYC-startup Next Jump, the credit card organization just launched MasterCard Marketplace. Any cardholder can go to the site and sign up for discounts on electronics, computers, clothing, jewelry, and other products from thousands of merchants and manufacturers. Next Jump will operate the program on behalf of MasterCard, and help it advance its overall e-commerce strategy in other ways as well.

While it is not a very high-profile company, Next Jump already powers the employee discount and rewards programs for 90,000 companies, including 60 percent of the Fortune 500. Next Jump also powers Overwhelming Offers and Yahoo’s Daily Deals. It’s raised $45 million, and early Google investor Ram Shriram sits on its board. (Read my earlier profile for more details).

Next Jump takes an algorithmic approach to reward both good shoppers and good deals. In the MasterCard Marketplace, consumers can rate offers, set alerts, and get ranked based on how much they shop. Each offer, in turn, is also ranked base don its conversion rates. Next Jump has put together a network of 28,000 merchants. They are encouraged to offer products at a discount in return for gaining access to highly-motivated shoppers.

In this day and age, everyone wants a special deal. (Note the rise of group discount and flash sale sites). Now everyone with a MasterCard can feel a little extra special.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Next Jump Takes Over MasterCard’s New Rewards Program, MasterCard…

Back in October, Yahoo revealed that Yahoo Answers sees 30 million questions and answers per month, with users contributing 2.4 questions and answers per second. Although Yahoo Answers sees a significant amount of traffic, its design and layout has been outdated. Now Yahoo is rolling out a much-need upgrade and redesign to Answers, which will be implemented over the next few days.

Navigation: The homepage’s navigation bar has four new tabs: Home, Browse Categories, My Activity, and About. Each of the tabs stays on every page you visit in Yahoo Answers. “Home” brings you to the homepage which includes a rotating Best of Answers feature, the link to the Answers Blog and more. “My activity” lets you access your Answers profile, and view your activity on the site. “About” features the Community Guidelines, answers leaderboard, Suggestion Board, and links to the Answers blog.

Browse Categories: Yahoo has redesigned the feature to browse answers by categories. On the previous version of the Answers homepage, all of the categories were displayed on the left hand column, which Yahoo says took up prime landscape on the homepage. Now, Categories is featured in a navigation tab within a hide-away menu. So you can always see the categories on any page via the drop down feature of the “Browse Categories” tab. And you can also lick on the tab j to be taken to the “All Categories” page. From this page, you can access all the questions that are open, resolved or in voting on the site.

Aesthetics: Yahoo has slightly changed the background color of the Answers page; toning down the green and replacing the white background with a light blue palate. Even the smiley icons have received a facelift. With the removal of the categories section, the homepage is a bit more cluttered and roomier. Yahoo says that the backend of the site has been fixed to eliminate a few bugs. Answer category leaderboards will now be updated on a daily basis instead of weekly.

While Yahoo Answers is still one of the leaders in the Q&A space, the site is now facing competition from startups who are innovating in the space, including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s Hunch.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Yahoo Answers Gets A Much-Needed Facelift

After months of silence, Yahoo’s BOSS team is opening up to frustrated third party developers about the future of the powerful search platform. A few hours ago, Yahoo’s Ashim Chhabra left a post on the BOSS group forum, offering an explanation for why it has taken so long for Yahoo to relay information to developers, and giving them some idea of BOSS’s fate. The good news? BOSS will continue to live on in some form, but it’s unclear exactly how things will be changing and which services will be powered by Microsoft technology — and there may be fees involved. That uncertainly will probably leave some developers on edge, but at least they know the project isn’t being scrapped entirely.

Chhabra’s post was clearly prompted by the actions of some frustrated BOSS developers, who grew tired of being left in the dark and approached the Department of Justice to talk about how BOSS will be impacted by the Yahoo/Microsoft search deal. The DOJ heard their complaints, scheduling a conference call with them for next week. Chhabra’s post may help placate them for the time being. We’ve included his full post below:

Folks,

Thank you for your feedback. We understand your frustration. This process has been long for all of us due to the complex nature of our agreement with Microsoft, and we appreciate your patience.

Under this agreement, Yahoo! is permitted to continue offering the BOSS web service, with search results that would integrate Yahoo! services and content with algorithmic results provided by Microsoft. As always, our intention is to provide a BOSS offering as long as it makes business and economic sense to do so. We are still examining what the BOSS offering will consist of, with some services powered by Microsoft, unique content that Yahoo! currently provides, and the potential for additional Yahoo! content in the future.

Prior to the announcement of the Yahoo!-Microsoft search agreement, we’d already shared our intention to explore a fee-based structure for BOSS. We continue to explore an appropriate fee structure or other revenue model as we work through the future of BOSS.

As you know, we must receive regulatory clearance before actual implementation of the search deal with Microsoft can occur. Only then can we finalize the future shape of BOSS. Of course, we will provide additional clarity and certainty when we can.

Thanks for your attention!

Yahoo! BOSS team

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Yahoo BOSS To Survive Microsoft Deal In Some Form; Details Still Hazy

One of the best things about being an academic is being able to mold young minds and guide them to success. When one of my students, Andrew Leblanc told me he was entering the Duke Startup Challenge Elevator Pitch Competition, I told him to come and see me and do a practice run. After all, I had judged several of these contests at Duke and other universities. I thought I knew what worked.

After the eleventh iteration, Andrew got it right. He wasn’t trying to pack his presentation with unnecessary details. He had slowed down his pitch, added a personal touch and was now exuding confidence. Andrew even researched the background of the judges and tailored his message to their interests. So after two hours of intense preparation, I had little doubt that Andrew would win.

Andrew lost. I was surprised. But what I told him afterward is that it really doesn’t matter. Contrary to what the organizers of these competitions will tell you, university business plan contests don’t produce winning companies. Yes, a number of companies have emerged from business plan bake-offs that have been moderate or small successes. But not a single home-run has emerged from this now-omnipresent practice.

This is not to say that the contests are bad. Instead, they educate students in entrepreneurship and motivate them to come up with interesting ideas. But for all of you out there who think a biz plan victory is a ticket to the big time, think again. And for all the engineering students who think any outcome but victory is a waste of time, you also need to think again. Even though he lost, Andrew met a potential partner and also got to speak with Bill Maris of Google Ventures, a priceless encounter. (Bill promised to introduce Andrew to the Google Power Meter team. Don’t forget, Bill!).

In fact, let me throw out a radical thought. I submit that losing in a business plan contest is actually more beneficial than winning. There is a growing body of research that children who are praised too early and too easily end up under-performing peers who are not praised but are told, in constructive terms, they can do better. This is one of the core tenets of Po Bronson’s new book on parenting, “Nurture Shock.”

Extending this to the realm of entrepreneurship might be a leap (and it could be great fodder for a future PhD dissertation). But to me the outcomes don’t lie. Business plan competitions don’t breed winning businesses. Rather than winning a beauty contest, building a business is a marathon that requires steady and constant effort, surmounting regular difficulties, and living through emotional peaks and valleys.

The very roots of the current business plan craze go back to one of the periods that represents a low-point in sane business practices. The business plan competitions first started in the dotcom days. At that time, there was a frantic rush to start new companies. Entrepreneurs would create professional-looking, buzzword-laden business plans. Venture capitalists would then trip over each other to fund these plans, usually with way too much money. The prevailing theory was that a good business idea and enough money were enough to create the next hot IPO. B-schools readily jumped on the bandwagon and soon an arms race ensued to see which school could offer a bigger prize to winners.

With the bursting of the dotcom bubble, the tech world was reminded that even a great idea funded by venture capital didn’t necessarily produce business success. In hindsight everyone saw that it took more than a good idea. It took a thorough understanding of the market, excellent management, and the ability to navigate rough waters to build a thriving enterprise. Some of the biggest dotcom winners came from me-too ideas that were executed better than the originals.

Nor was this anomalous. Ask any seasoned entrepreneur in any industry, and he or she will likely tell you that his or her first business plan was probably the best work of fiction they ever created. A glimpse back through the big winners of the Dotcom Era also underscores the lack of impact business plan competitions actually had. Amazon, Google, Ebay, Yahoo—none of them won a business plan contest. In fact, not a single home run from that era won a business plan contest. And one of the biggest successes of its time,  Akamai Technologies, actually lost the M.I.T. $100K  contest.

After the great Internet Bubble burst, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs quickly adapted to the new reality and went back to basics. But no one told the b-schools. From Silicon Valley to Research Triangle Park to New Delhi and Shanghai, new contests are still sprouting. Only now, the prizes have gotten bigger and the competitions more serious. Yet real successes remains non-existent. (If I’m wrong in five years on this, then call me out). But failure is no surprise for these b-school business launches

Without a solid understanding of market needs and real-world validation of their ideas, few young entrepreneurs can achieve their business-plan projections. The hottest startup methodologies of today, built around ideas fostered by Y-Combinator and TechStars emphasize giving startups almost no money and encouraging them to get a product to market as quickly as possible in order to get real world validation. This is almost the exact opposite of the current business school competition ecosystem, where market validation is non-existent.

So realistically, few of the business school plan entrants can even understand whether their business plans even make sense. Business plan judges, for their part, are equally in the dark most times. Andrew’s plan involved utilities and power management, a topic I know virtually nothing about. B-school contest judges are usually generalists who have only superficial insights into the internal dynamics of the industries at which these plans are aimed. It would seem, then, that the insights of long-time experts in those industries would likely be far more valuable to a prospective entrepreneur.

Again, I am not at all saying that business school plans are inherently bad. To the contrary, Andrew learned an enormous amount about starting a business, the importance of understanding markets, utility and power management technologies, and team building. His plan to build software that would allow residents of college dorms to track their power usage through a visual interface and more easily understand the direct impact of their behaviors on electricity consumption was not a bad idea. In fact, it was a good enough idea that many others are currently attempting similar types of systems for various social settings and environments. My colleague, Lesa Mitchell at the Kauffman Foundation believes that these contests foster collaboration between business school students and engineers or scientists. This, she says, teaches valuable lessons about launching businesses to both potential inventors and would-be CEOs alike.

Finally, let’s not confuse failure to execute or unrealistic plan expectations with bad ideas. Young CEOs going into industries they barely know armed with b-school plan competition money are like lambs to the slaughter. But the core idea behind their plan may be quite innovative and powerful.

My takeaway from all this? If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, don’t win a business plan competition. If you do win, your first act might be to hire a CEO with industry experience. And win or lose, the most valuable lessons you’ll learn will come more from playing the game than from coming up with the best plan.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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Winner’s Curse: Why Losing A B-School Biz Plan Competition Is Better…

We’ve written a lot about Yahoo Meme, Yahoo’s new microblogging platform that resembles Twitter. A few weeks Yahoo launched an API for Meme and also shed some light on where the social media site is being used; which seems to be mainly outside the U.S. According to Yahoo, Meme is gaining a following in Brazil, China, the Philippines, India and Turkey. Yahoo initially rolled out Meme in Portuguese, then Spanish and then English. Today, Yahoo is rolling out a native version of Meme in Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia. The Republic of Indonesia, which comprises over 17,500 islands, is the fourth most populous country in the world.

With the translation, Meme is actually spelled as “Mim” on the site, but it appears to have much of the same functionality as the other versions of the site. Yahoo meme lets users post their own content (including text, photos, videos, links and more) and repost the content of others with one-click publishing, allows users to follow other Meme users (via one-way connections, no friend authorization is required) and comment on their posts. Meme’s content limits are higher than Twitter’s—the limit is 2,000 characters.

Coincidentally, Twitter also recently made an announcement concerning Indonesia, launching a partnership with Indonesian mobile carrier AXIS to provide Tweets via SMS. While Yahoo Meme may be growing internationally, Twitter is aggressively going after international markets as well. The site most recently launched a version in Spanish and plans to roll out versions in French, German and Italian soon. Hopefully Meme doesn’t suffer the same fate as Yahoo’s social network in India, SpotM, which didn’t even make it to its first birthday.

Thanks for the tip Rama.

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Yahoo Meme Extends To Indonesia

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm Pixi definitely shipping with a new webOS version, but which? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm Pixi definitely shipping with a new webOS version, but which?

In one of those wonderful ironies of scheduling that make columnists weep with joy, Larry Dignan spent yesterday at a Yahoo! hack day in New York.

This is the same Larry Dignan who is Editor in Chief of ZDNet, which is the same ZDNet that yesterday published a blog post accusing Yahoo of passing the names and email addresses of thousands – sorry, hundreds of thousands -  of bloggers to the Iranian authorities during the country’s recent election.

Poor old Larry. One can only imagine the warmth with which he was greeted when he arrived at Yahoo’s event. “Hey Larry!” his hosts may perhaps have said “go fuck yourself.” And their suggestion wouldn’t be entirely unfair, given that the story – written by ‘lawyer and technology writer’ Richard Koman, was a steaming pile of horseshit.

How much horseshit? Let’s break it down, just for giggles. Koman’s unnamed source for the story was a guy who had translated an Iranian blog post written in Farsi. The post – which, let’s say it again, was written in Farsi, which Koman doesn’t speak – was published on the blog of an avowedly anti-government Iranian student group. In the original post, which Koman quoted without a secondary source or an independent translation, it was claimed that Yahoo’s Malaysian subsidiary had passed on the information after access to their Iranian site was blocked by Tehran. Yahoo doesn’t have an Iranian site, nor does it have a base of operations in Malaysia. Neither Koman nor anyone else at ZDNet bothered to put the allegations to Yahoo before publishing a story which Koman admitted he hadn’t got entirely “buttoned down”.

I emailed Larry to find out what on earth went wrong. Is there even a jot of editorial oversight on ZDNet’s blogs? I asked him. Didn’t the fact that the sole source for the story was someone who had translated an avowedly biased blog written in Farsi by students in opposition to the Iranian government give him or any other ZDNet editor pause?

In response, Larry was candid in the way that only a man who has spent the day at a hack day organised by people he’d accused of sentencing two hundred thousand Iranians to death can be….

“Our bloggers publish on their own schedule and post themselves. We backread posts and sometimes read them in advance, but generally we trust our bloggers will follow journalistic principles.  And many of them have years of experience and are experts in their fields. In five years of ZDNet blogging we have had few issues of shoddy journalism within our blog network. We trust the bloggers we select to use good judgment and alert us to any potential problems. This was an gross error from a seasoned blogger, and we should have been more on top of it.”

Kudos, Larry. And kudos for publishing a such a prompt and detailed retraction. But yes, you should have been more on top of it. Here’s why…

Earlier this year TechCrunch published a story titled ‘Did Last.fm just hand over listener data to the RIAA?‘ (Spoiler alert: no). In the story, we – by which I mean, not me – quoted an apparently rock solid (and English speaking) source who claimed that Last had been tricked by parent-company CBS into passing on a whole bunch of listener information to the recording industry. An outcry promptly ensued, especially after TechCrunch’s source disappeared without trace and both Last.fm and CBS issued categorical denials. A source at CBS was quoted by Ars Technica describing our – which is to say not my – story as “irresponsible journalism” while Last’s Richard Jones went even further in a blog post headed ‘Techcrunch are full of shit.’

Despite doing our best to verify the story, including roping in additional sources, we – which is to say, not me – were left with some egg on our faces. At the time, I was still writing for the Guardian where I wrote a couple of brilliantly insightful columns about the incident, including one in which I lectured TechCrunch – and by extension all bloggers – on how writing on a blog doesn’t excuse you from the rules of journalism 101.

Specifically I offered some lessons that professional blogs might want to carry over from old media. Stop allowing bloggers to post their own stories without passing them first through an editor. Don’t publish a story accusing a company of malpractice without first giving them a chance to deny it. That kind of thing. And yet, eight months on, ZDNet still operates a policy – as does TechCrunch (mostly), as did the Telegraph when I wrote for them – where ‘trusted’ bloggers can post stories without so much as a gramme of editorial oversight, and without anyone ensuring that the subject of the story has been contacted for comment.

Enough.

Trusting the common sense  of your writers is all well and good – but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute – bloggers being what they are – the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives. This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill’s remark: that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on” is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.

I was going to reply with all of this to Larry, to tell him about our – which is to say not my – run in with CBS and to sympathise with him over how easy it is for this kind of thing to happen. He’d had a bad day after all, and he didn’t need anyone making it worse. But then I clicked ‘reply’, saw Larry’s email address and experienced one of those wonderful moments of serendipity that make columnists weep with joy. Because seeing Larry’s email address reminded me which company owns ZDNet. That company…?

CBS.

Did CBS just accuse Yahoo of handing over user data to the Iranians? Oh yes they fucking did. Thank you baby Jesus.

I thought for a moment whether it was mean to gloat. Whether it was unfair to write a post reminding CBS of their “irresponsible journalism” remark. Wouldn’t that just be mean? Shouldn’t I at least give Larry a chance to respond to the irony? Perhaps I should check with my editor before posting – yunno, make sure I’ve got everything buttoned down.

And then I remembered. I’m a blogger. And that’s just not how we do things.

Click.

Post.

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WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other…

Residents of San Francisco are a bit put off by the temporary closure of the Bay Bridge this holiday weekend. For the next 2+ days, the short bridge commute between the city and the East bay is closed, forcing people to take 30 mile detours through Marin County to get to Oakland, Berkeley and beyond.

This is a perfect opportunity to test the map products on the major Internet portals. Who noted the temporary closure and helped users figure out the next best route?

The short answer - Google wins. Yahoo a close second, and Microsoft Bing fails in this particular test.

Google Maps notes the closure, telling users “The Bay Bridge is closed from September 4 to September 8. Try dragging your route to a different path.”

Yahoo also seems to know about the closure, but doesn’t mention it to users. Instead, it routes you 35 miles through Marin county and over two other bridges to get to your destination. This is useful, but without pointing out that the Bay Bridge is closed, most people will likely think it’s a glitch and simply try the easier route (and be disappointed).

Microsoft Bing fails this test completely. Oblivious to the current road conditions, it blithely tells users to use the Bay Bridge to zip on over to Oakland.

Thanks to Noah Veltman for the tip, and the stunning image of the Bay Bridge above was taken by Thomas Hawk.

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Maps Wars: How Google, Microsoft And Yahoo Deal With Bridge Closure

Have you tried out this blind search tool yet? It provides results from Google, Yahoo and Bing in three columns but doesn’t tell you which column is which search engine. You then tell it which one you think shows the best results, and you then see which answers are from which engines. I keep choosing Yahoo as the best results.

A few search engine experts we’ve spoken with over the years say that users tend to think Google results are better just because they’re from Google. If you take any search engine and put the logo on top, it tests better. So Yahoo results with a Google logo will always test better than, say, Google results with the Yahoo or Bing logo. People are just used to thinking about Google as the best search.

This search tool strips out all the branding, so you’re forced to really think about which results you like better. And early results showed a much more even distribution than Google’s 70% market share would suggest: Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%.

The score keeping feature was removed when people found a way to game it, but you can still run the test against yourself and see which search engine you really like the best. Too bad the one I seem to like will shortly be mothballed.

The tool was created by Michael Kordahi, a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft.

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Which Search Engine Do You Choose In The Blind Test?

Delicious was once one of the hottest social sites on the Internet. That’s why Yahoo bought it in 2005. But it’s weird now to even think about it as a social site, I get more of the utilitarian vibe from it these days. People still use it, but it’s more of a repository. Or, to put it another way, it’s where links go to die.

Contrast that with services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed where people are sharing and re-sharing links all over the place, and having conversations about the content, making it feel alive. And that’s what Yahoo wants to tap into now, with another revamping of Delicious. And not surprisingly, this revamp is very Twitter-centric.

The biggest difference is that the main Delicious homepage is now an area called “Fresh Bookmarks.” Previously, the main page contained the most popular bookmarked pages on the site, but that is now relagated to the second tab. This redesign is all about freshness, which is to say real-time-ness. Delicious looks at and refreshes this list of links every minute or so based on what people are bookmarking and what they’re tweeting. This model, while flawed (I’ll get to that), does make the main page of Delicious more interesting.

“Design” is the most popular tag on Delicious, according to Yahoo, and that meant a “Popular Bookmarks” area that was dominated by things like “200+ Paper Brushes For Photoshop.” For some people, that is useful, but for at least just as many, those types of links are not useful in the least bit. The redesign is an effort to move away from that.

One problem I see with this Fresh Bookmarks area is that the tweets it uses in its equation, often don’t have anything to do with the content being linked to. Yahoo did this on purpose, noting that some 81% of tweets don’t contain URLs, and they still wanted to use data from the most amount of tweets to populate this area. So instead they use keywords in tweets, but this often results in tweets populated below the shared content that have absolutely nothing to do with it.

And on top of this new Fresh Bookmarks area, when you bookmark things, Delicious now allows you to also tweet your links out at the same time. This should be useful to people who want to save stuff for later, but also want to let others know about it. You can also easily email links to people, and send them to your Delicious contacts. This is all done through the bookmarklet.

And the search aspect of Delcious has been completely revamped as well, making it easier for power users to dig through things they’ve bookmarked in the past. The new search area also features rich content, so if someone shares a YouTube video, you can play it inline. The same is true with Flickr images.

All of that is great, the problem is that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Delicious has long just been about saving links and not about sharing them like many of the new, more versatile social sharing services out there. If Yahoo wanted to tie the product into Twitter, it should have done that months ago, to get ahead of the curve, rather than at the back of it.

The problem now is that there are plenty of other services people are already using to share stuff on Twitter. Most people still just paste links right into the update box, and Twitter uses Bit.ly to shorten them. This is allowing Bit.ly to collect a huge amount of data about what people are sharing — something which it could use soon to take on Digg and Delicious.

And on the bookmarking side of things, the trend seems to be towards simple. Mike likes a service called Pinboard, I’ve long been a fan of Instapaper. Both require less effort to use than Delicious, and are quicker.

But you don’t have to take our word for the downsides of this new Twitterification of Delicious, just listen to its founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google). He’s not even waiting for the embargo to lift on these new changes, he’s just ripping them left and right. First, he notes:

I can’t BELIEVE delicious delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own. sigh

But later he completely rips the new feature:

i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal.

Well, at least he likes the new search, I guess.

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Delicious Freshens Up With Twitter, Which Its Founder Hates