Internet portal Yahoo! puffed its chest out today and insisted it would not yield to Microsoft’s $42 billion offer, despite the fact that no white knight seems to be around to save it from a takeover.
In a letter addressed to Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, the Yahoo! board insisted that the current offer–which is now valued at $42.2 billion–did not reflect the best interests of shareholders.
The letter was a response to Ballmer’s own bout of gauntlet-throwing on Saturday, when he gave Yahoo! three weeks to accept Microsoft’s offer or face a hostile takeover.
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Laurence Hooper and Dan Goodman (former AOL), created Loladex, a local search application for Facebook. The two men took some of their AOL earnings and founded Loladex, which launched end of March, 2008. We added this application to Facebook and were sad to see it was focused on Washington DC; however, once added it immediately pulled up a bunch of local Arizona restaurants.
With Web 2.0 and users relying on social reviews in their decision making process, this tool is a great idea and integrated with Facebook could become quite succesful. Loladex combines local search with the recommendation and rating possibilities inherent in social networks. Loladex already has about 16 million listings. The application is able to return localized results based on recommendations and ratings made by Facebook friends. “Loladex mimics the way people think about things in the off-line world,” Goodman said.
These kind of applications from outside developers have taken advantage of the site’s open application platform. Check it out at Loladex.
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Wikipedia, the community driven encyclopedia, passed a huge milestone this week in the form of 10 million articles in over 250 languages. As explained by Emily Chang, the 10 millionth article was a biography of a 16th century English goldsmith and painter named Nicholas Hilliard, written by user named Pataki Marta.
Before you click to look at the entry, it might be good to know first that it exists in the Hungarian annex of Wikipedia. This of course shouldn’t be much of a surprise to Wikipedia fans. While English is the number one language on the site, others have quickly grown to nip at it’s heels. Some of the other big languages include German, French, Polish, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Marathi, Tagalog, and Cantonese are also said to be experiencing rapid growth.
Despite the site’s numerous critics for accuracy, it is obvious that people love the idea of such a resource being out there for them to access so freely and contribute so easily and openly. Can Wikipedia now double its count? We’ll just have to wait and see. Read the rest of the article at Mashable.
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No one else in the industry has been able to compete with Google, so it may be that Google’s biggest disruptors will come from within. Google will likely have to increase cash salaries and outright stock grants to retain its best people. This will likely further pressure the company’s profit margin which has declined over the past year. Here’s a glimpse of ex-Googler’s starting up their own companies:
- Gokul Rajaram, the “Godfather of AdSense,” is working on a stealth startup.
- Louis Monier, Anna Patterson, Russell Power are working on a search service called Cuill (pronounced “cool”) — it’s said to index the web more economically than Google. Uses a web crawler called “twiceler.”
- Jason Liebman, Sanjay Raman and Daniel Blackman co-founded HowCast, a network of “how to” videos. The pair company has apparently raised $8 million in funding.
- Steffen Mueller started a “search engine community” called Topicle.
- Vanessa Fox left Google for real estate search site Zillow.
- Dan Daugherty is heading RentBits, a real estate rental site. He’s got support from fellow ex-Googler Tim Moynihan, who is COO of the site.
To read more check out Silicon Alley Insider
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Microsoft Corp. sent a letter to the Yahoo Board of Directors Saturday setting a three-week deadline for moving forward on its more than $40 billion buyout offer.
The letter signed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft will take its case directly to Yahoo shareholders and work to elect a new slate of directors, if the board doesn’t respond by the deadline by April 26. The bid to buy Yahoo was made in January and announced Feb. 1.
At the time, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion, or 62 percent above Yahoo’s market value. The deal is currently valued at about $41 billion, based on Friday’s closing share prices. Yahoo’s board formally rejected Microsoft Corp.’s bid, saying it undervalues the company.
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Defeating click fraud is a data problem, pure and simple, according to a post from Google on its blog.
That better data makes for better tools to combat click fraud isn’t exactly Earth-shattering news, but Google’s comments come at a sensitive time for the company.
While Google cracked open the doors surrounding its click fraud detection measures, the news comes at a time when the search giant is trying to explain some rather bleak click data to Wall Street. To be fair, Google posted its assessment of data and click fraud ahead of comScore’s report that the company saw only a modest 3 percent gain in its paid clicks business. But that report came after a disastrous report for the prior month that prompted many on Wall Street to suggest that Google, digital and the wider U.S. economy were showing greater signs of weakness than previously thought.
Read rest of article at iMedia Connetion.
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YouTube Insight was just launched and is a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. Video uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed, as well as how popular they are. We post a lot of video’s to YouTube and are really excited to see how Insight works out. With each client the results are never the same. As we test this tool it will allow us to determine what day a video is most watched, what part of the country or world generates the most viewing traffic, etc.
You can check out YouTube Insight by:
- Clicking under the “About this Video” button under “My account
- Go to Videos
- Go to Favorites
- Go to Playlists
- Go to Manage my Videos.
If you have any feedback please share your comments on how YouTube Insight is working out for you!
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A new version of Mozilla’s popular Firefox Web browser is ready for download with improved security and memory use as the tiny company takes a stab at Microsoft Corp’s dominant Internet Explorer.
The program’s creators told Reuters on Thursday that the privately-held company’s trial version of Firefox 3 browser is ready for the masses to use after months of development
Until now, the company has discouraged average Internet users from moving on from Firefox 2, which was launched in October 2006.
“In many ways it (Firefox 3) is much more stable than anything else out there,” Mozilla Corp Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said in an interview.
Read the full article at Reuters.
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Changes are afoot at Facebook (per iMedia Connection). The once red-hot social network has bid farewell to Owen Van Natta, the CRO who helped the company secure a $240 million investment from Microsoft, and now there are reports that it’s looking for a high-level executive to serve as a kind of second in command to founder Mark Zuckerberg.
According to Kara Swisher at BoomTown, sources close to the company say that Zuckerberg himself has been looking for a well-known technology executive to give him more support.
Such a search couldn’t come at a better time for Facebook, which has been beaten up a bit with reports that its opt-out program was beset by technical glitches. But perhaps more alarming for Facebook are reports that fatigue has begun to set in with users in the U.K. According to a BBC story, the social network saw a 5 percent drop in users from December to January. Facebook now has about 8.5 users in the U.K.
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