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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Below are some of the sites our team reviews on a daily basis. If you have not visited the sites below, we strongly recommend checking each of them out to gain marketing knowledge:
Advertising Age
http://www.adage.com/
eMarketer
http://emarketer.com
CNet
http://Cnet.com
IMediaConnection
http://imediaconnection.com/search/index.asp
Interactive Advertising Bureau
http://iab.net
Marketing Vox
http://www.marketingvox.com/
Online Media Daily
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showTodaysEdition&art_type=13
Search Engine Land
http://searchengineland.com/
Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com/
WebmasterWorld.com
http://www.webmasterworld.com/index.htm
iClick Solutions
http://www.iClickSolutions.com
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.
