Posted 10/29/09 at 08:26:58 AM by Paul Lilly

In a filing with the SEC, Yahoo said more time is needed to complete the search and advertising deal with Microsoft. The two sides had agreed in late July to have everything squared away by October 27, but hammering out the details of a long term deal is taking longer than expected.

"The parties are working diligently finalizing the agreements, have made good progress to date, and have agreed to execute the agreements as expeditiously as possible," Yahoo wrote.

Assuming the two sides can get this done -- and both sides said they are committed to doing so -- Microsoft's Bing will power Yahoo's search results in exchange for those all important advertising dollars. In a joint statement, Microsoft said the companies are "optimistic" they'll be able to close the deal by early 2010, but did not specify a new deadline.

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Posted 10/26/09 at 02:26:10 PM by Bart Salisbury

As we bring in the new, out must go the old. And the old is GeoCities which, with about 15 years of life, the last ten under the benign neglect of Yahoo, has finally been pushed out the door. Today is GeoCities last day, may it rest in peace.

GeoCities seems old school by today’s standards, but at the time of its introduction in late 1994, the ability for individuals to quickly and easily post a web page was visionary. Thousands took advantage of the opportunity to post pictures, poems, tributes, opinions, likes, and dislikes. Created by David Bohnett and John Rezner GeoCities became the place to be on the web.

And like many early Internet ventures it made quite a splash while making little or no money, despite determined efforts to do so. GeoCities did make its founders rich, both when GeoCities went public in 1998, and later when Yahoo, looking to expand its Internet presence, bought GeoCities at the peak of the dot.com bubble for a cool $3.57 billion in Yahoo stock. Yahoo’s heavy-handed management drove away a good number of subscribers, leaving GeoCities bordering on becoming a ghost-town rather than a thriving metropolis, and, for some, marked the beginning of the end of a vibrant experiment in social networking.

In April Yahoo announced plans to close GeoCities down, and stopped accepting new registrations. GeoCities inhabitants were helped to move their web content to their hard drives, and offered the opportunity to move to Yahoo’s pay web hosting service. While all of those web sites, that intimately portrayed the lives of millions of subscribers, are now on their way to the ash heap of history, they won’t much be missed. We’ve still got Facebook, Myspace, Ning and Twitter to keep us occupied.

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Posted 10/20/09 at 05:52:21 PM by Jason Barry

Yahoo was able to report positive numbers to the tune of $186m so far this year compared to the disappointing $54m they reported this time last year. While those numbers seem promising, sales fell about 12% this year with revenue down to $1.58b.

They can report these numbers because thye slashed more than 2,000 jobs during the past year, freeing some of their overhead costs. Further, they deployed some large service changes, such as welcoming the use of rivals onto its portal, and upgrading and enhancing its web search tools. They also initiated a $100m global advertising campaign for its portal and advertising services.

Most likely, Microsoft is happiest to hear this positive growth as they signed a deal in July to utilize Yahoo’s advertising sales in exchange for Microsoft’s search services. The Federal Trade Commission is still finalizing the deal.

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Posted 10/11/09 at 01:24:53 PM by Justin Kerr

Email spam is on the rise, no surprise there, but new information is suggesting that these emails could be coming from good old mom and dad as well. According to researchers over at Websense, personalized spam emails are being sent from tens of thousands of compromised accounts spanning all of the usual suspects including Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail.

Security researchers have suggested that given the sheer volume of spam emails being observed, the recent leak of some 10,000+ Hotmail accounts obtained through a phishing scam isn’t the only source of compromised email addresses, and it is very likely malware key loggers have helped to contribute to the rise in fraud. "The quantity of people hit makes me think that it was key logging — the success rate for phishing is only about one in 1,000," said Shulman, chief technology officer for security firm Imperva. "Secondly, when I went through the list of email account credentials, there were entries with the same username, but a slightly different password, which suggests that they're typos.

According to Patrick Runald from Websense “"Generally phishing is declining and being replaced by key logging, and considering the number of compromised accounts, it could be a combination of both." Apparently it also helps if your password isn’t 1-2-3-4-5. Time to go change the combination on my luggage!

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Posted 10/05/09 at 08:08:07 AM by Paul Lilly

As part of its mega-million ad campaign, Yahoo has tapped into India's largest English-language newspaper, The Times of India, with a giant yellow ad on the front page pushing the company's 'It's Y!ou' slogan.

Citing circulation statistics from 2008, TechCrunch says the newspaper reaches 3.14 million readers, which is more than any other English-language newspaper on the planet. But whether or not a full-page spread spread makes sense is questionable, as Yahoo's presence in India is already pretty strong, reaching 26 million of the 35 million online users, according to data from comScore.

Yahoo plans to spend $100 million or more on its new marketing campaign, which will also include TV ads on AMC, ESPN, USA, Comedy Central, Bravo, and a bunch of other broadcast networks in the U.S.

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Posted 10/02/09 at 08:09:50 AM by Paul Lilly

Yahoo this past summer committed to a ten year deal agreeing to use Microsoft's search technology in exchange for selling both its own and Microsoft's search ads. But as far as everything else going on at Yahoo, the search company wants to make it clear it's getting along just fine on its own.

"What impact does the Microsoft search deal have on the Yahoo cloud? It has no impact," Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's senior VP of cloud computing, told The Register. "All the services we're building, we will continue to build. All the roadmaps we have in place, we will continue to work towards."

Yahoo has diverted a lot of its attention to cloud computing in recent years, and its search technologies were gobbling up half of the resources on its open-source, cloud-based infrastructure consisting of roughly 25,000 servers. With the Microsoft pact freeing up those resources, Yahoo can focus on other uses.

"Search is just one of the many services [in use across the platform]. We use it for advertising. We use it for content. We use it for all of our usage logs. It is essentially becoming the data warehouse for all of Yahoo," Shugar added.

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Posted 09/29/09 at 09:24:12 AM by Paul Lilly

You have to spend money to make money, and Yahoo will spend $100 million (or more) on its new marketing campaign, which formerly rolled out on Monday. As part of the pricey campaign, TV ads will begin airing on AMC, ESPN, USA, Comedy Central, Bravo, and several other broadcast networks in the U.S.

"You are about to enter a place. A place where time and space collide, and breed wonder, and joy, and wow. Where news travel faster, where friends come closer, and you go farther," Yahoo's new Anthem ad starts out.

The initial ad appears to be more about pushing the company's 'It's Y!ou' slogan than anything else, as there's no mention of specific Yahoo products or technologies. But according to Elisa Steel, Chief Marketing Officer for Yahoo, the search company is planning on rolling out some new products and promoting them through future ads.

Anthem Ad Link

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Posted 09/25/09 at 08:16:58 AM by Paul Lilly

What a rough year it's been for anal retentive geeks who like the Internet just the way is, thank you very much. Still flabbergasted over Ikea's decision to switch its font from a customized version of Futura to Verdana, members of the Defenders of Things That Don't Matter organization (which doesn't really exist, but should) found themselves reeling once again, this time over Yahoo branding Flickr so that it reads "Flicker from Yahoo!"

How could Yahoo be so callous to the dozens, maybe even hundreds of Internet users who would predictably be taken aback by the insignificant change? According to company CEO Carol Bartz, techy hipsters and "middle America Yahoo" just don't go hand-in-hand.

"When you get outside New York and Silicon Valley, everyone loves Yahoo," Bartz said to a roomful of journalists and bloggers a few days ago at the unveiling of Yahoo's $100 million marketing campaign 'It's Y!ou.' "I just want to transplant all of you guys out of your cynicism. What is wrong with you guys? Go be cynical about frickin' Google. You got me pissed off."

Some Flickr users are pissed off too. As one commenter in Flickr's forums put it, "it really does feel like Yahoo is kidnapping the once awesome Flickr name by forcing itself on the logo." Others have called the logo change "stale" and "very ugly." Makes you wonder how Flickr user shhexycorin could possibly be "indifferent" when so many others are obviously perturbed.

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