Yahoo peps Search, Mail and Messenger

Yahoo has added slew of new features and updates to its three core offerings – Mail, Search and Messenger. Yahoo Mail, one of the top leading email services, gets more social features as one of the key milestone in Yahoo Open Strategy. Along with that, Yahoo Messenger 10 will also bring social tinge like showing status updates, photo sharing, video calls and other notifications.

Yahoo Mail gets the long deserved attachment limit raise to 25MB from 10MB per mail. New Application box combines Calendar, Notepad, and several other third party apps for streamlined single window Inbox. The Application box will contain third party apps like Picnik, ZumoDrive or PayPal along with several others coming in future.

Yahoo Mail’s integration with popular social networks will be a boon to community website lovers. Users will be able to get updates from their contacts on various social networks and interact directly from Yahoo Mail window. Photo sharing would now be fun as users will be able to select several photos and share all of them at same time.

Yahoo has also redesigned its Mail’s mobile version (m.yahoo.com) which can perform important functions including attachment downloads. This mobile version will now have read-write access to phone’s folders. Also, Mail Contacts now will automatically get updated as the contact changes the name.

Yahoo Messenger 10 beta has new HD video calling support and new Y! Updates window that’ll remind you of Facebook. Users will get status updates from their contacts on Yahoo Buzz, Flickr, Twitter and other series. Yahoo Insider now can be localized with pin code to obtain local information. Messages from Yahoo Messengers contacts can be received for different IM apps on iPhone. Basically, because the Yahoo 360 service that was rolled out to compete with MySpace and Facebook didn’t work, Yahoo is lifting interface and adding more features to its Mail and Messenger services.

Yahoo Search will offer a new search results page that connects users directly to web content and new results filtering options. Also, Search Assist, Yahoo’s real-time query suggestion engine, has been added to Yahoo universal header’s search box for search suggestions. Users can also organize, save and share their search results with Search Pad. Check out images of the latest updates here.

Even after the deal with Microsoft, Yahoo Search continues to differentiate itself from Bing. “We are Yahoo and that will continue…We collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end”, clarified Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice-president of Yahoo, at a press event held at company’s headquarters.

Yahoo has sent out a clear word regarding its Search – We’re still in competition!

Source: techtree

Tech giants unite against Google

Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google’s attempt to create what could be the world’s largest virtual library.

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive.

They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works.

“Google is trying to monopolise the library system,” the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle told BBC News.

“If this deal goes ahead, they’re making a real shot at being ‘the’ library and the only library.”

Back in 2008, the search giant reached an agreement with publishers and authors to settle two lawsuits that charged the company with copyright infringement for the unauthorised scanning of books.

In that settlement, Google agreed to pay $125m (£76m) to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers could register works and receive compensation. Authors and publishers would get 70% from the sale of these books with Google keeping the remaining 30%.

Google would also be given the right to digitise orphan works. These are works whose rights-holders are unknown, and are believed to make up an estimated 50-70% of books published after 1923.

Comments on the deal have to be lodged by 4 September. In early October, a judge in the Southern district of New York will consider whether or not to approve the class-action suit.

In a separate development, the US Department of Justice is conducting an anti-trust investigation into the impact of the agreement.

‘Open access’

Critics have claimed the settlement will transform the future of the book industry and of public access to the cultural heritage of mankind embodied in books.

“The techniques we have built up since the enlightenment of having open access, public support for libraries, lots of different organisational structures, lots of distributed ownership of books that can be exchanged, resold and repackaged in different ways – all of that is being thrown out in this particular approach,” warned Mr Kahle.

The non-profit Internet Archive has long been a vocal opponent of this agreement. It is also in the business of scanning books and has digitised over half a million of them to date. All are available free.

As the 4 September deadline approaches, the number of groups and organisations voicing their opposition is growing. But with three of the world’s best-known technology companies joining the chorus, the Open Book Alliance can expect to make headlines the world over.

Microsoft and Yahoo have confirmed their participation. However, Amazon has so far declined to comment because the alliance has not yet been formally launched.

“All of us in the coalition are oriented to foster a vision for a more competitive marketplace for books,” said Peter Brantley, the Internet Archive’s director of access.

“We feel that if approved, Google would earn a court-sanctioned monopoly and the exploitation of a comprehensive collection of books from the 20th Century.”

‘Trust’

Much of the focus of the proposed settlement has been on anti-trust and anti-competitive concerns, but just as many are worried about privacy.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU of Northern California and the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group wrote to Google to ask the company to “assure Americans that Google will maintain the security and freedom that library patrons have long had: to read and learn about anything… without worrying that someone is looking over their shoulder or could retrace their steps”.

“We simply don’t like the settlement in its current form,” said Consumer Watchdog advocate John Simpson.

“There are serious questions about privacy and Google seems to be taking the view ‘let us put this in place and we will do the right thing down the road’. That is simply not good enough.”

The American Libraries Association (ALA) agrees.

“We do think the product in essence is good but the proposed settlement asks us to trust Google and the other parties a little too much,” the ALA’s associate director Corey Williams told BBC News.

“When it comes to privacy, the agreement is silent on the issue and with regard to what Google intends to do with the data it collects. It’s a great idea but it requires more trust than I think we feel comfortable being able to extend at this point,” said Ms Williams.

‘Brave new world’

In its defence, Google has argued that the deal brings great benefits to authors and will make millions of out-of-print books widely available online and in libraries.

In a statement, the company said: “The Google Books settlement is injecting more competition into the digital books space, so it’s understandable why our competitors might fight hard to prevent more competition.”

Despite the increasing tide of criticism over the settlement, there are some who believe there is not that much to fear.

Michelle Richmond is the author of New York Times best seller The Year of Fog, which is also being turned into a movie starring Rachel Weiss.

“The thing I keep hearing from authors is ‘I don’t know what this settlement really means’. But this is the brave new world and we don’t really know where it is going,” Ms Richmond told BBC News

“Most authors work for so little and start from the point of we are doing this for the love it. But when there is this company that has nothing to do with the creation of the book or its publication, I think a lot of authors are concerned about this being a portal to greater access to their work without compensation for writers.”

Source: BBC News

With all the chatter about Yahoo’s impending roll-out of a completely overhauled brand – see Techmeme for more – this particular tip that landed in our inbox last night definitely caught our attention.

TechCrunch reader Bradley Scott Shoemaker checks in with us to tell us this new Yahoo homepage turned up when visiting the portal using Google’s Chrome browser. All his other installed browsers still showed the classic Yahoo website, which lead him to believe they’re gradually bucket testing the new redesign for now (update: some users reported seeing it for over a month already).

We think so too: the screenshot shows that this design is very close to the redesign we reported on back in September 2008 (embedded below again). They only tested that one for a select few users in a limited amount of countries too, but it was the last we’d actually heard of it.

Update 2: The Business Insider posted a screenshot of a new redesign back in May too, but there are some differences, particularly on the color and navigation level.

For the record: comScore pegs Yahoo’s total traffic at over 550 million unique visitors worldwide (May 2009), of which 150 million located in the U.S. alone.

So, who else has spotted this revamped Yahoo website? Let us know in comments.

Source: TechCrunch

After spending a lot of time speaking with Yahoo employees, partners, and customers, new CEO Carol Bartz has come to realize the importance of giving consumers a “Wow experience,” she told investors in the first quarter conference call. But they have yet to experience that from owning the stock. Yahoo reported a 13 percent decline in revenues for the first quarter of 2009 to $1.6 billion, while net income dropped 78 percent to $118 million.

Google, in comparison, last week reported a 3 percent decline in first quarter, but was able to manage a 9 percent increase in net income. Update: As a comment points out, Google saw a 3% decrease in revenue from Q42008 to Q12009, but saw a 6% growth year over year for Q1. Yahoo saw losses for both metrics.

Yhoo 1 Q09 Earnings Presentation Final

Diving into the numbers, search advertising revenues on Yahoo sites declined 3 percent to $399 million, while display advertising on Yahoo sites declined 13 percent to $371 million. The biggest decline, however, was from affiliate ad network revenues, which were down 16 percent to $511 million.

Page view growth also slowed down to 8 percent from 20 percent growth a year ago and 15 percent growth during the fourth quarter. On the search side, query volume grew but revenue-per-search declined as commercial queries and click-through rates saw weakness. Bartz puts a positive spin on Yahoo’s results and claims that it is actually gaining share of advertising dollars compared to the overall industry:

I think our search results, . . . it is like online window shopping, people are grazing around, just not clicking to buy. Marketing budgets have been slashed a heck of a lot more than any declines in these metrics. It is my belief that we must be gaining share.

Bartz announced another round of layoffs, which will affect 5 percent of the workforce, or about 675 people (out of 13,500). The cuts will take place within the next two weeks. Bartz also indicated during the conference call that she is focusing on the products and properties which drive the bulk of Yahoo’s traffic and revenues, including the homepage, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Mobile. Her three-pronged strategy is to globalize the platform, build “fantastic products to deeply engage users, and to improve the return from its advertising platforms.

Asked about discussions with Microsoft, Bartz had no comment. Later on she did manage to drop the F-word, though (but quickly apologized for the slip).

Yahoo Inc. confirmed Tuesday that it will cut 675 jobs, 5 percent of its workforce, as its online advertising business continued to erode in the first quarter amid economic gloom.

The Sunnyvale Web portal said it would carry out the layoffs, the third round in just over a year, in the next two weeks in hopes of saving money and freeing resources to hire elsewhere in the company. Executives said the cuts will be focused on Yahoo’s product managers and engineers.

After three months on the job, CEO Carol Bartz is still grappling with turning Yahoo around in an environment in which advertisers are slashing their budgets. Although she’s made some relatively minor tweaks at the company, Bartz is still weighing several bigger decisions such as whether to team up with rival Microsoft Corp. in search advertising.

Against that backdrop, Yahoo’s first-quarter profit fell 78 percent to $118 million (8 cents per share), from $537 million (37 cents) a year ago. The comparison isn’t quite as dire as it seems, however, because Yahoo’s quarterly earnings in 2008 were helped by a $401 million gain from an investment in Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company.

Absent those proceeds, Yahoo’s first-quarter profit would have declined 16 percent.

First-quarter revenue fell 13 percent to $1.58 billion from $1.82 billion for the equivalent period in 2008. Yahoo attributed some of the decline to the sale of its Kelkoo shopping search engine and unfavorable foreign currency exchange rates.

Excluding fees paid to partners, Yahoo would have had $1.16 billion in revenue.

The results met analyst expectations of 8 cents per share in profit and $1.2 billion in adjusted revenue.

Sameet Sinha, an analyst with JMP Securities, said that Bartz has made clear that Yahoo’s revival is no short-term project. The longer it takes, he said, the more pressure she’ll be under to reach an agreement with Microsoft, which has been Yahoo’s on-again, off-again suitor for more than a year.

“Carol Bartz is in there making some significant changes, but she said that it’s not one or two quarters of changes,” Sinha said. “There’s still a long way to go.”

Yahoo cut 1,000 jobs in January 2008, and trimmed 1,500 more in October. An announcement about the new cuts was widely expected Tuesday after leaks to the media last week.

Bartz said she hoped she could make Yahoo more streamlined, in part by reducing some of its inefficiencies in its workforce.

“We sort of had one product management person for every three engineers, so we had a lot of people running around and telling engineers what to do.” Exasperated, she used some of the salty language that she’s known for, but that is rarely heard in conference calls with investors, declaring “But nobody was f- doing anything.”

“Excuse me, I knew that would slip out one of these times,” she said.

Yahoo had 13,500 employees at the end of the first quarter.

Bartz has eliminated several of Yahoo’s minor services, continuing a process started under her predecessor, Jerry Yang, and is contemplating more significant changes. Career site HotJobs is a candidate for sale while Yahoo Maps may be outsourced to another company, analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research said in a recent research note.

Last week, Yahoo sold its 10 percent stake in Gmarket, a South Korean e-commerce site.

Bartz has said she wants to focus Yahoo on its core properties, where it is already successful, including its home page, e-mail and finance.

Meanwhile, Yahoo continues to feel the impact of the economic downturn. Display advertising revenue dropped 13 percent. Search advertising revenue fell 3 percent, reversing double-digit growth in previous quarters.

Yahoo’s results contrasted with Google, which is facing some of the same economic headwinds, but nevertheless reported a 6 percent increase in first-quarter revenue.

Bartz said that she is pleased with how Yahoo performed in the first quarter under difficult circumstances and that she expects the business to turn around with the economy.

More earnings reports. C2

Even as Google is cancelling its experiment with newspaper advertising, Yahoo is expanding its newspaper consortium. Today, Yahoo is announcing that it is adding two new members: The Boston Globe and the St. Petersburg Times. That brings the consortium up to 38 media companies, representing 793 total newspapers, up from 635 newspaper partners a year ago, and 176 at launch in November, 2006

Yahoo’s newspaper strategy has seen success because, unlike Google, it never tried to get into the business of selling print ads. Instead, Yahoo focused on helping newspapers get more traffic to their Websites. One way it does this is by showing article headlines from partner newspapers across Yahoo-owned properties, including the home page, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Mobile. Over the past year and a half, these links have delivered 200 million clicks or views to the partner newspaper sites, including some that have reached a million views for an individual story, such as this one about puppies saving a three-year old. (Puppies sell newspapers).

HotJobs is being used by 600 of those newspaper Webistes. And Yahoo also helps 120 of the newspapers with online ad management, through its Apt ad management system, which allows the newspapers to tap into Yahoo’s advertising inventory when they cannot sell the the inventory themselves. This won’t save the newspaper industry, but at least it is a bright spot. Or is Yahoo simply taking share in a dying business?

Source: TechCrunch

Terry Widener has been selling newspaper ads for 35 years. But until last fall, Widener, a 53-year-old saleswoman at The Knoxville News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn., had never sold an Internet ad.

Then in a two-week sales “blitz” intended to test an innovative partnership between newspapers and Yahoo, she persuaded advertisers to buy $200,000 in online ads that ran on the paper’s Web site and on Yahoo. That represented about a seventh of the amount she typically sells in an entire year.

“I’m pretty much from the old school,” Widener said. “It was such a learning experience. Hopefully, I am going to sell more and more online.”

Many newspaper owners and publishers have similar hopes. They say the partnership with Yahoo is one of the only bright spots in an otherwise horrible advertising market.

Through the partnership, ad salespeople at newspapers pitch local businesses on advertising packages that let them reach visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites and Yahoo users in the area. The newspapers also use Yahoo technology that lets them charge more for ads on their sites.

A similar sales blitz at The Ventura County Star, a small daily north of Los Angeles, netted nearly $1 million in sales in the run-up to Christmas, or roughly 40 percent of what the paper sold in online ads in 2008. The Naples Daily News in Florida did even better: The late-January blitz generated $2 million in sales, or more than half what the paper sold online in 2008. Some larger newspapers have had similar successes.

“If we could do just shy of $1 million in two weeks in a horrible economy, what does it mean for us when the economy turns?” asked George H. Cogswell III, publisher of The Ventura County Star.

Yahoo, which has been struggling with internal turmoil and slowing growth, is also hailing its alliance with the newspaper consortium as one of its most important efforts. The consortium has grown to nearly 800 dailies, up from 176 in 2006.

“It seems to be hitting the sweet spot for both newspapers and Yahoo,” said Lem Lloyd, a Yahoo vice president for the partnership.

No one expects that the partnership will make up for what’s ailing Yahoo or the newspaper industry any time soon. Consider that on Friday, E.W. Scripps, the owner of the Knoxville, Ventura, and Naples newspapers, closed The Rocky Mountain News, one of its flagship properties. The San Francisco Chronicle, one of the first papers to make use of all parts of the Yahoo alliance, is being threatened with closure by its owner, the Hearst.

Yahoo’s bet on the newspaper consortium will not give a meaningful lift to its finances this year or tilt the balance in its fight with Google, which dominates the online-ad business.

“In 2009, this partnership is not material,” said Hilary Schneider, executive vice president for North America at Yahoo, who is one of the driving forces behind the alliance. “If you look at the long-term opportunity, it is material, and it continues to exceed our expectations.”

The partnership began in 2006 and was initially focused on sharing employment classifieds. But over the last year, about half of the newspapers in the alliance, including some smaller newspapers owned by The New York Times Co., have agreed to begin testing two new elements of the relationship.

One is a new ad system from Yahoo, currently installed at about 100 newspapers, that allows them to sell graphical ads on their sites that are aimed at specific audiences, like car buyers or sports enthusiasts. The system puts users into those groups based on the pages they visit online, a technique known as behavioral targeting.

This allows publishers to sell, say, high-price travel ads not only on travel pages but also on any page visited by a user interested in travel. An advertiser may have paid 50 cents to reach every thousand visitors to a high-school sports page, for example, said Leon Levitt, vice president for digital media at Cox Newspapers. “Now it doesn’t matter where the page is on the site,” Levitt said. “All of a sudden, we can sell that page for $15″ for every 1,000 visitors who are interested in travel, he said.

The other new element of the partnership allows newspapers to sell ads on Yahoo pages, with the two sides sharing the resulting revenue. That lets newspapers promise advertisers that their messages will reach a larger portion of the local audience, helping the newspapers compete more effectively with television.

Between its print and online editions, The Ventura County Star, for example, reached about 56 percent of its local audience. With the addition of the Yahoo pages, it now reaches 85 percent of Ventura residents, and it can also tell advertisers that they can reach Yahoo’s audience in the larger Los Angeles market.

“It is certainly a new opportunity,” Cogswell said.

Yahoo benefits too, by being able to tap into some 7,500 salespeople at newspapers across the country. The additional ads translate into higher rates for pages that typically command low ad prices, like those on Yahoo’s mail service, Lloyd said.

Some newspaper executives have been worried that a management shake-up at Yahoo could put the partnership at risk. Schneider said Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s new chief executive, is squarely behind the alliance. “Carol looks at this partnership as core to Yahoo’s future,” Schneider said.

Ken Doctor, a newspaper industry analyst with Outsell, said losing Yahoo’s support would be a blow to newspapers. “For the companies that are in it, this is the No. 1 growth initiative in 2009 and 2010,” Doctor said.

For now, however, that growth provides only a small dose of relief for an ailing industry.

“It’s a new source of revenue that we think is going to be a growing source of revenue,” said William Dean Singleton, the chief executive of the MediaNews Group, which owns 54 dailies and is one of the original members of the consortium. “It is still small, compared to the recessionary print declines we are seeing.”

Source: The New York Times

Yahoo’s tab in its efforts to fight off Microsoft last year ran $79 million, according to the company’s filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Yahoo spent much of that bill on outside advisers who helped it weigh Microsoft’s proposals, which ranged from a total buyout bid for $33 a share to an eventual offer to acquire only Yahoo’s search business. Yahoo rejected all of Microsoft’s proposals.

Part of the $79 million bill was also attributed to hiring outside advisers for fighting off a proxy contest by activist shareholder Carl Icahn, who eventually settled with the company and received three seats on Yahoo’s board.

A portion of the bill also went to Yahoo’s outside advisers considering its controversial search agreement with Google, which ultimately ended with the companies walking away from the deal when federal antitrust regulators said it would challenge the deal.

For Yahoo, however, the true cost was much greater than just $79 million.

In the process, Yahoo founder and CEO Jerry Yang stepped down after enduring the brunt of shareholder anger and has since resumed his role as chief Yahoo. Sue Decker, who was Yahoo’s president during the tumultuous year, lost out her bid to become the next CEO when Yahoo’s board named former Autodesk chief Carol Bartz to oversee the troubled Internet company. And Yahoo saw an exodus of executives in June 2008.

Source: CNET News – by Dawn Kawamoto

Yahoo could start the week by launching a major reorganization of the company

Internet search giant Yahoo will likely undergo another major reshuffle sometime in the next week, as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is looking for several new high-level executives.  The new CEO admitted there are “fundamental issues” that must be dealt with in the coming months if Yahoo is serious about competing with Google in the future.

“Get well-rested, because next week’s a biggie,” Bartz said in a memo to employees last night according to PC World.

As the company reshuffles, it is possible that Yahoo chief technology officer, Aristotle Balogh, will also become head of product, unless Bartz is able to find someone else to run the division.  Yahoo currently has three different divisions for Europe, Asia, and emerging markets, but it is likely one executive will control all three divisions, unnamed sources reported last week.

Yahoo desperately is looking for new ways to compete with Google, which has absorbed the search engine market, while also taking advertising money away from Yahoo.  Along with search advertising control dwindling to Google, the entire display advertising market has struggled because of the recession.

Bartz took over after former CEO Jerry Yang repeatedly refused the $47.5 billion Microsoft takeover offer in 2008.  Insiders say Yang’s departure was caused by numerous issues over the years, but the mistakes made in the possible Microsoft deal proved to be the final nail in the coffin.

Several Yahoo executives left the company and joined Microsoft after the deal fell through, including Microsoft’s new online services group, along with the Larry Heck, who was Yahoo’s executive of search and advertising algorithms.

Bartz understands that there is a lot of pressure on her and the rest of the company’s executives, and it’s unlikely she’ll be given a lot of leeway to make mistakes over the next 12 months.

Source: Daily Tech