Yahoo Letter to Advertisers

Dear Advertiser, We wanted to reach out to you directly regarding Google's decision, announced earlier today, to terminate the advertising services agreement that the companies announced in June. Yahoo! continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement, and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court. Google notified Yahoo! of its refusal to move forward with implementation of the agreement following indication from the Department of Justice that it would seek to block it, despite Yahoo!'s proposed revisions to address the DOJ's and advertisers' concerns. While disappointed by this turn of events, we are writing to you to reaffirm our commitment to working together to drive your advertising results, and to provide the continued leadership you expect. The fact is that this deal was incremental to Yahoo!'s product roadmap and does not change Yahoo!'s commitment to innovation and growth in search. As you know, Yahoo! has long focused on how to improve the user, advertiser and publisher experience. We will continue to enable you to easily connect with the consumers you most want to reach, by creating a more open, efficient and effective marketplace for advertisers and publishers. We also plan to continue to provide the cutting-edge advances in products, platforms and services that the industry needs and expects, by leading the way in helping advertisers navigate the converging contextual and search ad markets. Finally, we remain committed to innovation in anticipating the needs of Yahoo!'s audiences--one of the largest and most engaged populations of consumers on the web--by creating the unique context that delivers results for brand advertisers online. In short, even in the absence of a commercial agreement with Google, we intend to become an ever-stronger player in online advertising. Our certainty on this front comes from the progress we continue to make in many areas, not the least of which are the significant innovations we're making in search. We continually optimize our algorithmic and sponsored search. In fact, in 2008 alone, we have developed and launched hundreds of improvements to our search engine, including index expansions and updates, ranking models and performance tuning. Each of these features is designed to improve search quality and deliver a more relevant search experience to our users. Particularly in this economic climate, identifying and making rich and deep connections with your target audience is of the utmost importance. No company is better prepared to help you succeed in that quest than Yahoo!. In addition to being the largest aggregate publisher in the U.S., we are #1 or #2 across virtually every key category, including being #1 in the categories of News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment, and we're putting our leadership to work for you every day. By offering extensive reach to consumers, breakthrough advances in technology, simplifying inefficiencies in the advertising process, putting new and industry-recognized talent in place, and providing tailored solutions across our network to meet your needs, we are well prepared to provide you with the most significant return on your investment. We are looking forward to continuing to work with you in building your business. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me or anyone on our team with your questions, or to discuss your challenges. We're open to a productive dialogue with you in the service of continuing our successful work together. Warmest Regards, Hilary Schneider Executive Vice President, Yahoo! U.S.

Job Sites Reviewed

Coming soon. We are working on a review of several of the top job sites.

Including:
Yahoo HotJobs: Apply for a job now at Yahoo! HotJobs


Monster.com: Stand out with a resume on Monster


Beyond.com: Find a New Job with Beyond.com


Also check out LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, JobFox,

ASCAP Ruling could cost AOL, Yahoo, Real $100mil

Staci D. Kramer at Paid content reports that:

Federal Court Rules AOL, Yahoo, Real Must Pay ASCAP Music Licensing Fees; Could Run $100 Million

ASCAP is ballyhooing a federal court ruling today that AOL (NYSE: TWX), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK) must pay higher licensing fees for streaming songs by its 320,000-plus songwriters, composers and music publishers. The license period covered by the ruling from U.S, District Court for the Southern District of New York, acting as a “rate” court, could go as far back as July 1, 2001 through Dec. 31, 2009. The amount owed based on a “reasonable” 2.5 percent of music-use-adjusted revenue could run the three companies up to $100 million, ASCAP claims. According to the court, AOL would owe roughly $5.9 million for 2006 while Yahoo would owe $6.76 million. But the revenue numbers are redacted so it’s difficult to tell what basis the court used to reach that number.

From a section of the ruling comparing the rate for the online sites to that paid by the television networks: “It is difficult to believe that music is that much less important to Applicants, whose visitors spend X (redacted) amount of their onsite time streaming music and who can select the music that is streamed, than it is to the television networks, whose viewers surely hear music for no greater percentage of their viewing time and have no choice of that music.”

The ruling also compares the fee to that the companies have agreed to pay major record companies, but those numbers, too, are redacted.

ASCAP has posted the pdf the 153-page decision.

Most Popular Browser Toolbars

Most popular Browser Toolbars
By: Victor Caballero

Browser Toolbars are common add-ons nowadays to different browsers adding different functionality to the user experience. The browsers themselves take care of fundamental browsing navigations like moving back and forth and similar works. The toolbars time and again add supplementary functionality to browsers like search options, quick links, send emails, bookmarks and many more. These actually add the easy with which the users can move across the workspace over the internet and also gives them the essential time saving for being able to do things at single click from the browser itself. Some of the most popular browser toolbars available in the market are Yahoo toolbars, Google toolbars, AOL toolbars, Windows Live toolbar and many more.

Coming to a brief description of each of these, let us talk about Yahoo. As it is popularly known among most of the internet users across the world, as per statistics it is a principal online information portal attracting hundreds and millions of users inside its network that is a collection of different websites like email, news, technology, chatting, entertainment, news, shopping, search engines etc and available in different languages. The services are available as free ones as well as paid premium ones as well. The services are advertised and made localized to every individual user across the world via the free downloadable toolbars that provide the cool user experience to a host of these services. It can be stated as an endeavor from the company to reach out to the multitude with its bouquet of services and also enable them to use these services as much as possible.

Google toolbar is also a browser toolbar presented for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers. Being a global player and leader in search engine frontier, the Google toolbar provides a search box and “Go” button to enable users to search almost everything that they need information on across the world and truly makes the entire earth accessible at a click away from them. The “Google Suggest” is like an intelligent piece of this functionality that gives instant suggestion of topics that can be searched, while the user types any keywords in the search box from the toolbar. It is indeed a very handy device and useful from the perspective of the users. Apart from it, the other functionalities available are “Spell Checker”, “Auto Links”, “Google Bookmarks”, “send email via GMail” and many more. Another great add-on to the Google’s toolbar is the “Google Compute”! It permits a computer to help the users to unravel tricky scientific problems during the time the computer would otherwise remain unused.

The AOL Toolbar by AOL is also available for Internet Explorer and Firefox with options like email, games, radio, search engines and other similar functionality. Windows Live toolbars comes as a next generation for the MSN Search toolbars with functionalities like desktop searching functionality and index options for emails as well as files. It also provides facilities like “Instant Messenger”, “Windows Live homepage”, “Search options” and many other things.

In all the Browser Toolbars have indeed become extremely popular over the years and within a short time and the above mentioned most popular browser toolbars are truly doing a great market among the ever growing Web community across the world.

Resources:
Download a Free copy of Windows Live Toolbar and Search while being fully protected.

Has the Eagle Landed?

http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ has been announced by Yahoo.

Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy. We're here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.

Microsoft to buy xobni?

TechCrunch is reporting that Microsoft is negotiating a deal with Xobni.

Xobni makes a software add for Outlook to improve your email experience.


Xobni
Website: www.xobni.com
Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Founded: April 1, 2006
Funding: $4.3M

Xobni, the word “inbox” spelled backwards, has created a new way to look at your email. Xobni takes the effort out of organizing, searching, and navigating your email.

The only thing that has changed with email in the last ten years is that… Learn More

Yahoo at IAB Phoenix Conference

Yang and Decker from Yahoo! made an appearance at the the IAB Conference in Phoenix today.

It appears that conversations are still ongoing with Yahoo and Microsoft, although it is a little confusing what is really going on, one thing for sure is that Microsoft is going for it and has started hostile takeover steps with preparations for a proxy battle and the ousting of the Yahoo board.

What will Yahoo do?

At this point it appears is preparing their Apex ad system, which has some buzz. We will see if it is as promised. Indications are good so far.

Along with Apex we should expect to see a Buzz offering from Yahoo.

We haven't heard too much about Yahoo Live, it appears to still be up and running with about 1500 viewers and 100 channels broadcasting live. Most of the video is not worth watching but there are a few that are interesting. How is Live going to be different than ustream and justin tv? That is the question.

Yahoo has to offer a product that is different than anything else out there. Maybe playing catchup and surpassing the competition is part of the strategy?

More to follow.

Yahoo Toolbar

With all the buzz about Microsoft buying Yahoo we should take a look at some of the offerings from Yahoo.

I am a big fan of the Yahoo! Toolbar


The toolbar installer will ask if you want to install for Firefox and it will also to make Yahoo the default search engine and to make yahoo.com the home page.

Agree to the terms. You will be asked to help Yahoo with tracking, I usually answer yes. It really does help make for a better search experience when you supply some of your behavior and per the privacy policy your identity is not used. On the machine I just installed it I didn't have to put in my username and password or even login.

Media 3.0 Stories Feb 6 2008

MediaBytes from Shelly Palmer:

* SUPER BOWL XLII averages 97.5 million viewers.
* FCC faces dual must-carry lawsuit from C-SPAN, A&E and more.
* COMCAST adds VOD for Project Infinity.
* NEWS CORP will keep the upfront. Won't pursue Yahoo.
* MYSPACE launches its developer platform today.

Billboard is reporting Yahoo and Rhapsody formed a pact

Yahoo Drops Subscription Service, Pacts With Rhapsody

Yahoo is dropping its subscription music service and replacing it with Rhapsody America as part of a broad strategic partnership announced by the two companies today.

Does this mean Yahoo Music will drop it's service? Probably.

Microsoft makes $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo

Microsoft makes $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo
Microsoft said Friday that it is making an unsolicited offer of $31 a share, or $44.6 billion, to buy Yahoo in a move that would give the software giant more market share and become a significant threat to Google.

Yahoo Life! Yahoo Go!

Starting today, any publisher can make “widgets” that plug into Yahoo! Go! Showing some icons on screen of eBay (EBAY), News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, and Viacoms (VIA.B) MTV. Been working in partnership with eBay, Viacom and News for past few months, have some widgets developed with them.

A “widget” is a fully fledged mobile app, Boris is insisting — “Everything I do on my PC I can now do on my mobile phone.” Showing off MySpace, friend requests. Yang: “We have the potential for many, many developers to join this.”

Yahoo! Go! available on over 300 devices. Yahoo! Go 3.0 will be offered on over 30 devices when it goes live. As part of the developer strategy, also manage to runs the widgets on any phone with a Web browser, which means a phone doesn’t have to have the Yahoo! Go! code on it. Able to call up one’s personalized list of widgets from any phone.

Working with LG Electronics and other phone vendors to make widgets run natively on phones.

Yang points adds are running on the user interface of the phone, segueing into mobile advertising. Taking technology for widget developers and giving it to advertisers to make “rich ads.” In the demo, clicking on the “stores” link for an advertisor leads to a scrollable map of store locations.

You’ll be able to check out a beta version of 3.0 later today by directing your phone’s browser to http://beta.m.yahoo.com