Category Archives: Yahoo!

Professors from the Wharton School of Business analyzed Yahoo!’s many business lines in a recent article featured in Knowledge@Wharton. While Microsoft and Google duke it out Yahoo! may remain friendly to both and emerge a winner. Google is known for being good at search, and it is argued that while Yahoo! is certainly in a lot of different areas it is not a product leader. Most of the “Web 2.0” goodness mentioned in the article comes through acquisition of other small companies like Oddpost and Flickr that might be able to shake up a large media company. I think Yahoo!…

John Battelle interviewed Terry Semel this morning at Web 2.0. Below are some select quotes I found particularly interesting. If you look at Google as being more than search, “as a portal [Google] would probably be rated #4.” “So far [Google] seems to have no real plan, but maybe they do.” “We think the big change on the Internet is not just to get more and more unique users. As we go forward it’s more about a deeper experience, more time spent, and a deeper experience for users and advertisers.” Almost every session is mentioning Google even though there are…

Yahoo! just announced they have acquired events site Upcoming.org and the three-man team of Andy Baio, Gordon Luk, and Leonard Lin. Upcoming is an events message board for individuals and companies, providing a way to publicize and discover events. Upcoming has a database of venues supplied by users, tags for events, as well as information about what events its members are attending and watching. Upcoming recently added a groups feature to allow private events and recurring distribution lists. Upcoming and its team will be integrated with Yahoo! Local. Yahoo! Local has a database of venues complete with reviews and merchant…

Yahoo! plans to lease 200,000 square feet of office space in San Francisco according to the San Francisco Business Times. The new office is located at 475 Sansome Street, near the landmark TransAmerica pyramid. Yahoo! currently has a HotJobs office in San Francisco and is currently hiring for two account executive positions. I wonder what teams will be located at this new location. I have thought about working at Yahoo! in the past but the commute to Sunnyvale is just too much for city dwellers like me or people living in Marin or the East Bay. 200,000 square feet holds…

Yahoo! announced quarterly results yesterday and gave us a peek at what’s been happening for the last 3 months. The Yahoo! Music service seemed to cause the most excitement among analysts on the conference call and Yahoo! plans to fully release the service by the end of September. Terry Semel said over half a million publishers are submitting feeds to My Yahoo! and over 4 million sites have “Add to My Yahoo!” buttons on their pages. He also mentioned the relevance of personal content producers using Flickr and blogs during the recent London bombings. Yahoo! had 3.14 billion average…

Social search is here. Yahoo! introduced My Web 2.0 beta this evening, the first step towards personalized and social search online. I have been exploring the new service for the past half-hour and I am impressed. Personalized search and extending that search to a network of friends is an intensive computational operation and I am surprised Yahoo! has pulled it off. What can you do with My Web 2.0? Each search is limited to your saved bookmarks and the bookmarks of your friends my default. Every bookmark has an option for one or more tags and Yahoo! will suggest tags…

Jim Winstead just announced Yahoo! has purchased blo.gs. The cloud interface will still be available for general use. What does this mean? Yahoo! now has a ping beacon that is already built-in to most weblog software as well as a database of blog posts from the past few years. The cloud technology allows Yahoo! to easily share content update notifications inside and outside the firewall, allowing for easy sharing between blo.gs and Yahoo! Search for example. Jim originally planned on pulling the cloud interface offline at the end of last year and it is good to see the continuation of…