Archive for: yahoo
Back in 2006 before the average Joe on the street had a smart phone – we all used our cell phones to check our e-mails, Flickr, news, weather and other such services. The main port of call for this was Yahoo Go – a mobile client released by Yahoo!
However, Yahoo! have just announced that Go is to suffer the same fate as GeoCities did last month – it’ll be leaving us. Come January 12th next year, when you turn on Yahoo! Go on your mobile you’ll get an error message.
Undoubtedly this is because of the competition from more powerful apps and platforms such as those on the iPhone.
However I think this might be slightly pre-mature because the app is still being sold on phones as you read this. Perhaps Yahoo! are trying to push us into the smart phone market?
Search has become a hot topic for the past year. Bing, Google, Yahoo, and others have fought for dominance and in this battle, users have been introduced to a bevy of innovations in their searches. The concept of search is nice, type in a few words, or phrases and find content directly related to your query. Some searches are more successful than others all the while introducing users to content across hundreds of thousands of pages. Still, most users will not go past the first two or three pages at most.
SurfCanyon strives to change the user’s search experience and focus not just on getting content, but becoming a tool for discovery. Much like a tool we spoke about some time ago, Worio, SurfCanyon attaches itself to your browser of choice and adds a target tab that allows for further discover of related content right from your normal search. The reason behind such an app is the fact that sometimes your content is not where you expect it. I with users not typically going past page 3, SurfCanyon will pull related content together for you and place it right under all the links you see on the first page.
You don’t just get deeper results, but as seen below you can dig even deeper into your results. This provides a real drill down experience for search discovery. This immersive search experience might be something you’ve been longing for. There’s lots of results to search through and the concept is to provide you answers for even the most complicated of queries.
Back in 1999 Yahoo purchased GeoCities for $3.65 billion, but today it has sent out a “final notice” warning GeoCities users that they are pulling the plug on the 26th October.
Yahoo currently is shutting down a lot of services which it seems as though previous CEO’s purchased for no real reason. Current Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz seems to have her head switch on and is focusing on Yahoo’s key business areas:
- Homepage
- Mail
- Messenger
- Everything “mobile”
- Search
- Media experiences across sports, news, finance, entertainment
“Yahoo’s goal is to be at the center of people’s online lives, and these efforts all support that,” says a source.
What is Yahoo wanting to sell:
- Yahoo Games!
- Yahoo Hot Jobs
- Yahoo Small Business
- Zimbra
- Yahoo Shopping
- Delicious
Here’s the farewell letter:
Previously here on Crenk we wrote about Yahoo Meme and we were even offering invites to our readers. It has been announced on the site only that Yahoo Meme is now open to the public. There is still no official word from Yahoo about the launch, but make sure you head over to Yahoo Meme and check it out.
Additionally, make sure you follow Crenk on Yahoo Meme.
I was lucky enough to receive an invite to Yahoo’s new product Meme. Meme is a micro-blogging service from Yahoo that works in a very similar way to Twitter. You may now ask, whats the difference?
- Yahoo Meme is very fast and stable
- Yahoo Meme makes it very easy to post Video, Music and Photos straight into your stream
- Yahoo Meme has really focused on making it easy to re-post items you like, with just 1 click (Viral focused)
We have joined just to test out the service and even after testing im pretty sure im going to keep using the account, because it is just so simple and easy to use. If you want to follow Crenk on Yahoo Meme our url is: http://meme.yahoo.com/crenk/
So you may be wondering why doesnt everyone just move over to this service from Twitter, well basically its because of the amount of users using Twitter. Additionally its the community of developers who have helped Twitter grow at the rate they have.
What Yahoo Meme really needs to develop:
- Yahoo Meme needs its own URL and identity away from the Yahoo.com domain. It would be good to see this as a standalone service
- Ability to resize pictures and videos down so that a lot more streams can be seen in the same window (problem with media in the stream)
Yahoo Meme is currently in private beta, so to mark its launch we can offer a lucky 5 people into the system. All you have to do is comment on this post and let us know why you want to use the service so badly!
When Bing and Yahoo! decided recently that they would work together in an effort to stage an offensive against the internet giant that is Google, I though competition between the two had come to an untimely end. I was wrong.
As it happens, although the two search engines will work together to defeat Google they will still compete for glory. Perhaps we will see a kind of WW2 cooperation just like the bitter Allies united to defeat the Nazis…not that Google is a Nazi.
A senior vice president of Yahoo! said “We are Yahoo and that will continue…We collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end,”
I guess this makes sense. I mean, what were we all expecting? Yahoo! and Bing to come together like two lost lovers? Nonsense. This is a recession and both companies will by going full steam ahead to stay afloat. They will share advertising revenue with both search engines using the Bing ad model. The deal is due to come into affect next year and will last for ten years. By the end of that time will Google have been defeated? And will Yahoo! be left needing Bing more than Bing needs Yahoo?
It appears as though Yahoo! may be the first real competitor to Twitter. Other companies such as Facebook have tried to draw people away from micro-blogging back to social networking. But there has been no real competition on the actual micro-blogging front.
A while back, Yahoo! stealthily rolled out Yahoo! Meme in the Portuguese language only. Nobody was all too sure why they did this because as business goes, you’re supposed to promote, promote, promote! Now their reasoning is clear.
It was a test. To see if it stood a chance without causing the company any embarrassment if it failed. They are now tackling Twitter on the global front by launching the micro-blogging platform in the second biggest language in the world; Spanish.
While people all over the world do use Twitter, studies have shown that services are received better by the public when they are tailored specifically to their needs – in this case their language.
While I can’t see Meme over running Twitter on the English servers I can see the new Yahoo! service picking up steam in South America, Mexico, West Africa and of course Spain.
Last week, here at Crenk we reported that Microsoft and Yahoo! are entering into a deal to combine search technology and the revenue from their engines in a bid to strike Google who has a share of around 65% of the global market. Yahoo! and Microsoft barely have 28% – combined.
It has emerged that the companies’ lack of market holding has led to Yahoo! putting a clause in the agreement which states that Yahoo! can back out of the deal at any time before the scheduled five year renewal if their revenue share falls too low.
Yahoo! and Microsoft failed to specify what exactly the number was that would entitle Yahoo! to pull out should revenue fall below it however it is expected that the danger zone will be in the first eighteen months.
This is because any new service, whether continuing on from an old one or starting from scratch will experience growing pains. A few other details have emerged since the deal was officially filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
For example, Microsoft must hire 400 Yahoo! engineers and pay them “market-competitive” wages. Furthermore, a full deal must be struck by October 27th otherwise the debates will be brought to a arbitration panel. Time is money.
I guess now we all have to play the waiting game. I wonder in two years time will be caught saying “I Binged myself and I’m 5th in the search results!”.
A whopping 67% of us ‘Google’ things. If we want to know something we simply ’Google it’, as it has become known. Like any good online company, their name is also a verb. Just like Twitter with Tweet. They have a hug share of the market – undoubtedly. Now however, they may have their first real competitor in years.
Anyone remember last year when Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo! for almost 50 Billion dollars? It went down in flames. But the inter-company relationship didn’t end. Now, they’re discussing a possible collaboration between the two search engines –Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo!.
If this were to go ahead then it would offer a chunk of healthy competition to the dominant Google. The news storyalone would send thousands flocking, to give it a whirl – but Yahoo and Microsoft better be careful.
People like their search engine. For me, its been Yahoo! imply because I like a bit of news before I search and also because it was the first search engine I ever used so I just kind of stuck with it. People don’t like change – and when they do change they don’t want to be insulted by too many sponsored results like over at Ask.com or search results that make them want to ‘Google’ .
It’s impossible to tell what the end result would be from this mutation of search engines. Would it be Yahoo!, powered by Bing or the other way around? They do have a plan to split the revenue between them but what about the work load such as PR, development and staffing the site. Now might not be a good time to invest in any search engine as there’s going to be a war, with casualties. I’ll wait until the final few blows before I put my money on one of them.
Yahoo has been getting a lot bad press lately, but with their recent new home page launch they seem to be slowly getting on the right track. Other positive news coming out of Yahoo is their Microsoft search marketing deal, acquisition of Xoopit, and more. Today we wanted to show you a quick video about what Yahoo! engineers think about their new home page.
Yahoo has confirmed that is has purchased a small start-up located in San Francisco in order to add better photo functionality to their Web Mail. The company which has been bought out is called Xoopit and is an emerging contender in the photo sharing world. The service allows users to share photos easily on a host of different sites such as Flickr and Facebook by taking them from their e-mail inboxes.
On the company blog, Bryan Lamkin, the senior vice-president said:
“ Why is this such a big deal? Yahoo! Mail is actually home to one of the largest online photo repositories in the world. And every day, millions of you use Yahoo! Mail as your primary way to share the photos of important moments in your lives. While social networks and community sites are great for sharing photos with everyone you know, we realize it’s not for everyone or every occasion. For many, email is still best for sharing photos among a more select group of friends or family. And now we’re making it all that much easier for you.”
Xoopit seems over the moon with the new deal. They have updated their homepage screaming Yahoo! everywhere. On their company blog they said that “the Xoopit team today sees this acquisition as an exceptional path for us in achieving our vision. Over the last few months, we have left every conversation with the Yahoo! team thinking that together we can wow the world”
The specific financial deal has not been revealed but it is estimated to be in the region of $20 million. That amount of money is no chump change for a new group of start-up creators who will hopefully go on to create even better websites and services in the future.
It has been reported that sources at a major client of investment house ThinkEquity say that the firm considers a Microsoft (MSFT) link-up with Yahoo! (YHOO) in the search business to be “imminent”. The comments were made by analyst William Morrison. ThinkEquity did not have an immediate comment.
Sources beyond ThinkEquity speculate that under the terms of the arrangement, Yahoo! will be paid $3 billion upfront and will get 11o% of the revenue that its searches provide after traffic acquisition costs in each of the first two years. In the third year, that figure would go to 90%.
Microsoft will then have control of 30% of the US search market if they can close the deal with Yahoo. Given that Microsoft’s own Bing is on the rise also, it will then only be about taking share away from Google. However, I can see how this deal with allow Microsoft to take marketshare from Google, Google has much better technology and a huge amount of brand loyalty. comScore put Google’s US June search share flat at 65%, Yahoo! at 19.5%, down .5%, and Microsoft at 8.4%, up .4%.
For Yahoo!, the transaction would give it the opportunity to lock in a substantial revenue stream from search and potentially save several hundred million dollars over the next three years by cutting development personnel and costs. If the transaction materializes, Yahoo!’s share could jump $4 or $5.
Back in 2006 before the average Joe on the street had a smart phone – we all used our cell phones to check our e-mails, Flickr, news, weather and other such services. The main port of call for this was Yahoo Go – a mobile client released by Yahoo!
