11/04/2008 by swordfish.

Yahoo may have played a blinder by tying up with Google and hinting at a deal with AOL, but Wall Street still thinks Microsoft will win the takeover battle.

Yahoo announced earlier in the week that it was planning to trial an advertisement sharing scheme with Google, which sent analysts into a spin predicting a possible three way alliance with AOL.

Hours later, Microsoft trumped the announcement with the New York Times reporting that MySpace owner News Corp was in talks to join Microsoft’s bid for the web company. “Everyone is just exploring. The best option is to accept the Microsoft deal. I just see Yahoo as a mature brand and AOL as declining brand” says fund manager Mike Binger at Thrivent Financial, which owns small stakes in Yahoo and Microsoft.

Source: PC Pro

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09/04/2008 by swordfish.

Yahoo has added video sharing to its Flickr photo website in an effort to carve a niche in an on-line arena dominated by Google-owned YouTube.

Short videos can be posted along with pictures on Flickr pages that let users share images photo-album style with select people, as opposed to the way videos are displayed on YouTube for the world to see.

“Flickr is a very different experience from anything else out there,” Flickr director Kakul Srivastava said, demonstrating the video-sharing feature for AFP in the Internet firm’s San Francisco office. “We are not trying to be the highest volume site, but we are trying to be the most interesting, authentic and personal.”

The video-sharing feature rolled out Tuesday in eight languages on Flickr websites worldwide.

Only people with “pro” premium accounts, costing 25 dollars annually, can upload videos to their Flickr pages.

Source: Yahoo News

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01/04/2008 by swordfish.

Google said on Monday it is taking the next step to make its web-based software useful in the real world of spotty internet access by allowing users to edit word-processing documents offline.

The world’s top internet company said it will begin over the next several weeks to allow users of its Google Docs word-processing application to edit documents without an active web connection, on planes, trains and other disconnected spots.

The offline feature of Google Docs temporarily stores document changes on a user’s local computer. Once reconnected to the internet, any changes the user made will automatically be synchronised and stored on Google-hosted computers.

Source: ZDNet

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05/03/2008 by swordfish.

Google has launched its Google Gears for Mobile browser extension for Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices, which allows users to access their web-based applications even when they are offline. This could mean that when there is no wireless access, or the network is experiencing delays, applications will still work.

The application won’t work with devices running Opera or other web browsers, however, which rules out the iPhone and some other devices.

Meanwhile, Yahoo has developed a new bookmarking tool, Yahoo onePlace, which keeps track of web favourites, such as news feeds, sites, images, video, etc from a single place on their mobile device. Yahoo onePlace will be available in the second quarter of 2008.

Source: ZDNet

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15/02/2008 by swordfish.

Google has revealed it has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset.

The figures were so high that the search company initially thought they had made an error compiling the data.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again”, Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times during this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

American iPhone operator AT&T recently said that the average revenue from iPhone users is double that of average users because the of top-up data packages, while in the UK O2 has said the iPhone is generating “unheard of data traffic”.

Source: Yahoo News

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04/02/2008 by swordfish.

Google has said it finds Microsoft’s $44.6bn (£22.65bn) bid to buy rival Yahoo “troubling” and wants regulators to scrutinise the proposed deal.

In a blog, Google said the tie-up could unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email and instant messaging services. It also said Microsoft had previously sought “to establish proprietary monopolies”.

Microsoft made an unsolicited offer for Yahoo on Friday, and Yahoo has said it is considering the proposal.

Source: BBC News

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