New leaders arrive, old ones leave -- sometimes by the back door in the dead of night. And so it goes with this week's quiz, as the country gets to know a new president elect, a longtime senator says adios, and Yahoo employees wonder who will wear the crown (or the dunce cap) after Jerry Yang departs. Also on tap: A print magazine and a virtual world die, while a dead ISP and an extinct mammal rise from the grave. Have you got your finger on the tech pulse? Prove it by acing this week's quiz. Correct answers are worth 10 points, and no looking at your neighbor's DNA for clues. Ready?
1. In a move that surprised absolutely no one, Jerry Yang is stepping down as Yahoo's CEO but remaining at the company in another capacity. What will be his new title?
a. Chief Operating Officer
b. Chief Vacillating Officer
c. Chief Yahoo
d. Chief Sitting Duck
Further proving that security through (very, very light) obscurity isn't a good means of keeping things secret, a new beta version of Yahoo's Mobile Front Page (generally known as just m.yahoo.com) has been found hiding just one character away from the beta announced to the public back in January.
Where as the public beta can be found at beta.m.yahoo.com, our tipster dug up the new version by instead navigating to beta2.m.yahoo.com. Unfortunately, it seems we weren't supposed to see this just yet; within a half-hour of us reaching out to Yahoo! for comment, the page had become password protected - but not before we snagged a couple screenshots.
Reuters - Verizon Wireless said on Thursday that some employees had gained unauthorized access and viewed a personal cell phone account held by President-elect Barack Obama that is now inactive.
When we first wrote about Genwi a year ago, it was a social feed reader with content feeds that could be organized by different categories (blogs, news, videos, music, podcasts) and shared with your friends. Today, it is relaunching with a completely new design that takes into account what your friends are doing across the Web as well.
You can think of Genwi as a combination of Google Reader and FriendFeed with sophisticated search, auto-categorization, and filtering features. As before, Genwi is a super RSS feed reader. It suggests feeds by category, or you can add your own (via search or by importing an OPML file from another reader). You can also invite your friends by giving Genwi permission to match its members to your contacts in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, AOL, Outlook and elsewhere (although it does not have Facebook integration yet).
Once you do that, you can track your the social activity of your friends across the Web, just like on FriendFeed. Anytime a contact does something on Twitter, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, or other social media sites, it appears on Genwi.
So far, so what. But Genwi has some interesting features that could push the ball forward in the Web filtering/lifestreaming game.
Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update.
In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice.
Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000, or about 28%, come from Google Reader. Newsgator and BlogRovR are next with about 10% each, followed by Netvibes, Bloglines, AOL, Flock, Yahoo and the Windows Media Center.
The complete breakdown is below.
Everything is Terrible found this funny infomercial from a long gone company Zillionaire.com, pushing a site called dotplanet.com ("the world's only lifestyle destination portal"). If George Bush would have ran an Internet business in the late 1990s, he would have had the same spiel and delivery style of Zillionaire.com CEO Hubert Humphrey (Not the politician): "I firmly believe that Dot Planet is the most powerful phenomenon to ever hit the Internet. Our goals are just mind-boggling. We will be the fastest portal to ever hit one million users, two million, three million and all. Our vision is limitless. And I'm totally convinced that Dot Planet will be just as well known in the very near future as America Online. Microsoft, Yahoo, and it's all because of one thing: out great Zillionaire Internet army." Here's an interesting 1999 article from Investment News about Hubert Humphrey and Zillionaire.com. Humphrey now runs a company called WLG International. From perusing the WLH site, I can't make heads or tails of what the business does: "WLG International has the Quantum Compensation Plan, which is specifically designed to help associates build and grow their 'business within a business.' One of the most powerful compensation and promotion plans in marketing, it offers a unique blend of great Personal Contracts, Infinity Overrides, Generational Overrides, Bonus Pools and Equity Sharing Pools – featuring a 100 percent gross payout to the field." Huh? The First Zillion is Always the Hardest...
Last I heard about Leapfish (this was a couple of years ago), they ran a useless but fun tool that provided you with a free appraisal for your domain name based on a variety of ratings and criteria. Now they're back with an equally useless tool, this time without the fun part.
The company just revamped itself under the ownership of California-based DotNext, morphing into what they refer to as a "multi-dimensional information aggregator," which is actually nothing more than yet another meta search engine. You know the kind: sites that pull together search results from real engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo and attempt to differentiate themselves by adding tabs for meta-searching images, videos, Q&A, blogs, and so on. Leapfish also displays a number of static, non-customizable widgets on their homepage for the latest news, weather reports, and a stock market summary, which is a kind of step backwards from all the start page personalization efforts we've seen over the years.
The premise of meta search engines is that the aggregation process digs up the most relevant results across different sites and technology platforms, all on a single page. What I want to know: if these meta search engines (and boy, are there many) deliver significantly better results or a greater experience than a Google's or Yahoo's core search technology can on its own, then why doesn't everyone flock to them instead?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a five-year low today, closing down nearly 450 points. And the New York Times Co. had an even worse day. The company's stock dove almost 10%, lower than it's been in decades. And just after the close of the markets came the payoff: the company is cutting its dividend to six cents per share, down from 23 cents last quarter. How bad is it? Very bad. How long can the company last before calling bankruptcy if things keep going like this? We're putting the question to you.
In one sense, it's wise for the company to cut the dividend, because it needs to conserve all the cash it can get. But it's pretty apocalyptic for its stock, because it just makes it that much more unattractive to investors.
The company also released its October revenues just minutes ago. How are those? Horrible! Total revenues are down 9.4% from last year, and ad revenues are down more than 16%.
National advertising revenues decreased as weakness in the studio entertainment, healthcare and home furnishing manufacturer categories offset very strong growth in financial services advertising as well as increased advocacy advertising.
Yes, all those full-page ads by failing banks desperate to retain their customers were the bright spot for the NYT Co.
So here's the question: How long until the NYT Co. declares bankruptcy? "Never" is an acceptable answer for the optimists among you. A sale by the Sulzberger family is another obvious alternative. For the more hard-hearted, put your predictions in the comments. There will be some sort of reward for the winner. Though nobody really "wins" if it actually happens.
AFP - Shaquille O'Neal has earned many nicknames during his NBA career: "The Diesel," "The Big Aristotle," "The Big Daddy" and, since his move last year to the Phoenix Suns, "The Big Cactus."
AFP - Microsoft, seeking to boost the popularity of its Zune music player, announced a new subscription offer on Thursday that will allow users to keep 10 tracks a month permanently.
Yahoo is rolling out a search service that aggregates an interesting mix of non-web search results across a page. Glue has been available through Yahoo India with customized results for about seven months, and the U.S. version offers a similar set of results boxes: Yahoo Shopping, blog search from Google (seriously), Yahoo Answers and Images, YouTube and Wikipedia pages. More relevant search types are shifted to the top when found. It's an intriguing, semi-open move, and a decent bookmark for grabbing broader information about a topic at a glance. Tell us your take on Glue in the comments.
Cold-hearted bastards. The New York Times sent out a memo to employees this morning telling them that the 14th, 15th, and 16th floors are going to be closed over Thanksgiving weekend so that workers can finally put finishing on the wood floors—a vital job for which the paper has plenty of money. Do you know what this means? The cafeteria will be closed on Thanksgiving. Take your snack from the coffee cart and be happy, peons! Wait, that's closed too:
"Now that the wood floors in the building have acclimated to their new home, we are able to complete the finishing job. To take advantage of limited foot traffic during Thanksgiving weekend, there will be no access to the 14th, 15th and 16th floors from 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 26, through Sunday night, Nov. 30. The floors will reopen on Monday, Dec. 1.
Note that the cafeteria will be closed for the duration of the work. Newsroom coffee cart service will continue except for Thanksgiving Day.
AFP - The top emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China will drive mobile services growth in the coming years, a new report by Britain's telecoms regulator Ofcom said Thursday.
Now that Yahoo is gone under $10 Microsoft is not interested anymore. Apparently the company is not interested when it’s a bargain. MSFT decides to do anti-virus for some unknown reason. Company also unable to promote Silverlight against Adobe Flash. HP story from yesterday actually explained. I run down all the stocks that are in the [...]
T-Mobile USA will provide Yahoo's OneSearch search engine on its phones, a Yahoo executive said Wednesday.
T-Mobile is placing a OneSearch button on its phones in a deal that is to be announced soon, said Marco Boerries, executive vice president and head of Yahoo's Connected Life Division, at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. The carrier's decision to place a OneSearch button in the software of its subscribers' handsets is a much-needed win for Yahoo as it struggles against Google and Microsoft for search advertising dollars and looks for a successor to outgoing CEO Jerry Yang.
Yahoo's latest partner has a close relationship with Google in at least one area. Last month, T-Mobile USA became the first mobile operator to offer a phone based on Google's Android software platform when it put HTC's G1 handset on sale. T-Mobile could not immediately be reached for comment, and Yahoo's Boerries didn't say specifically whether the OneSearch button would appear on the G1.
Yahoo let Google take away most of its market share in PC search and is working with carriers to make sure the same thing doesn't happen in mobile, Boerries said. So the company is working through mobile operators to get OneSearch set up on their phones in hopes that subscribers will go straight to Yahoo's search engine rather than calling up a competitor's, he said. Yahoo has deals with 26 mobile operators around the world, which have 850 million subscribers, he said.
OneSearch is available by download to users of many phones. However, since mobile users traditionally don't download applications to their phones often, Yahoo can reach more users by preloading the button on their phones.
In March, T-Mobile in Northern and Central Europe dropped Google search for Yahoo, and the U.K. carrier O2 also is a partner, Boerries said. Those deals have helped Yahoo gain a market share of 25 percent in Europe and more than 30 percent in the U.K., he said. The company had "lost all footprint on search" on PCs in Europe, he said.
OneSearch is designed to return useful answers, instead of just a series of links, for easier use on mobile devices, and earlier this year was opened up to allow content from third parties such as reviews site Yelp. Voice search, which just this week became available from Google as an iPhone application, already was available for OneSearch, Boerries said.
In 2009, Yahoo will concentrate on making it easier for advertisers to set up effective mobile advertising, Boerries said. For example, it's hard to make ads look good on a wide variety of mobile devices, and Yahoo wants to help solve that problem, he said. The company is exploring how to give advertisers the tools they need to create the right ad experience for consumers and to reach as many people as they want without having to make deals with many operators, he said.
Mobile search advertising has to be built from the ground up, and not all Web search advertisers will want to make the leap, Boerries said.
Reuters - Yahoo Inc announced an expansion of its mobile Web portals to T-mobile, so its smart phone users who get data will have Yahoo search by default.
AFP - The EU launches Thursday its Europeana digital library, an online digest of Europe's cultural heritage that aims to draw together millions of books and other items.
Further proving that security through (very, very light) obscurity isn't a good means of keeping things secret, a new beta version of Yahoo's Mobile Front Page (generally known as just m.yahoo.com) has been found hiding just one character away from the 
When we first wrote about 
Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a 
Last I heard about 
The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a five-year low today, closing down nearly 450 points. And the New York Times Co. had an even worse day. The company's 
Yahoo is rolling out a search service that aggregates an interesting mix of non-web search results across a page. Glue has been available through Yahoo India with customized results for about seven months, and the U.S. version offers a similar set of results boxes: Yahoo Shopping, blog search from 
Cold-hearted bastards. The New York Times sent out a memo to employees this morning telling them that the 14th, 15th, and 16th floors are going to be closed over Thanksgiving weekend so that workers can finally put finishing on the wood floors—a vital job for which the paper 
