SiliconBeat

Google Buzz is here. And the big question is this: Can Google finally get in the social game? After playing around with Google Buzz for a bit today, I’ll say the jury is out for me. But I have a few thoughts, and will have more after I’ve played with it for a few weeks.

The first impulse I have is to fight is the despair over creating and learning a new social networking tool. Facebook and Twitter work well for me, despite some imperfections. I won’t say there isn’t room for improvement. But any new service has to clear a pretty high barrier to become part of my daily routine.

After digging in and following a few friends on Google Buzz, the next thing that strikes me as interesting about Google Buzz is how much it mirrors the approach to social that Yahoo is taking. And there’s something I wouldn’t expect to be writing: How Google is following Yahoo. Read the rest of this entry »

Palm Pixi

After covering Apple’s music event this morning, I met with Palm and got a hands-on look at the company’s new Pixi smartphone, which Palm announced early today

I was a bit underwhelmed by the actual phone, which will be the second to run Palm’s WebOS software. But the Pixi, which Palm plans to launch before the holidays, will have at least one new features that will be very cool.

I found a lot to like about Palm’s Pre, the Pixi’s WebOS predecessor. One of the features that I liked most was something Palm calls Synergy. The feature collects and combines address book information from a variety of sources and displays them all together.

Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook just announced it has acquired FriendFeed of Mountain View, a social media aggregator built around a news feed similar to its new owner’s.

I think Yahoo missed a big opportunity here. I had written a couple times that Yahoo should buy FriendFeed and make it the centerpiece of its new homepage. Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo announced Monday it would start selling self-service display advertising to small businesses.
The ads, which require a minimum payment of $30 per day, will let advertisers target specific segments of Yahoo’s giant global audience. For example, a clothing store could show ads to women in San Jose between the ages of 18 and 24 years old when they visit Yahoo.
Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesman, said advertisers could choose among 800 ad templates provided by AdReady, an advertising-technology company based in Seattle.
Google began self-service display ads that run on its AdSense partner network last October.
Diana Adair, a Google spokeswoman, said the display ads are proving more effective than more typical text-based ads. For example, she said, the Wilshire Grand hotel in downtown Los Angles has seen online reservations increase by 12% since beginning its ad campaign.
Last month, Google announced that its ad-builder template would be available in 40 languages and 100 countries.
Yahoo’s product, called My Display Ads, is currently only available in the United States.

Speaking at Stanford University on Sunday night, Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz said it has been a “distinct pleasure” to have Carl Icahn, a famous corporate raider turned shareholder activist, on her board.
Last year, Icahn led a proxy fight to oust former Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang and replace other members of the board of directors after Yahoo rejected a $47.5 billion bid from Microsoft. Icahn later dropped his challenge in return for being given control of three seats on the 11-member board.
Speaking at the 15th annual Stanford Directors College Bartz, who replaced Yang in January, said she was “fortunate” not to have been at Yahoo during the proxy battle but added that it is “better” to have Icahn around and described him as a “smart guy.”
Bartz, who won respect for turning around a hostile board of directors while she was chief executive of Autodesk, said corporate boards need to have more members who are involved and willing to speak up. She also said boards need a diversity of ages and should be selected from different industries and positions — not just chief executive officers.

OpenX, an open-source ad-serving platform that competes with Yahoo and Google, announced Tuesday it has raised an additional $10 million in a third round of funding.
The round was lead by DAG Ventures and includes Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and Jon Miller, the former AOL chief who is also chairman of OpenX’s board of directors.
OpenX Chief Executive Tim Cadogan said he was not been formally raising money when the round came together. OpenX, which has about 50 employees and is based in Pasadena, has raised a total of $30.8 million, including $15.5 million that was collected in December 2007. Cadogan said he still has “a good chunk” left of that Series B round.
Cadogan said investors are eager to support the company’s rapid growth. Founded in 1998 as an open-source project to give Web publishers free software for serving ads on their site, OpenX now shows Internet users 300 billion ads a month and sells support and consulting services.
In April, OpenX launched the OpenX Market, which automatically matches Web publishers and advertisers in return for a 15 percent commission. Cadogan said the OpenX Market is simpler and costs less than rivals like Google’s DoubleClick Advertising Exchange and Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange.
Since December, the number of customers using OpenX’s hosted software, which includes a paid premium version, has quadrupled. Cadogan said adoption of OpenX appears to be accelerating despite the faltering economy.
“We have the benefit of building an innovative new business in the middle of a recession,” Cadogan said. A former Yahoo executive who played key roles in search and advertising, Cadogan joined OpenX last year.

Could it be that Yahoo is finding it harder to hire a new chief financial officer than it expected. Its current CFO, Blake Jorgensen (pictured) is still leaving, as the company announced Feb. 26 when he became one of the first casualties of the house cleaning done by the Internet company’s new chief executive Carol Bartz. Read the rest of this entry »

Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with Collins Stewart, said Microsoft’s new search engine, which is expected to be unveiled in the next week or two, could make Yahoo more comfortable about agreeing to a search deal with the software giant.
“We expect a commercial agreement for search between Microsoft and Yahoo by the time these two companies report their June quarter earnings,” Aggarwal wrote in a note on Thursday. “As we highlighted numerous times before, a likely search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo can very likely give $8 to $10 per share lift to Yahoo and increases Microsoft’s likelihood to emerge as the second most compelling Internet advertising company.”
Microsoft and Yahoo have been talking about a potential deal for months. Negotiations are being led by Qi Lu, a widely respected engineer and a former Yahoo search executive who now runs Microsoft’s online services group.
Together, Microsoft and Yahoo would deliver about 30 percent of all Internet searches in the United States.
According to comScore, Google’s market share in April was 64.2 percent versus 20.4 percent for Yahoo and 8.2 percent for Microsoft.
But Yahoo search executives, speaking at an event on Tuesday, said a new Yahoo search service, known as BOSS, is carrying out almost as many searches as Microsoft’s Live search engine.
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy, said the BOSS platform, which powers a multitude of smaller, customized search engines, is processing 35 milion queries a day, compared to 40 million for Microsoft.

Yahoo’s stock surged more than 4 percent after AllThingsD, a tech blog owned by Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, reported that Yahoo and Microsoft are engaged in meaningful talks.
The report by Kara Swisher was based on anonymous sources that said a deal is “closer than it has ever been…we’re finally talking about the how rather than the if,” and that talks are “meaningful…The fact that there is even progress and engagement, after so many failed attempts between us, says a lot.”
Rick Munarriz, an analyst with the Motley Fool, says a deal that involved Microsoft providing technical infrastructure while Yahoo handled both search and display advertising sales would make sense. “This isn’t the ridiculous chatter that finds Yahoo! accepting gobs of money to hand over its precious real estate to Mr. Softy’s grubby hands,” he wrote in a post this morning.

Jerry Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo and, until earlier this year, the company’s chief executive, placed 2 million of his Yahoo shares into a blind trust managed by a third-party “who will have complete discretion as to when, and to what extent, the stock is to be sold or otherwise disposed of.” The trust, set up April 29, is set to expire after one year, according to a regulatory filing Monday.

The blind trust’s holdings represent about 3.8 percent of Yang’s total holdings of Yahoo stock, based on the company’s most recent proxy.

Should the blind trust choose to sell some or all of Yang’s Yahoo stock, it would be the first sale Yahoo stock by Jerry Yang since 2005.