Posts Tagged with ‘microsoft’

Really, “indoctrinating” kids against correct copyright practices and fair use before the details have even been hammered out in the courts is a better description of this seemingly innocuous little site than “teaching”, in my opinion. The computer giant has created a site called MyBytes, aimed at kids and teens, whose sole purpose is to give them “real experience” of how P2P file sharing can affect a musician and “educate” them on file sharing laws in the way Microsoft sees [...]

During 2007, the former college student-limited social network known as Facebook experienced its most successful year to date in terms of growth and traffic. All eyes were on Facebook for the now widely-mimicked developer API, as well as the advertising platform designed to help monetize its surging crop of applications. Facebook was even supposedly valued at a worth of $15 billion (according to Microsoft’s $240 million investment), which is not bad for a company whose CEO is just 23 years [...]

Allan Stern over at Center Networks is much more excited about the Microsoft conference call today than I am. A quick scan of the press release will tell you all you need to know, and that it's a big fluffy piece of PR being floated out there. I grabbed a buzzword bingo card online and had a bingo before I was finished with the first three paragraphs.
Make no mistake in my feelings about the proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo; Microsoft [...]

Every so often, one of these “not an app, but a feature” products surprises me. SurfCanyon is one of those feature products. Originally designed as a web site, they have relaunched as a browser plug-in designed to make your search results better.
SurfCanyon runs on top of Google, Yahoo, and Live searches (not Ask.com, though, or any of the search aggregators like Dogpile), unobtrusively. All you see is a small target icon next to a link in search results. If you [...]

Watching the Yahoo layoffs on Tuesday as news of who was out hit Twitter and blogs was depressing, to say the least. But the biggest surprise, at least for me, was what appeared to be a decimation of Brickhouse, with Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo's Advanced Technology Division leaving for Google, and Salim Ismail, head of Brickhouse, either getting the axe or leaving of his own accord depending on which news source you read.
Obviously, I have no secret window into [...]

It seems clear that the Yahoo board is delusional. There is just no other way to describe it aside from out-of-touch, clueless, or just plain crazy. They turned down the Microsoft offer. Fine, we get it. Big bad Microsoft would cramp your free-wheeling style that has had you, the first big search and portal online, cowering in the shadow of Google . You can't get bought by Google because everyone from the EU to the US to the kindergartners at [...]

Holding out for more money, Yahoo's board of directors has officially rejected Microsoft's $44 Billion USD Bid for the struggling company. The board stated that the bid didn't put enough value on their company, in spite of its recent financial struggles.
The rejection by the board comes shortly after their shareholders launched a lawsuit for a previous rejection of a Microsoft offer. The shareholders felt then that the board was not acting in the shareholders' best interests. With this [...]

Shortly after the Microsoft hostile takeover bid was announced, Google contacted Yahoo to discuss possibly banding together for a bail out. If the choice is between two monopolies, Google or Microsoft, I'd want Yahoo to go with Google. Mainly because replacing Microsoft with Google would at least give it backing of a company that "gets" the Internet, as opposed to one that struggles against even the most basic compliance with web standards.
Yahoo's search engine has always been terrible at producing [...]

Still not sure widgets are a must-have for any Internet company? AOL will announce today that they have acquired Goowy, a company that allows you to create your own widgets (a la Widgetbox) as well as the Goowy Webtop, a suite of online apps that was long ago surpassed by the yourminis platform.
AOL has actually been working with Goowy since 2006, using their widget creation tool for their myAOL feature. Neither AOL nor Goowy have divulged the financial details of [...]