Online Net Meeting

Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder’s gaming start-up | Geek Gestalt – CNET News

Tiny Speck, a company started by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and three partners, is unveiling its new game, Glitch, on Tuesday. The company has been under the radar since it was founded last March, and no one has known what was being developed. But CNET’s Daniel Terdiman reports from behind the scenes.

SAN FRANCISCO–Stewart Butterfield and his business partner Cal Henderson stared at the MacBook Pro in front of them.

For nearly a year, they’d been struggling to figure out what to call the game their start-up was building. Any time a team member loaded a working version, they’d sit through a few seconds of a splash screen with nothing on it but a generic title featuring little more than the name and logo of their company.

But now, the group had finally given their baby an official moniker: Glitch. And this was one of the first times the two had sat through the splash screen since plunking down a low-five-figure sum to buy glitch.com.

Butterfield and Henderson, dressed casually, were hovering over the computer in the bright, east-facing front room in a beautiful Victorian vacation rental that they’d been using for a four-day company off-site in mid-January. Everyone else had already left. Energized from an intense four days of brainstorming (and maybe a coffee run to a local hot spot called the Mercury Cafe) they were running a demo of their game. Watching the bland screen load as they had countless times before, Henderson’s eyes lit up.

“I guess we could replace that with the title of the game now, couldn’t we,”

DEMO’s Chris Shipley teaches VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall the finer points of dancing on stage at DEMOfall 09.

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DEMOfall Bonus: Dance Lessons

Yahoo Acquiring Arab Portal Maktoob After All; Around $75M-$80M | paidContent

he Jordan-based portal was founded in 1999 mainly to offer a free Arabic language online e-mail service, a rarity then. It expanded from there to include all the regular features of a portal. In June 2005, the UAE-based PE house Abraaj Capital purchased 40 percent stake in the company for $5.2 million, which in turn flipped it to Tiger Global Management in Dec 2007. More about the company history here in Wikipedia. more >>

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Yahoo Acquiring Arab Portal Maktoob

Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » What our Microsoft deal means to you

It’s inhumanly early in California, but it’s already a great day at Yahoo!. We’ve just signed a major search deal with Microsoft. Under the terms, Microsoft will become the search engine behind Yahoo! and we will become the worldwide exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

While you’ll read a lot about why this is good for our business and for advertisers, I want to talk about what’s in it for you -– the Yahoo! fan.

Here’s the rundown:

* Better search: You’ll still find search boxes all across Yahoo!, but this deal will make the difference between a great Yahoo! search experience and an awesome one. Some of the biggest brains in the business work on Yahoo! Search, and they will continue to innovate to create a better search experience on Yahoo!. As a result of the deal, Microsoft, which has great technologists and deep pockets,will have the scale to bring users faster, more useful and more personally relevant search.
* Better everything else: With Microsoft powering Yahoo! Search, we’ll be able to focus on the things we do best -– being the center of people’s lives online with properties like our homepage, mail, finance, news, sports, entertainment, mobile, etc. Sure, we’re the world’s largest online media company and your loyalty has made that possible. But we’re not satisfied – we still want you to say “wow” a lot more often. And that’s what makes this deal especially exciting.
* Better competition: Competition equals innovation. But with one player dominating 70% of search, that field has been pretty lopsided. This transaction will create a healthy competitor that’ll keep everyone on their toes.

In short, everything’s just going to get a whole lot better for you.

And one final note — what this agreement does not cover is any of Yahoo!’s other properties or products. In those areas, Microsoft can expect a fierce competitor.

We’ve set up a special site, www.choicevalueinnovation.com, that answers your questions.

Carol Bartz
CEO

Credit:
What our Microsoft deal means to you

im on the MSFT German page to download IE 8 and its splashed all over with Yahoo Advertising, yeserday as I was working with IE 7 ( i think ) it tried toe default recommend Yahoo as the default SE.

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a yahoo microsoft deal ?

In an interesting and innovative move compared to what has typically been less-than-hip online programming over the years, Microsoft’s MSN service is debuting a slick new celebrity site called Wonderwall today–created, designed and produced by a Hollywood company run by former Yahoo media chief and well-known television exec Lloyd Braun.

Using an unusual horizontal design with a scrolling “wall,” a plethora of pictures and a deeply visual sensibility, it’s definitely a laudable risk for Microsoft as the company seeks to continue to push itself into the online content business, despite a lackluster record.

The site, by BermanBraun Interactive, which is being launched right before the Grammy Awards, will aggregate content from a variety of partners, but also use a small staff of editors to differentiate it and give it “voice.” BermanBraun will operate Wonderwall for MSN.

Last week, in yet another sign that it is upping the content ante at MSN,Microsoft hired Yahoo’s most recent media head Scott Moore, who used to work at Microsoft (MSFT).

“We are investing more than ever in content,” said MSN GM Rob Bennett. “With Wonderwall, we are creating an offering to attract and retain new audiences, using content that is already at the core of MSN.”

But unlike other MSN sites, there is more subtle MSN branding on Wonderwall, although Microsoft’s search will be an important part of the site. MSN will promote Wonderwall across the service and will also give it an external marketing push.

To make money, Microsoft and BermanBraun are jointly selling the advertising for Wonderwall, which also has a partnership with MediaVest, to bring major brands to the site.

One obstacle is the huge amount of competition in the Internet space, from AOL-backed TMZ to Perez Hilton to omg! from Yahoo (YHOO), which is currently the most-trafficked celebrity site (and, ironically, was pushed through Yahoo by Braun and Moore).

But the interest in this pop culture category is obvious–celeb-focused online programming has grown strongly.

Celeb news-obsessed BoomTown accounts for much of that traffic (How much do we love following the hijinks of Britney? Much!).

So, I hightailed it to the Santa Monica offices of BermanBraun yesterday to have a look-see at Wonderwall and do some video interviews.

Overall, I was struck by the site’s arresting visual design, particularly the easily interactive wall, which has what I can only call an “iPhone” feel combined with a flipping-through-a-magazine tone (see above; click on image to make it larger).

With more touchscreen technology moving to personal computers, you can easily see Wonderwall being manipulated by hand.

And it makes great use of linking out, another plus, without excessively pointing to only Microsoft sites.

One problem: No true ability for users to interact on Wonderwall, via comments or other social-networking tools, which Braun said are coming soon, along with videos being able to be played in the main wall.

But overall, it raises the stakes in the celeb market and gives users a new interface without straying too far.

Here’s my video interview with Braun, along with another below it with his partner, former Fox and Paramount exec Gail Berman, and also Wonderwall’s top creators–all talking about Wonderwall.

(And, as an added bonus at the bottom, Oasis singing their hit, “Wonderwall.”)

SOURCE

Is Wonderwall Gonna Be the One That Saves MSN?

Google Closes in on Yahoo’s Leadership in Display Advertising

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Google Closes in on Yahoo?s Leadership in Display Advertising

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Windows 7 on a MacBook Pro

SAN FRANCISCO — In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.

Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.

On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.

“I think it will be better,” Mr. Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”

Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is only the latest in a long string of start-up companies that have been founded and financed with the goal of competing with Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. (In June, Google accounted for 61.5 percent of search queries in the United States, while Yahoo held 20.9 percent and Microsoft had 9.2 percent, according to comScore.) Some of the most prominent include Powerset, which Microsoft recently bought, and Wikia, which was founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. So far, none have managed to make a dent in the search market.

But some analysts say Cuil has potential, in part because of the pedigree of its founders.

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

Google would not comment on Cuil and would not disclose the size of its own index. But in an e-mail statement, Google said that it maintained “the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web” and welcomed competition.

Mr. Sullivan said he was unimpressed by Cuil’s claim that its index includes more Web pages, noting that that could mean users are “overwhelmed by a whole bunch of junk.” But he said that Cuil’s new approach to ranking pages and presenting results could prove to be a hit with some users.

“If it turns out that they have good relevancy, I could see that the word of mouth” would bring Cuil some popularity, he said.

Ms. Patterson left Google in 2006 to found Cuil. The new company has other prominent ex-Google employees, including Russell Power, who worked with Ms. Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine. Cuil, which has about 30 employees and is in Menlo Park, Calif., has raised $33 million from venture investors.

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Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine

The New Yahoo: Sticky, Viral, And Most Of All, Friendly

Yahoo’s CTO Ari Balogh and Chief Architect (Platforms) Neal Sample filled in a few more details today around their new Yahoo Open Strategy (called YOS internally).

Background

Yahoo wants to turn itself into one big social network-driven site, and simultaneously open many of its core services to get users and developers thinking of Yahoo as their Internet hub. They’ve been talking about parts of this since last November. First were details about how webmail will serve as the social networking hub, followed by more tidbits in January. In March they joined the Google-led Open Social initiative. And they’ve made a series of announcements around Search Monkey which will allow third parties to enhance Yahoo search with structured data.

Yahoo Open Strategy

Yahoo mashes the social stuff and the open stuff under the same banner of YOS. There are three components to the additional news announced today – platformization, opening services, and portability. It’s important to note that nothing has launched, and there’s no public timetable for the launch of any particular part of YOS. Sample said in a briefing today that the pieces will be released over the coming months.

Below is Balogh’s presentation at the web 2.0 Expo:

Platformization: Users will notice this most, as the overall Yahoo experience becomes social. This is driven by (1) the reduction of the dozens of profiles (for each service) they have today to a single, unified Yahoo user profile, and (2) the promotion of the email inbox as the center of the Yahoo experience. Once the profile is centralized they will begin to socialize the services. Think friends lists, activity streams, etc.Clearly Yahoo isn’t bolting yet another social network onto their existing services. They keep saying that, of course. But even the fact that they refer to this part of it as “platformization” internally shows how they are thinking of this. They’re moving Yahoo to a massive new social network platform, and rewriting large parts of the core functionality.Open Yahoo: This encompasses a few different things. First, they are now deeply involved in OpenSocial and will allow developers to get access via those common APIs. But they are layering their many existing (and planned) APIs on top of OpenSocial to allow deeper integration with Yahoo services. Users will be able to add these third party applications, built on Open Social and the Yahoo APIs, into Yahoo.

The other piece of this is Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) – which will be a direct competitor to Google App Engine. Users can host their independent applications on Yahoo’s bandwidth, storage, database and CPU resources. At first they’ll support SecurePHP applications only, but they’ll expand to additional languages over time. The model will be very similar to Google’s – free usage up to a point, metered after that. They’ll also offer various developer tools as well.

Portability. Yahoo is also going to promote the spread of Yahoo around the web to third party apps and services. This isn’t just widgets – they’ll also let user data out of the ecosystem. For example, Sample said in the briefing, they’ll facilitate the synchronization of the Yahoo address book with Plaxo (Facebook hated the idea of users doing this, by the way).

Yahoo: Sticky, Viral, Friendly

Yahoo continues to compete in search marketing, the big driver of revenue. But they realize they’ll always be second to Google in that game. So the win for them is to make Yahoo as sticky, friendly, and viral as possible. They have 500 million worldwide visitors per month – nearly 60% of the total Internet audience visits a Yahoo property every month (Google has 72%) (Comscore). That audience can clearly be leveraged, and this is a war that, unlike search marketing, Yahoo thinks they can win.

They still, of course, have to actually launch this massive project – for now it’s all ideas and vaporware. And no one knows what Microsoft thinks of all this, or what happens to YOS if that deal is done.

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