yahoo

Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, is to stand down as the internet portal’s chief executive officer.

His departure follows lengthy criticism of his stewardship of the company, which has seen its share price collapse to about $10.

Earlier in the year he fought off a hostile takeover bid from Microsoft which offered $33 a share.

Mr Yang also told the workforce that he would be participating in the search for his successor.

“I will always do what is right for this great company,” Mr Yang wrote in an e-mail to employees.

The BBC was told that Mr Yang made the decision to leave as chief executive officer last month. No names were given as to who will succeed him.

The company, based in Sunnyvale, California, said it is interviewing candidates inside and outside Yahoo in a search led by chairman Roy Bostock.

“Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level,” said Mr Bostock.

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Yahoo

Yahoo said the “For Sale” sign is still on its front lawn and that Microsoft should buy the company.

The internet portal’s co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang made the comment despite the fact Yahoo rejected a $33 (£21) a share offer from Microsoft back in May.

Mr Yang’s suggestion also came hours after Google pulled out of an internet advertising partnership with Yahoo.

“To this day the best thing for Microsoft to do is buy Yahoo,” said Mr Yang.

“I don’t think that is a bad idea at all, at the right price whatever that price is. We’re willing to sell the company,” he told a packed ballroom at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

During the on stage conversation in front of a standing-room only crowd, Mr Yang was asked why the company did not take the $33 a share offered back in the summer. The company’s share price closed Wednesday below $14 (£8.80) a share.

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Yahoo to implement ad-tracker opt out

Facing privacy pressure from Congress, Yahoo Inc. said Friday that it will institute a system to let consumers opt out of ads on its site that target their Web browsing behavior. Behavioral targeting is a technology that seeks to deduce consumers’ interests by tracking what sorts of Web sites they visit.

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Yahoo Inc.’s incumbent directors were re-elected by shareholders on Friday, although a sizeable number of votes were withheld for CEO Jerry Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock in a sign of investor discontent with the Web portal’s board.
However, Bostock received a 20.5% withhold vote, while Yang received a 14.6% withhold vote. Director Arthur Kern had 22.1% of votes withheld while Ron Burkle had 18.8% and Gary Wilson had 18.2%. Kern, Bostock and Burkle are members of the board’s compensation committee and had been the target of a ‘Vote No’ campaign by a group that criticized the group’s decisions.

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Three tech giants Hewlett Packard, Intel and Yahoo said on Tuesday they are teaming up on a research project to help turn Web services into reliable, everyday utilities.

The companies are joining forces with academic researchers in Asia, Europe and the United States to create an experimental network that lets researchers test “cloud-computing” projects Webwide services that can reach billions of users at once.

Their goal is to promote open collaboration among industry, academic and government researchers by removing financial and logistical barriers to working on hugely computer-intensive, Internet-wide projects.

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We knew Yahoo Music was shutting down but not that it was planning to take down its DRM servers at the same time. Ars Technica reports that Yahoo has notified customers the license servers will shut down Sept. 30.

Yahoo had already said its music subscribers would be migrated to Rhapsody. Microsoft eventually took another approach when it stopped MSN Music, promising after a fuss that the DRM-protected music will work through 2011.

What does this mean? Unlike subscription music users, who are leasing music and have no reason to expect it will be available after a service closes, buyers of DRM-protected music think they have acquired the rights in perpetuity. In reality, that only works as long as the DRM works unless the user takes other steps. In this case, the music will keep working on its current computer but can’t be trasnferred?or re-licensed after operating system change like upgrading from XP to Vista or downgrading from Vista to XP.

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Popular social networking site MySpace said Tuesday it will join the open source authentication platform OpenID, further bolstering the idea of a unified system to carry online identities between Web sites. But for now, MySpace’s OpenID accounts cannot be used elsewhere.

OpenID has already been embraced by nearly 8,000 sites, including Yahoo (the largest supporter in terms of users), Plaxo, Wetpaint, Technorati, and LiveJournal. But MySpace is the second largest site to join the network to date, and will nearly double the amount of OpenID accounts to a half-billion. Although, because MySpace doesn’t require e-mail verification, many of its accounts may not be legitimate. continue

San Francisco - Yahoo will offer users a slew of advertising-supported games and allow companies to piggyback on its search technology, the company announced Thursday. The moves came as Yahoo seeks to assure investors of its potential as an independent company in the face a shareholder revolt that may force the internet firm to sell all or parts of itself to software giant Microsoft.

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Adobe announced a partnership with Google and Yahoo to make rich Internet applications (RIAs) friendlier to search engines. The enhanced capabilities by search engines are targeted at crawling and reading the Flash file format (SWF). Previously, search engines like Google were able to crawl text and links on static SWF Web content, but the new partnership looks to help bring that information to users immediately.
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After Microsoft’s on-again-off-again-maybe-not-done-yet bid for Yahoo or some part thereof, its acquisition of Powerset shows that it want to be a serious player in search. Better search results might drive users to Live Search, or at least keep them from leaving when the results aren’t so hot. Yet there’s still a lot more Microsoft needs to do.

Powerset’s claim to fame is the use of “semantic search” techniques. Put simply, semantic search improves search quality by techniques such as inferring meaning from sentence structure, using word synonyms, and determining the specific meaning of words from their context.

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The Justice Department’s antitrust division has begun issuing civil subpoenas as it probes further into whether a planned Google-Yahoo partnership in search advertising is anticompetitive, a person close to a company that received a subpoena confirmed on Wednesday.The subpoenas are being issued not only to Google and Yahoo, but also to Microsoft, an Internet search rival, and other companies including advertisers and media companies, said the person, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak.

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Yahoo is offering its full account of the company’s recent acquisition talks with Microsoft.The company issued a filing on Monday to the US Securities and Exchange Commission which included a copy of a presentation to shareholders. In the presentation, Yahoo makes its case for opposing a takeover bid by Carl Icahn and a defense of its actions in the ill-fated negotiations with Microsoft.

Shareholders will vote in August on whether to keep the current board or replace the members with a group hand-picked by Icahn, who has vowed to pursue a full sale to Microsoft. continue