Yahoo, Time Warner’s AOL Close to Reaching Agreement
Yahoo! Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL are close to striking a deal to combine their Internet operations, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.
Yahoo would also propose buying billions of dollars of its own stock and is negotiating to display Internet search ads from Google, the Wall Street Journal said.
Under the terms of the deal, Time Warner would combine its Internet unit with Yahoo and take a 20 percent stake in the combined company, the Journal said. Yahoo would buy back its shares at a price between $30 and $40 a share, the newspaper said.
A final agreement would be offered to Yahoo shareholders for approval, the Journal said, citing the unidentified people.
Source- Bloomberg
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Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5 Released
Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5 Released Mozilla announced Firefox 3 Beta 5 today, intended for developer testing and community feedback. Beta 5 includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed.
- Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
- Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatabilty and stability.
- Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.
Download Firefox 3 Beta 5 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 45 different languages. Also check the Release Notes.
Source: TechPowerUp!
Google and Virgin announce Mars expedition and colony
Google and Virgin Group today announced the launch of Virgle Inc., a jointly owned and operated venture dedicated to the establishment of a human settlement on Mars.
“Some people are calling Virgle an ‘interplanetary Noah’s Ark,’” said Virgin Group President and Founder Sir Richard Branson, who conceived the new venture. “I’m one of them. It’s a potentially remarkable business, but more than that, it’s a glorious adventure. For me, Virgle evokes the spirit of explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo, who set sail looking for the New World. I do hope we’ll be a bit more efficient about actually finding it, though.”
The Virgle 100 Year Plan’s milestones will include Virgle Pioneer selection (2008-2010), the first manned journey to Mars (2016), a Virgle Inc. initial public offering to capitalize on the first manned journey to Mars (2016), the founding of the first permanent Martian municipality, Virgle City (2050), and the achievement of a truly self-sustaining Martian civilization with a population exceeding 100,000 (2108).
“Virgle is the ultimate application of a principle we’ve always believed at Google: that you can do well by doing good,” said Google co-founder Larry Page, who plans to share leadership of the new Martian civilization with Branson and Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
“We feel that ensuring the survival of the human race by helping it colonize a new planet is both a moral good in and of itself and also the most likely method of ensuring the survival of our best – okay, fine, only — base of web search volume and advertising inventory,” Page added. “So, you know, it’s, like, win-win.”
The original contingent of Virgle Pioneers will be selected by numerous criteria, including an online questionnaire, video submission, personal accomplishments, expertise in scientific, artistic, sociological and/or political fields of endeavor, and inadequate Google and Virgin personal performance reviews.
It surely seems to be an April fool’s day joke by Google
Update- Here is another google april’s day joke just take a look-
http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html
Source- Google Press Release
Yahoo! supports OpenSocial; Yahoo!, MySpace and Google to form non-profit OpenSocial Foundation
Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google today announced they have agreed to form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web. Yahoo!’s support of OpenSocial and role as a founding member of the new foundation are landmarks for the rapidly growing specification which will now offer developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.
The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.
“Yahoo! believes in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users,” said Wade Chambers, Vice President – Platforms, Yahoo!. “Our support builds on similar efforts with the OpenID community and will expand the opportunity for developers and publishers to benefit from an open and increasingly social web.”
Source- Google press Release
Expandable Google Search Box
If you entered long queries in a Google search box, you would notice that it’s difficult to edit them because Google optimized the size of the box for short queries. Things have changed and now you can much bigger queries and Google will adjust the search box’s size after you perform a search.
Google limits queries to 32 words, but most people don’t need that many words. The average number of words in a Google query was 4 at the end of 2007.
Source: Google Operating System Blog
Google unveils "white space" airwaves plans
Google Inc on Monday unveiled plans for a new generation of wireless devices to operate on soon-to-be-vacant television airwaves, and sought to alleviate fears that this might interfere with TV broadcasts or wireless microphones.
In comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission, the Internet leader outlined plans for low-power devices that use local wireless airwaves to access the "white space" between television channels. A Google executive called the plan "Wi-Fi 2.0 or Wi-Fi on steroids."
"The airwaves can provide huge economic and social gains if used more efficiently …," Google said in the comments.
Rick Whitt, Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel, said this class of Wi-Fi devices could eventually offer data transmission speeds of billions of bits per second — far faster than the millions of bits per second available on most current broadband networks. Consumers could watch movies on wireless devices and do other things that are currently difficult on slower networks.
The white-space airwaves could become available in February 2009, when TV broadcasters switch from analog to digital signals. Whitt said he expects devices using white-space spectrum could be available by the end of 2009.
Shares of Google surged $27.36, or 6.3 percent, to $460.91 amid a sharp rise in U.S. stock markets. The Nasdaq composite index was up 3.3 percent.
Google sees the white-space spectrum as a natural place to operate a new class of phones and wireless devices based on Android, Google’s software that a variety of major equipment makers plan to use to build Internet-ready phones.
The Silicon Valley company also said that, in general, it stands to benefit whenever consumers have easier access to the Internet. Google’s primary business is selling online ads as people perform Web searches.
Source- Reuters
Flickr Video beta due in April
In early February, in the midst of Microsoft’s surprise bid to acquire Yahoo, I wrote about Yahoo’s Flickr Video coming soon. It’s been a long time coming. I first asked Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake about a Flickr video service in December 2005.
After spending a few hours at the Flickr fourth anniversary party in San Francisco on Saturday night, the "coming soon" line was uttered by various Yahoo people, including Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Upon further investigation, it appears that "coming soon" means that Flickr Video will debut in beta next month.
Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo in March 2005, defined the concept of photo sharing, but has been slow to extend the service into the video world. In the meantime, Google’s YouTube has become the primary destination for video sharing, capturing one out of every three of the online videos in the U.S., according to comScore Media Metrix. Fox Interactive Media (MySpace) accounted for 6 percent of the nearly 10 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. in January. Yahoo sites, Yahoo Video, claimed 3.2 percent of video viewing.
Flickr Video will not replace Yahoo Video, unlike Yahoo Photos, which was folded into Flickr. The audience for Flickr is different, Kakul Srivastava, director of product management at Flickr, told me. She used the term "authenticity" to convey the esprit de corps of the Flickr photo community, which numbers more than 23 million contributors.
Flickr has been a pure photo site since its inception. Adding video into the mix has to be done in a way acceptable to the community. In other words, launching a Video service primarily to compete more with YouTube would turn the community off. It has to appeal, in an "authentic" way, to the Flickr community.
While YouTube has a large share of market, video is growing fast on the Web. The problem for Yahoo is that many Flickr members, like myself, have gone to other places to share videos. Winning them back is going to be a challenge. We’ll find out next month if all the time spent figuring out how to bring video to Flickr has been worthwhile.
Source- CNET
Google to unveil new ad service for publishers
Web search giant Google Inc plans to unveil a new service that Web publishers can use to manage their online ad sales and serve up ads each time a consumer pulls up a Web page, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The new Ad Manager service will provide the ad service free, said the Journal.
Google is hoping that Ad Manager users will agree to carry some ads Google sells in any vacant ad spots on their own Web sites, and Google would take a commission on revenue from any ads it sells, said the report.
Source- Reuters
