Fourth manufacturing plant for Hero Honda: Decision this year

Fourth manufacturing plant for Hero Honda: Decision this year

How to Stuff a Porsche into an Elevator (yes, with pics!)

When we first saw and rode in the 2009 Porsche Panamera, a lot of questions came to mind — none of which was whether it would fit into an elevator. But with the Shanghai auto show in full swing, sending a Panamera to the top of the city’s World Financial Center was one of the first orders of business for Porsche’s PR folks.

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Toyota tops 1 million U.S hybrid sales

Not wanting Ford to steal all the hybrid hype of the day, Toyota announced on Wednesday that Toyota and Lexus hybrid sales have topped the 1 million mark in the United States. Toyota and Lexus market a total of six hybrid vehicles in the U.S., including the wildly popular Prius.

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How To Archive Instant Messages | eHow.com

Thanks to the practical nature of modern life, a lot of important conversations now happen through Instant Messaging programs, such as Yahoo Messenger,

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Yahoo Is More Popular Than Google - says Google.

Google's own product - 'Google Trends' says that Yahoo is more popular than Google since a long time. Even though the graph of Google has been steadily climbing, it has never beaten Yahoo. Should we or shouldn't we believe you Google?

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Yahoo Messenger for Vista Beta

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Ford Partners With Yahoo! To Deliver Industry-first

In an unprecedented move, Ford Motor Company of Canada, Limited and Yahoo! Canada today unveiled a global and industry-first feature on www.ford.ca.

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MySpace to let users to share data with Yahoo

Social networking site MySpace said Thursday it will soon enable users to quickly share profile data with Web sites operated by Yahoo Inc., eBay Inc. and others.

MySpace aims to save its users keystrokes and allow them to export their photos, videos and lists of friends.

"There's this concept that social networks are walled gardens," said Amit Kapur, MySpace's chief operating officer. "We're taking those walls down."

Civic groups urge DOJ probe of possible Google-Yahoo deal

As reported on ComputerWorld.

A group of civic leaders is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate any potential deal between Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

The civic groups, comprised of rural organizations, civil rights leaders, technologists, business advocates and concerned citizens, sent a letter to the DOJ today urging it to investigate the proposed alliance, saying it “threatens to concentrate power on the Internet.” They said such a partnership between the two largest search and advertising companies would give Google control over approximately 90% of the search market.

A DOJ spokeswoman said because there is no deal between Google and Yahoo, the department has no comment.

According to published reports, the DOJ has been looking into the antitrust implications of a partnership between Google and Yahoo. Last month, the two companies were engaged in a test whereby Yahoo delivered relevant Web advertising from Google alongside its own search results. However, there has been no news regarding a continuation of that test.

Neither Google nor Yahoo could be reached for comment.

The civic groups have expressed concern that Google “has already exhibited a pattern of violating privacy, engaging in anticompetitive conduct, and using its monopoly power in the search market to drive Internet users to its affiliated services and its viewpoints on policy matters.”

The groups, which include the Black Leadership Forum Inc., the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and the League of Rural Voters, said there will come a day when no one will be able to get any information without Google’s permission.

Gary Flowers, executive director and CEO of the Black Leadership Forum, said the effect of large corporate mergers on the black community is hardly ever positive.

He said any proposed Google-Yahoo partnership is no different because doing away with competition would increase prices and limit new Internet business opportunities for members of the black community.

Other spokespersons for minority groups said a deal between Google and Yahoo would not be good for consumers.

“Privacy is a basic [tenet] of American law and culture. Google’s Gmail invasions of consumer privacy are the kind of worrisome behavior that you expect when there is no competition in the Internet’s gateway,” said Gabriela Lemus, executive director of the Labor Council, in a statement. The statement charged that Gmail service has repeatedly violated consumer privacy by scanning the actual text of individual customer e-mails in order to extract information for its advertising.

“We urge you to open an investigation into the current market concentration in online search and to oppose any combinations that would result in undue market concentration,” the groups said in the letter.

[via ComputerWorld]

Week in review: Yahoo, Microhoo's biggest loser

After Microsoft failed to make a love connection with Yahoo, we got a clearer picture of Yahoo as a company that didn't even want to be in the dating game.

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Inquisitor Purchased by Yahoo!

Last year, Yahoo! Search launched Search Assist to help users find what they're looking for quickly and easily by providing query suggestions and related concepts in real-time. Today, Yahoo! Search is embracing the Mac community and offering similar search assistance features with the acquisition of Inquisitor software, a Safari browser plug-in.

Inquisitor 3, a search technology that auto-completes queries and delivers results right in Safari Web browser, is similar to Yahoo!'s existing Search Assist technology. Simply type in your query and websites will appear immediately, as well as suggestions for refining your search. Just as with Search Assist, the goal with Inquisitor is to help users find exactly the site they're looking for as quickly as possible.

The new version of Inquisitor removes affiliate ad links, simplifies the search provider selection interaction and refines the preferences user interface. Additionally, the new version provides quick access to Yahoo! Search however, existing users may still utilize their current default search engine or a different search engine entirely, such as a vertical alternative like Amazon or Flickr, if they prefer.

While search interface design has remained fairly utilitarian over the years, David Watanabe, founder and developer of Inquisitor, has done a fantastic job designing a simple and elegant UI. David and our team of macphiles will continue to innovate on both form and function for Inquisitor.

Mac users have been using the Inquisitor plug-in already and they seem to like it. It's a free download, so whether you're familiar with it or just trying it out for the first time with Yahoo! Search, let us know what you think in the comments below.

Ariel Seidman
Director of Product Management
Yahoo! Search

Microsoft will now focus on inhouse talent to grow

Microsoft Corp. will focus on growing its own advertising and Internet search business after it withdrew its takeover offer for Yahoo Inc., Chairman Bill Gates said Friday.

Microsoft has not presented an alternative strategy to compete with its dominant rival in the Internet business, Google Inc., since withdrawing a $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo Inc. last weekend.

Glue pages - Yahoo Launched Beta Version in India

Yahoo has launched Glue Pages Beta in Yahoo India. Glue Pages are specialized pages that contain an enhanced visual search result page, for select search queries. The search results that trigger the special "Glue Pages" run across searches in health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology, and finance categories.

The Glue Pages combine classic search results on the left hand column with more visual information related to your query in the middle and right section of the page. The results contain images, videos, articles and more. For example a search on diabetes returns standard search results on the left, in the middle we have WebMD results, followed by HowStuffWorks.com results, then results from Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, and even Google Blog Search.

• Gopal Krishna, Head of Audience, Yahoo! India said: Searching on Glue Pages Beta will result in an experience that promises more than just web links. Users will receive more relevant, visually appealing search results from across the Web in one topical page. The new Glue Pages Beta feature for Yahoo! India Search supports our strategy to make Yahoo! the starting point on the Internet and demonstrates our commitment to provide a compelling online search experience.

Article source: SearchEngineLand.com [1]. Fair use under educational and information purpose.

Google keen on greater Yahoo ties

Google has expressed interest in extending an advertising partnership with fellow search engine Yahoo.

The comments from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and chief executive Eric Schmidt were made before the firm's annual general meeting on Thursday.

Google and Yahoo recently shared advertising for two weeks, but some analysts said the trial was more about stopping a Microsoft bid for Yahoo.

Microsoft ended its interest in buying Yahoo last weekend.

'Shared values'

"We have been talking to Yahoo and we are very excited to be working with them," said Mr Brin before the AGM.

"We share a lot of values with them."

Mr Schmidt said the two week trial with Yahoo had been "successful".

"That's a good basis to talk to Yahoo some more," he said.

Human rights

As expected, Google defeated two contentious shareholder proposals at the AGM.

However, Mr Brin decided to abstain on both votes.

The first wanted the company to create a special committee on human rights, while the second asked Google to increase its opposition to censorship demands from countries such as China that wish to limit their citizens' internet access.

While both votes were defeated, a breakdown of the vote has yet to be released.
news.bbc.co.uk

Earnings Show Microsoft Needs Yahoo

During a speech in Milan Apr. 23, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he's prepared to walk away from the company's takeover offer for Yahoo!, which has rebuffed the advances. Not so fast, Microsoft. Quarterly results reported the following day reinforce why Microsoft (MSFT) could use the growth Yahoo (YHOO) would provide.

Microsoft posted an 11% drop in profit and flat sales for the quarter ended Mar. 31. Microsoft relied on overseas operations and sales from smaller divisions to offset weakness in its flagship PC products. "It wasn't a spectacular quarter by any means," says Brent Thill, director of software research at Citigroup (C).

Profit Declines, Revenue Flat

Sales had been unusually high a year earlier, when Microsoft booked $1.6 billion in revenue from previously sold coupons for its new Windows Vista operating system and a new version of its Office productivity suite. Fiscal third-quarter profit fell to $4.41 billion, or 47¢ a share, from $4.93 billion, or 50¢ a share. Revenue was little changed at $14.45 billion, according to results released after the close of trading on Apr. 24. Analysts had expected per-share earnings of 44¢ on sales of $14.49 billion.

Excluding the benefit from the coupons, third-quarter sales would have risen 14%, Microsoft said. And the results would have been even worse if not for a 68% increase in sales in the company's Xbox division, a strong performance from the group that makes corporate server software, and the strength of Microsoft's international business, which accounts for 60% of sales.

Equally troublesome, Microsoft said this quarter's per-share profit would be 45¢ to 48¢, compared with a Wall Street consensus estimate of 48¢, says Charles Di Bona, a senior equity analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. The earnings follow two quarters of strong gains in sales and profits.

Economic and Competitive Worries

Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell, during an Apr. 24 conference call with investors, said Microsoft's diverse range of markets and products have kept its business healthy amid a weakening U.S. economy. Still, the results raised concern about the company's ability to continue weathering the slump, especially in light of rising competition from Google (GOOG), which controls the market for ads pegged to online searches, and is encroaching into Microsoft's markets with online software for e-mail, productivity, and other applications. What's more, investors took the results as a sign Microsoft isn't selling copies of Windows Vista as fast as the PC market is growing, and sold Microsoft shares in extended trading. The stock fell $1.58, or about 5%, after closing the day up 35¢, or about 1%, at 31.80.

Microsoft went public with a $31-a-share takeover bid for Yahoo Feb. 1 to try to close the gap with Google. But it has been unable to negotiate a deal and has threatened to take its appeal directly to shareholders if Yahoo doesn't capitulate by Apr. 26. Citigroup's Thill says Microsoft could raise its offer by $1 or $2 per share to close the deal, but adds Yahoo is holding out for perhaps $5 to $10 more. Even a combined Microsoft and Yahoo would be hard-pressed to eclipse Google in the online ad market, he says: "There's still a runaway train they're trying to catch. And they are two little trains trying to hook up."

businessweek.com

CNET announces partnership with Yahoo

CNET Networks, News.com's parent company, on Thursday announced a three-year strategic partnership with Yahoo under which CNET will be a third-party content provider of technology news and reviews.

The partnership also allows for Yahoo to sell display ads on CNET properties and for CNET to sell ads alongside the content it provides on Yahoo sites.

"Working together, we have the ability to build more robust content environments and more comprehensive programs for our marketing partners," CNET CEO Neil Ashe said in a press release.

The announcement was made as CNET reported its quarterly earnings, a net loss of $6.1 million, or 4 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $9.1 million, or 6 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Reuters said the per-share loss was in line with Wall Street estimates, but net revenue of $91.4 million fell short of analysts' average expectation for $93.4 million.

CNET has also been in the news of late because the hedge fund Jana Partners is trying to take control of its board.

news.com

Yahoo to radically open its platforms

Yahoo is swinging the doors of its Web platforms wide open to let outside developers create applications across its network of sites, as well as radically stitching together its online services under the social profile concept.

The idea is to let the hundreds of millions of people who use its Web mail, instant messaging, calendar, photo management and other online services replicate the social experience that social networks like MySpace and Facebook have made so popular.

This means that Yahoo users will have a profile under which their Yahoo services will fall, and which users will be able to customize by adding applications. This profile will also simplify the map of connections between Yahoo users so that they can find each other and interact more easily and efficiently.

If Yahoo is able to bring this vision to reality, it could pose a major threat to the appeal of MySpace, Facebook and other social networks, and give Yahoo the boost it has been seeking for years among Web users.

"It is rewiring Yahoo from the inside out, across all of our properties, to fundamentally open up those Web services and provide a consistent development model, a consistent deployment and consumer experience as well," said Ari Balogh, Yahoo's chief technology officer, during a keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on Thursday.

While Yahoo has had open APIs (application programming interfaces) for a variety of its services for years, Balogh said this initiative will take those efforts to much greater lengths, and it will include streamlining the development process so that it's uniform for developers across Yahoo platforms, he said. "It includes opening it up in a way we have never done before. It's about making the entire Yahoo experience more social," he said.

The process is already ongoing, as Yahoo on Thursday announced the opening up in beta of its Search Monkey development environment, which lets external developers customize Yahoo search results to make them, in theory, more relevant and richer with information. Yahoo had announced its intention to do this in February.

Yahoo expects to hit more significant milestones in its opening-up process throughout the year, he said.

With this vision, Yahoo seems to be finally tossing out the window its failed and misguided attempts to compete against MySpace and Facebook by creating a straight-ahead social networking site, like its disappointing Yahoo 360.

Instead, Yahoo is going to attempt to harness its users worldwide, which have some 10 billion latent social relationships already established amongst themselves via their Yahoo Messenger contact lists, Yahoo Mail address books and the like.

By unifying all Yahoo user profiles, Yahoo will create its own consistent social graph for the benefit of both consumers and developers, he said. From the social graph, Yahoo will be able to establish relevant connections among users, as well as event streams of what people are doing online, which are popular on Facebook and via FriendFeed.

"We don't think of social as a destination. We think of social as a dimension. It infuses every element of the consumer's experience on the Web," Balogh said.

Yahoo will also take care of making sure that people are in control of the applications they opt to add and thus share data with, as well as making sure that data is kept safe.

utilitycomputing.itworld.com

Justice Dept looking at Google/Yahoo deal: source

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating possible antitrust implications of Google's two-week test with Yahoo to combine some of their Web search and advertising business, a source informed about the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

Google and Yahoo separately told Reuters they had informed the Justice Department about their test before it was launched.

In the test, which ends this week, Yahoo uses Google's advertising system to show ads to Yahoo users based on their searches.

The Justice Department is concerned the test may violate antitrust law, the source said, adding that authorities "have initiated an investigation" of it.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said some of the government's concern focused on a telephone call from Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt to Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang to offer help in thwarting Microsoft's bid worth around $44 billion.

The test was one of a series of efforts by Yahoo to fend off Microsoft's unwelcome bid.

A second source said the Justice Department was concerned about a longer-term deal between Google and Yahoo, and had an initial inquiry underway into the matter.

A Justice Department spokeswoman would only say that the department was "aware of the collaboration."
reuters.com

Yahoo’s Directors Could Be Close to Deciding on the Final Fate of the Microsoft Bid

With a strong earnings statement in its favor, Yahoo Inc (NASDAQ:YHOO) could be less vulnerable to a buyout by Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) at a price that Yahoo, and the company’s the Board of Directors, considers to be unacceptably low.

"Yahoo’s chief executive, Jerry Yang, said that the company’s solid performance reaffirmed the board’s conviction that Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover offer undervalues Yahoo," The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

But Yang still left the door open for a new buyout deal with Microsoft:

"Still Mr. Yang said Yahoo remained open to ‘any and all’ alternatives, including a deal with Microsoft," The Times article added.

Yahoo’s comments indicate that the company’s Directors could be close to striking a deal with Microsoft.

NewsVisual created an IntellectSpace Knowledge Map in order to illustrate the business connections of Yahoo’s Board of Directors as a method for assessing their knowledge of business and for determining whether they can make a wise decision on how to resolve the buyout issue with Microsoft.

The Knowledge Map shows that Chairman Roy Bostock also serves on the board of Morgan Stanley and is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Northwest Airlines Corp.

The following Yahoo Directors also have strong board room experience:

Director Eirc Hippeau is also a Director for Starwood Hotels and Resorts Inc; Director Robert Kotick is also the CEO/Chairman of Activision Inc; CEO/Co-Founder Jerry Yang also sits on the board of Cisco Systems Inc and Alibaba Inc; and Director Edward Kozel also serves on the board of Network Appliance Inc.

Click here for a fuller and an interactive version of this IntellectSpace Knowledge Map.

newsvisual.com

Yahoo's Invalid Click Filter

ahoo has added a feature to it's Traffic Quality Reports. This feature answers an old problem and question advertisers had, "What if my competitor clicks the hell out of my advertisement?". This is a big problem and the techniques competitors are using to charge you for invalid clicks is getting more and more savvy.
To view the "Click Filter Report", go to your "reports tab" and click on "Click Filter" in the Reports Navigator section on the left side of your screen.
Yahoo allows you to see the exact clicks they deem were from an invalid source.Yahoo says that advertisers will not be charged for these clicks and they offered 3 reasons why they have added this incredibly helpful feature: The biggest reason is to offer transparency, which is something every business and government office/entity should offer to the public. The other reasons are they wanted the end user to have more tools at their disposal and they are competing with AdWords. This is a great addition and I'm sure others will follow in their footsteps.
nycseoconsultant.blogspot.com