|
|
 Google is letting you get personal with your search results.
The Internet company today introduced a new feature, called SearchWiki, that allows users to change their results from Google searches. You can move items up and down in the rankings, remove them entirely, leave notes about whether you found a particular site useful and add sites that either don't show up in the search results or are buried. Then it remembers those changes the next time you log in.
And that is a catch, with privacy implications: You must be logged in to use the service so Google can remember you. Once you are, you can check the bottom of a Google search results page to "see all notes for this SearchWiki." By clicking on the link, you will see how other users ranked results and what comments they left.
The new feature should come in handy for searches that people do on a regular basis. About 40% of searches are repeats of ones the users have done before, research shows.
The way people modify their search results, at least at first, will not influence how Google ranks sites or returns results, Google Product Manager Cedric Dupont said. But Dupont did not rule out the possibility that the new data could influence results in the future.
A small fraction of Google users have been testing the service for about a year.
"It's a way to make search a more participatory medium," Dupont said. "The Web is becoming more participatory, and search should take part in that movement."
This is the first time Google has given its users the ability to customize search results. Other websites have experimented with personalized search results. There is Wikia Search. And Santa Monica start-up Mahalo is a "people-powered" search engine.
-- Jessica Guynn
* UPDATED at 4:45 p.m. with a link to Google blog post about SearchWiki.
 Choire Sicha
(Courtesy C. Sicha)
Last week, when we heard Valleywag was undergoing a gestalt downsize, we thought we'd see if anyone had any thoughts about the move by Gawker Media czar Nick Denton. Taking the bait was New York writer Choire Sicha, a two-time editor of Gawker ("the second and then again like the sixth or something"), regular L.A. Times freelancer, and now a member of increasingly large and prestigious underclass of jobless journalists. Sicha answered a few questions about Denton's motivations, noting that all answers were speculative.
Does it seem like a straightforward business decision that Nick Denton would shutter Valleywag, a top 25 Technorati blog and Silicon Valley household name? Why or why not?
It makes sense from a business perspective in conjunction with the
selling of Consumerist, and after the cross-company staff layoffs, and
after the selling-off of the other sites they've already done. Plus
whatever they're doing to what they now consider the outlier sites.
Plus I don't think this is the end of this stuff over there!
Is it a straightforward business decision? Hmm. Probably? Gawker
Media's advertising people are pretty top notch. So if they felt they
couldn't sell enough on Valleywag, that means ...
Read on »
 Anthony E. Zuiker, the creator and executive producer of hit television franchise "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," was introduced as the leader of a religious movement.
Speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco, Zuiker said he believed Silicon Valley and Hollywood could combine forces to transform television and bring its storytelling power to all devices, including mobile phones and video game consoles.
"There is a ton of business to be done with Silicon Valley," said Zuiker, a forensics junkie who developed his ideas for "CSI" while driving a tram at the Mirage resort in Las Vegas.
He has experimented with new media, including casting the pinup models from the Suicide Girls website on an episode of "CSI," running an online contest and having actor Gary Sinise make an appearance in the virtual world Second Life.
The experiments haven't all panned out. But Zuiker is committed to finding ways to extend the "CSI" brand beyond television, he said.
Capturing the attention of your audience wherever they are and creating an immersive experience that keeps them coming back may not be a matter of survival at this point. But it will be. Despite every network boasting hit shows, Zuiker said, viewership and media companies' stock prices are depressed.
"CBS has empowered me to take chances," Zuiker said.
So he's spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley. Today he had lunch with serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen.
Zuiker may not be able to fully achieve his all-media-all-the-time goals with "CSI." He says the key will be to create, from scratch, a television program with all devices in mind.
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: "CSI" creator Anthony E. Zuiker. Credit: Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images
Conference organizers Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle set out this year to change the agenda in the technology world at the Web 2.0 Summit by refocusing Silicon Valley on how the Internet can solve tough problems.
To drive home that point in the final hour of the annual conference in San Francisco, they asked a gentleman from Tennessee to say a few words.
Al Gore has gone from U.S. vice president to Democratic nominee for president in 2000 to successful businessman (among his many hats: chairman of Current TV, venture capitalist, board member of Apple and Google) to Academy Award- and Nobel Prize-winning environmental activist to high-tech rock star -- all to the same young, wired people who this week made history by helping elect Barack Obama to the nation's highest office.
He strode on stage to such loud applause that he had to hush the room. Then this self-identified recovering politician proceeded to get down and geeky, throwing out tech jargon like "crowdsourcing" and "cloud computing." He was animated and emotional about the power of technology to change the planet.
"Who knew that you were the guru of Web 2.0 as well as global warming?" O'Reilly kidded Gore.
If the reaction of the crowd is any indication, Gore has already achieved Web 2.0 guru status. Pretty ironic for a guy who once had to live down bogus reports claiming he invented the Internet. He may not have invented the Internet, but he has clearly been ...
Read on »
 He had traded his trademark sandals for tennis shoes, but Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was still sporting his same old North Face fleece and that uncanny confidence beyond his 24 years.
Sitting with his back straighter than a steel rod, he calmly fielded questions from John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, batting a bemused smile from time to time.
"Do you need money?" Battelle asked about Facebook.
"No," Zuckerberg replied.
Last year, Battelle revved up the audience at the Internet industry gathering by asking Zuckerberg, "How's the financing going?" right before Facebook -- the Web darling du jour -- received a $240-million cash injection from Microsoft at a $15-billion valuation.
Now speculation is spreading in Silicon Valley that the social networking site, which last year also got another $120 million from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, is again raising money as it ...
Read on »
Yahoo President Sue Decker broke the bad news about Google withdrawing from the proposed search advertising partnership to the Yahoo troops in an e-mail this morning. We got a copy: Earlier today we announced that Google has terminated the advertising services agreement Yahoo! and Google announced in June. Yahoo! continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and we are disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court. Google notified us of its refusal to move forward with implementation of the agreement following an indication from the Department of Justice that it would seek to block it, despite Yahoo!’s proposed revisions to address the DOJ’s concerns.
While this turn of events is regrettable, it’s important for all Yahoos to recognize that our agreement with Google was just one of many efforts that we have underway to accelerate our strategy. While the implementation of the services agreement with Google would have enabled Yahoo! to accelerate its investments in its top business priorities through an infusion of additional operating cash flow, this deal was incremental to Yahoo!’s product roadmap and does not change Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation and growth in search. The fundamental building blocks of ...
Read on »
 It just goes to show that you can teach old media new tricks.
Television networks and Hollywood studios used to try to prevent people from uploading copyrighted content on the Internet. Now they are looking to profit from the practice.
MTV Networks is teaming with MySpace to run advertising on clips from "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," "Punk’d" and other shows that MySpace users upload to the social network site — whether they have permission or not. They plan to announce the deal with Auditude, a Silicon Valley start-up that is providing the advertising technology, on Monday morning.
The strategy is similar to that of YouTube, which late last year launched a system that identifies video clips and then offers copyright holders a choice between removing the material or letting YouTube place ads on it in exchange for a piece of the revenue.
Analysts say the strategy -- and others like it -- show great promise. You can read the full story about MySpace, MTV and Auditude here.
-- Jessica Guynn
Image: Punk'd on MySpace
Read on »
Kevin Rose is an influential guy in Silicon Valley, the kind other young gearheads follow. And that includes on micro-blogging service Twitter, which is where Rose announced to the world that he had canceled his Comcast cable and TiVo subscriptions.
"From this point forward I'm going all internet / netflix," he wrote. A few dozen FriendFeed users posted comments about his decision, with many saying that they had done the same or were thinking about it.
Rose, the 31-year-old who helped start such sites as Digg, Revision3 and Pownce, says he realized he was only watching a handful of shows and about 10 to 12 hours of programming a week. And although he still dug loading up Blu-ray movies on his 110-inch high-definition projector TV, he was just as happy to tune into "Lost" at ABC.com and "Heroes" on Hulu.com on the small screen. A fan of the Green Bay Packers (his grandfather played center for the football team), he could kick back and watch games streamed live on NFL.com.
He can also get streaming video through a Netflix set-top box manufactured by Roku and, soon, on his Xbox 360 console. BitTorrent fills most other gaps. Or Rose hits house parties or local bars to pick up entertainment he misses elsewhere.
It's a big improvement from the days when he had to wait six to eight hours to download pirated versions of his favorite shows, Rose says. Today even pirated shows are a snap. "Now most of the stuff is Flash encoded. It's a single click," he said.
Rose should be in the cable industry's sweet spot. He takes his entertainment seriously. But he said he decided to dump Comcast after ...
Read on »
 LinkedIn has raised an additional $22.7 million to pack onto its growing cash reserve, giving it more flexibility and security in the troubled economy.
The investment in the popular online business network came from long-time investor Bessemer Venture Partners and three new partners, business software maker SAP, banker Goldman Sachs and publisher McGraw Hill.
The deal values the privately held company at slightly more than $1 billion, the same as when LinkedIn raised $53 million in June.
"This definitely strengthens our balance sheet and gives us some friends in important places," said LinkedIn Chief Executive Dan Nye.
At a time when much of Silicon Valley is hunkering down to ride out the economic storm, the large, untapped cash reserves give LinkedIn peace of mind and the ability to make acquisitions, Nye said.
"It's an interesting time because the network is booming right now," Nye said.
LinkedIn, which has 370 employees, is adding nearly 2 million members a month. And it recently hit 30 million members.
"Clearly activity is rising. People are reaching out. The density of the graph is growing," he said.
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye. Credit: Dave Getzschman / For The Times
 Last week, Google's new chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, made the Internet search giant shine at a time when many expected it to stumble.
The pleasant surprise for investors was the company's uncharacteristically grown-up response to the spreading economic crisis: a tight grip on expenses.
Google searched for 10 months before landing Pichette, a 46-year-old Canadian telecommunications veteran. Before the quarterly earnings report, Pichette reflected on his new gig in an interview with Canadian Business.
Pichette allows that "everybody is going to expect the occasional 'oops' at Google, because we're fast prototyping, we're always changing." But he says he's "pushing to make sure all the resources are used efficiently, that you feed the winners, starve the losers."
Gulp. No more free food?
Job No. 1? Compliance. "You make sure the corporation's protected, no one goes to jail, everything is in order," he said. No jail time? Definitely a positive.
Then, he said, a good CFO makes sure the company doesn't run out of money. Fat chance with those beaucoup bucks.
As for life in Silicon Valley versus Montreal? Pichette takes his daughter to school and bikes to work. He wears jeans, not suits. Everyone is really smart. And you don't have to be at your desk to answer a question. Ah, the miracles of technology.
The best part? Duh, the weather.
"Every day, I get up and look at the sky and it’s slightly cloudy at 8 a.m; and by 11 a.m., it’s sunny and 80 degrees. Every day," Pichette said. "So I am adapting pretty well, thank you."
-- Jessica Guynn
For the last few years, they couldn't hire fast enough. Now, with the financial crisis spreading a pall over Silicon Valley, Internet and software start-ups are shedding workers to prepare for the "nuclear winter" that Marc Andreessen forecast in April.
Last week alone, there were layoffs at Zillow, Pandora, AdBrite, Hi5, Jive Software, and Redfin. Rumors of more cuts abound. TechCrunch is tracking the layoffs.
And venture capital investment has already started slowing. In the third quarter, the number of investments in information technology companies fell to dismal levels not seen since at least 1997, according to a report Saturday by Dow Jones VentureSource.
What a comedown for the bubbly Web 2.0 scene that produced, for a time, a seemingly unending stream of start-ups loaded with ideas (both good and bad). The companies attracted fortune seekers and brain power from around the country. Now start-ups are taking a hard look at their odds of surviving a prolonged recession, and the smart ones are going on a major diet. It's a healthy dose of fiscal realism -- and a departure from the dot-com excesses that ultimately led to an epic failure rate for Internet start-ups.
Last week, Seesmic laid off a third of its staff. Founder and CEO Loic Le Meur, clearly shaken, made the announcement through his video commenting service. He later said in an interview that the cutbacks, while extremely painful, would add another year of life to his San Francisco company. Investors, which include EBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, agreed with Le Meur that Seesmic should save as much money as possible.
"We had two years of runway, but I wanted one more year because the recession is going to make it much tougher to get revenues," Le Meur said. "It's like giving myself another round of funding."
Another company slimming down in a big way is Zivity, a subscription-based adult social network.
The sexy San Francisco Internet start-up has always been an attention-getter. It was formed by ...
Read on »
 Finally some good news: Google’s strong third-quarter performance defied low expectations today, reassuring spooked investors who had worried that the slowdown in the economy and consumer spending would hit the Internet search giant.
Its shares, which have suffered along with the broader market, gained $13.85, or 4%, at $353.02 in regular trading then jumped an additional 8% in extended trading following the earnings release.
Google's quarterly profit rose 26% along with strong demand for online search advertising, despite the economic woes that have begun to spread in Silicon Valley and the pinch that some online advertising companies have begun to feel.
The Mountain View., Calif., company posted net income of $1.35 billion, or $4.24 a share, up from $1.07 billion, or $3.38 a share, a year ago.
Revenue climbed 31% to $5.54 billion. Excluding so-called traffic acquisition costs, which are commissions paid to partners, Google's revenue increased 34% to $4.04 billion.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a prepared statement: "We had a good third quarter with strong traffic and revenue growth across all of our major geographies thanks to the underlying strength of our core search and ads business."
Wall Street had trimmed estimates for Google in recent weeks, fearing slowing demand for online advertising and the impact of the strengthening U.S. dollar. Shares had plunged about 30% over the last month.
Some didn't stop believing. American Technology Research analyst Rob Sanderson wrote in a research note that Google's dominance of the search market would prove invaluable in an economic downturn even if the rest of the online advertising market declines.
"The paid search model is proving to be very resilient," he wrote, predicting that Google would do better than feared.
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Credit: Matthew Staver / Bloomberg News
 The Holy Grail for social networks: turning popularity into profits. All have ambitious plans to make money, but few are actually doing so in any meaningful way.
Facebook, for example, has amassed 110 million active users but has not yet hit on a solid strategy to generate the kind of revenue that many expected of the much-hyped Silicon Valley start-up. And some of its advertising efforts have backfired. This year, it's expected to generate $265 million in revenue. Its executives say the big winner in social networking will emerge in the coming years, not coming months.
In fact, founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says his company just isn't laser-focused on making money. In an interview with a blogger for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he said: "Growth is primary, revenue is secondary."
MySpace has a different philosophy, says CEO Chris DeWolfe. It wants friends and advertising dollars. And it's working hard to get them both.
On Monday, the popular social network is officially launching a self-service advertising program called MySpace MyAds that lets small businesses and individuals create ads tailored to the personal information on its users' age, gender, location and interests. The minimum ad buy is $25. Pricing is based on clicks on the advertiser's profile. The ad campaign's performance can be tracked. And small businesses can charge it on a credit card.
DeWolfe said 3,500 advertisers are already using the program, which has been in ...
Read on »
While Wall Street was melting down this week, a bunch of friends went on vacation to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. They enjoyed the sunshine, dined together and uploaded photos and videos, including one of themselves lip-synching to Journey's "Don't Stop Believing."
 The group reportedly included several young Turks from the Web 2.0 crowd -- such as Brittany Bohnet of Google, Dave Morin and Aaron Sittig of Facebook and Sam Lessin of Drop.io -- as well as Lessin's girlfriend, Jessica Vascellaro, who covers Internet companies for the Wall Street Journal. They stayed at a house built by Lessin's dad.
The lip-synching video appeared on a website that described the trip this way: "20 world Internet citizens met in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in October of 2008 for a week of reflections on life, love, and the Internet." (The video has since been set to private.)
The vacationers also chronicled their trip (in few words) on Twitter, collecting them on a feed called campcyprus and pointing to photos taken during the vacation. For example, Vascellaro Twittered that she "is living la vida camp cyprus," "won't stop believing" and "is looking forward to getting back to work." (Her most recent tweet, posted a few hours ago, noted that she had "posted a question to her group on WSJ about the impact of the market turmoil on Silicon Valley. Look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts.")
So far, Silicon Valley pundits have not been amused by the vacation or even jealous of it. Mostly, they're annoyed.
The online record of the trip was discovered -- and spread widely -- during a week in which venture capitalists told their companies to tighten their belts and horde cash to help them get through the tough times looming, EBay said it would lay off 10% of its employees and tech companies saw their stocks crater even more deeply than the broader market.
So when the video of the bathing suited vacationers was discovered, it quickly became too perfect a symbol of Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Or as VentureBeat put it, "Silicon Valley lip-synchs while market burns."
"The video gave me flashbacks to heedless-partying-until-the-bomb-fell attitude before the popping of the Web 1.0 bubble," wrote Kara Swisher at All Things Digital, which is owned by the Wall Street Journal.
"This video will always be associated with the end of Web 2.0," said Michael Arrington at TechCrunch.
Dan Frommer of Silicon Alley Insider said he wasn't sure whether the video was a great example of Web 2.0 tools at their best or a cry for help.
Of course, it's not fair to hold up a video of adults on a vacation they had planned long ago (and presumably paid for themselves) as an example of the end of the roaring bull market. This is no AIG situation, in which the insurance giant's employees were taking a junket to Southern California's swanky St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach while the government was bailing out the company to the tune of $85 billion.
As L.A. Times columnist David Lazarus wrote about the AIG trip, "When the going gets tough, the tough get pedicures."
When it comes to the Web 2.0 crowd, the rest of us can wait for the tough to post evidence of their pedicures online.
-- Michelle Quinn
Photo: A beach on the island of Cyprus. Credit: Dan.. via Flickr
Computer-book publishing magnate Tim O'Reilly is urging young geeks to stop making software that lets you throw sheep at your friends on Facebook or drink beer on your iPhone and to instead start making a difference in the world. He is daring them, in the words of James Collins and Jerry Porras, authors of the business classic "Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies," to take on "big, hairy, audacious goals."
That is the theme of next month's Web 2.0 Summit: "Web Meets World." And that has been the theme of O'Reilly's addresses to the Web 2.0 faithful. (You can watch video of his keynotes in San Francisco this spring and in New York City last month.)
As we write in this story in today's L.A. Times: He says it's not just the right thing to do, but also the smart thing to do -- especially as the credit crunch spreads to Silicon Valley, venture financing becomes scarce and start-ups have to retrench.
[skip]
O'Reilly argues that Silicon Valley has strayed from the passion and idealism that fuel innovation to instead follow what he calls the "mad pursuit of the buck with stupider and stupider ideas."
Flush with money and opportunity following the post-dot-com resurgence, he says, some entrepreneurs have cocooned in a "reality bubble," insulated from poverty, disease, global warming and other problems that are gripping the planet. He argues that they should follow the model of some of the world's most successful technology companies, including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which sprang from their founders' efforts to "work on stuff that matters."
That might sound like empty rhetoric coming from some. But when O'Reilly talks, the tech world tends to listen.
After all, this is the guy who understood the power and significance of the Internet before most people knew it existed. O'Reilly helped coin the term "Web 2.0" to refer to the next phase of the Internet built on bottom-up sharing and collective action. He's the consummate matchmaker, bringing together great minds to work on great projects. He's a successful blogger, entrepreneur (he sold a business to AOL for $11 million mostly in stock and options back in the day) and investor (he was an early investor in Blogger, which earned him pre-IPO Google shares when the search giant bought the start-up). And he runs an influential book publishing empire in Sebastopol, Calif., called O'Reilly Media, which has snared a significant share of the computer book market.
But he is perhaps best known in Silicon Valley for putting on packed conferences headlined by some of the tech industry's brightest. Now he is using those conferences as a bully pulpit.
"There are big problems to be solved," he told the audience in New York last month. And then he listed the problems: The financial meltdown. Global warming. Declining U.S. competitiveness. The spread of infectious diseases. The widening income gap and soaring health care costs. The dysfunctional political system. "These are pretty depressing times," he said.
Some forward-thinking philanthropists and entrepreneurs, corporations and nonprofits have already turned to the Internet and other modern-day technologies to tackle these growing problems, O'Reilly said. Now it's time for others to step up and accept his 21st century version of 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal's wager: "Assume the worst, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, unless we do something about it," he said. Even if the planet isn't getting warmer, the innovation to cool it down will help make it a safer, happier place for all, he argued.
O'Reilly says he was spurred to action by his son-in-law, Saul Griffith, president and chief scientist at wind-energy company Makani Power, which is funded by Google. He and Griffith are considering holding hearings on global warming to pressure Congress to hold its own.
"Saul could have done anything," O'Reilly said. "He has more ideas than you could shake a stick at. But for him it's not about where he can make the most money. It's about where he can make the most difference."
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: Tim O'Reilly. Credit: Brian Solis via Flickr
Sequoia Capital this week held a sobering wake for the second Internet boom.
Call it Economics 101 on Recession 2.0. The premier venture capital firm, which has backed such companies as Apple, Cisco and YouTube, invited about 100 executives from its portfolio companies to give them an overview of what the global economic crisis means for Silicon Valley and their start-up dreams.
 "We were all talking outside before it got started and one of the CEOs said, 'Gee, I wonder what they are going to talk about at the meeting today?' So we peeked in and there was a tombstone that said 'RIP: Good Times' on it," said one executive who asked not to be named because the meeting was confidential.
The main message: Cinch your belts for a much longer and deeper recession than most people think.
"They gave us a macroeconomic overview of what they see happening and why they don't think this is just some volatility," the executive said.
Sequoia partner Michael Moritz, who led the firm's early investments in the likes of Google and Yahoo, gave an introduction at the meeting. Earlier this week, Moritz made clear his feelings about how sharp the retrenchment would be for Silicon Valley start-ups that sprang up during the boom. Many will end up "spattered on windshields and radiator grills and be forgotten," he told the Financial Times.
Sequoia declined to comment about the Tuesday meeting, which was first reported by technology blog GigaOm.
It was not a "doom and gloom" message, the executive said, but a serious one. "They basically said: 'This is a business. This is not an excuse for you and a bunch of your friends to have a pool table and goof around with something you think is neat.' I didn't come away thinking that the sky is falling or that I have to move to Canada, just that these guys are taking this seriously."
Sequoia offered practical advice on how best to ride out the economic storm. It even had an entrepreneur it funded in the first Internet boom speak about how he managed to cut costs and eventually sell his company during the dark days of the dot-com bust. The meeting covered every area of business and how best to cut costs in hopes of surviving as long as possible. Among the recommendations: If you need to conserve cash, lay off as many staff as possible in one fell swoop. If you need to raise money, raise it immediately.
Of course, ex-PayPalers Max Levchin and Keith Rabois of Slide figured that out back in January. They turned to Allen & Co., the uber-connected investment bank, to help raise $50 million from the likes of Fidelity and T. Rowe Price at a heady $500-million valuation, giving the San Francisco Internet start-up plenty of money and time to ride out the economic storm. Another seasoned entrepreneur, Netscape Communications founder Marc Andreessen, in April raised $60 million for a $500-million valuation.
This week's meeting would have felt familiar to Internet veterans: Sequoia held a similar one with its portfolio companies during the dot-com bust.
"One good thing they said is that last time the downturn started in Silicon Valley so Silicon Valley was less than well-prepared to handle it," the executive said. "This time it started in New York. We have more time to prepare for it."
What's clear: The party is over, and the shake-out has begun. Silicon Valley likes to say that the best companies thrive in the worst of times. And that's the reality: Prepared or not, many companies won't make it.
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: Keith Rabois of Slide helped raise $50 million for his company, Slide, to ride out the tough economy. Credit: Jakub Mosur / For the Times
Yahoo shares fell to a five-year low of $13.20 today before rebounding to close down 5.6% at $13.76, below even the lowest of the deflated price targets set by Wall Street analysts.
And this time, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company couldn’t even chalk up the drop to a bear market. Investors are increasingly concerned about how vulnerable Yahoo’s online display advertising business is as advertisers pull back on spending. The outlook continues to worsen as the economic slowdown and credit crunch spread around the globe.
 These days, nothing seems to be going Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang's way. The company continues to lose Web search market share. Regulatory scrutiny has held up a proposed advertising partnership with Google that could deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in additional annual revenue. Two analysts cut price targets today ahead of what is projected to be a disappointing third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 21. Yahoo may have missed its best window to sell or spin off its stakes in Asian Internet firms, which have fallen in value. It is expected to lay off a significant chunk of its workforce as consultants from Bain & Co. scour the company for ways to save money. And investors are still hoping for a stock buyback, something, anything, to realize some value.
"We don’t see any change in operating trends. If there is a change, it's a change for the worse," Stanford Group Co. analyst Clayton Moran said. "With the global macro economic slowdown deepening, there really is no end in sight to Yahoo’s operational struggles."
So what's Yahoo to do? "Everything should be on the table," Moran said.
Hard to believe that it was just nine months ago that Yahoo spurned an unsolicited $31-a-share takeover offer from Microsoft. Despite an American Technology Research report today speculating that Microsoft would again bid for Yahoo, analysts say the chances of the software giant doing so are remote.
"Yahoo is trading on its fundamentals again," said Anthony Valencia, media analyst for TCW Group in Los Angeles. "People are much less confident, or not confident at all, that there is going to be another offer from Microsoft, which was keeping the stock a little higher than it should have been."
Microsoft is far more interested in Yahoo’s search business -- and AOL's too, if Yahoo's on-again, off-again merger talks with Time Warner to snap up the AOL Internet business bear fruit.
The possible combination of Yahoo and AOL gets mixed reviews. Some analysts and investors hope the two companies would be stronger together than they have been on their own. Collectively, they would have a huge stake in advertising, content and communications. And AOL would add about 5 percentage points to Yahoo’s 14% domestic search market share, Moran said.
That said, not everyone is a fan.
"AOL is a Band-Aid to a bigger problem," Moran said. "It could appear to address the issues, but in reality I think it would come up short."
Yet, even as talks intensify, one major investor who wants the deal to move forward said he was not holding his breath. "It’s like waiting for Godot," he said.
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: Jerry Yang Credit: Mark Lennihan / Associated Press
 Yahoo wants to change the way you keep track of your schedule.
The company is rolling out new features for its Web calendar that it hopes will lure more of its webmail users.
Thanks to technology it got from last year's acquisition of Zimbra, Yahoo has come up with ways to make it easier to share events with family and friends. You also can drag and drop appointments and get reminders about upcoming events via e-mail, instant message or text message.
A new feature that will remind people of their old wall or desk calendars: You can add photos from Flickr. Another bonus: You can share calendar information with friends even if they use calendars from competitors such as Google, AOL and Microsoft.
Eventually Yahoo Calendar will help users discover and track favorite events, such as concert dates, by integrating the calendar with Upcoming.org and other Yahoo properties, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.
The beta version of Yahoo's new calendar will be available to a limited number of people in the United States, Brazil, India, Taiwan and Britain and will roll out more broadly in coming months. It is part of Yahoo's broader focus on luring more users by making their in-boxes "smarter," Kremer said. He added that more people are embracing online calendars with the spread of broadband and mobile devices and that the calendars are becoming easier to use.
Gartner analyst Matt Cain says Yahoo -- like other major Internet players -- is looking to get users to spend more time on its site. Gartner expects the volume of calendar use for consumer e-mail accounts to grow to 25% by 2012, from about 3% to 4% now. Most people still rely on paper calendars or their Outlook calendar at the office. But that is beginning to change, particularly among the younger set, Cain said.
Yahoo has set a new bar for Web calendars that Google, AOL, Microsoft and others will have to match, he said. "I think we are going to have an escalation in the calendar wars."
"It's not a quantum leap for Yahoo," Cain said. "But it gives them bragging rights for the time being."
-- Jessica Guynn
 Ever watched a video on YouTube and wanted to buy the song? YouTube is counting on it.
The world's most popular video-sharing site is hoping to make money from its huge audience by installing buttons under YouTube videos so that the ability to buy the music and video games featured in the video clip is just one click away.
The "click to buy" buttons, which began appearing in the U.S. today, connect viewers to the product page on Amazon.com or Apple's iTunes. To start, YouTube, which will receive a commission for each sale, is selling songs from two major labels, EMI Music and Universal Music Group, and video games from Electronic Arts. Eventually it wants to expand to sales of other products such as movies, television shows and concert tickets. "This is the first step in a viable e-commerce platform," said Bakari Brock, business affairs counsel at YouTube.
It's another effort by the video-sharing site to figure out how to profit from its popularity. So far, YouTube has mainly focused on advertising as a source of income, including text ads that run along the bottom of videos as they play, contests sponsored by advertisers and home-page video ads. But it has begun to experiment with new ways to take advantage of the site, which attracts nearly 100 million people a month in the U.S.
Google bought YouTube two years ago for $1.65 billion. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has pledged to investors that YouTube will make money once it hits on the right formula. Last month he said Google was being patient. "We are where we should be," he said. Yet revenue this year is expected to be only about $200 million. YouTube declined to talk about the success of its advertising efforts or the revenue the site generates.
YouTube seems to be catching on to an old Web trend called "hotspotting." The classic example: You spot Jennifer Aniston wearing a sweater you must have, and you click on the sweater to buy it. A couple of years ago, LA Times Technology Editor Chris Gaither and former staffer Claire Hoffman wrote about a French clothier that decided to make hotspotting even hotter by letting potential online shoppers click on the clothes that actors were wearing -- just before they took them off and had sex on the small screen.
-- Jessica Guynn
 Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder who had overseen engineering, is leaving the social networking start-up to form another.
Moskovitz launched Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, while they were students at Harvard.
Moskovitz will leave Facebook in about a month with Justin Rosenstein, an engineering manager who joined Facebook from Google.
Rosenstein and Moskovitz, who couldn't be reached for comment, are joining forces to build software they hope will be "to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life," according to a note on Rosenstein's Facebook page. Moskovitz recruited Rosenstein to Facebook, and the two have been collaborating on software for business users in recent months. Social media is increasingly gaining traction inside businesses, which are experimenting to see if they can increase productivity and communication.
Rosenstein became well known in Silicon Valley circles for his enthusiastic embrace of Facebook as the new "it" company that was "on the cusp of changing the world." After joining in June 2007, he called it "that company that shows up once in a very long while -- the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago." In his post today, he said, "Leaving Facebook makes me sad, but I feel I have to follow my passion on this."
Moskovitz is the latest in a series of departures of executives from Facebook as the 4-year-old Palo Alto company hires seasoned managers such as former Google executive Sheryl Sandberg, who is now chief operating officer. Moskovitz and Zuckerberg are close friends and confidants.
"Dustin has always had Facebook's best interest at heart and will always be someone I turn to for advice," Zuckerberg said in a statement.
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Credit: Facebook
 Two days without Facebook?
That's the plan hatched by millions of disgruntled Facebook users who are threatening to boycott the popular social networking site on Oct. 18 and 19.
The slogan of the boycott is "It's only ONE weekend, we can all do it!" And of course the organizers are using Facebook to spread the word. The Facebook protest page reads: By 11:59 PM (in your region) on 17 October -- be sure to log off. Do not log back in no matter how tempting until 12:00 AM (in your region) 20 October.
On 20 October we all log back in and see if there has been a response of any kind. A blog, a post.... anything. If not, we repeat the process...
The protesters are unhappy about the site's new design and have gained quite a following. About 4 million or so have joined groups such as "I hate the new Facebook." (It's not clear how much overlap there is between the various groups.)
The "1,000,000 against the new Facebook layout" group, which is sponsoring the boycott, has already exceeded its own ambitions by netting more than 2.7 million members.
One of the group's leaders, Jessica Fishbein, a 37-year-old high school English teacher from Miami, says she hopes people can "break their addiction for the weekend."
"The members of our group want action," she said. "They want to take a stand to make a statement to show that we are still on Facebook, we are not leaving necessarily, but Facebook really needs to listen to our feedback and make some adjustments."
Boycotting Facebook won't send the same kind of powerful message that leaving Facebook would. But Facebook has "everyone between a rock and a hard place, and they know it," Fishbein said. "People are invested in Facebook. They have all their friends there. So they won't be quick to go."
Facebook owes quite a bit to its more than 100 million active users who have turned the site into one of the world's most heavily trafficked.
A Facebook spokeswoman issued the following statement: "We're flattered to have such passionate users provide feedback on the new site design, and we're pleased to see them sharing their views, which is what Facebook is all about. We are still working on the site and are committed to making Facebook better for all users."
She added that Facebook has been gathering feedback from users over the past several months, continues to monitor groups for feedback and has contacted some of the administrators of some of the larger protest groups.
 To its credit, Facebook tried to get it right this time. It has faced large-scale protests in the past for launching the News Feed, an activity feed feature that users complained violated their privacy by broadcasting their every move to all their friends, and for creating an advertising feature that broadcast their purchases to all their friends. Facebook, of course, is a social network designed to broadcast what you're doing to friends. But users apparently feel there are limits and Facebook crossed them.
With the redesign, Facebook kept members informed of its plans months in advance and solicited their feedback. It unveiled the new design, which is supposed to reclaim the site's uncluttered, spartan aesthetic, in July but gave members time to get used to it before forcing them to switch to the new format a few weeks ago.
In a blog post last month, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said "it's tempting to say that we should just support both designs, but this isn't as simple as it sounds. Supporting two versions is a huge amount of work for our small team, and it would mean that going forward we would have to build everything twice. If we did that then neither version would get our full attention."
"That said, Facebook is a work in progress," he said. "We constantly try to improve things and we understand that our work isn't perfect. Even if you're joining a group to express things you don't like about the new design, you're giving us important feedback and you're sharing your voice, which is what Facebook is all about."
Indeed, Facebook is a powerful vehicle to mobilize behind a cause. So, it's not surprising that Facebook has discovered that some of its best customers can quickly become its most vocal critics. And that dialogue is taking place on and off Facebook. Check the point/counterpoint here, for example.
In other news, Facebook next month plans to let former and current employees sell some of their shares even though the company is still private. Former and current employees can cash out 20% of their vested shares or up to $900,000, whichever is less. That's one way to pacify the troops in a moribund IPO market.
A Facebook spokeswoman e-mailed the following statement: "To provide employees with a financial cushion while we continue to build the company, Facebook has designed a one-time program to enable employees to realize some liquidity."
-- Jessica Guynn
 Tech companies glum about their sagging stock prices can take cheer in a bill Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed into law that aims to make it easier for employers to determine which of their workers are exempt from overtime compensation.
A number of technology companies, including Sony, Electronic Arts, Apple and Cisco Systems, had been tripped up by California's overtime regulations, which stated that highly skilled technology workers earning less than $75,000 a year, or $36 an hour, were entitled to OT.
Sounds simple, but the devil is in the math. Companies have contended that as long as the worker's annual salary was at least $75,000, he or she was exempt from overtime pay, regardless of how many hours the employee clocked. Labor advocates have countered that the number of hours worked matters very much: They argued that the regulation in fact required companies to pay $36 or more for each hour worked, or else the employee was due OT.
As a result, programmers, engineers and graphic artists have filed lawsuits in recent years demanding overtime compensation for working long hours without extra pay. Some, including Sony and EA, have paid tens of millions of dollars to settle those cases.
The new law, which Schwarzenegger signed late Tuesday and took effect immediately, eliminates the hourly calculation. It says employers can instead meet the overtime exemption by paying their workers a gross salary of at least $6,250 a month. That equals the same $75,000 a year, but it means that high-tech companies now don't have to worry about keeping track of the number of hours their employees work, said Carol Freeman, a partner at law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Palo Alto. "There was an ambiguity in the law, and this clarifies that," Freeman said.
Labor advocates said the law, which applies only to highly skilled tech workers, opens the door for companies to force employees to work unlimited hours without paying them anything extra.
"Instead of hiring another worker, companies can just save money by making their existing workers clock twice as many hours," said Caitlin Vega, legislative advocate for the California Labor Federation.
The new law, however, does not clarify one controversial point about the overtime exemption: whether extra compensation such as stock options, bonus or profit-sharing count toward the $75,000 annual figure. So if you're a highly skilled tech worker making $60,000 a year in salary and $20,000 more in extra compensation that's paid out in equal monthly installments, who knows if you're due overtime?
-- Alex Pham
Photo of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger by Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times
 Call it a big win for online auctioneer EBay. The San Jose company announced today that Netscape Communications co-founder and all-around golden geek Marc Andreessen had joined its board of directors.
In a statement, EBay Chief Executive John Donahoe said Andreessen's insights would be invaluable as the company seeks to "drive further innovation on our platform, invest in growth opportunities and develop technology that will further benefit our customers, build powerful communities and enhance e-commerce."
Translation: EBay is counting on Andreessen's mojo to help outmaneuver Amazon and Google, which have been siphoning some of its merchants. Things are only bound to get tougher with the economy preparing for what Andreessen last year predicted would be a financial "nuclear winter."
Andreessen, who through a representative declined to comment, pioneered today's Internet as the co-creator of the first widely used browser. He pulled off another major coup with Opsware (formerly known as Loudcloud), which he sold to Hewlett-Packard for more than $1.6 billion in 2007.
He's currently working on social networking site Ning. He's also a widely followed blogger and investor. He has invested in Digg, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Qik, LinkedIn, Meebo and Scribd, among others. Earlier this year, he joined the board of social networking phenom Facebook.
-- Jessica Guynn
Andreessen photo by Randi Lynn Beach / Special to The Times
Young upstart Facebook is growing up at Internet speed.
The latest sign: Its freshly installed management team has hired a legal gun with a loaded resume that includes serving as a White House lawyer who helped coordinate the response to the investigation into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and serving as chief of staff to former U.S. Atty. General Alberto Gonzales.
Ted Ullyot will join Facebook as its vice president and general counsel next month. Ullyot, who also has had major private sector stints including as a top lawyer for AOL Time Warner Europe, is leaving a partnership with law firm Kirkland & Ellis and will relocate to the Bay Area, he said in an interview Friday.
"We view Ted's joining us as just another reaffirmation of the fact that we are working at the cutting edge of lots of incredible innovation," said Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president of communications and public policy (and himself a lawyer). "He has an extraordinary combination of private legal practice and public sector experience. So many of the legal issues we face touch on both of those arenas. He is equally comfortable helping us expand internationally as he is in helping us navigate complicated legal issues we may face in Washington. Ted's arrival really demonstrates we're a little more grown-up."
Ullyot also complements the Facebook team from a political perspective. "Ted has extremely strong connections with the Republican party, and we think that's a good thing," Schrage said. And it could make for some interesting debates. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's No. 2 is Sheryl Sandberg, who was chief of staff at the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration.
This is just the latest milestone in the maturing of Facebook, which, with more than 700 employees, 100-million-plus users and ambitions of becoming a public company, is filling out ...
Read on »
 Google has taken the unusual step of publicly opposing Proposition 8, an upcoming ballot initiative that would ban same-sex marriage in California.
The initiative has quickly become a bitter and divisive political fight, with California becoming a battleground as donations pour in from around the nation.
Same-sex marriage became legal in California in June after the state Supreme Court ruled a ban was unconstitutional, setting the stage for the ballot proposal that would make same-sex marriage illegal.
Google routinely and robustly exerts political influence in Washington in the realm of technology and energy. But it rarely ventures into social issues that can be a lightning rod for criticism.
Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, noted in a blog post that Google is "an active participant" in policy debates that relate to its core businesses. He also points out that Google lays claim to a "diversity of people and opinions," Democrats and Republicans, convseratives and liberals, straight and gay. He acknowledged that it was an "unlikely question" for Google to take a stand on this initiative. But for Google, he says, it became an "issue of equality." "However, while there are many objections to this proposition -- further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text -- it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love."
It is unclear whether Google will take further steps to oppose the ballot initiative. The company could not be immediately reached for comment.
Another company that has publicly opposed Proposition 8 is San Francisco's Pacific Gas & Electric.
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: Sergey Brin Credit: EPA / Peter Foley
Shortly after Google unveiled Chrome, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the new Web browser "represents some of the best Google can do." Then he encouraged everyone to try it.
But not many people are. Chrome gained market share within the first 24 hours of its release on Sept. 2, but since then it has given back much of those small gains to the leaders, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox, according to Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of marketing and strategic alliances at Internet measurement firm Net Applications.
Chrome shot up to 1% of the market but has since fallen to 0.77% as of last week, according to Net Applications. Apple's Safari was not affected since Google has yet to release a version to run on the Mac operating system. Chrome is currently duking it out with Opera Software ASA's Opera for fourth place. Net Applications bases its findings on tracking the browsers of unique visitors to 2 million websites around the globe. As you can see in the accompanying chart, Chrome use spiked after it launched the week of Aug. 31 and rose a little the following week but then slipped.
"Chrome started off pretty fast and furious," Vizzaccaro said. "Within 24 hours they surpassed 1% of usage market share which was shocking and impressive. Since then, they have been slowly fading in market percentages. The trend has a slight downward angle to it."
Microsoft declined to comment other than to pump up its latest version of Explorer as "faster, easier, more safe and reliable than ever before."
Mozilla's John Lilly said it was premature to draw any conclusions. "It's only been three weeks," he said. "That's not a helluva lot of time. We don't know anything about anything yet." That said: "We are seeing lots and lots of users come back."
So, if users are returning to Explorer and Firefox, why? Are they not convinced that Chrome offers the speed or features that would get them to ditch their current browsers? Are they concerned about privacy? It's hard to tell, although Chrome gets more usage at night than during the day when people are at work using corporate-sanctioned browsers. A Google spokeswoman issued the following statement: "We're pleased with the response we've gotten from users thus far."
To reverse the slide, Google will have to market Chrome, Vizzaccaro said. Thus far, Google has settled for promoting it on its home page and sponsoring links on the Google and Yahoo search engines.
So far, there have been no announcements about deals with vendors such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard to get Chrome preloaded on personal computers. (That's how Microsoft trounced Netscape during the first browser wars back in the 1990s, although Firefox has captured market share without crafting such deals.)
But, like with most things Google, Chrome is not your ordinary browser. Consider how Schmidt described Chrome: "Chrome is more than a browser, it is a platform for applications," he said. "From my perspective, the Chrome announcement is the beginning of a new platform."
That platform will host Google's online applications such as word processing and spreadsheets to compete with Microsoft's lucrative office software empire.
-- Jessica Guynn
Market share graphic by Wil Ramirez / Los Angeles Times
Photo: Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Credit: Matthew Staver / Bloomberg News
* Post updated to explain why Chrome was showing up on the research firm's measurements Aug. 31 when the browser launched Sept. 2; the measurements covered the week of Aug. 31.
It's apt to get attention when you pitch your digital advertising system to Madison Avenue with everyone's favorite pitchman: Jon Hamm, who plays the hard-drinking and hard-living Don Draper on the Emmy-award-winning, critically acclaimed television series "Mad Men."
 That's just what Yahoo did today at a press conference in New York, part of the annual New York Advertising Week festivities. Hamm joined Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker to talk up its digital advertising system, APT (formerly known as AMP). They didn't light up any Lucky Strikes, but they struck a positive note while making their case for APT, which they say makes it easier and faster to buy online ads by eliminating many of the steps. They also announced that the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News would be the first to begin using the service.
It was a message apt to get less attention than the one Yang dispatched to Yahoo employees Tuesday. In an e-mail, Yang said the troubled Internet company had hired Bain & Co. to "improve efficiencies," i.e., cut costs, and likely, jobs -- a decision that analysts say is necessary, particularly after Yahoo rebuffed would-be suitor Microsoft. As spending on online advertising falls off, Yahoo is under more pressure than ever to grow revenue, they say. Yahoo continues to lose search ad market share to Google and display ad market share to other competitors.
In a statement, Yahoo said: "Yahoo has been exploring ways to streamline our processes and bring new agility and efficiency to how we work as an organization. As part of this effort, we have engaged Bain & Co. to help us identify opportunities for improvement. This work is well underway, with the ultimate goal of positioning Yahoo to achieve long-term, sustainable growth."
As for job cuts: "It would be premature to speculate about possible headcount reductions."
Yahoo first started talking up APT in April. The system got a boost from Yahoo's acquisition of Right Media, an advertising exchange. It competes with AOL's Platform A, which earlier this week added its own exchange called BidPlace. Google, which rose to dominance with text ads, bought DoubleClick to make inroads in display advertising and is also taking aim at newspapers and other media.
APT offers partners a targeting technology to sell more relevant ads on their own websites and eventually to sell advertising on the sites of other partners. Yahoo aims to recruit hundreds of newspapers by year's end and then to open up the system to others, said Mike Walrath, senior vice president of Yahoo's advertising marketplaces group. He founded Right Media.
"Today there are tremendous inefficiencies in how display ads are bought and sold," he said. "What we are providing is a platform that streamlines how our partners do business."
Hamm remarked that the characters on "Mad Men," with the explosion of television advertising in the early 1960s, faced similar challenges to the ones publishers today face with the digital advertising boom. And Yang underscored that point in a blog post.
With great challenge comes great opportunity. UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter likened this opportunity to Google's in search advertising. And, he said, dominating online display advertising is Yahoo's opportunity to lose. "Given Yahoo's execution history, we are concerned that they could lose it," he wrote in a research note. "This will all come down to execution; if Yahoo executes, the market opportunity could be significant."
In the face of such skepticism, Yang is talking a good game. He wrote: "If only Sterling Cooper could be here to reap the benefits."
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: From left, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, actor Jon Hamm and Yahoo President Sue Decker. Credit: Jeffrey Holmes
* A previous version of this post credited the photograph to the Associated Press.
After months of secrecy and speculation, T-Mobile USA this morning unveiled the first mobile phone to run on Google's Android operating system.
 Called the G1, the phone made by Taiwan-based HTC will cost $179 with a two-year contract and go on sale Oct. 22. There will be two data plans: one for $25 with unlimited Web surfing and some messaging, the other for $35 with unlimited Web surfing and messaging. T-Mobile customers in the U.S. can pre-order the G1 in limited quantities, beginning today.
Analysts expect T-Mobile to sell fewer than 500,000 of the phones. During the news conference, Christopher Schläffer, group product and innovation officer of Deutsche Telekom, said his company is determined to bring the mobile Internet to the mass market.
As we explained in an earlier post, there's a lot at stake for Google as it tries extend its lucrative advertising empire to the mobile Web. The G1 allows users to search the Web, get driving directions, play music and watch YouTube videos, all by swiping a touch screen, very similar to the iPhone. The G1 comes with a version of Google Maps with a special street-view feature: a compass mode that makes the scene you are viewing move as you do. A slide-out keyboard allows users to fire off instant messages or send e-mails.
The pitch: Anything you can do on the Web, you will be able to do on the G1. It's a salvo in the smartphone wars as Google takes on Apple's iPhone and Research in Motion's BlackBerry, which combined dominate that market. The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg called the G1 "the first real competitor to the iPhone."
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a surprise appearance at the news conference in New York to promote the phone, which will rely on the innovation of independent software developers to drive new applications.
"I am a bit of a geek. I really like tinkering with things," Brin said. He has been playing with the phone "for a while now," he said. He wrote an application that measured how much time elapsed from the time he threw the phone in the air to the time he caught it or it crashed to the floor. "It's very exciting for me as a computer geek to have a phone that I can play with and modify and innovate on just the way I have done with computers."
Apple introduced the iPhone in June 2007, radically reshaping consumer expectations for mobile phones. Now Google, along with wireless partner T-Mobile and hardware partner HTC, is trying to bring a similar experience to the masses in the United States and Europe.
Sales of search ads on mobile phones could double to $181.1 million in the U.S. in the next year, reports research firm EMarketer. That's a tiny fraction of the ad revenue generated by Web search on computers (Google alone generated $16.6 billion in revenue last year), but the market is expected to keep growing fast as more smartphones come out. Google is hoping to break the tight hold that carriers usually exert over the kinds of applications that run on their devices and make its applications more broadly available. It formed the Open Handset Alliance with industry partners in November to develop the Android software.
T-Mobile executives said today that the rise of mobile Internet traffic and revenue is the dominant trend for the wireless industry going forward.
T-Mobile USA's chief technology and innovation officer, Cole Brodman, said the collaboration with Google and HTC began three years ago. Brodman said T-Mobile realized it had to open up its handsets to drive innovation. G1 users will be able to download free applications from the Android Market.
"It's time to change," Brodman said.
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: G1 from HTC, the first phone that runs Google's Android operating system for mobile phones. Credit: T-Mobile
UPDATED 7:50 A.M.: T-Mobile said this morning that the phone, officially called the G1, will go on sale in the U.S. on Oct. 22, and it will cost $20 less than expected: $179 with a two-year service plan. A previous version of this post said it would cost $199.
The phone, pictured below, will go on sale in Britain in November and other European countries the first quarter of 2009. We'll have more details in a new post soon.
-----
Andy Rubin has a utopian vision of the future of mobile: Cellphones, which are already more common in the world than cars and nearly as powerful as personal computers, will allow you to remain connected at all times.
Today Google is taking its biggest step to date in pushing the vision that Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms, promoted: The Internet giant and T-Mobile are showing off the first handset to run Google's new mobile operating system, Android. (Android was the name of Rubin's mobile phone software company, which Google bought in 2005.) The $179 phone, code-named the Dream, is being manufactured by HTC.
With the Dream and other phones like it in the pipeline, Google hopes to ring in an era in which consumers have more freedom and flexibility. Most important for Google, as the world increasingly logs on to the Web from cellphones rather than computers, consumers will have easy access to its services such as search and maps while on the go.
"In five years, the Internet will be with you wherever you are," Rajeev Chand, a wireless analyst at investment bank Rutberg & Co.
It's not quite there yet. Right now, many people still don’t have wireless data plans or so-called smartphones. The U.S. mobile Internet audience is about a quarter that of personal computers. But analysts say the mobile Web could eventually eclipse the traditional Web.
For Google to maintain its edge, it must maintain its early lead in mobile search and play a leading role in revolutionizing Internet service on cellphones the way it did on personal computers. Just because it dominates on personal computers doesn't guarantee it will dominate on cellphones.
"The cellphone is the world’s most popular device, and it is going to be the world’s most popular way to access the Web on a global basis," said Ross Rubin, NPD Group’s wireless and consumer-tech industry analyst. "Google depends on access to the Web. Without access to the Web, its business would die. Google certainly has a vested interest in ensuring no one company becomes so dominant in cellphones or cellphone operating systems to the point that it restricts access to Google’s services."
The Dream, which will go on sale in the coming week, will sport the Google brand and come with a two-year service contract with T-Mobile, according to published reports. It also will sport many of the same features as ...
Read on »
 UPDATED 2:05 P.M.: Another group added its voice to a growing chorus of opposition. The World Federation of Advertisers, which says it represents 55 national advertiser associations around the globe, said today that it has asked European regulators to block the partnership.
-----
Let the dissent begin.
Tomorrow Yahoo's revamped board of directors will meet for the first time with billionaire activist Carl Icahn taking a seat -- and apparently taking a stand on his previous argument that Yahoo needs to craft a deal with Microsoft. Oh, to be a fly on that boardroom wall.
Icahn and two of his allies were elected after Yahoo's annual meeting last month in a truce brokered to end an acrimonious proxy fight for control of the Internet company.
Icahn replaced Activision Blizzard honcho Bobby Kotick on the board. Former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi Jr. and former Nextel CEO John Chapple were also appointed to the expanded 11-member board.
Icahn will get the opportunity to push for a Microsoft deal from Yahoo's board. He told CNBC on Friday: "Yahoo is a really great company, but I think they have to do something with Microsoft or Google is going to kill them."
That's not the prevailing view among Yahoo managers, who have been forcefully making the case that a controversial search advertising partnership with Google would be its salvation. It's a key part of the argument advanced by Chief Executive Jerry Yang and others that Yahoo is a viable, independent company. Yahoo is also said to continue serious talks with Time Warner's AOL unit.
The proposed Google partnership faces intense scrutiny from U.S. and European regulators and attorneys general, including in California, as well as opposition from some U.S. advertisers and the World Assn. of Newspapers. Yet Yahoo and Google say they are committed to the deal, which they expect to launch next month.
In a letter on Friday to Assn. of National Advertisers President and CEO Robert Liodice regarding his organization's opposition to the search advertising pact, Yahoo's head of U.S. operations, Hilary Schneider, argued the pact would give advertisers more and better options while strengthening Yahoo's ability to compete in all aspects of online advertising, including search. She also rejected the contention that the pact would raise prices for advertisers.
Yang will also make his case to advertising executives this week with an address in New York.
-- Jessica Guynn
Photo: Carl Icahn. Credit: Mark Lennihan / Associated Press
 Google is aggressively campaigning for its proposed search advertising partnership with Yahoo, trying to ease fears among advertisers as the Justice Department weighs whether to bless, block or curb the deal.
Last week it was Yahoo's turn, with U.S. operations head Hilary Schneider defending the deal. Here's a recap of the week's Google spin:
First, it trotted out its chief economist, Hal Varian, to argue for the deal on the company's policy blog. Varian took issue with a SearchIgnite study claiming the partnership would result in higher prices for advertisers.
Then, Tim Armstrong, Google's president of advertising and commerce in North America, joined co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt in a media roundtable during the Internet search giant's Zeitgeist conference. They argued that the partnership not only complied with antitrust laws but would benefit users, advertisers and publishers.
Brin said that Google owed it to Yahoo to move forward with the partnership and to help assure that Yahoo would remain an independent company. After all, it was Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo
who convinced Brin and Page ...
Read on »
| |
Google is letting you get personal with your search results.
