Early gains do not guarantee a long-term increase in search market share, and thanks to its experience with Live Search and Live Search Cashback, Microsoft knows this better than anyone. That said, Redmond’s new search engine, Bing, does seem to be making some solid progress.
Yahoo announced some updates to its homepages today–mobile and Web both. Designed to make them more personally relevant to their users, the pages are more customizable than they’ve been before. The release in full, after the jump.
What silliness. Microsoft and the European Commission have canceled a face-to-face hearing in an antitrust case pending against the company over a scheduling dispute, of all things.
Palm’s Michael Abbott delivered more than just the keyonote at Web 2.0 Expo. But not that much more. Absent from his remarks Wednesday evening was any news about the price of Palm’s forthcoming Pre handset or a hard-and-fast release date–two bits of information the industry has been pining for since the device was first announced in January.
If 2008 (or 2007, 06, 05, 04…) was the year April Fools on the Web jumped the shark, then 2009 was the year it was eaten by it. The Web is so overburdened with pranks this year, it may that the best April Fools announcement of all proves to be Palm’s, a company promising to deliver real news and not some over-thought hoax. Google alone has posted no fewer than 12 pranks–and none of them match Pigeon Rank in wit.
Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz often says that the best time to invest is when people are cowering under their desks. Google appears to have taken that message to heart because it’s launching a new venture fund at a time when the VC industry is busy practicing its duck-for-cover exercises.
So those rumors of a PlayStation2 price cut? True. Rumors of a similar cut for the PlayStation 3? Not so much… Confirming recent speculation, Sony this morning said that it’s dropping the price of the PlayStation 2 from $129 to $99.99 as of April 1. But it aggressively dismissed reports of a PS3 price drop as false.
The debut of IBM’s Open Cloud Manifesto has proven more pratfall than grand entrance. When the controversial “standards” document–which calls for the cloud, like the Internet itself, to be open–finally went live this morning, it did so without a number of important signatories. Among them, the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum–a group that helped draft the document.
Looks like Microsoft just lost the sole advantage its CEO Steve Ballmer claimed it had over Google in search: the ability to experiment. The search sovereign made two changes to its search results pages Tuesday that it says will produce better results for complicated searches.
Poor adCenter Analytics. Never even made it out of beta. Microsoft today announced plans to scuttle the Web publishing metrics service, which was being developed as a rival to Google Analytics. Scheduled to shut down on Dec. 31, it will never go head to head with the search behemoth’s offering now.
Its proposed acquisition of Twitter now little more than an unrequited Superpoke, Facebook is tweaking its own service to mimic the microblogging outfit. The social network on Wednesday unveiled a new homepage that, in a nod to Twitter’s real-time message broadcasting system, now features “Streams”–Facebook’s “News Feed” revamped to update in real-time.
So much for the “YouTube Presidency.”
The Obama administration is no longer using Google’s video player to deliver the President’s weekly addresses online. Instead, it will use an Akamai player. No reason has yet been given for the abrupt switch, although some speculate it was inspired by privacy concerns over the video-sharing site.
Tech may be done with layoffs for 2008, but 2009 is another matter entirely. Now that the souring economy has had its way with Yahoo and AMD and Palm and Sun and Nortel, it’s moving on to bigger fare. We’ve already heard predictions that Google will sack as much as 15 percent of its workforce next year. Now come rumors that Microsoft is steeling itself for large-scale job cuts as well.
After a week of bleeding purple, a heavily bandaged Yahoo has regrouped to roll out its vaunted Open Strategy. At an event in San Francisco today, the company introduced “socialized” upgrades to Yahoo Mail, Toolbar, My Yahoo, Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music. Each service now features social enhancements that essentially transform the experience of using them into one more akin to social networking.
Thirteen hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube. And, according to YouTube founder Chad Hurley, that figure will grow exponentially until online video broadcasting becomes as ubiquitous as toilet cats on YouTube.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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