Yahoo’s long-awaited deal to show Google ads on search results and an unrelated executive reorganization in its technology group could be announced today, CNET News.com has learned.

Update, 12:32 p.m. PDT: It looks like another departure is Jason Zajac, who’d at various times has been general manager of social media, head of finance for the audience division, and vice president of corporate strategy for Yahoo. He’s bound for Hewlett-Packard, a source familiar with the situation said.

Google is a “relatively small part” of the advertising market, Schmidt said. “Yahoo is the No. 1 player by far in the display ad business…If we were to deal with Yahoo or the like, we would be sure to structure in such a way that (antitrust) concerns were not the primary concerns.”

Update, 12:03 p.m. PDT: Usama Fayyad, Yahoo’s chief data officer and executive vice president of research and strategic data solutions, is the departing technology executive, The New York Times reported Thursday.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Yahoo declined to comment for this report.

Usama Fayyad, chief data officer at Yahoo

Update, 2:16 p.m. PDT: Hewlett-Packard confirmed that Zajac will start working in the company’s Personal Systems Group on June 23.

The executives who report to Weiner could report to Hilary Schneider, Yahoo’s executive vice president of global partnerships and the leader of Yahoo’s efforts to make money from its products, the source said.

Update, 11:20 a.m. PDT: TechCrunch reports the Yahoo-Google deal could be announced after the market closes this afternoon.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated that point Wednesday in an onstage interview.

Hilary Schneider could be taking over some duties at Yahoo held by the departing Jeff Weiner.

The technology group runs Yahoo’s infrastructure and its Yahoo Open Strategy effort to make the Internet company a foundation for others’ Web applications, among other things.

(Credit:
Yahoo )

Who is the big loser in today’s Yahoo/Microsoft/Google news?
(surveys)

Jeff Weiner, the executive vice president who runs Yahoo’s network division, is leaving, but another senior executive also is departing Yahoo’s technology group, the source said.

The Google deal, tested for two weeks in April and under development since then, could help improve the revenue generated by Yahoo’s search. But investors probably shouldn’t expect a significant financial lift until 2009, because the deal won’t necessarily kick in immediately, a source familiar with the plan said.

Update, 11:54 a.m. PDT:
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Microsoft is no longer willing to pay $33 per share for Yahoo and that talks between the companies ended without a deal. Icahn earlier had told Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock to offer itself to Microsoft for $34.375 per share.

Update, 12:48 p.m. PDT: Yahoo’s search-ad partnership with Google raised Microsoft’s antitrust hackles; Google dominates the market. But Google’s top executives, who have said they would rather Yahoo remain independent than be acquired by Microsoft, have downplayed Google-Yahoo antitrust concerns by arguing that the relevant market is online advertising, not just online search advertising.

The Google ad deal isn’t the only change afoot at Yahoo, which has been under intense scrutiny with Microsoft’s acquisition attempt and the machinations of activist shareholder Carl Icahn. The company is also dealing with at least two executive departures.

A source has said that in order to allay antitrust concerns, the Yahoo-Google ad deal would involve an open bidding process in which Microsoft also could participate, with the ad being delivered by the company that would generate the most revenue when a searcher clicked on the ad. Further details about the scope of the deal remain unclear.

Update, 12:15 p.m. PDT:
Microsoft talks are indeed over. Yahoo said in a statement that “discussions with Microsoft regarding a potential transaction–whether for an acquisition of all of Yahoo or a partial acquisition–have concluded…with respect to an acquisition of Yahoo’s search business alone that Microsoft had proposed, Yahoo’s Board of Directors has determined, after careful evaluation, that such a transaction would not be consistent with the company’s view of the converging search and display marketplaces, would leave the company without an independent search business that it views as critical to its strategic future and would not be in the best interests of Yahoo stockholders.”

2003: $1.7 billion

Here’s a historical view of clean-tech investment, according to Cleantech Group:

2006: $3.6 billion

Cleantech Group said that the number of deals over $100 million increased, which it saw as an indication of growing investor confidence.

Venture capital investment in
green-tech companies topped $5 billion in North America and Europe last year and shows no signs of slowing down.

2004: $1.8 billion

Behind that was energy storage at $471 million, transportation at $445 million, energy efficiency at $356 million, and recycling and waste with $291 million.

Energy generation was the most active sector with 172 deals, totaling $2.75 billion.

“We foresee continued growth over 2008 as the clean-tech market cycle moves from early adoption to mainstream driver of wealth and job creation,” he said in a statement.

2002: $899 million

2001: $714 million

Investment leaped from $3.6 billion in 2006 to $5.18 billion in 2007.

2007: $5.18 billion

The Cleantech Group on Thursday published results of its quarterly numbers that show investment in the sector was stronger than expected.

2005: $2.5 billion

(Via Google Operating System.)

For example, you can limit which of your mail labels are exposed as folders to outside e-mail clients to improve performance. That’s useful, according to the Gmail blog posting, “if you find your mail client choking on a big All Mail folder,” the often-overstuffed location where Gmail messages are archived so they’re still available but not in the way.

Of course, technically savvy folks might enjoy this option. But the bigger reason this is interesting is it shows how flexible an infrastructure Google has built under Gmail. That’s powerful because the company can monitor how often people use the options, and how that affects Gmail’s performance and utility.

The company launched Advanced IMAP Controls in Gmail Labs, a feature that lets users fine-tune the behavior of the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) technology that outside e-mail services or software can use to access Gmail accounts.

Gmail Labs lets people fine-tune settings for IMAP, which is used to let other e-mail software access mail stored with Gmail.

Some of the tweaks that arrived with the launch of Gmail Labs are fairly silly (Mail Goggles and Old Snakey spring to mind), but a new option that arrived Thursday makes it increasingly apparent that Google is doing something right with the e-mail service.

And because the Gmail Labs options are largely independent of each other, Google can test many improvements simultaneously. The overall approach lets the company gradually morph Gmail rather than release massive, disruptive overhauls. Perpetual flux aside, though, I still think that it’s time to take Gmail out of beta.

These are:

In a direct slap in the face to consumers, tech industry giants including Microsoft, AT&T, and Verizon are frantically engaged in an effort to kill pro-consumer provisions in a data breach notification bill currently being considered by the Indiana State Senate.

(Credit:
Indiana House of Representatives)

Anyone wishing to help to save the pro-consumer AG Web site notification parts of the bill (HB 1197) may want to try and call up the state senators on the Indiana Senate Committee on Corrections, Criminal, and Civil Matters. All can be reached by calling the Senate switchboard at (317) 232-9400.

Representative Matt Pierce

While the encryption parts of the bill may end up passing, I suspect that the lobbyists may get their way, and kill the breach notification website requirement in the bill.

No matter what happens, this has been a fantastic experience for me, and a chance to see democracy in action (including the sordid world of lobbyists). A bill that I asked for and helped to draft passed through the house 94-0. I got to testify before a Senate committee, and with any luck, some of the loopholes in the existing law that I identified may be closed.

AT&T: consumers should be kept in the dark–oh, and we kick puppies too.

(Credit: The Electronic Frontier Foundation)

I drove up to Indianapolis this morning, and testified before the Senate committee considering the bill. Apart from Representative Pierce, I was the sole voice calling for the bill’s passage, while more than 10 lobbyists took turns at denouncing the bill as a gift to phishers and fraudsters.

At a State Senate committee meeting this morning, lobbyist after lobbyist criticized the provision. They claimed that by putting a list of breach notification reports online, the AG’s office would provide phishers and other online fraudsters with ammunition with which to engage in phishing attacks. A lobbyist for Microsoft argued that phishing emails would be sent out to consumers, including a link to a real breach report on the AG’s site, and then include a link to a fake website where consumers wishing to protect themselves from fraud would be tricked into inputting their personal information.

I spoke with Paul Stephens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse this afternoon to get his thoughts on the attempt by lobbyists to kill Indiana’s breach Web site bill. When asked if PRC’s site or reports located on it had been used by phishers, he dismissed the lobbyists’ claims, and stated that “we have not heard of anything of that nature. All of the information on our site is otherwise available elsewhere, we are just creating a handy compilation of information.” He added that “virtually every security breach already gets reported by the media.”

It took several months to hammer things out–and it took the help of Indiana University privacy law Professor Fred Cate who acted as the voice of moderation and wisdom, but eventually, Representative Pierce submitted a bill in January that included most of the changes that I requested. The bill sailed through the State House of Representatives a couple weeks ago, passing 94-0. It is only now that it has come up for consideration in the Senate that the industry lobbyists have decided to try and sabotage one of the most pro-consumer parts of the legislation.

The state of New Hampshire already posts copies online of all breaches reported to its Department of Justice. The state has done this for the past year, yet in hours of searching, I’ve been unable to find a single phishing site or email that has referenced a breach report on the New Hampshire site. While New Hampshire regularly posts these reports, it is not required to by law, and only does so because someone in the attorney general’s office is forward thinking and pro-consumer.

The bill would require that the state attorney general act as a single point of contact for data breaches. Any company that suffered a breach impacting one or more Indiana consumers would be required to notify the AG’s office. The bill would also make Indiana the only state in the country to to require the attorney general to post a copy of each report to its Web site–so that consumers, members of the press, and academics would have a single place to go to in order to find out about data breaches.

Senator Brent Steele, Senator R. Michael Young, Senator Jeff Drozda
Senator Brent Waltz
Senator John M. Waterman
Senator Richard D. Bray
Senator Joe Zakas
Senator Karen Tallian
Senator Tim Lanane
Senator Jim Arnold Senator Glenn Howard

The proposed data breach notification bill was written by my local state representative, Matt Pierce, after I contacted him back in mid-2007. I voiced my concern about flaws in the existing law after I discovered, and publicized an undisclosed 2006 data breach incident at Indiana University. Representative Pierce asked me to come up with a list of changes that I would like proposed, and asked me to try and find states that already had similar provisions on the books.

In addition to the New Hampshire site, both the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Attrition.org collect and publish data breach reports online. Attrition.org is even nice enough to provide an RSS feed of the latest breach reports, perfect for interested parties, or computer geeks wanting to create a mashup.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Other layers that have made their way into Google Maps from Earth include clouds, elevation, and the Wikipedia mapplet, which shows you Wikipedia entries based on location–something that’s been ported over to Yahoo’s Fire Eagle as well. Still missing, however, is Google Earth’s claim to fame: a spinning 3-D and oblique view. Competitors like Microsoft have been pushing the limit of in-browser visuals on its Live Maps product, while Google seems to have settled (for now) with its Street View technology, which incidentally is making its way to Google Earth from Google Maps later tonight.

Google Maps and Google Earth may be two separate services, but the gap between the software and Webware apps is narrowing. Last night Google rolled out a new view in Maps, enabling users to view geocoded YouTube videos, something Google Earth users have been doing since October of last year.

The videos show up as small red dots, and can be played right on the map. To enable the feature users simply need to add the layer from Google’s map add-ons directory, which has quickly grown to include more than 50 add-ons–many of which come from third parties.

You can now watch YouTube videos in Google Maps with a brand new add-on. Missing, however, is a way to search. (Click to enlarge.)

For the true geeks: Yahoo initially plans to support microformats such as hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN; will support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS; and will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Yahoo also will be supporting the OpenSearch specification.

Yahoo plans to hold a developer launch party at its Sunnyvale, Calif., campus in coming weeks. It will launch a beta test program for a tool that developers can use to write applications that integrate Yahoo Search. Such applications use the structured data available through public APIs and in the Yahoo index, Amir Kumar, director of product management at Yahoo Search, wrote in a blog post.

For the consumer, Yahoo’s move means more direct connections to Yahoo Search results, and a better overall search experience, on various Web applications.

Yahoo announced on Thursday that it is opening up its search platform to third-party developers. The company also says it will be supporting the semantic Web.

This is all an extension to the open-search idea Yahoo began talking about a few weeks ago.

“For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site,” Kumar writes. “With a richer understanding of LinkedIn’s structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site.”

Top 10 Feeder Sites for The Open Road

But how do media sites make content sticky so that a casual passerby might decide to invest more time in a repeat visit? CNET, perhaps, should be putting links to other blog posts and articles (mine and those from others) to the side of this blog so that people stay with the site even if they don’t find the blog useful. Perhaps this would be enough to generate a positive experience worth repeating.

But on the other hand, could it also mean that rather than creating net new customers it’s simply cycling its existing customer base, pushing readers around to different pages within its content network but not necessarily generating additional page views. If true, it’s a phenomenon that must be common to all websites: keeping customers is easier than finding new ones.

commentary

This may not be a good thing.

So how does a media site generate net new customers? Search-engine optimization (only 10 percent of The Open Road’s visitors find the blog through search engines). News aggregators (It’s a pain to administer, but Digg, Slashdot, etc. can generate significant traffic). Etc. CNET is probably better than most in these areas but reviewing data for this blog made me realize just how much work it is to be seen by new “eyeballs.”

That’s the problem of finding new customers. But how should media sites keep them? Only 28 percent of the visitors to The Open Road are repeat offenders. That means that 72 percent of the people shuffling through only come once. What would it take to get them to return? To subscribe via an RSS feed? Undoubtedly some were caught by a headline and then figured out the blog’s content wasn’t a good fit for them upon closer inspection. (Heck, you all probably feel this way.

I was looking through the visitor traffic to The Open Road this afternoon, interested to see from which sources most of the traffic derives. It turns out that CNET is the first and second most important source of traffic for my blog.

But for CNET, it must measure a blog’s success on absolute page views and/or click-throughs because this is how it makes money. There must be more efficient ways for CNET to attract and retain new visitors to The Open Road and hence to CNET.com. But how? This, to me, is the big question looming over online and print media.

Frankly, I’d love to easily know which blogs/etc. my friends and colleagues are reading without having to wade through the noise of Facebook (which has a feature that allows for promotion of articles and such). If there were a way to see that in my RSS reader, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

That said, a media site’s goals and those of its authors might not always be the same. There are roughly 8,500 people who read this blog somewhat religiously (meaning, they return regularly to the site to read posts). This is nice but for me, personally, this blog is a success if a core group of 100 or so influencers in the open-source world read on a regular basis. That’s my metric.

CNET.com Delivers Traffic

I’m glad I’m in open source. It’s much easier than this media gig.

On the one hand, it means that CNET is delivering additional content to its existing customers, keeping them with the brand. I don’t have access to CNET’s data but I’d hope it means that people stay on CNET’s site longer and therefore end up “spending” more advertising clicks with CNET.

Security software: necessary evil or just evil? I tend to think it’s the latter, though many would argue it’s very necessary and not evil at all. If you fall into that camp (or know a tech doofus who does), check out this deal from Newegg: Panda Internet Security 2008 (3-user edition) shipped to your door for zero dollars. Well, actually, for $40, but you get it back in rebate form.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

(Credit:
Newegg)

The Panda package bills itself as a “total security solution,” offering anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-phishing, anti-spam, and possibly anti-matter and anti-depressants (checking on those). It also offers rootkit protection, a two-way firewall, parental controls, and loads of other false-hope–er, safety–features.

CNET hasn’t reviewed the suite, but four users spoke up about it on the product page. As with most security suites, some loved it, others hated it. If you don’t mind waiting to get your money back and do want hardcore protection against the horrors of the Internet, you can’t beat free. The rebate deal [PDF] expires Aug. 16.

As if that wasn’t enough, Circuit City’s market cap is just $680 million. Compare that to Best Buy’s $17.26 billion and you quickly learn everything you need to know about two of the largest big-box electronics retailers in the world.

In essence, Circuit City is on its own.

After visiting both Best Buy and Circuit City this weekend, I was floored by the incredible differences between both stores: Best Buy was packed, Circuit City was begging people to come in; Best Buy was making sales every few seconds, Circuit City had one register open and no one in line. Thinking this must have been an anomaly, I did some research on both of the companies’ financials and came to a staggering conclusion: Circuit City is dead in the water.

And unfortunately for Circuit City, the majority of the population finds no value in shopping there either.

But alas, Circuit City may be around for longer than you think. As it stands, it still has a relatively stable financial structure and has been successful in keeping debt at a manageable level. That said, it’s losing cash at an astounding rate and its stock price has no chance of rising to any level that would help it turn things around. And if it’s losing money at a such a fast rate and it can’t raise cash through stock ventures, it has but one option to turn things around — borrow.

Taking all of those figures together, it’s not difficult to see that the end is near for Circuit City. But how close is it? According to the company’s board, it will continue to do all it can to keep it afloat, but I simply don’t see how that’s possible. To make matters worse, it’s not even a target for acquisition because Best Buy stores can usually be found anywhere a Circuit City store is and very few companies are willing to get in on the big-box electronics retail game anymore.

Trust me — it’s all over for Circuit City.

Circuit City is nothing more than a floundering enterprise that is trying to do all it can to stay relevant. And while I believe the chances of that happening are slim, the company still hangs on to a faulty belief that it has a chance at becoming a major player in the electronics retail industry.

And although some may say that it’ll be a sad day when Circuit City finally follows CompUSA down the path of obscurity, I don’t agree. To be quite honest, Circuit City is nothing more than a major retailer with only some of the products you’re looking for at prices that aren’t nearly as competitive as those online or even at Best Buy. In other words, I don’t see any value in shopping at Circuit City.

Sure, some may say that my assertion that Circuit City is dead may be a bit premature considering the fact the company has enjoyed growing revenue with last year’s figure amounting to almost $12.5 billion, but for the first time in three years, Circuit City incurred a loss of $8 million — a sharp contrast from its 2006 profit of $139 million.

If you still don’t believe me, let’s simply compare numbers. As it stands, Best Buy’s stock price is hovering at about $40-$42, while Circuit City’s is just $4 per share. As I mentioned, Circuit City lost about $8 million in 2007 and Best Buy incurred a profit of $1.377 billion. Best Buy increased its cash coffers by about $457 million, allowing it to invest in even more profitable enterprises, while Circuit City’s was reduced by $174 million.

But Circuit City’s problems go far beyond its financials. Much like CompUSA, it’s a company that is plagued with poor leadership and a host of issues that its management simply can’t fix. And to make matters worse, the same two forces that killed CompUSA — the online world and Best Buy — have Circuit City in their sights now and things don’t look good.

But it gets worse. In its latest quarter alone, Circuit City incurred a loss of $207 million with revenue of just $3 billion. On the other hand, Best Buy enjoyed revenue of about $10 billion with a net income of $228 million.

While the upgrade from SD to HD would be nice for any service, it may seem like an even larger upgrade for Unbox on TiVo users, since our initial hands-on testing with the service revealed that movies were letterboxed, instead of true anamorphic widescreen. We’d also like to see HD movies get a bump from the standard stereo soundtrack to at least a 5.1 Dolby Digital/DTS–although Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio would be even better. And while Denney’s comment only referred to HD content coming to the Unbox on TiVo service, we see no reason why HD movies shouldn’t be available to PC users as well.

TiVo users have been able to rent and buy movies from Amazon.com’s Unbox service for over a year now, but lately the service has felt a little outdated compared with competitors like Vudu and Apple TV, which offer HD downloads. Well, thanks to a comment by TiVo’s VP of product marketing, Jim Denney, it seems like that’s going to change soon. In an article on TV Week, Denney claims TiVo and Amazon will announce HD capabilities “in the not too distant future.”