The company, which was private so far, was rather secretive about their financial dealings. Most of these details will now have to be made public, as they will be answerable to their shareholders.

Facebook has filed for an IPO worth $5 billion. This means that they hope to be able to raise that amount of money from the sale of their shares. However, they have not yet clarified how many shares they will be selling and what the price of each share will be.

Analysts are speculating that the total valuation of the company is around $75 to $100 billion.

It is also too early to know exactly how Facebook will utilise the money generated from the IPO. Speculations are rife that among other things they may choose to buy over Zynga the manufacturer of the popular social game FarmVille. Rumours about Facebook manufacturing their own mobile phone are also doing the rounds.

Additionally, it is certain that the IPO will help the local economy of Silicon Valley where their headquarters are situated. The cash generated from the IPO will also help Facebook to steal a chunk of Google’s display ad revenue as advertisers reallocate budgets to the place where most users are.

None of these possibilities matter too much to Facebook’s end users though. Their experience and loyalty to the network should theoretically remain the same.

Going Public Changes Companies

Whatever Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO may say, once the company goes public, they will be answerable to their shareholders and they will have to change the way some things are done.

For one, there is bound to be a push to monetise the network further and further. While a lot of this growth could come from international expansion and uptake of their advertising services, analysts will expect to see growth in the US and Europe as well.

In-Stream and Mobile Ads

Growth and monetisation will mean the need to sell more advertising. While the right-hand column on Facebook already contain a lot of ads, the news feed has remained relatively free of advertising. This is likely to change with the introduction of sponsored stories in the ticker in the near future, and surely will result in the placement of ads within or at the top of the main news feed eventually.

Mobile is another area that is currently free of advertising, but is also very likely to start seeing the infusion of ads.

What other changes do you expect to see once Facebook goes public?

According to a report in the BBC, Facebook will file papers for the IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday.

The company will be valued between $75 billion to $100 billion. They hope to be able to raise about $10 billion through the public offering.

If they manage to achieve this target it could be one of the largest share offerings to take place on Wall Street, making Facebook one of the largest companies in the world, by market capitalization. Google had raised $1.9 billion through their public offering in 2004.

It is being suggested that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will be involved with this public issue.

Most of Facebook’s monetization occurs through advertising and is believed to be around $5 billion. Since Facebook is a private company so far, they have not been required to publish their accounts.

Ironically, the upcoming IPO has made the executives at Facebook extremely conscious about their own privacy. Web Pro News has reported that before a recent news conference, attending journalists were initially asked to sign a non-disclosure contract. It is a different matter that the contract was eventually called off when they objected about such a contract infringing their right to free speech and code of journalism.

Facebook has not yet made an official announcement, but the indications are all there that this announcement will happen, and the possibility of such an announcement has got the press and investors very excited.

Possibly the worst kept secret in the industry at present, this IPO filing could be what the U.S. economy and stock markets need. However, a lot of analysts and investors are also worried that such an ambitious floatation could flop just like the recent IPOs from Groupon and Zynga.

The Prince in question Alwaleed bin Talal is a majority share holder of the company Kingdom Holding through which the investment in Twitter has been made. This holding now gives the Prince a strategic stake in the network, which means that he owns more than 3% of the shares.

As a result of this investment Twitter will now have a valuation in excess of $10 Billion.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has recently been voted as the richest Arab businessman by the magazine ‘Arabian Business’. He is also the largest individual investor in Citigroup Inc. and also holds a stake in News Corp. He has also invested in Apple and General Motors.

This infusion of $300 million will enable Twitter to go ahead with their plans of a redesign in order to make the network faster and simpler. This should also attract more advertisers to the site.

While Twitter has confirmed the investment, they have not given any further details so far.

Twitter had also received $800 million in August from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner who has also invested in Facebook. At that time twitter had a valuation of $8 billion.

Considering the fact hat Twitter had played a significant role in the Arab Spring protests earlier this year, it may seem quite surprising that an Arab Prince has decided to invest in it. It could however be attributed to his good business acumen.

The study takes into consideration various devices such as tablets, e-readers, and other portable connected devices. The study concentrated on user demographics, features of the devices being used and shipment details. Retailing strategies being used by the manufacturers and marketers as well as pricing tactics were also studied.

Mobiles, smartphones and tablets are expected to be the fastest growing devices in the near future. This assessment has been further strengthened by the recent announcement from Microsoft stating that their Windows 8 OS will be orientated towards mobiles and tablets. Microsoft have also said that their Office suite will add to the attraction of tablets within the enterprise space.

Analysts at Juniper estimate that the number of tablet devices being shipped out will touch 253 million by 2016. This is a huge jump compared to the number of such devices expected to ship this year, which is just around 55.2 million.

Juniper’s numbers match other forecasts by Gartner and DisplaySearch quite closely. Numbers for this year were forecast to be around 50 million, but have now been revised up a bit, which further reinforces these steep growth expectations.

It is also believed that by 2016, more than half the number of tablet devices will have Wi-Fi as well as cellular connections. At present, most of these devices only include Wi-Fi connectivity.

Currently, customers are required to have separate connections for their mobile phones and for the tablet. This situation is expected to change in due course and could also influence the growth in usage of tablets.

It was certainly a surprise to Ms. Bartz, when she was informed about the decision over the phone on the 6th of September!

Bartz had been heading the company for nearly three years. When she had taken over, Yahoo! was bad shape and she had to face many challenges. Although she managed to overcome some of the problems, the general consensus was that her style of functioning was not good enough and she had not been able to achieve as much as was expected of her. It was also felt that she was not taking the competition from Facebook seriously enough.

During her tenure at Yahoo! Bartz did not succeed in bringing the company’s stock back up anywhere near the price it was trading at when Microsoft tried to buy it out.

YHOO share price between 10 Jan 2009 and 07 Sep 2011

After the news of her termination was publicised, Yahoo! stocks went up 6% in after-hours trading. The share price had been more or less flat during her regime in spite of a 60% rise in the overall Nasdaq Composite Index. Yahoo!’s performance was also poor compared to fellow search provider, Google.

Comparing YHOO and GOOG share prices between 10 Jan 2009 and 07 Sep 2011

That said, Yahoo! did post a profit of over a million dollars last year even though comScore reported that visitors were spending 33% less minutes on Yahoo! sites since Ms. Bartz took over.

Yahoo!’s Chief Financial Officer, Tim Morse, has been asked to take over her duties until a suitable replacement is found. In a memo to employees, Carol Bartz expressed her sadness at having to leave the company and wished all her colleagues all the best.

As of now, Yahoo!’s future is once again up for speculation. It is believed by some that they may even be willing to be bought over for the right price.

According to Charles Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group,  spelling errors are resulting in losses of millions of pounds in terms of revenue generation.

Duncombe, whose company runs travel, mobile phone and clothing websites, says that an analysis of online sales figures shows that even a single spelling mistake can reduce online sales of a product by half.

A simple test conducted on one of the group’s own websites measured the revenue generated per visitor with and without a prominent spelling mistake. They found that the revenue doubled after a spelling mistake was corrected.

It is a widely-held belief that spelling errors could lead to concerns about credibility, in a day and age when online fraud has become rampant. The spellings of words become important on the Internet because the selling itself is done by the written word online.

If we extrapolate Duncombe’s findings across the whole of online retail, then it’s easy to see how millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes.

The Confederation Of British Industry (CBI) has also issued similar statements, warning that often employers have to invest money in improving the literacy of their staff. The CBI’s head of education and skills, James Fothergill says, “Our recent research shows that 42% of employers are not satisfied with the basic reading and writing skills of school and college leavers and almost half have had to invest in remedial training to get their staff’s skills up to scratch.

Among school and university leavers, spelling mistakes and poor grammar are very common. Some people even use “text speak” in their job cover letters and official business communications. One of the reasons for this could be a growing dependence on social sites such as Facebook, where spellings and grammar are not given due importance.

William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University says that “In these instances, when a consumer might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a mis-spelt word could be a killer issue.”

The fact is that Yahoo! is not only big, but several of its properties are number one in their respective fields, while many others are at the number two position. Alex Linde, Yahoo! Director of Mobile Advertising, said during the OMMA Tablet Revolution Showcase at Internet Week New York 2011that “Yahoo! is the premier digital media company”.

Linde explained that Yahoo! reaches about 680 million users every month, which is about 50% of the online global population. They also reach about 187 million users in the U.S., which is almost 90% of PC users in the U.S.A.

Similarly, Yahoo! has a large clientele on sites like Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and several other sites such as Flickr. Linde says, “We are the most trusted brand on the Web.”

According to the April 2011 comScore Media Metrix report, Yahoo! is the number one overall Web property and twelve of their properties are number one in their respective vertical sectors.

Yahoo! News Network, with 88 million users is far ahead of popular sites like CNN and MSNBC. Similarly, Yahoo! Finance is far ahead of Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and others. Yahoo! Sports is also far ahead of ESPN. Moreover, these Yahoo! properties have retained the number one position for the last several months.

In spite of this, Yahoo! seems to have lost the favoured position which it held, in the 1990’s.

Yahoo!’s Executive Vice President of the America’s region, Ross Levinsohn claims that this is just an evolution phase that the company is passing through. He describes it as “a generational thing. Not a Yahoo! thing.”

However, the company’s historical mis-steps have cost it in the long run, and even though it might continue to get visitors, it is unlikely to return to glory unless the management team at Yahoo! take some serious steps to bring the brand back into the limelight.

Groupon has entered into an arrangement with the US-based supermarket chain Big Y to offer discounted groceries to their customers through the store’s loyalty cards. The arrangement has been made in conjunction with the marketing company Halo Effect and the consumer behavior analytics company Incentive Targeting.

The first offer made to clients is in a Springfield, Massachusetts store. A shellfish grill pack, consisting of lobster tails, clams, mussels and other sea food bits, which would normally cost $39.99, will be offered as a Groupon deal of the day for $24 (40% discount).

Groupon – Big Y deal of the day

When Big Y customers buy this Groupon deal, they have to enter their Big Y Express Saving Club membership number and when they make the payment it is automatically billed at the discounted price.

This feature will use retail shopping and marketing technology by Incentive Targeting to create and manage the promotion of various deals that will be made available from time to time. They will also monitor market response to the deals. Halo Effect has been associated with Groupon since 2009 and will help out with their marketing experience and expertise.

Groupon only recently filed for an Initial Public Offering and had also announced a new vacation feature called Groupon Getaways just a few days before that.

Industry experts are already speculating that these new services may eventually lead to other retailer driven promotions with participants of loyalty programs via other US chains such as Kroger Co., Safeway, CVS or Walgreens. Supermarket loyalty programmes, such as this, may also eventually help to eliminate fraud occurring through the use of print-at-home Internet-distributed coupons, thus encouraging other players to also join Groupon or similar service providers.

On the one hand Twitter is believed to be in the process of acquiring AdGrok, which is a Y Combinator-backed keyword bidding platform that enables the automated bidding of contextual keywords on Google AdWords. This deal is expected to cost Twitter less than $10 million and may be helpful to them in future monetisation of Promoted Trends or Promoted Tweets.

Twitter is also supposedly ready to launch its own photosharing site, possibly within the next day or two. The launch of a photosharing site will be an economically viable and sensible move on the part of Twitter as it is likely to help them generate a lot more revenue through additional ad views and clicks.

In addition to these speculated developments, Twitter has already acquired TweetDeck just a few days ago. TweetDeck is a dashboard that allows brands, publishers and marketers to keep track of their important conversations. The acquisition cost Twitter $40 million, and will likely pay rich dividends in future.

An entire ecosystem of sites and apps that were built on the Twitter platform could be affected in the near future. Sites such as Twitpic and yfrog will have to change their core business if they hope to survive the launch of an official Twitter image platform. Similarly, apps such as Twhirl, Twitterrific and Seesmic could lose users to a Twitter-backed TweetDeck.

All of these near-simultaneous changes indicate that Twitter is indeed gearing up to make some major changes in the way they will do business or deal with third parties in the future. A lot of their changes seem to indicate a desire to keep users on their platform, thereby allowing them to maximise ad revenues.

This is Microsoft’s largest takeover deal yet, and it is hoped that this deal will place them in a better position to deal with the onslaught of laptops, mobile phones, tablets and other devices.

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, made this announcement during a recent conference in San Francisco. The VoIP service will be paid for fully in cash, to become a part of Microsoft.

Services on Skype will be integrated with Microsoft’s existing platforms such as Xbox Live, Kinect, Outlook and Hotmail. Microsoft hopes to be able to put this technology to use for purposes such as video chats on Xbox, mobile conferencing through the Windows phone, audio chats between business associates and many more person 2 person services. This should enable Skype to reach a much larger audience worldwide.

Steve Ballmer has said, “By bringing together the best of Microsoft and the best of Skype, we will empower people around the world with new technologies that should bring them closer together.”

Earlier, Skype had been bought over by eBay, but the arrangement did not work out very well and Skype sold their major share shortly thereafter. It is a known fact that Skype had been on the lookout for someone to take over the company. It is believed that Google and Facebook were among the companies that showed an interest in the acquisition.

While Skype’s main offering of free voice and video calls over the Internet has been the main driver of its growth, the service has been making substantial losses over the last 5 years. After the amalgamation with Microsoft, the Skype user base will jump from 107 million to 660 million, which should help improve the balance sheets.

Microsoft has also said that they will continue to support Skype’s non-Microsoft based platforms such as Mac OS X, Linux, Android, Blackberry, iOS and others.

For the past four years, the top place in the Brandz 100 list was held by Google, but this time they have been toppled over. Apple’s iPhone has been doing very well and is indeed very popular but this change in valuation is largely being attributed to the iPad.

Apple has increased its valuation by $137 billion or 859% since 2006, when the Brandz Top 100 list was first introduced. Since last year, Apple has increased its valuation by $153 billion or 84%.

Google has fallen to spot number 2 and has also lost 2% in terms of valuation, in spite of the fact that their Android OS is doing quite well.

Popular social network Facebook has also entered the top 100 list for the first time this year and is placed at number 35 with a valuation of $19.1 billion.

Amazon has shown the greatest rise in position from number 46 last year to 14 this year, with a valuation of $37.6 billion.

Technology based companies held 6 out of the top 10 spots in the list. These were Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, AT&T and China Mobile.

Among the losers in this year’s ranking were Nokia, which has fallen 38 places and is now ranked 81, and Nintendo, which has fallen 47 places and now ranks 79 in the list.

The Brandz index uses various parameters to judge the top 100 brands in the market. These include brand equity surveys and financial data from analyst reports. The future growth potential of the brand as well as the bond it has with users is taken into consideration.

Google, Groupon and LivingSocial now include user reviews on their sites. These sites compete directly with Yelp, which is essentially a local business guide built on user reviews.

Details about the Yelp’s progress and strategies were discussed by the company’s CFO, Herman Vlado, during the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference in San Francisco, reports Ben Parr from Mashable. He mentioned that they grew from 39 million visitors to the site in November 2010 to 45 million visitors in January this year. They also had 15 million reviews at the end of 2010, and 16 million in January.

Over 6 million user reviews were posted on Yelp in 2010. They expect this number to grow to 9 million this year.

While restaurant reviews were the mainstay of their business in the past,  they now include shopping reviews for all kinds of products and across all budget categories. As of now restaurant reviews continue to be an important part, generating 25% of the business, shopping reviews have become equally important and generate another 25% of the business. Other important sectors of the business are local entertainment, services and health and beauty, each of which contributes 10%.

Local subscriptions account for the major part of Yelp’s revenue. Each business pays them between $300 to $1,000 per month. Advertising and daily deals sectors have also become strong revenue generators. Their main competitors, Google focus solely on raising revenues through advertising. Others such as Groupon, Facebook and Foursquare focus more on earning revenue by providing deals.

Vlado, Yelp’s CFO, denied that the changes that had recently been incorporated into Google Places had had any significant impact on Yelp. It is, however, possible that the local sales divisions of Google, Groupon and LivingSocial may give Yelp a run for its money in future as they continue to solidify their respective positions in the reviews market.

In 2009, the total revenue generated by mobile games was $6 billion, and by 2015 this figure is expected to cross $11 billion.

Of late, it has become the norm to offer games for free initially, in order to gain popularity and to get users hooked onto it. Later, additional extra gaming levels and game-play items are made available for purchase.

The report forecasts that the number of users downloading games through off-store and in-store means will rise significantly, thus adding to the total revenue through the pay-per-download and in-game purchase services. Mobile advertising spend is also set to increase substantially.

One of the main challenges that developers face today is that of discoverability. In other words, the game should be able to catch the attention of the user, given that there are thousands of apps and games now available on the iPhone and Android mobile app market places, all of which compete with each other.

This is a vicious cycle, in which a game that is downloaded frequently becomes prominent, but in order to be downloaded frequently, the game has to be prominent in the first place. Since only a few games are able to do this, most of the games usually remain obscure, and therefore clock very few downloads.

Another important feature guiding the growth of this market is the development of new handsets with modern technology that improves the mobile game experience.

Apparently, TripAdvisor has been trying to prevent reviews from their travel site appearing on Google’s Place Pages.

TripAdvisor has even issued an email to the effect that ‘while it continues to evaluate recent changes to Google Places it believes the user does not benefit with the “experience of selecting the right hotel. As a result, we have currently limited TripAdvisor content available on those pages,”

On the other hand, Google has attributed the absence of TripAdvisor reviews from Place Pages, to a technical snag.

One of the possible reasons, for TripAdvisor wanting to discontinue providing their reviews on Place Pages, could be their opposition to Google acquiring the travel software company ITA.

Another possibility is that they may be concerned about possible loss of traffic to their site, if their reviews are available on Place Pages, as Google is now focusing a lot on local search.

However, some reviews from TripAdvisor have continued to intermittently appear on Place Pages, sending out rather confusing signals to users. TripAdvisor has claimed that this only means that they have not been entirely successful in blocking Google.

In the meantime, Facebook has recently announced a partnership with TripAdvisor.

Facebook will now be able to get reviews from TripAdvisor, and reviews and comments from friends of a user, will be placed on the top.

Now, when a user is logged in to his Facebook account and visits TripAdvisor, he will receive reviews from his friends, which will be more valuable to him than general reviews. A map will also show the places which his friends have visited and their favourite destinations.

Google is reported to have said that during the second quarter of the year, marketers were more likely to agree to pay a higher charge for their ads to appear online. This was probably a result of the fact that users were more likely to click on the ads.

The largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. Gannett Co. has also reported a positive trend in the print media after a gap of 31/2 years. The decline of print ads has dropped to 6% during this period.

General Electric Co. has also reported a recovery in the local ad market and the percentage of growth is quite substantial.

The first two months of the quarter were good for Yahoo!, but in the month of June they noticed a sudden drop in the ad spend of several of their advertisers. Though the total search advertising revenue fell by 8%, the display advertising sector has shown a growth of 19% compared to the same period last year.

The Omnicom Group Inc. has shown a 4.2% growth of quarterly net income. There overall revenue grew by 5.9% and in the U.S. alone, it grew by 7.4%.

The New York Times has reported a quarterly growth in revenue after a gap of 3 years. Digital ad sales grew by 21% but the print media saw a drop of 6% in advertising generated revenue.

Online ad revenue on Bing has increased Microsoft’s revenue by 19%. Fox Cable Network reported a growth in their advertising revenue. Time Warner Inc. also saw a surge in growth due in part to increased ad revenue.

Apparently, the deciding factor in this deal was the fact that Google’s services in the Japanese language were better than those of Microsoft.

The partnership is likely to come into effect next year.

While Yahoo! has a strategic partnership for search with Microsoft in the U.S. and other places, they are under no obligation to do so in Japan. This is because Yahoo! Controls only a 30% stake in Yahoo! Japan, while Softbank controls 40%. Since Softbank is the dominant partner, they are at liberty to select the partner.

At present Yahoo! Japan controls about 57% of the search market in Japan, while Google controls about 385. When these two ‘super powers’ join hands, they would effectively control about 95% of the market, potentially killing all competition.

Microsoft had to fight a similar situation between Google and Yahoo!, in the U.S. in 2008.

They had won that round thanks to the Anti-trust laws. They intend to do the same thing in Japan.

A Microsoft spokesperson has said, “We plan to present evidence to the Japanese FTC explaining why we believe that this deal is substantially more harmful to competition than Google’s deal with Yahoo! in 2008 that the U.S. Dept. of Justice found to be illegal,”

However, it is believed that it may not be very easy for Microsoft to win this battle in Japan, and the deal is eventually likely to go through.

The popular microblogging site which started out about two and a half years ago, was initially focused only on building up their popularity by offering a free micro-blogging service to their users. Recently they have changed focus and started paying attention to monetisation.

Twitter has put up job postings that indicate that the priority for the new recruits would be “cutting edge monetization projects”.

Of the 26 jobs on offer, 4 are specifically devoted to monetising the site. Another 2 jobs are aimed at “striking licensing deals” with other sites.

Twitter has now reached a stage where they have become extremely popular. They know that they must now become self-sufficient if they want to continue to grow. They currently have about 120 employees, who constitute the company’s second largest source of expenses.

In October last year, Twitter made licensing deals with Google and Microsoft, allowing their tweets to appear on the search engine results page. These deals earned them $25 million, helping them to post a small profit then, but further innovation is a must for continued growth.

While they want to keep it a free service for all ordinary users, they do want to monetise the businesses that have been effectively using Twitter as a convenient means of communication with their clients.

They have already mentioned offering specialised premium accounts to these businesses. Recently, Twitter has launched a new feature in beta. This feature is called ‘Contributors’.

This service will better allow businesses to manage several of their contributors through a single account. The username of the contributor will be attached to the byline of the tweet sent out by the business, thus making the interaction between the business and the client more personalized.

For instance, if Twitter co-founder Biz Stone were invited to tweet on behalf of Twitter, then the tweet from @Twitter would include his username @Biz, in the byline, to let users know the people in the organisation which they are dealing with.

This feature will be available on the Web as well as on APIs and it will further enhance existing Twitter business apps such as CoTweet and HootSuite.

Contributors is still in the developmental stages and hence it has not yet been made available to all. It is currently being tried out by a few businesses and will be rolled out to all others after it has been fine tuned.

The study was carried out across 2,948 professionals in North America and Canada.

The main aims of the study were to find the top social media resources used for business info, which departments drive the most corporate social media initiatives, the top business social media initiatives, how well companies can actually measure their success and rating of the top social media sites for business use.

The results provide an insight into how businesses use the social media at work.

It was found that webinars and podcasts are the most popular social media resources for business professionals and were used by 69% of the participants of the survey.

Ratings and reviews of business products and services were used by 62% of business social media users, as were company profiles on social media sites.

Facebook is the most popular social networking site for business owners too. 83% of business to consumer (B2C) businesses maintain one or more profiles on Facebook, while only 45% do so on Twitter. Business to business (B2B) companies, on the other hand, have profiles on both sites in more or less equal proportion – 77% on Facebook and 73% on Twitter.

Participants using social media in their day-to-day jobs visit company or brand profiles on social sites 62% of the time and 55% of them search for business information on the social sites.

Consultants and marketing communications professionals in small and micro companies use social media for business information most often, while, surprisingly, IT professionals do so the least.

The average company is planning, developing or running 7 different social media initiatives. 71% of these companies and 65% of staff have less than 2 years experience in social media business.

Since building brand awareness and reputation and reputation are top priorities, it does not seem like a very good idea for businesses to restrict employee access to social networks, which is reportedly the case with almost 90% of companies.

Research from the UK Trade and Investment government offices has found that despite favourable circumstances only 75,000 businesses in the U.K. are engaged in exporting their products and services.

Chief among the reasons for this low turn out are language and cultural barriers, apart from other factors like administrative restrictions, cross-border logistics etc.

To help businesses overcome these obstacles, Google has tied up with Applied Language Solutions, HSBC, Royal Mail, Institute of Export, U.K. Trade and Investment and Alibaba.com, to launch a new comprehensive solution called Export Adviser.

Google Export Adviser

UK-based businesses interested in export can now avail of this service.

The Export Adviser will help novices to start an export business by guiding them through various steps like identifying and evaluating target markets, judging the market demand, creating an English language keyword list, translating that list and forecasting a cost per click for those multilingual keywords.

The opportunity finder tool offers a neat tie-in between three Google tools to translate keywords, mine keyword data and predict demand in the market, as demonstrated by the simple example below, where a search for ‘seo’ brings up a map showing where most opportunities lie among emerging markets, along with suggestions for related keywords and rising keywords in various languages.

Google Export Adviser’s opportunity finder tool

For those who wish to expand their export business, the Export Box, created in partnership with Applied Language Solutions offers a slightly expensive (considering the target market is SME) solution: For a price of £3,000 users will be provided with the following:

1. A translated website, built as landing pages for specific search terms
2. Keywords and Adverts specially researched and designed for the target country in the target language
3. £1,000 worth of paid advertising on Google AdWords using Multilingual PPC, plus a free Google voucher worth £200
4. A free online shop front and discounts on Gold Supplier membership for Alibaba.com to market products to over 8 million international buyers
5. £1,000 worth of language support
6. Membership to the Institute of Export and discounted international banking with HSBC.

SMEs that don’t want the full support of this £3,000 package are lured by an alternative £200 AdWords voucher, the details of which can be found from AdWords account managers.

Screenshot of Google Export Adviser website

This is also one of the steps the site is taking to generate for more revenue for itself, which should definitely make their investors happy. According to Silicon Alley Insider, the introduction of an ad network is another step they are taking with the same goal in mind.

TechCrunch spotted a ‘Pay with Facebook’ button on the Group Card application. This new system for payments will be available to all accounts that use Group Card.

This new button is similar to the Facebook Connect button, which had been introduced a while ago.

When a user clicks on the ‘Pay with Facebook’ button, an overlay opens, asking the user to confirm that he/she wishes to pay through his Facebook credits.

Other payment modes, such as Visa and MasterCard will continue to be available to users.

This service will shortly be extended to other applications as well.

Google continues to top the list, growing in value from $86 billion last year to $100 billion in 2009, which represents a growth of 16%. Google is followed by rival, Microsoft, which climbed up one position from last year with a current value of $76.2 billion – also up 8% over last year.

Yahoo! has fallen from number 62 last year to number 81 this year, and its value has also fallen, from $11.5 billion to $7.9 billion.

Other technology brands in the top 10 are IBM at number 4 with a value of $66.6 billion, Apple is at number 6 and is valued at $63.1 billion. China Mobile is placed at number 7, with a value of $61.2 billion, and Vodafone, which is a new entrant in the top 10 list, is at number 9, with a value of $53.7 billion.

Mobile operators have seen brand value rise, for the most part. O2 and AT&T have especially benefited from the launch of the iPhone, both seeing double-digit rises in brand value. The top 10 mobile operators by brand value are:

Among the non-technology-based companies, General Electric (GE) has taken quite a beating, as the brand’s value has fallen from the number two position last year, to number 8 this year.

Ten of the companies in the top 25 list are from the technology sector. Further down the list is Amazon at number 26, AT&T at number 28, Cisco at number 30 and eBay at number 54.

Quite surprisingly, the value of some of the brands has gone up substantially this year, in spite of the effects of the worldwide recession, which only goes to show that good companies can do well even in tough times.

In the UK, brand value for some of the brands in the list has fallen. Marks & Spencers, in particular, has seen a 48% fall in brand value over the past year.

The 10 most valuable brands in the UK are as follows:

A new project called ExecTweets, was launched last week in conjunction with Federated Media and Microsoft. Twitter has introduced an ad unit to promote this upcoming program. Since then, similar ad units have been spotted promoting other products and services from Twitter itself and from third-party advertisers.

ExecTweets will pool in Tweets from various big-shots and top executives of industry, and then republish them for the general public. The service could be of great interest to a lot of people who want to know the personal opinions of top executives on a wide range of issues ranging from business to personal matters.

While there are rumors that businesses would pay Twitter to feature their Tweets prominently on the network, there is no confirmation of this.Back in February, Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone had told Marketing Magazine, “We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”

Federated Media, on the other hand, has suggested that they would like to put in place a revenue-sharing deal with Twitter.

The ExecTweet list currently includes such prominent names as Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Werner Vogels and Evan Williams among others. Exec Tweets will allow users to vote on the Tweets and the Tweets will then be ranked accordingly.

Twitter is definitely trying to monetise itself now, a year ahead of their planned intent to start earning revenue. This should not be too difficult as various organisations are promoting Twitter to stay in touch with employees as well as for customer service. Twitter has now hired a product manager to oversee the development of these commercial accounts, but they have not yet set a date for their launch.

Facebook plans to grow as much as possible, in spite of the financial crisis. While most companies are cutting costs and laying off staff, Facebook has increased its employee headcount from 800 to almost 1,000 since the beginning of 2009. They are also not desperate to raise capital as they have about $500 million in reserve, which is quite enough for now. Hence they can afford not to be too focused on monetisation through ads.

Twitter has also grown significantly – from 800,000 unique users last year to over 6 million at present. The micro-blogging platform, though, does not generate any revenue, making it difficult to peg a real, meaningful value on it.

The plans to acquire Twitter fit in well with Facebook’s strategy of laying more stress on user growth and product innovation over profits.

When Facebook suggested a sum of $500 million to buy Twitter, it was obvious that they would have to pay in Facebook stock. The point in question was how much Facebook stock was worth. Since Facebook is a private company, its shares are not listed on the stock market.

In 2007, values ranged between $3.7 billion to $15 billion. With the current financial meltdown, though, the stocks of several companies have fallen.

According to sources, while Facebook claimed that their stock was worth between $8 billion and $9 billion, Twitter claimed that Facebook was worth only $2-4 billion. This was the main reason why the discussions fell apart.

Peter Thiel maintains that Facebook stock “is worth more than people think it is”. They also remain open to the possibility of acquiring other companies.

Facebook and Twitter still continue to have talks with each other but there are no serious acquisition considerations at present.

Doug Anmuth, who is an analyst at Barclay’s, believes that Google is re-evaluating their deal with MySpace. The current deal between the two companies requires Google to pay $900 million to MySpace over a span of three and a half years, which end only in mid 2010.

Google has not been able to reap the expected financial benefits from this deal so far and it seems very likely, given the current worldwide economic climate, that they may decide to pull out of an unsatisfactory partnership.

In fact, if one takes a closer look at some of Google’s recent financial decisions, it is quite obvious that the search giant is protecting its margins by making some not-so-subtle changes in their policy as regards distribution deals. They are being more prudent where spending money is concerned.

The past few months have seen Google let go of a potential mobile search partnership deal with Verizon Mobile to avoid competing on price and margins with Microsoft. They also did not renew their toolbar distribution deal with Dell and have allowed Microsoft to happily walk in on what was previously Google territory.

Since Google is firmly established as the search market leader, they do not really need to get distribution deals at any cost. This is probably a wise decision for now.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is trying very hard to increase market share in search operations. If Google disengages from the deal with MySpace, Microsoft might swoop in to take their place, even at a higher price than such a deal would be worth.

The offensive video is a 3-minute mobile phone video, which had been posted on YouTube in 2006. In this video, a boy with Down’s syndrome was being teased by his classmates in Turin.

People found this video objectionable and complained about it, following which Google responded by deleting it quickly. The prosecutors, however, felt that that was not enough, as the video should never have been allowed to be displayed.

The executives involved are David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, George Reyes, former Chief Financial Officer, Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel for Google and Arvind Desikan, previous head of Google Video Europe.

The trial is being held in Milan and the executives may face up to 3 years in jail if found guilty. If that happens, it will not only mean that henceforth privacy laws will have to be taken very seriously, but it could also force a change in the way YouTube functions in Italy and the rest of Europe.

A thorny issue that will have to be reconsidered, as a result of a ruling against the Google executives in this case, will be whether or not Internet companies should screen content submitted by individuals before it is published.

In the United States, copyright laws so far do not punish online services if they respond quickly to complaints. Europe too has similar laws, but they are unclear about applicability to young people and certain private information.

If Google and its executives are held responsible for this video it will have very wide-ranging implications.

Google has said that their sympathies lie with the victim and his family, and they are happy the culprits have been identified due to their video and punished . However prosecuting Google would be like prosecuting mail services for hate mail. Also, holding Google responsible for content posted on their site is an attack on a free and open Internet and hence they will vigorously defend their employees.

The New york Times reports that the first hearing lasted only about five minutes and none of the defendants were present. The next hearing is scheduled for February 18.

The rumors began after eBay CEO, John Donahue, said that Skype was a great stand-alone business, indicating that though the VoIP service is doing well, (its fourth quarter revenue increased by 26% over the third quarter, and it has over 405 million users worldwide with 30 million users being added every quarter) it was still not integrated into their core business, 4 years after they bought it for an astounding $2.6 billion.

eBay, on the other hand, is not doing too well during the current economic crisis. Their net profits fell to $367 million in the last quarter of 2008, compared to $531 million during the same period in 2007.

Jack Murphy an analyst for investment bank William Blair says “It’s important that eBay has opened the door to a buyer by talking about Skype as a stand-alone business. It would be best for eBay to get whatever cash they could for it and focus on their struggling core market business.”

According to Jim Friedland, senior Internet equity analyst at Cowen and Company, the highest offer eBay can expect for Skype is $1.6 billion.

According to industry sources companies such as Google, Yahoo!, AT&T and Verizon could all be potential buyers as they can easily integrate the VoIP service with their core business.

It is especially believed by some that buying Skype could be the logical next step for Google, as it already has various communication facilities such as Gmail, Google Chat and the Android mobile platform. Owning Skype could enable Google to offer a cheap VoIP-based mobile solution.

There are others who feel that Microsoft may be more likely to buy Skype as they are looking to increase their user base to boost search.

eBay, however, has neither confirmed nor denied any of the rumors.

A recent story run on TechCrunch says that according to trusted but anonymous sources, AOL is planning to sell Bebo as its performance has been far below expectations.

Both AOL and Bebo have denied this, saying “there is no truth to this rumor”.

According to sources, when AOL bought Bebo last March, Bebo was marketed as a clever startup that was able to win over ad agencies and clients by presenting itself very well. Ad agencies convinced their clients that they must get on to Bebo, which was growing more popular by the day in the relatively new social network market.

When AOL saw this, they obviously felt that it would be a wise move to buy Bebo, and accordingly they did so on March 13 2008 for $850 million.

Time, however, proved that Bebo did not perform as well as expected. While Bebo is popular in the U.K. with 10.5 million users, its worldwide user base is just 22.6 million.

Facebook’s meteoric rise in popularity is the biggest factor contributing to Bebo’s failure. That, and the fact that singular social networks are no longer as popular as they were, due to the growing popularity of the open social platforms is partly responsible for this. The current economic climate makes the performance of the company look even poorer. While Facebook is believed to have earned $250 million last year, and MySpace much more than that, Bebo has managed only $20 million.

A spokesperson at Bebo, however, rubbishes the rumors of a possible sell off by AOL, saying that Bebo has launched a new tool, Social Inbox, just last month. It is doing very well and will allow users to read emails from various sites and also access other social services like Twitter and Flickr. It will also integrate AOL’s instant messaging service. AOL is also reportedly planning further expansion with Bebo.

Only time will tell whether the rumors turn out to be true or not.

In the last few days there have been some stories doing the rounds that this deal would be revived in a round about manner. It was suggested that Microsoft would lend money to some executives and investment bankers, who would then buy out Yahoo! at the price of about $13 per share, which is just a little over the current market price, and then sell it back to Microsoft. Sources at both the companies have rubbished these stories for now.

Acquisition rumours may have been fuelled by a comment by Steve Ballmer, in an interview with the Financial Times, where he said, “now is a good time for the software company to buy.”

However, in an interview with the Fox Business Network last week, Steve Ballmer told Brian Sullivan that the attempt to acquire Yahoo! was “a thing of the past”. He made it very clear that the deal would not be revived, while still keeping his options open about a partnership in any other form.

During the unveiling of the next Windows operating system, Windows 7, Steve Ballmer also admitted that the current financial crisis had affected the IT industry adversely, and it was realistic to expect that fewer people would be buying technology at the moment. While he sidestepped questions about the possibility of layoffs at Microsoft, he did acknowledge that it was important to conserve cash resources and be prudent about expenditure.

In the meantime, Yahoo! has just named Carol Bartz, who was the chairman of Autodesk, as its new CEO. This announcement has once again raised speculations that the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal may go through under her leadership.

According to the report released by comScore for the month of November 2008, Google has taken a gigantic leap forward by registering 11.8 million unique visitors on the Google Shopping site, in that month alone. This represents a growth of an almost unbelievable 786% compared to the same month last year.

This is the largest one-year increase seen by any online comparison shopping service.

As of now, Yahoo! Shopping search continues to remain the number one shopping search site, as it has been for the last few years. However, it registered 27.6 million unique visitors in November 2008, which is not a very impressive gain, compared to their own figures for the same month last year.

At present, Google is ranked at number five in this arena, but they are certainly moving forward, and once the results for the Christmas shopping season are out they may have further consolidated their position.

Jerry Dischler, Group Project Manager for Google Product Search says, “we have made a number of changes to improve both the relevance and the quality of products that are displayed, to reduce erroneous entries and display popular products (making the site) easier for consumers to understand and more useful.”

While they have definitely already achieved a lot with Google Product Search, it continues to remain one of their lower priorities, and hence one can only wonder at the possibilities of growth for their high priority platforms such as Gmail and Chrome.

A software engineer at Google Image Search, Sean O’Malley, says “searching for the perfect image can be challenging if the search results match the meaning of your query, but aren’t in the style that’s useful to you.”

To begin with, they launched “face search”, which as the name implies allows one to find only those images related to the search query, which have faces in them. There are two options available; search with faces, and search without faces.

The next innovation was the introduction of photo search. If a user selects this option, the results will automatically delete all images containing cartoons, drawings etc. and focus only on images with photographic content. The reverse option is also available. i.e. users can opt to delete photographs, and select only cartoons and drawings instead.

The latest enhancement which Google has added, is the choice between clip art and line drawings. which allows users to decide beforehand, which category of results they wish to see.

To select any of these options, the user can click on the “Any Content” option in the blue title bar, of the search results page, or he can select “Content Types” on the Advanced Image Search Page.

These new facilities are very simple and practical ways to help users find what they are looking for without wasting their precious time and are sure to become very popular in a short while.

Microsoft adCenter had commissioned Kelton Research to carry out the survey across 400 small businesses, which had fewer than 250 employees.

The study was conducted online, with the help of 38 questions selected for the purpose of judging the mindset and behaviour of such business owners.

Last year a similar study was conducted in U.K. and revealed similar results.

Surprisingly, of the 59% who said they did not use search marketing 90% said that they had never even attempted to do so, though 86% felt that they were missing an opportunity to expand their businesses.

In fact, 73% of these businesspersons went to the extent of saying that they would rather do their own taxes than start a search marketing campaign. This just goes to show how scared people are to try marketing their businesses through paid search, which could actually be beneficial to them.

72% of the people who do use search marketing say that the number of sales inquiries they receive have gone up and 68% report that they have found that paid search marketing has been effective.

Among the major factors which respondents to the survey reported, were fears regarding costs, time involved and complex procedures involved in the process of search marketing.

In order to allay these fears, Microsoft has offered a free search marketing assistance campaign.

Director of adCenter at Microsoft Advertising, Brian Boland says, “Given today’s current economic conditions, small business owners need more effective ways to optimize their marketing dollars. By investing in paid search marketing, small businesses can track online sales, and determine the return on investment for their campaigns, while at the same time boosting traffic and visibility for their websites.”

The Quick Launch program offered by Microsoft adCenter offers free guidance to advertisers with a minimum monthly budget as low as $500. The advertisers will also be given advice on managing their campaigns through classroom-style training programs, and help to build Keywords etc.

Jamplant Limited, a U.K.-based private equity firm will buy Kelkoo for an amount of less than Euro 100 million (£85 million). Jamplant Ltd. was incorporated only last month and is an investment vehicle for the former management team of uSwitch.

Kelkoo, which was founded in 2000, had been bought by Yahoo! in 2004 for Euro 475 million (£315 million). At that time, Terry Semel, the then CEO of Yahoo!, had said that Kelkoo would “add depth and breadth” to Yahoo!’s consumer services.

An incompetent management team at Yahoo! is of course being blamed for the difference between the purchase and selling price of Kelkoo.

A spokesperson from Yahoo! said that the move to sell off Kelkoo was aimed at aligning costs with revenues and focusing on their core business under the present economic conditions. This seems to be just the reverse of what Microsoft, who took over a price comparison site Ciao, only last August is doing.

According to reports by Moneysupermarket.com, the market is heating up in the price comparison sector as more people look to save money, which is probably the reason Kelkoo has recently launched a cash-back scheme in the U.K. where their subscribers will receive up to 25% cash back if they shop online through one of the 500 online dealers affiliated to Kelkoo.

Kelkoo is currently the third largest e-commerce company in Europe, next only to Amazon and eBay, and has operations across 10 European countries.

News of the announcement drove the share price up 11% at the start of trading, adding $1.8 billion in shareholder value to YHOO.

Enough said!

Microsoft and several advertisers and publishers had objected to this deal, citing anti-trust laws and raising concerns about the possible rise in ad prices for advertisers.

At the time, both Google and Yahoo! had maintained that this was neither a merger nor an acquisition, and hence there was no question of violating the anti-trust laws. They also said that ad prices would continue to be determined by the usual auction process, so there was no need to worry about increased ad rates.

Their stand obviously did not pacify their opponents, who continued to lobby against the deal, and eventually, in September, the Justice Department appointed Sanford Litvack, the ex-Vice-Chairman, of Walt Disney Co. to look into the matter and prepare an anti-trust case if applicable. This development not only generated a lot of publicity regarding the issue, but also caused the stock prices of Google to fall.

Even though Google and Yahoo! maintained that their deal was not subject to government approval, they decided to cooperate voluntarily with the Justice Department. They even decided to put the deal on hold for a while. The two companies have been holding meetings with the Justice department in this regard but so far they have not reached any solution. One of the major stumbling blocks here is the reluctance of these firms to sign a consent decree, stating the terms of the partnership. Agreeing to sign such a decree would, in effect, mean agreeing to be constantly monitored by a judge, which they would not like for obvious reasons.

In their withdrawal statement Google said that a protracted legal battle and the possible estrangement of relationships with other partners were the main factors influencing their decision to end their relationship with Yahoo!
Google has seen a further fall in their share prices, but contrary to expectations, Yahoo! shares jumped up. The rise in YHOO stock could be due to announcements from Microsoft and Yahoo! saying they were now open to merger talks as well as Wall Street’s expectation that with Google out of the way, Microsoft is bound to step in and acquire Yahoo!

Yahoo! announced their quarterly earnings yesterday. Profits dropped 64% compared to the same period last year, which was in line with analysts’ expectations. Revenues were up a bit, but the total forecast for 2008 had to be reduced.

The 10% reduction in jobs should help the company control costs and therefore increase profitability. The news was welcomed by Wall Street, as the Yahoo! stock rose in after-hours trading following the earnings announcement.

Rumours about the lay-offs were circulating since last week. Speculation arose that employees would not be offered anything more than the basic government-mandated severence package. Employee morale in the company has fallen once again this year, with the common sentiment among employees seeming to be “why bother?”

Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen said the company is conserving cash, “to allow us to do some of the things we may be looking at.” This statement has fuelled further speculation that the possibility of Yahoo! acquiring AOL might actually be more than just an idle rumour.

Behind all the uncertainty, one thought is ever-present in all investors’ minds – Yahoo! should have taken Microsoft’s offer earlier this year, and run! With share prices at a five-year low at around $12.00, with little hope of returning to even $20, the $31 per share offer from Microsoft seems like a generous gift that they turned down.

Jerry Yang is definitely not the favourite person in many peoples’ books at present. Investors, employees and users on a number of online message boards and blogs are calling for his resignation and wondering if he will leave with the same severance package (or lack thereof) as the other unfortunate employees.

www.google.com/yahoogooglefacts/

Google has tried to prove that this deal will not only be harmless, but will actually be beneficial for the industry. They have highlighted various details of the deal, which they feel should be of interest to advertisers and publishers and should lay any doubts to rest.

According to Google, this deal does not violate antitrust laws of the U.S. constitution in any way, as it is similar to several other deals in industry, such as the deal between Toyota and Ford – Toyota provides hybrid engines for Ford – or the deal between Canon and HP – Canon provides laser printer engines for HP.

Regarding the fear of ad prices going up, Google keeps using the same old argument that the prices of ads are not manually set, but are decided by an auction process, whereby prices are never fixed and an advertiser will never bid to pay more than a keyword is worth. However, as Silicon Alley Insider points out, they have stopped short of actually saying that ad prices will not go up as a result of this deal.

In a market where there is only one dominant player, all advertisers will end up competing for the same ad spots and this will drive up bid prices, whether one likes it or not.
Consumers will will benefit from this deal as they will see more relevant ads while searching on Yahoo! and the interoperability between Yahoo! Messenger and Google Chat will mean better communications.

In theory, website publishers too should be pleased with this deal as better ad matching technology could increase their revenue and advertisers could find new ways to reach their target audience. However, if the publishers have only one supplier controlling almost all the traffic volume, this puts them at a great disadvantage when bargaining for better rates.

The serch giant keeps reminding users and litigators that this deal is not a merger and does not remove Yahoo! from the field and that since the deal is non-exclusive, Yahoo! can continue to make similar deals with others. It is true that Google’s share of search traffic will not increase with this deal, though, they fail to mention that the share of search traffic their ad platform serves will definitely be increased.

When the newly constituted Yahoo! board met for the first time, one of the major points on their agenda was to settle the matter of whether or not to proceed with discussions with Time Warner, for the possible purchase of their Internet arm, AOL, which Time Warner has wanted to get rid of for a while now.

The board has been given the go ahead to pursue the matter with Time Warner, but no negotiations have taken place yet according to sources.

The two companies had been in discussions with each other over this matter earlier, but failed to reach a settlement then.

If Yahoo! And AOL can reach an understanding, it might help to improve their position in the Internet advertising and content market, but more importantly, such a deal is likely to dissuade any future takeover attempt by Microsoft, who have also shown an interest in AOL. As things stand,

Microsoft is certainly in a better position to pay a much higher amount than Yahoo!, which would be the bottom line for Time Warner. However, a Microsoft-AOL merger would do absolutely nothing for the software giant’s search marketing business, and such a move would be nothing but a petty attempt to get back at Yahoo!
Interestingly, in an interview with CNBC last Friday, Mr. Icahn still felt that eventually Yahoo! would have to “do something” with Microsoft or Google Inc. would “kill” the company.

Speculation, however, continues to persist about Time Warner washing their hands off AOL, by selling it to some big player in the online advertising market.

The second quarter results show that it was not a very lucrative season for AOL. Revenue has fallen to $1.1 billion, which is a drop of 16 percent. Only their advertising revenues have gone up by 2 percent (i.e. $8 million), but that gain is certainly not sufficient to make up for the losses suffered by the Internet access division.

The once popular internet service provider has lost 2.8 million customers since last year, bringing down their subscriber base to just 8.1 million users. They have lost 604,000 subscribers in the second quarter itself. In monetary terms, that is a loss of $200 million. Ironically, the company had increased its charges for the dial-up services in late June.

The operating income of AOL has dropped by a steep 36 percent and is now pegged at $230 million. Unconfirmed reports state that AOL’s access business may find a buyer in EarthLink.

In the meantime, CEO of Time Warner Cable, Glenn Britt, says that revenues are up 7 percent, seeing a decline only in television pay-per-view. An additional 214,000 people have subscribed to the ‘triple play’ offering of cable TV, broadband Internet and telephone service.

The two firms were in an advanced stage of negotiations, and the price being quoted was in the range of $200 million.

Google was looking into the technical and financial aspects of Digg. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch explains that usually, by this stage the buyer knows pretty well what they are getting into, but since there is no firm commitment even at the term sheet stage, it is always possible to walk out for any reason.

No official reason has been given for calling off the deal at this late stage of discussions, but one undisclosed source says that it was due to some technical glitch, that the deal did not materialize, while another source reports that there were differences of perspective and ideology between the two companies, that led to the break down of talks.

It is possible, according to Arnold Zafra at Search Engine Journal, that Google just realised that this deal may not really help them to generate more revenue, which would obviously be their bottom line.

Whatever the reason may be, it looks as though Digg has been ditched at the last minute, yet again, and this might make it difficult for them to find a new buyer, as most companies would wonder what the problem was. Digg are supposedly looking to Allen & Co. to help them get some new financing for now.

In what seems like more than just a coincidence, Google started testing a Digg-like voting system for its own organic search results just last week. One might almost wonder – even though it obviously would not be the case – could Google have just freely borrowed ideas from Digg and then walked away once they got what they needed?

Executive Vice President of Search and Advertising Technology, Qi Lu, is quitting and has plans to go to China.

Senior Vice President of Search, Vish Makhijani, is likely to join Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine as Head of SF area operations.

Brad Garlinghouse is reported to be “considering alternatives”.

Jeremy Zawodny, popular blogger and Technology Evangelist at the beleaguered search enigne is moving to Craigslist.

Jeff Weiner, Executive Vice President of the Network Division, is also among those who are ready to move on.

Due to the reorganization plans, some of these executives had been reassigned to the new Global Products Group under Ash Patel, who has been with Yahoo! for well over a decade, and is the Executive Vice President of Yahoo! Platforms and Infrastructure.

The co-founders of Flickr, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, and founder of Del.icio.us, Joshua Schatcher, are also leaving Yahoo! Both these companies had been acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.

Edward Kozel, a director who was with the company since 2000, has also resigned.

Usama Fayyad, Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Strategic Data Solutions, has also resigned.

Executive Vice President of Global Partner Solutions, Hillary Schneider, is likely to be given added responsibilities, and both she and Ash Patel will report directly to President Sue Decker, who is in charge of the reorganisation.

Yahoo! officials have denied that these resignations have anything to do with the failure of talks between Yahoo! and Microsoft. They claim that all the executives have left for personal reasons. However, this is not sending a good signal to Wall Street, as Yahoo! shares have continued to fall, reaching $20.66 on Monday.

aQuantive, Fast Search and Transfer and Farecast each brought in a few hundred employees when they got acquired by Microsoft.

The AOL branch of Time Warner and Facebook were among several others believed to have been on Microsoft’s shopping list. However they have decided to put a stop to any further acquisitions for now.

After the failure of talks with Yahoo!, Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer and Kevin Johnson, Head of Microsoft’s Windows and Internet Businesses, explained to the Financial Times that the attempt to buy Yahoo! was with the sole intention of strengthening Microsoft’s advertising business, of which search advertising is the most important part for revenue generation.

Steve Ballmer said, “at the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just one of the applications.” Microsoft supposedly would work towards these goals from within and said they had made plans to build a center for search technology in Europe.

Today however, fresh rumours surfaced about renwed talks of a full acquisition of Yahoo! at a price lower than the $33 they had previously offered.

It is well known that Yahoo! ran tests with arch rivals Google, to show AdWords advertising on Yahoo! Search. What is not so well known, however, is their opinion on the same subject.

On 30 January 2008, just a day prior to Microsoft’s announcement that they intentended to acquire Yahoo!, the board of executives, led by Jerry Yang had dismissed the suggestion of a tie up with Google, stating that although such a tie up may result in short term gains, it would not be a good idea in the long run, as it would reduce Yahoo!’s chances of becoming a “must-buy” for advertisers.

This fact was revealed following a complaint, filed by lawyers representing shareholders of Yahoo!, alleging that the board of directors at Yahoo! purposefully acted to discourage the Microsoft offer. In fact, the papers reveal that even as far back as January 2007, the then CEO, Terry Semel, had rejected Microsoft’s offer of $40 per share!

The complaint further alleges that CEO, Jerry Yang, has not acted in the best interests of the company, or the shareholders, but rather out of personal hatred against Microsoft. The plaintiffs go on to say, that the tie-up with Google was only a means to deter Microsoft, as the situation would lead to a lot of legal complications that would deter Microsoft.

According to Eric Auchard at Reuters, Yahoo!’s sudden change of heart following Microsoft’s takeover bid seems to prove that the partnership with Google is just a desperate bid to keep Microsoft away at any cost.

Mr. Carl Icahn, who has already received permission to buy more shares of Yahoo!, just had his position strengthened by these revelations, as he tries to oust the current board of directors, including CEO Jerry Yang, through a proxy contest.

The big question at Yahoo!, however, is that even if Mr. Icahn is successful in replacing the board, will Microsoft still be interested in the deal, and if so at what rate?

Amongst the supporters, oil investor T. Boone Pickens, has bought 10 million shares, a hedge fund, Third Point, led by activist Dan Loeb, which had 1 million shares of Yahoo! in its possession on March 31, now has more than 5 million shares and may collect up to 10 million shares. And yet another hedge fund, Paulson, has 50 million shares of Yahoo!

It is believed that Icahn’s supporters now have over 80 million shares, that is more than 5% of Yahoo! between them, and Mr. Icahn himself has the option of purchasing another 49 million shares.

Although Microsoft has withdrawn its offer to acquire Yahoo! at $33 per share, the two firms are in talks with each other to arrive at a working relationship that would be mutually beneficial to both. The shareholders of Yahoo! are annoyed at the board’s decision because, according to a source, “they haven’t laid out a game plan that gets you to $33 to $34 per share on a stand–alone basis”.

Yahoo! is trying to fend off Icahn’s advances to replace the board by delaying their 3 July 2008 shareholders meeting to the end of the month. In the meantime the current board of directors at Yahoo! need to either fix an alternative deal with Microsoft buying only part of the company or an advertising agreement with Google that could inject $1 billion revenue per year.

The merger with CNet Networks will put CBS in the top 10 list of web publishers, with 54 million visitors per month, and it will reach 82% of web users in the U.S.A. All the sites run by CNET, including News.com, GameSpot, MP3.com, MySimon, and ZDNet. will be integrated with CBS’s interactive brand operations on completion of the deal.

President of CBS Quincy Smith says, “together we will have a terrific opportunity to grow our established businesses and build new attractive verticals of content. This is the beginning of an era for CBS and CNET networks.” It is very likely, however, that there may be some hiccups during the integration process, as CBS is known to be lavish in its spending habits while CNET is known to be rather thrifty.

In the second big merger, InterActive Corp (IAC), owner of Ask.com, plans to buy Lexico, which owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com, for $100 million in cash. This move is expected to improve the position of Ask.com in the search engine market, as the new sites will drive 145 million additional users per month.

The merger with Lexicon will also enable Ask.com to earn more revenue through display advertisements shown to people asking basic questions, as most searches on Ask are for reference material.

Finally, media company Comcast plans to buy Plaxo, which is a social networking site. Plaxo CEO Ben Golub says, Comcast plans to “bring the Social Media experience to mainstream consumers.” The financial details of this deal have not been disclosed yet.

The idea is that Comcast could be Plaxo’s launching pad, helping the company grow its user base beyond its current 50 million users. Plaxo will remain an independent operation in Silicon Valley, providing the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center, slated to launch this year. Plaxo will also work on socially enabling the Comcast.net portal and Comcast Interactive Media’s Fancast and Fandango properties.

Leading the pack is Carl Icahn, who purchased 50 million shares – about 4 percent – of Yahoo! at $1.3 billion, after Microsoft walked away from the deal. He is known to have a history of waging corporate battles against companies and pressurizing them into taking decisions they had earlier resisted.

Icahn has threatened to motion for an alternate board of directors to replace those who are currently on the board, during the next shareholder meeting, which has been scheduled for July 3. The deadline to nominate these directors is May 15.

According to the Wall Street Journal, he is not the only one baying for blood. There has been a lot of criticism from several shareholders over the board’s decision to refuse the Microsoft offer. Bill Miller of Legg Mason, Yahoo!’s second largest shareholder hopes Mr. Icahn can force the parties back to the negotiating table.

Although it is the majority shareholders who will determine the end result, a lot of small share holders are also upset with the present situation and feel that Yahoo! was wrong to turn down Microsoft. One of them, Eric Jackson, has decided to launch a ‘vote no’ campaign, to convince shareholders to out vote all 10 directors presently on the board. He wanted to wage his own proxy battle but realized that he could not afford the million dollar fight; hence the grass roots campaign. He feels the board has made several mistakes over the years, and Yahoo! shares have remained more or less steady over the last 4 years, in spite of the stock market rising 30% and Google stock going up by 440%.

According to Shirley Westcott, Managing Director of Policy at Proxy Governance, Mr. Icahn’s entry into the arena will put a lot of pressure on Yahoo! to renegotiate with Microsoft. She further adds, “if there is no progress, between Yahoo! and Microsoft, you could end up with enough angry shareholders and institutions voting the whole board out of office, and that would be a horrible scenario.” Robert McCormick at Glass Lewis and Company says that in such cases the company often negotiates with the main dissident shareholder and offers them a few seats on the board rather than risk losing a proxy battle which would be distracting, expensive and time-consuming for both sides.

Yahoo!, Mr. Icahn and Microsoft have all declined to comment.

Although there had been no official announcement about the launch of such a facility by AT&T, visitors to the iPhone section of the site noticed mention of the availability of WiFi access through AT&T’s network of over 17,000 hotspots, which include Starbucks coffee shops, Barnes & Noble book stores and airports.

MacRumors.com reports that iPhone users were provided with a customized portal to enable them to access Wi-Fi services for free, by just entering their mobile number on a specially formatted page.

However, just a short while later customers who had previously used the free service, said that the service had been disconnected at the same places where it had earlier been available. Customers stated that they were now being asked to provide a username and password for the same facility that had been available for free a few days ago. AT&T’s iPhone site was also updated to remove mention of the free mobile Internet access.

While AT&T has chosen to remain silent about the issue, it is assumed that the service has been temporarily discontinued as they have not updated all their hotspots with this facility, but once that is done the service will resume. Speculation is also rife that the next iPhone version will not be tied in to a specfic operator, which would explain why AT&T sees the need to differentiate its offering and provide free WiFi to its iPhone customers as an added bonus.

Yahoo! stuck to its demand of $37 per share. The option of a hostile takeover bid does not seem desirable at this point as it would clearly involve a long drawn out proxy war between the parties.

Also, in view of Yahoo!’s imminent deal with Google, Microsoft feel that the acquisition of Yahoo! would involve tremendous headaches with anti-trust laws – a combined Google and Yahoo! ad platform would control over 80% of the U.S. search market – which would bring hassles that are quite clearly unwanted by any purchaser, including Microsoft.

In his letter to Jerry Yang, CEO and founder of Yahoo!, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, clearly mentions that Yaho!’s deal with Google would mean harming the effectiveness of Yahoo! Search Marketing’s paid search platform, Panama. It would make it difficult to retain Yahoo!’s talented engineers, and also give complete dominance to Google, with regard to search advertising rates.

Steve Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo! CEO, Jerry Yang

Yahoo! shares fell only 15% on Monday, to $24.37 per share, from Friday’s close of $28.67 per share. This is still higher than the stock price before Microsoft announced their acquisition bid, largely due to the market’s expectation that Microsoft may still come back and buy Yahoo! at their weakened share price.

Jerry Yang will undoubtedly have to shoulder the responsibility of proving, to his shareholders, that he has acted in their best interests and done the right thing by not accepting Microsoft’s offer. If he is unable to raise the stock prices within a few months, he may find himself compelled to accept a lower offer or find a new job.

At present however, Yang remains convinced that the company is on the right track and share prices will improve shortly with the new strategies they have put in place. In the meantime Microsoft shares fell by $0.16, While Google shares rose by $13.61. As of now, it would seem that Google is having the last laugh, especially if their new ad deal with Yahoo! comes through.

Net revenue for the quarter came in at $1.35 billion (compared to a consensus of $1.32 billion). The overall revenue growth has gone up from 8% to 9%, which can be referred to as marginal at best. However, the revenue and cash position have both been boosted by one-time payments from AT&T ($350 million) and a non-cash gain of $401 million related to Alibaba Group’s initial public offering of Alibaba.com. The actual adjusted cash flow is about 20% less than that of last year.

Yahoo! President Sue Decker and others in the company seem to be quite satisfied with the results and tend to blame the economy for the weakness in finance and retail. The net earnings, however, are 11% below those of the first quarter of last year, and the stock price fell by 8% ($0.15), during after-hours trading on Tuesday, just after the results were declared.

The advertising system, Panama, is yet to start showing positive results. In the meantime, the higher operating cost incurred means the overall revenue gains have come down from $160 million to $142 million. Terry Samuel, CEO and Chairman of Yahoo! feels they have made good progress with their outlined goals, and are set to capture major growth opportunities in the future.

Analysts’ Opinions

Wall Street does not seem to be blinded by the superficial increases in revenue or cash. The underlying truth is quite plainly visible for all analysts to see – Yahoo! cannot continue to grow on its own.

Jim Friedland analyst at Cowen &Co. said, “Microsoft is breathing a sigh of relief. Even though these are solid results, given long and short term challenges, there’s been no overall shift in Yahoo!’s business. Microsoft’s offer is still the best offer on the table.”Mike Binger, fund manager at Thrivent Financial says, “I would say at this point, Microsoft would stay their bid.” Susquehanna Financial Group analyst, Marianne Wolk, also shares that opinion. She says “This doesn’t change the picture much at all.”

Blake Jorgensen, CFO of Yahoo! says the results are “right on track”, despite the distraction of Microsoft’s offer. He adds that they are not opposed to a deal with Microsoft, but only to a value which discounts the underlying value of the company.

Yahoo! has declared their first strong quarter in a while. Microsoft could wait to let their steam drop, rather than raise their bid price. Yahoo! could pull out all the stops in one quarter or two, but they just aren’t good enough to keep the results up, and when they fall, Microsoft will swoop in for the kill.

However timing is of the essence, and if shareholders see through the overall revenue increases and realise that Yahoo!’s core business is not improving, the sale could be imminent. Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer had said before the results were declared that their resolve would remain unchanged, irrespective of the results. Sources at Microsoft said there was no reason to revalue their offer of $43 billion.

Will They Act Or Will They Go?

Bloomberg News speculates that Microsoft’s bid to take control of the Yahoo! board may start as early as this weekend. Meanwhile, PC World reported that Steve Ballmer threatened to walk away from the deal, when speaking at a conference in Milan on Wednesday.

Is this just acquisition politics? Will the board of directors at Yahoo! be ousted? Or will Microsoft give them the cold shoulder and just move on?

Needless to say, if this deal does go through, it would help Yahoo! avoid Microsoft’s bid to buy them over. The benefits of such a deal for Yahoo! in the long run, though, are extremely limited. Yahoo! would be handing over control of its most important asset – Yahoo! Search Marketing – to Google and would turn into a sitting duck in the future.

Shareholders should be worried about the competency of Yahoo!’s board of directors if this information is true. They are either taking desperate measures to avoid being acquired by Microsoft at all costs or are trying some really poor tactics to get Microsoft to raise their bid. Either way, their actions seem puerile and selfish with little or no thought to raising shareholder value.

Analysts have reported that a Google-Yahoo! deal would increase Yahoo!’s revenues by about 33% and Yahoo! shares would likely gain $5. Such a deal could raise an additional $1 billion for Yahoo! annually, according to Citigroup Global markets analyst Mark Mahaney. However Microsoft’s offer of $45 billion might seem far more enticing to shareholders.

It is almost certain that if such a deal were to take place, Microsoft would make its displeasure known by invoking antitrust laws. Microsoft’s top lawyer Brad Smith has said, “Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90 percent of the search advertising market, in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in contrast to our own proposal to Yahoo.” Smith further mentioned that Microsoft would closely assess all its options.

ValleyWag suggests that in order to avoid antitrust issues, Yahoo could set up an ‘open market place’ and invite both Google and Microsoft to make bids for advertising there. This system could work well if Google were really interested in keeping Yahoo! out of Microsoft’s clutches which seems like a reasonable belief.