The last CEO, Carol Bartz, had been asked to go by chairman Roy Bostock quite unceremoniously last September, and CFO Tim Morse was named as Interim CEO of the beleaguered company.

Yahoo! has now announced that they have found a suitable candidate in Scott Thompson, to lead the company. He has been the president of online payments firm, Paypal, which is a subsidiary of eBay.

Mr. Thompson has a tough task ahead of him, to say the least. He will not only have to focus on rebuilding the core business of Yahoo! but he will also have to carry out a strategic review of what new investments to make and existing business lines to dispose off.

According to Stuart Miles of technology blogsite Pocket-lint, Thompson will have to decide on whether they should concentrate on product innovation or content creation.

Yahoo! was founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang in January 1994 and was incorporated in March 1995. The company had a great run for the first decade or so. It was around 2005, with the rapid growth of Google that their troubles started. In 2008 they had to lay-off several employees, but when Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to take over the company at $33 per share, they refused the offer, saying that they were being under-valued.

However, the company has never fully recovered from that set back, and the share price continues to hover around $15 ever since. Will Scott Thomson change Yahoo!’s fortunes?

eBay reports that the amount of shopping done through mobile handsets saw significant growth during the last holiday season.

Considering the importance of e-commerce in everyday life, it was only a matter of time before mobile shopping, or m-commerce as it is being called, followed suit.

According to the report from eBay, about 6 million people across 165 countries, have installed an eBay application on their mobile phones, and eBay receives 750,000 unique mobile visits daily.

1.5 million purchases were made via m-commerce on eBay during the 2009 Christmas holiday season, which is almost 3 times the level seen during the same period in 2008.

The total revenue generated via eBay mobile applications in 2009 was reported to be worth half a billion U.S. dollars, and a new transaction took place every 2 seconds. This alone should be enough information to make a number of companies rethink their mobile strategy

Consumers are not just using mobile phones to make small purchases of items of daily use. Some very high-ticket luxury purchases were also made via mobile. Examples cited by eBay include a 23-foot deck boat, a Boston grand piano and a 1966 Chevrolet Corvette.

In a separate report, mobile phone manufacturer, Motorola, found that the usage and impact of mobile shopping technologies exploded during the 2009 holiday shopping season. The survey identified that 64 percent of Gen Y (age 18 to 34) shoppers used their mobile phones for in-store shopping-related activities during the holiday season.

With the ever-increasing amount of news pointing to the growth of mobile in just the first 2 weeks of the year, one wonders if 2010 might finally be the real year of mobile?

The Mobile Search Benchmark is a means of ranking mobile search providers, with regards to five different criteria. They are, discoverability, readiness, availability, response time and consistency for a search operation carried out through a mobile handset.

Only the larger, better-known search providers have been considered for this survey. The selection was based on comScore’s Expanded Search Query Report published in July 2008.

Nine companies were selected for this survey: Yahoo!, Amazon, Ask, Google, AOL, Craigslist, eBay, MySpace and MSN. Facebook was not included in this survey, as their mobile web applications did not meet the technical requirements of this study.

To ensure a uniform playing field for all participants, a predetermined task was set out, with a fixed set of steps to be used while performing the search operation on each participating provider. One had to first navigate to the home page of the mobile web site, type a search query, and then click on ‘search’. The search results page would then be displayed and would show the search result obtained for that specific query, which were then graded.

According to the study, Yahoo! has currently been ranked the best site for mobile search operations. The provider rankings within individual categories were as follows:

Discoverability

Ability of a consumer to discover the location of a company’s mobile site on the Web.

1. Google
   MySpace
   Yahoo!
2. AOL
   eBay
   MSN
3. Amazon
4. Ask
5. Craigslist

Readiness

Ability of the mobile web site to be rendered on popular mobile devices.

1. Ask
   eBay
   Yahoo!
2. Amazon
   AOL
   Craigslist
   Google
   MSN
3. MySpace

Availability

Percentage of successful transactions out of the total number of transaction attempts.

1. Google
2. Amazon
3. Craigslist
4. eBay
5. Yahoo!
6. MySpace
7. AOL
8. Ask
9. MSN

Response Time

Time required to download each page in an entire multi-step transaction.

1. Amazon
2. Google
3. Craigslist
4. Ask
5. Yahoo!
6. AOL
7. MySpace
8. MSN
9. eBay

Consistency

Standard deviation of the response time of completed transactions

1. Amazon
2. Craigslist
3. Google
4. Ask
5. Yahoo!
6. AOL
7. MySpace
8. eBay
9. MSN

Overall Ranking

1. Yahoo!
2. Google
   Amazon
   Ask
3. AOL
   Craigslist
   eBay
4. MySpace
5. MSN

The research also measured performance of mobile sites in other industry verticals. AirTran was found to be the highest ranked mobile airline site and Bank of America was ranked top for mobile banking.

Overall, though, the results indicated that mobile websites are 30% less efficient than traditional Internet sites.

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.

The bras were from the well known couture brand Victoria’s Secret, and were collectively valued at $80,000.

The seller used various user IDs to sell his goods through eBay and PayPal. He sold around 2,000 bras in this manner. The goods, originally priced between $40-80 each, were sold for just $25 each, which is certainly a very tempting offer for shoppers.

Apparently, Mr. Tutaya must have provided excellent services as well. Satisfied customers left good reviews on eBay. One of which said, “Honest person to buy from”, and another one said “Excellent Service, Honest, Will do business again, Thank you!”

Investigations reveal that the man did not steal the bras from the stores himself, but was involved with a ring of professional shoplifters. During raids on his premises, records proving 2,000 transactions on eBay and another 650 unsold bras valued at $26,000 were found.

The Supreme Court in Queens has arraigned him on charges of criminal possession of stolen goods. If the charges against him are proven, he faces a maximum sentence of up to 7 years in jail. He will have to return to the court on November 18.

Queens District Attorney, Richard Brown says, “Trafficking stolen goods on the Internet will no more be tolerated than fencing stolen property would be anywhere else.”

All products having a ‘Buy it Now’ price on eBay, ranging from jewelry to electronics, will be eligible for a certain amount of refund, thus helping clients to save some money.

The purchases will have to be routed through Paypal, and the percentage of cash back, could be as high as 35%. The offer will be valid for up to 3 purchases, and a maximum of $250, will be paid as cash back.

There will however be some differences between this and other cash back schemes:

• All eBay ads will display a cashback icon
• Clients can go directly into the advertiser’s (eBay) website, instead of going through Live Search
• The cashback icon will be visible all the time that the client is shopping on eBay, which is a good reminder for the client, and Live Search would like to follow this method with other advertisers if possible.

Live Search will continue to make modifications in this system, based on the feedback they get from customers and advertisers.

There are 2 ways to implement these cash back schemes:

Destination site experience- here users, study a particular product category, and then go to a Live Search cashback ad, in order to get the best deal available.

Direct to merchant experience- here the advertisers ads will directly show the cashback icon (gleam). When the customers click on the icon they are directly taken to the advertisers site.

Both of the above schemes are still to be fine-tuned, in order to achieve the best results in the simplest manner and the Live Search team is eagerly looking for customer feedback to achieve this.

1. Beginners usually get carried away by the rankings of their ads. While it is surely advantageous to be #1, rather thanat the bottom of the page or worse, on the second page, where most potential buyers might not even look, advertisers must realize that rankings bear no significance to customers.Consumers buy from websites that offer good services, good prices and reliable products. Few consumers even remember whether the site they had clicked on was number 1 or number 5 once they are on it.

   Moreover, as Mike correctly notes, nowadays search engines offer personalized results in the paid and organic listings, so that people with different requirements get different results even with the same keyword. This just further necessitates focus on other measures of marketing efficacy than mere ranking.

   The only time when traffic without sales can be justified by an advertiser is when they are using search to build their brand. Then too, one must be mindful of the user. Consistently showing irrelevant ads to a consumer can put them off the brand. Companies like eBay have negatively impacted their brand image in the past by advertising on irrelevant keywords such as “Golders Green College”, which then delivered meaningless ads saying “Buy Golders Green College on Ebay”!

2. The next parameter that lures novice search marketers is traffic. While traffic does matter, it is important to differentiate between the window-shoppers and real buyers. For paid search operations, especially, it is a very costly error to have a lot of searchers but only a few buyers.Advertisers pay for every click. The revenue generated from each click may be negligible or even nothing. Hence it is important to focus on overall conversion rates rather than just traffic volumes. For this it is important to use keywords and ad copy that encourage sales and don’t just drive traffic.
3. The final common error that should be avoided is delivering a relentless sales pitch. While it is important to highlight the salient features of a product, advertisers must also provide a proper background to customers. Few consumer like being sold to all the time. It is important for advertisers to address consumer problems rather than just rattle on about product features or advantages or “fantastic prices” and “super deals”!

According to the report, Skype will be teaming up with mobile operator 3 from the end of November. They will release a fully integrated mobile phone that will mean free mobile to mobile phone calls for anyone swapping networks.

This should be good news for 3. Providing free mobile to mobile calls from anywhere in the world, in association with Skype, could cause all the other operators enormous pain.

Rattling the competition

Speaking to the BBC, Per Lindberg, a telecommunications and IT analyst at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort said, “Whether they win market share depends completely on their competitors’ reactions.” He thinks a move such as this could prompt all the operators to cut their prices, “If Vodafone or Telefonica move to ‘all-you-can-eat’ then the situation may change.”

Skype’s phone could even be a threat to other new entrants such as Apple’s iPhone or Google’s rumoured GPhone. Sprint Nextel could also take over Vonage and integrate VOIP services into their products even more seamlessly than Skype can.

Three is the mobile business of Hong Kong based Hutchison Whampoa, better known in Asia and the USA for Hutchison Telecom and the Harbour Plaza hotel group. Skype was acquired by Ebay back in 2005 for $2.6 Billion. Recently, though, Ebay was publicly dissatisfied with Skype’s performance, when it was forced to announce to shareholders that it would have to pay an impairment charge of $900 million because it had over-valued the group.

If the Skype – 3 deal delivers on promise, it could prove to be a turn-around point for Skype as well as the sagging VOIP industry on the whole.

BBC Report: Skype teams up with 3

28.3 million UK visitors used at least one Google property, making it the most popular site, beating Microsoft’s 26.7 million visitors. Each of these companies reached a phenomenal 80+ per cent of the country’s online population. Yahoo! did not beat eBay to the third position, in spite of a 2.4 per cent fall in eBay’s visitor numbers.

The top ten websites in the UK can be seen in the chart below:

Facebook was the fastest growing site in the United Kingdom, with total visitors to the site rising from 7.6 million to 8.9 million in just one month. The 18 per cent growth rate is not a one-off occurrence. The social networking site has continuously risen in popularity since February of this year, making it an attractive acquisition target for Microsoft and Google.

Other sectors that fared well in the UK included online TV and shopping comparison, with sites from both sectors demonstrating double-digit growth percentages. BSkyB and News International both grew over 10% in August, with total visitor numbers well beyond the 5 million mark. In France on the other hand, the greatest percentage growth in visitor numbers came predominantly from travel sites. The fastest growing site, though, was an automotive trading site, LaCentrale.fr.

The top ten websites in France can be seen in the chart below:

Interestingly, Google reached only 69.5% of the French Internet population, compared to its 89% reach in the UK. The total number of Internet users in France is also still less than that in the UK. Google, Microsoft and France Telecom are the most popular sites here, with Yahoo! trailing at a distant sixth position in overall popularity.

The detailed reports for France and the UK can be read on the comScore website.