Yahoo chairman stepping down
Bostock, in a letter to shareholders, also said Yahoo was in “active discussions” with its partners in Asia on restructuring its holdings in the Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan.
Bostock said he had decided not to stand for re-election at Yahoo s next shareholders meeting, along with board members Vyomesh Joshi, Arthur Kern and Gary Wilson.
He said the board elected two independent directors on Tuesday: Alfred Amoroso, former president and chief executive of Rovi Corp., and Maynard Webb, a former chief operating officer at eBay.
Bostock said a strategic review of Yahoo has made “significant progress” and has included “a wide range of discussions with potential partners.
“We have engaged with potential investors and reviewed proposals concerning an equity investment in the company, although at this time there have not been any proposals which have been deemed by the committee to be attractive to our shareholders,” he said.
“We are also in active discussions with our partners in Asia regarding the possibility of restructuring our holdings in Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan,” Bostock said.
“While we continue to devote significant resources to these discussions, we are not in a position at this time to provide further detail or to provide assurance that any transaction will be achieved,” he said.
Facebook plans to expand in China
May 21, 2011 by Trend PK
Filed under Technology
Founded in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 by the now 27-year-old Zuckerberg, Facebook threatens Internet companies like Google and Yahoo as it becomes a popular online destination for Web surfers. Zuckerberg plans a second visit to China. Facebook plans to connect people around the globe and it is not possible without connecting them to China. China, the world s largest Internet market by users, represents an attractive frontier for Facebook, which is blocked there. Zuckerberg visited China in December and met with the heads of Chinese Internet companies including Baidu Inc, Sina Corp and Alibaba Corp.
China, where the government exercises tight control over online information, has proven hard to crack for Western Internet companies.
Facebook now wants a say in computer hardware
April 9, 2011 by Trend PK
Filed under Technology
PALO ALTO: Facebook, the world’s largest social network, wants to get in on computer hardware as well.
The company that revolutionized social networking on the Internet has teamed up with some of tech hardware’s biggest names — Hewlett Packard Co, Dell Inc, Advanced Micro Devices, and Intel Corp — to launch the “open compute project.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the project aims to offer specifications and designs for more power-efficient computers that are specifically geared toward running Internet services, shared openly with other companies.
“What we found over time is that a lot of the stuff that the mass manufacturers put out wasn’t exactly in line with what we needed and what other social apps needed,” Zuckerberg said at a media event at Facebook’s Palo Alto, California headquarters on Thursday.
By sharing design specifications, he said he hoped to increase availability and demand for the specialized servers.
Dell will build servers based on those technical specifications, while Synnex Corp will act as overall vendor for the systems. The technology will power servers in the social network’s first custom-built data center, in Prineville, Oregon. Until now, Facebook has leased data centers for its infrastructure.
With more than 500 million users, Facebook is the world’s No. 1 Internet social network and is increasingly challenging established Web companies like Google Inc and Yahoo Inc as a top destination for Web surfers and a compelling advertising channel for marketers.
The technical infrastructure that powers websites such as Facebook, on which more than 30 billion photos, videos and other types of content are shared by users every month, play a key role in a service’s performance.
According to Facebook, the new servers will be 38 percent more energy efficient and cost 24 percent less than off-the-shelf products used to power its service. AGENCIES
Yahoo Account, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Chat, Yahoo Server Down
December 15, 2010 by Trend PK
Filed under Technology
Yahoo Account, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Chat, Yahoo Server Down ;
Yahoo Account, Yahoo servers are facing overloading and Users of yahoo also suffering from it, Yahoo mail, Yahoo Chat and other yahoo prudects also down.
Tech, media executives debate free vs. paid
ASPEN: Top technology and media executives wrapped up a three-day conference here during which they grappled with — and left unresolved — the question of whether readers will pay for news online.
Firmly in the paid camp in the “paid vs. free” debate was News Corp.”s head of digital operations Jon Miller who said charging online readers is a notion that has been “accepted at a variety of levels.”
“It”s more about how it gets done,” Miller told participants in the Fortune Brainstorm Tech event which ended on Saturday in this Colorado ski resort.
With newspapers and magazines facing competition from free content on the
Web and declining circulation and print advertising revenue, Rupert Murdoch”s News Corp. has been leading the charge to get newspaper readers to pay online.
The Wall Street Journal, a News Corp. title, is currently the only major US newspaper to charge readers for full access to its website and one of the few to buck the trend of eroding circulation.
Another News Corp. paper, Britain”s The Times, erected a pay wall around its website at the beginning of July and Murdoch has said he will eventually do the same at all of the newspapers in his vast stable.
Miller said charging readers is “an idea whose time has come,” but others disagreed including Jimmy Pitaro, Yahoo!”s vice president for media.
“We firmly believe that free is the future,” said Pitaro, whose Yahoo! News is one of the most popular news destinations on the Web.
“The feeling is that when other people are charging they”re kind of driving people to free alternatives,” the Yahoo! executive said.
Pitaro said there were some publications with very strong brands or niche audiences that could get away with charging and cited The Wall Street Journal, which Miller said has attracted more than one million digital subscribers.
Brian Sugar, founder and chief executive of Sugar Inc., which operates a series of sites geared towards women including PopSugar.com and ShopStyle.com, said he had no plans to charge and invited his rivals to do so.
“We love paid… for our competitors,” he said.
“We believe Conde Nast, Time, People, In Style, Glamour — all of them should charge because we”re going to maintain our content as free,” he said.
“We look at our content as a marketing vehicle to grow our audience.”
News Corp.”s Miller also said tablet computers such as Apple”s iPad offered great opportunities for the news industry to develop paid applications.
The iPad and other tablet computers being developed offer “very media rich experiences that I think do allow a re-set, perhaps a do-over for the media industry, a chance to get it right,” Miller said.
Sugar dismissed a belief in applications as a potential saviour for a traditional news industry he said was grasping at straws.
“For content publishers I think like every eight to 12 months there”s the new shiny object you can go to (advertising) agencies with, and I think apps for content companies are currently that,” Sugar said.
“They need something to hang their hat on and the hat is apps,” he said.
Trip Adler, co-founder and chief executive of Scribd, the social publishing and reading website, said charging for content might be possible “if there was a better payment infrastructure on the Web.”
“The current payment systems that work really well on the Web such as iTunes or the Kindle ecosystem have users” credit card numbers, a lot of user
loyalty and it”s really easy to make a purchase,” he said.
“If there was one pan-ecosystem for the entire Web and you could purchase any piece of content for say 25 cents, that I think would dramatically ncrease
sales on many of these websites,” he said.
Yahoo!”s Pitaro said he didn”t believe it would make much of a difference.
“Ease of payment is one component but from my perspective it doesn”t matter how easy it is to pay if your competition is free,” he said.
ufc 115 video
June 13, 2010 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
UFC 115 Live Streaming: Liddell vs Franklin Fight Results – The fans are much crazy for this day because it is the time once again for the Ultimate Fighting Championship to bring the regular viewers another much thrilled and most anticipated episode for this month.
This is the UFC 115: Liddell vs Franklin, live on June 12, 2010, 10:00 pm ET live at the General Motors Place in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. 
The UFC 115 live streaming is pretty much sure be the most searchable in the next couple of minutes from now.
As usual, the UFC 115 live streaming will be available via pay-per-view, but for some who cannot afford to pay for the PPV, you may still look a quality live streaming video in your favourite and popular live streaming sites like in Yahoo Sports, Justin TV, Vshares and Ustream. Even the iPhone thru the iTunes store can give you the opportunity to watch the said event live.Ticket reseller StubHub has only 103 tickets left as of the time of writing, and though tickets had been on sale for as little as $68 on Wednesday, a far cry from the $75 membership fee and $75 ticket price that was needed to secure a nosebleed seat initially, last minute MMA tourists have started landing in the city and grabbing what they can.
With media buzz reaching fever pitch and the local MMA fanbase increasingly motivated, those once low-hanging cheap tickets are long gone, with upper level seats now fetching $175 and up. Craigslist sellers are asking for less in some cases, with anywhere down to $125 being asked for single seats
spelling bee 2010
June 5, 2010 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
Anamika Veeramani, a 14-year-old Ohio girl, won the 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee Friday, June 4. “Stromuhr” is the word she won on, which is a medical device that measures the amount and speed of blood flow through an artery.
Shortly after accepting her trophy, Anamika shouted, “Go Cavs!” — Which is funny because Cleveland’s last major sports championship was in 1964, but now they can boast the national speller!
According to the Associated Press, the eighth-grader attends Incarnate Word Academy and plays golf, likes to dance and wants to go to Harvard to become a cardiovascular surgeon.
“It was too surreal,” she said. “It was an amazing experience.” Last year Anamika tied for fifth in the spelling bee. She is the eighth Indian-American winner in the last 12 years.
There was a bit of controversy in this year’s spelling bee. The semi-finals began Friday afternoon (June 4) with 19 contestants left, but 9 were eliminated so quickly that they began to worry they wouldn’t have enough spellers for the primetime braodcast. So they declared all 10 spellers left onstage finalists — even though six of them hadn’t had to spell a word in the semi-finals yet.
Meanwhile, NBC star Shaquille O’Neal was in the house. He posed for pictures with the 10 finalists and then challenged last year’s winner, 14-year-old Kavya Shivashankar, to a spell-off on his “Shaq Vs.” reality show that premieres last this year.
Congrats to Anamika on her 2010 spelling championship!
danny ferry
June 5, 2010 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
pdate: It’s official, as the Cavs announced it on their site. Statements from owner Dan Gilbert and Ferry below, and Gilbert’s comments from a conference call here.
In case you needed another piece of evidence that wooing LeBron James is the single most important thing to the Cleveland Cavaliers (among lots of teams) this summer, well, here’s one: Yahoo! Sports’ Johnny Ludden is reporting that Danny Ferry is preparing to resign as Cavs’ GM and that assistant GM Chris Grant will be elevated to the top executive role.
This news follows closely on the heels of not only Mike Brown’s firing as Cavs coach, but also the rumor that LeBron is preparing a countrywide free agency tour with matching Nike shoes for each team that he’ll visit to boot.
In other words, while James may have recently told Larry King that the Cavs have “an edge,” everyone in Cleveland is keenly aware that they won’t be receiving any sort of “hometown discount” if serious changes aren’t made to the team.
Ferry’s original job was to make enough major changes, in terms of the roster anyway, that the Cavaliers could win a title and lock LeBron in. Clearly, if the report is true, the acquisitions of Shaquille O’Neal, Mo Williams, Leon Powe and Antawn Jamison proved to be his undoing.
bank of canada
June 1, 2010 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
Loonie and markets down as Bank raises rates
OTTAWA—The Bank of Canada Tuesday became the first Group of Seven monetary authority to raise interest rates since the credit crisis, but said any further increases would have to be weighed carefully against domestic and global economic developments.
The bank raised its benchmark overnight rate by 0.25 percentage point to 0.50%. The rate had been at a record low 0.25% since April 2009.
The highly anticipated decision underscores the bank’s dilemma as it weighs a strong domestic economy against concerns about the impact of the euro-zone debt crisis on a global economic recovery that it acknowledged to be “increasingly uneven” across countries.
The bank said “considerable” monetary stimulus is still in place.
“Given the considerable uncertainty surrounding the outlook, any further reduction of monetary stimulus would have to be weighed carefully against domestic and global economic developments,” the bank said in its interest-rate statement.
The widely expected rate hike is the bank’s first since July 2007 and the first under the watch of Governor Mark Carney, who took over the top job in February 2008. The bank also re-established normal functioning of the overnight market, including reverting to a 0.50 percentage point operating band for the rate.
The debt crisis in Greece and some other euro zone countries has so far had only a limited impact on Canada through lower commodity prices. But the bank said some countries will now be forced to tighten their budgets quickly and that, combined with debt reduction by banks and households, could slow the pace of global growth.
Canadian government securities gained. The two-year note’s yield slumped 11 basis points, or 0.11 percentage point, to 1.71 percent. The price of the 1.5 percent security maturing in June 2012 advanced 21 cents to C$99.60.
Canada’s government bonds have made investors 3 percent this year, according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch index.
More than half of the quarterly profit — a record $584 million — was generated by the Canadian banking operations, which saw growth in residential mortgages, lines of credit and business accounts.
Last week, the Bank of Montreal launched the earnings period with the strongest results, including a quarterly profit of $745-million that was 18 cents per share ahead of analyst estimates.
National Bank also beat predictions with a $261 million profit.
In the latest quarter, Royal Bank posted a $1.3-billion profit .
CIBC posted a $660 million profit that turned around a $51-million loss from a year earlier.
TD Bank more than doubled its second-quarter profit to nearly $1.2 billion.
russia european union
June 1, 2010 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
The 25th summit between Russia and the European Union (EU) concluded in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don Tuesday.
At a joint press conference after the summit, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, European Council President Herman van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso all hailed the two-day summit as fruitful, open and friendly.
A joint statement on the Partnership for Modernization, a bilateral agreement on the protection of classified information as well as a declaration condemning Israel’s attack on a Gaza-bond international aid flotilla one day ago have been issued during the summit.
Dmitry Medvedev has opened the Russia-EU summit in the southern Russian town of Rostov-on-Don. Within the three-hour meeting the sides are to discuss the economy, modernization and security.
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Opening the summit on Tuesday, the Russian president expressed hope that the event will become the beginning of the sides’ co-operation in the sphere of modernization.
