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Yahoo on Wednesday started offering Flickr users a new home page for the photo-sharing site that’s designed to show off more images and make it easier for people to use the site’s social features.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Another big change is a “recent activity” tab that displays new comments on a member’s photos, notices that others have made the member a contact, and other social events.

“This is not about adding new features, it’s about reducing the number of clicks of many of our most important core features,” she said. As long as a user has a fast network, the new pages load faster, though those with a slow dial-up connection might be constrained since more photos show on the home page, she added.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

“It’s definitely on our roadmap to improve that page,” she said.

The redesigned page displays more photos, both from the Flickr member and from his or her contacts. And it adds photos from Flickr groups to which the member belongs, said Matthew Rothenberg, director of product management.

“What we wanted to be able to do is make the home page more engaging, useful, and efficient for advanced users who have hundreds and sometimes thousands of contacts and who upload and log into Flickr several times a day (and for) our newest members who are trying to figure out how to engage with Flickr,” Srivastava said. The change also is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, which is geared in part to “light up” Yahoo users’ online social activity.

The redesigned Flickr shows more photos and, through a 'recent activity' tab, more social interactions. (Click to enlarge.)

Flickr currently has more than 30 million registered users, 3 billion page views per month, and 60 million unique users per month, she said.

Yahoo described the change on its Flickr blog–which, by the way, is now featured on the new home page to spotlight news regarding the site.

Many people just use Flickr to store and share their own photos, but the site also has social features including groups where like-minded people can share photos, a contacts list to share with particular friends, and comments that can lead to a discussion thread. Much of the redesign aims to spotlight these social features, making them more visible and easier to use, said Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s new general manager.

The change is available now to people who opt for it, but it will become standard for all users in coming weeks, Srivastava said.

Flickr's home page now features a 'recent activity' tab that lets people interact more quickly with others on the photo-sharing site.

It doesn’t change another core part of Flickr, though, the pages that house each photograph. That will be changed in a future update, she added.

Update 4:30 p.m. PDT: Yahoo has gradually added various features to Flickr, including video. But this change is about improving basic parts of Flickr that haven’t been changed in a much longer time, Srivastava said.

The Cashback site on its own ranked 12th in search engine traffic for the week ending September 27, Dougherty said.

Paying people to search, in effect, has its limits, though. One analyst said Microsoft’s newer SearchPerks incentive, which gives points for searching that can be redeemed for prizes, smacks of desperation and could hurt the company’s reputation. (Also, it requires Internet Explorer to sign up.)

The Cashback program is attracting attention of visitors to Microsoft's search sites, Hitwise reported.

“We see an interesting trend where the share of visits to the Cashback section of MSN Live is increasing,” said research director Heather Dougherty on the company’s blog. “Eleven weeks ago, MSN Cashback represented 3.75 percent of the traffic to Live.com and grew to 6.29 percent last week. This rise in Cashback’s traffic underscores the interest in the program, which is likely to be getting a boost from shoppers looking to save money and stretch their budgets given the current economic climate.”

While Cashback accounts for an increasing fraction of Microsoft searches, though, the company’s overall search share has stayed level at about 5.4 percent in July, August, and September, Hitwise said. Over that period, Yahoo dropped from 18.7 percent to 18.1 percent, while Google increased from 70.8 percent to 71.2 percent.

Microsoft’s Cashback program, which offers people discounts on products purchased through the company’s Live search engine, is attracting visitors, research firm Hitwise said Friday.

Microsoft, though, appears more worried about getting brand recognition in search in the first place than about having that brand hurt. “We know we have some challenges with the brand and perception. Simple awareness is still a challenge for us,” said spokeswoman Whitney Burk earlier. And paying people to search can work: “Over the long-term these programs have changed people’s behavior.”

(Credit:
Hitwise)

Yahoo’s financial results came in lower than analyst expectations for revenue and net income, but the stock is trading higher after hours. Here are highlights from what Chief Executive Jerry Yang, President Sue Decker, and Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen have to say about the second quarter during the company’s conference call.

• Yang made the case, essentially, that the executive exodus was all part of Yahoo’s plan. “We are actively promoting talented executives…The senior managers we placed in the last 12 months are nearly equally divided between external and (internal). We continue to recruit exceptional leaders.”

•  Decker said revenue per search is doing well. “We expect RPS growth to accelerate in back half of the year,” she said. “Our search assets are only growing in value. We believe we can sustain a three-year average growth of 15 percent in RPS, or more.”

Decker didn’t sound complacent, but she was bullish on gains made compared to Google, which today gets the most revenue per search ad. “We had another quarter of narrowing the RPS gap,” she said.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

• That’s it for today’s call. Thanks for tuning in.

• One of Yahoo’s changes to its search-ad platform was the incorporation of technology to set minimum bids for search terms, a method called marketplace reserve pricing that can increase revenue per search. So far, that had “a very modest effect” on revenue, but Decker has higher hopes as it’s deployed more widely: “We announced it in late April, but did not have very significant percentage of our queries impacted. Where we did have queries impacted by it, it was very positive,” she said.

• Yahoo is working hard on delivering a unified tool geared to make it as easy for advertisers to run display-ad campaigns as it is to run search-ad campaigns. But it’s not easy: “Buying search is straightforward, but buying display is hard,” Decker said. There’s only one interface for search, but display ads vary greatly in targeting techniques, the properties on which they’re being shown, pricing models, and formats that range from text to banners to video.

• Yang optimism: “The indicators of Yahoo’s progress are promising.”

• Decker said page views are up in India because of Glue Pages, which present search results in number of related modules, some potentially sponsored, rather than in a straight textual list of Web sites.

• Decker said that greater user engagement in revamped, more customizable My Yahoo could increase ad inventory. “The initial results are promising…As we scale this to other parts of the network, this could have an impact on page views and monetization of inventory,” she said.

Once Yahoo gets the tools right, though, Decker has high hopes to trigger a lot more advertising. “By removing friction, we believe our platform will greatly accelerate…the transition from offline to online.”

• Yang is relieved Carl Icahn is now an ally (we’ll see if he’s more genial on the board than he has been off it): “Our board and management are pleased to have reached this agreement to settle the proxy contest…We look forward to working with the new board members who will be joining us.”

• Decker said there is no change to the 100-day schedule to implement the Google search-ad deal, and said Yahoo isn’t changing its forecast of revenue from the deal, at least for now. Previously the company said that for the first 12 months of the deal, Yahoo expects up to $800 million in new revenue and $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow.

“Already, Glue Pages have produced a meaningful lift in page views and search sessions for Yahoo India,” Decker said. “While Glue was only out for half the quarter and on 4 percent of the Yahoo India search queries, user volumes are up more than 20 percent and we experienced a 1 percent search share improvement in May according to ComScore, indicating that Glue is delivering on our commitment to provide a compelling and locally relevant online search experience.”

Yahoo's revenue, excluding commissions called traffic acquisition costs. (Click to enlarge.)

But advertising has a tough environment. “We were affected by weakness in the overall economy,” he said. With consumer packaged goods and finance, branded advertising revenue “softened.”

• To recap, here are Yahoo’s numbers: Revenue excluding commissions increased 8 percent to $1.346 billion, shy of the $1.37 billion analysts had expected. Net income was 10 cents per share, excluding items, compared to 11 cents expected by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

The juicy news was first reported by a virtually unknown blogger, Josh Chandler. And with all the chatter, you’d think it were the next AOL-Bebo. That’s because the world of tech blogs (and this one is no exception) has a remarkable tendency to ignore the fact that Twitter is still largely a foreign concept outside the digitally astute and that there are plenty of avid Twitter users who still don’t know what Summize is.

As far as acquisitions go, this one would at least make sense. Twitter’s own search functions are limited, and Summize has proven to be one of the more impressive applications built on Twitter’s application program interface (API). It’s proven useful for searching up-to-the-minute conversations, a helpful tool to see what people are saying across the Web.

The problem would be, as Chandler himself points out, that Twitter has plenty of its own issues and an acquisition could be distracting, to put it nicely. With Twitter’s own stability and profitability still on the line, this promising start-up could easily make a wrong turn if it lets that fresh $15 million in funding get to its head.

Neither Twitter nor Summize was immediately available for comment.

Over the past day, a flurry of tech blogs has bloomed with rumors that microblogging service Twitter might buy Summize, a nifty Twitter search engine.

The rumor is also still a good deal unfounded. GigaOM wrote that “it is not just a rumor and a deal is certainly in the works.” Silicon Alley Insider wrote that “a source close to the company tells us it’s not true.”

So even though VenCorps is to my mind a form of stunt marketing, an “American Idol” of venture investing, the operation might help a few young companies get their ideas off the ground. Certainly, there’s no reason that the traditional three-white-guys model of picking VC investments deserves a monopoly on the process.

VenCorps' Sean Wise.

See also: Vator.TV; Spigit; ThotMarket; CrowdSpirit.

VenCorps’ parent company is Spencer Trask, a serious, non-stunt venture firm. Its $2 billion fund is underwriting the VenCorps project.

That said, Wise has thought through a lot of the complex prediction market and real-world contest elements in this model. VenCorps is, incidentally, feeding into the Ph.D. thesis he’s working on in prediction market economics. There are other elements here that tie the model together: There’s a “showdown,” or contest, that pits user favorites against each other for a $50,000 prize; and there’s an economy behind the reward points that companies can exploit by participating in the model. Also, VenCorps will aim to rope in experienced start-up investors and get them to commit their expertise to making the contests’ winners successes in the real world.

Instead, VenCorps lets you pick out the start-ups from its list of company submissions that you think would be good investments. VenCorp invests money in the companies its community members think are best. For users, there’s no upfront buy-in to the game. And likewise there’s no massive VC-level payback if VenCorps strikes it rich on one of your picks. VenCorps, from the user’s perspective, is a prediction market: you pick winners and pay for your picks with your online reputation, and get paid back primarily in kind.

VenCorps is a idea marketplace, but there's real money behind it.

Would you put time and effort into making recommendations in VenCorps?

( polls)

So, while VenCorps users may be, “smarter than three white guys in a board room,” as instigator Sean Wise says, I’m not sure it’s smart enough to give the funded companies the leg up they’ll need.

If you think you have what it takes to be a venture capitalist, you will definitely want to check out VenCorps when it launches in about three months. It lets you try your hand at picking start-ups to invest in.

VenCorps is not an actual fund in which you can participate. If you want to invest real money in a portfolio of pre-public companies, you can’t, at least not without inside connections. That’s what public company registration, and the public stock markets are for.

The VenCorps playing field is not level. When you first sign up for the game, the site takes your history and weighs your influence in its rankings based on your work experience, education, and other factors. From that point, your performance influences the weight your votes get: Pick well and your influence increases. Do badly and you sink into irrelevance. But you’ll have more influence at the start if you have experience in investing or entrepreneurship.

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman / CNET)

So why bother? Because you can win points, which can be redeemed for prizes, and maybe token cash amounts. And because if you really do want to be a VC, VenCorps, should it ever go into hiring mode, will tap its users who have proven that they can pick winners.

It is worth mentioning–strongly–that picking companies to invest in is only a part of the venture capital process. Money that’s just thrown at a start-up without a parallel investment in time and expertise by the people behind it is called “dumb money” for a good reason. VenCorps’ model of crowd-sourcing the investment strategy is, thus, only half the battle; actually doing well for the companies that the fund invests in is just as important. And in this regard, there’s a bit of a disconnect: If, for example, the VenCorps community picks a great company in a field that the VenCorps employees (the partners) don’t have expertise in, the smart VenCorps money could become dumb, and a potentially good investment could go bad.

What’s your score?

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

[via Kotaku]

The one nice thing about TypeRacer compared with Keybr (review) is that it uses real words. It’s also a stickler about errors, requiring you to go back and make any fixes before continuing the race, keeping lead-finger slopsters from winning based on speed alone. I’m not really sure if TypeRacer really helps you type any faster, but it sure is fun.

A side effect of that was seeing our own Caroline McCarthy in action, typing away. In case you’re wondering part of the reason she’s so productive, it’s her keyboard skills–which I think put her in the league of a court stenographer. If you’d like to know how you stack up in the typing world, there’s TypeRacer–a wonderfully simple game that pits you up against other typers, and of course your 100-plus key stead.

See how your typing skills stack up with TypeRacer. And yes, in case you were wondering: Even the fastest cars are still VW Beetles.

This past week at the Web 2.0 Expo has been a great chance to meet up with other bloggers and come face to face with some of the companies we write about every day. It’s also a great time to see how other people work, as we’re all packed into small seats in large auditoriums, or scouring rooms for the last remaining outlet to get the necessary wattage to keep writing.

The goal is to type as well as you can to get your
car from point A to point B. All the while you can compete with other users in real time and “race” across the landscape of the English language.

Separate solar chargers can be small, but they add to the number of items consumers must carry around. Also, many solar chargers are essentially just small solar panels without the ability to store electricity for later.

Electricity generated from the cells would be fed to the device’s rechargeable battery.

Rather than make a separate charger, Apple engineers have sought to package solar cells right into the device in an unobtrusive way. Electricity-generating cells could be placed underneath the device’s display. Specifically, the patent application details the use of a semitransparent display with a solar cell placed underneath it.

More significant, though, are the attempts by Apple and Morotola to package a solar cell into a device.

(Credit:
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office)

This integrated design would allow the mobile device, be it a PDA or portable music player, to be charged from daylight without having a separate solar panel that needs to be plugged into it.

A patent application, unearthered by MacRumors.com, describes technology to integrate solar cells into portable devices. The named inventors of the patent application are Apple employees, some of whom are
iPod engineers.

Drawings from the patent application show ways that a solar cell could be placed on the back cover of a device.

Having a solar cell integrated into a display or cover makes the device more likely to absorb light than if the panel is placed on the back.

Using small solar panels to charge portable devices is nothing new; there are several such products already available. Apple appears to be trying to innovate in the integration of the solar cells into a portable device.

Images from an Apple patent for solar cells in portable devices.

What remains to be seen is how much power an integrated cell, hid behind a display, can generate. This is dependent, of course, on the availability of light. But most likely, any solar-powered iPod or
iPhone would include an AC adapter for standard charging.

In an older patent, Motorola sought to build a display that would allow enough light in to reach solar cells that charge a device. Its display calls for “organic light-emitting diode displays, and touch-sensitive displays are stacked with one or more solar cells.”

Sandwiched together, the device’s cover would have “at least one glass layer coupled to the solar-cell layer; and a flexible printed circuit board (PCB) layer coupled electrically and mechanically to the solar-cell layer,” according to the patent application.

In a patent application, Apple engineers envision a solar panel integrated into a portable electronic device.

Apple has taken a shine to using solar cells in its mobile devices.

(Credit:
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office)

The patent application also describes using multiple solar cells coupled to specific electrical components within a device, including the data-processing system and the memory.

(Credit:
CNET.News)

And that occurred even without big sales of Atom processors, which Intel debuted in the second quarter. These chips are geared for what Intel describes as Internet-centric “netbook” and “nettop” alternatives to current notebooks and desktops. Truth be told, though, it’s still not clear how much impact Atom will have. Witness CEO Paul Otellini’s seeming putdown of his own product: “(Atom) is less than a third the performance of our Centrino (processor). You’re dealing with something that most of us wouldn’t use,” he said.

But enough computer shoppers, here and abroad, will be buying increasing numbers of these and other notebook computers. The second-quarter news Intel reported about notebook sales was not an anomaly. The trend will continue until the popularity of notebooks get eclipsed by even smaller devices. None of this suggests that the curtain is about to close on the era of big desktop PCs imminently. But “Let’s get small” has become more than just a mantra for the future. It’s now the present.

My back-of-the-envelope tally of friends and colleagues turns up the same taste trend. Few say they plan to spend money on desktops any more. Those who do say it’s because they need the bigger computer for serious gaming applications. I hang with a crowd of early adaptors, but it’s not just the predilections of the double soy nonfat latte crowd. Now the statistics are starting to bear out the anecdotal evidence.

One of the big surprises out of Intel’s second quarter numbers is that for the first time, demand for notebook processors outstripped the company’s product sales for desktop machines. Everyone expected this would happen one day, but the future just got here a lot faster than most folks–including Intel–ever assumed.

It’s hard to remember the last time I bought a desktop computer. Sometime back in the stone age, I suppose, when vendors still bundled the machines with CRT screens.

One middle-aged man in a faded NeXT T-shirt raised his hand for the microphone. If IDG wanted to save Macworld, he suggested, it should hold a “schwag-fest,” where Macolytes could bond over swapping tchotchkes from Macworlds past.

In the hardware arena, Apple completed its notebook refresh with the introduction of a 17-inch MacBook Pro, which brings the unibody design, trackpad button, and new displays to the company’s largest laptop. It will cost $2,799, the same price as the current 17-inch MacBook Pro. Apple is using a new type of battery that it says will allow the notebook to get between seven and eight hours of battery life, depending on which graphics chip is running.

The investment group would take Yahoo, which would have a $20 billion market cap under those terms, and simultaneously sell its search and marketing business to Microsoft under its previous terms presented in June, according to the report.

Also of note
President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team asked Congress to consider postponing the upcoming national switch to digital television, warning that more congressional action is needed to address potential problems…A man who posted a negative review of a chiropractor on Yelp, suggesting that the doctor was dishonest, is now facing a defamation lawsuit…Meg Whitman has been talked about as far back as March as a candidate for governor of California. Now there’s more evidence that the former eBay CEO will actually run.

In search of
Microsoft is hoping two new distribution deals will give its Live Search a much-needed boost. The company announced a global deal with Dell that will make Live Search the default search engine and will bundle the Windows Live toolbar on the bulk of Dell’s consumer and small-business PCs sold over the next three years. That deal is in addition to a five-year pact with Verizon Wireless, news of which slipped out earlier Wednesday.

These are the latest efforts for Microsoft, which has been trying–and struggling–for the past four years to build a search business that can substantively rival Google. But the latest market share numbers indicate that Microsoft is falling even further behind. Searches at Windows Live Search fell 16.7 percent year over year, giving Microsoft 9.1 percent market share in the U.S. in November, according to Nielsen Online figures released earlier this week. Google’s searches rose 21.7 percent, for 64.1 percent market share, and Yahoo’s searches dropped 1.4 percent from November 2007, for a 16.1 percent share.

But one source familiar with the search noted: “She has always been a strong candidate.”

Veghte also said that the economy is factoring into his marketing plans for Windows, which is in the middle of an advertising push initially estimated at several hundred million dollars over several years.

Despite tons of rumors circulating about what we could expect to hear from Apple this week at Macworld, one announcement caught everyone off-guard. After insisting for months that CEO Steve Jobs’ health was a private matter, Apple changed its tack in the face of widespread speculation that Jobs’ weight loss had contributed to his decision to skip the conference.

“I’m telling them that it could go either way,” Veghte said in an interview with CNET News. “We will ship it when the quality is right, and earlier is always better, but not at the cost of ecosystem support and not at the cost of quality.”

Microsoft has been pretty clear that it is no longer interested in buying Yahoo, but a group of investors is reportedly putting together a buyout deal for Yahoo that would call for Microsoft’s financial backing. Such an arrangement would ask the investment group to pay a premium of about 20 percent to Yahoo’s current share price, which closed Wednesday at $13 a share, for the entire company.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News)

Decker has undergone two full rounds of in-depth interviews with Yahoo’s board, according to sources. And, in executive recruiting circles, more than one in-depth interview with an internal candidate signals a strong contender.

However, now that it has cleared the air and addressed the state of Jobs’ health, Apple may be forced to give regular updates, according to corporate governance experts. And, they add, the company will need to be very careful, as it was on Monday, about how it words those statements.

iTunes users can upgrade their music libraries with a click of a button. For an additional 30 cents per song, consumers can receive a DRM-free version of their existing tracks at a 256Kbps rate.

But in perhaps the biggest announcement of the night, Ballmer said that Microsoft is ready with a beta version of
Windows 7 and showed off some of its key consumer features. Microsoft said it was immediately available for technical beta testers and those in Microsoft’s TechNet and MSDN developer programs and would be made publicly available Friday. The company still isn’t officially committing to a final release in time for this year’s holiday season, although it’s clearly aiming for that.

Yahoo may have fallen out of favor with Wall Street after the failed Microsoft buyout bid, but that doesn’t mean you can count Yahoo President Sue Decker out of the running for CEO, people familiar with executive search say.

A number of industry players and major Yahoo investors had discounted Decker as a viable CEO candidate for the struggling Internet search pioneer, following Microsoft’s failed buyout bid of $33 a share for the company.

Ballmer used his address to announce new deals for Windows Live that will see Microsoft’s search engine become the default on PCs from Dell. He also touted a deal with Verizon Wireless that was leaked earlier in the day (more on those deals below). In addition, the company is counting on two Halo game releases this year to help keep the
Xbox 360 going in the right direction.

Top Windows executive Bill Veghte said the company is telling PC makers that Windows 7 might or might not be ready in time for this year’s holiday season.

As CNET News reported first, Apple announced plans to lift DRM technology from its entire catalog of 10 million iTunes songs by the end of April. Eight million songs are DRM-free as of today, and labels will be allowed to charge different prices for their songs, in a departure from the previous iTunes Store policies.

Whether IDG will take up his suggestion is unknown. But IDG has a few of its own ideas for next year’s show. An executive revealed that next year’s Exhibit Hall at Macworld will be free for those attending this year’s show; a similar pass cost $25 this year. But there is no plan right now beyond 2010. The executive also confirmed CNET’s report that Apple’s decision caught IDG totally by surprise, speaking often of the “new business reality” that has been thrust upon the company in a very short period of time.

Steve Jobs, hormonally imbalanced but apparently otherwise fine.

On Monday, the company issued a statement that Jobs was suffering from a hormone imbalance that was “robbing” proteins from his body. That news cheered Apple investors, who dreaded far worse news regarding Jobs’ health after a report last week that his health was “declining rapidly.”

While there are no legal guidelines for companies to follow in making decisions about how and what to disclose involving the health matters of their executives, Apple may have decided that enough was enough following reports predicting its CEO’s imminent demise.

Dueling show in the desert
Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, the Consumer Electronics Show kicked off without Bill Gates’ customary keynote. Instead, the Microsoft part-timer was replaced by CEO Steve Ballmer.

As far as Macworld’s future without Apple’s participation, the show will go on in 2010. But it likely will have a much different look. IDG World Expo, the company that puts on Macworld, hopes to get a clearer idea itself from a town-hall style meeting it opened to Macworld attendees to solicit ideas for the future of the show.

The company also announced new versions of the iLife and iWork software suites.

This year’s most prominent tech trade shows were as notable for who wasn’t in attendance as for what was unveiled.

Despite Jobs’ absence, Apple took advantage of the San Francisco expo take the wraps off products it’s been working on.

A decision may be coming soon.

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