Yahoo! Weekly News: November 20, 2009

ConAgra And Yahoo! Search For Lunchtime Viewers
(Extracted from BrandWeek 11/14/2009) ConAgra Foods is putting snackable online media on its menu via a deal with Yahoo, which will run an online daily branded entertainment comedy program, "What's So Funny?" this month. The show, which began last week, runs on the display ad giant's television portal—Yahoo TV—and features hosts Shira Lazar and Michael Bachmann recapping the funniest moments from the previous evening's prime-time television lineup. Each clip follows a "he said," "she said" format, with viewers at the end of each show ultimately deciding. (Results are announced at week's end.)

Perspective: Yahoo!'s Turnaround Efforts Are Straight From Steve Jobs' Playbook
(Extracted from BNET, 11/17/2009) Carol Bartz, the still new CEO of Yahoo, convened her first meeting for Wall Street analysts a few weeks ago. Forget the specifics for a moment. She could have been talking about another iconic Silicon Valley company that had gone astray under experienced but ineffectual leaders who had been brought in from other industries to shore up damage done by the company's precocious founders. When Steve Jobs returned as interim CEO in 1998, Apple was perilously close to financial collapse. Jobs acted decisively in his first few months, killing the Newton PDA, rescinding the company's nascent "Mac Clone" strategy, paring a gangly product portfolio down to two basic machines, and sealing a controversial deal with archenemy Microsoft that gave Gates & Co. a chunk of Apple stock in exchange for an investment of more than $100 million and the commitment to keep developing software for the Mac. Bartz, who has occupied Yahoo's corner office for barely 10 months, has had to move quickly to repair a hemorrhaging brand and restore morale to a company that was a pioneer of Internet cool. She wasn't a returning founder, but she had street cred as the successful CEO of Autodesk, the leading maker of 3-D design software.

Leadership In The Information Age
(Extracted from Economist Online 11/13/2009) From The World in 2010 print edition The best bosses will be those who learn to swim amid all the information swirling around them, argues Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!.

Information will be the greatest opportunity for business leaders in the coming years—and perhaps our biggest headache. Since the dawn of the internet, all of us in business have been swept up by the Niagara of information that fills our daily life. Real-time updates from the Hang Seng index; online earnings calls; photos shared around the world seconds after they've been taken; customised maps and directions delivered to you even as you drive. It's all breathtaking. But for leaders in business, the information surge has triggered its own unintended consequences, especially for those of us over 40. Today, new employees arrive on their first day with an alarming amount of know-it-all. They have already read about you, and the online critiques of your plans, strategies and management style. The bloggers and the tweeters—all receiving steady streams of in-house gossip—analyse, assess and ridicule every business moment. At some companies, insider information can barely be said to exist.

Egypt To Apply For First Arabic Domain Name
(Extracted from AP, 11/16/2009) Egypt will apply for the first Internet domain written in Arabic, its information technology minister said Sunday at a conference grouping Yahoo's co-founder and others to discuss boosting online access in emerging nations. Tarek Kamel said Egypt on Monday would apply for the new domain — pronounced ".masr" but written in the Arabic alphabet — making it the first Arab nation to apply for a non-Latin character domain. The effort is part of a broader push to expand both access and content in developing nations, where the Internet remains out of reach for wide swaths of the population. The registering of the domain "will offer new avenues for innovation, investment and growth, and hence we can truly and gladly say ... the Internet now speaks Arabic," Kamel said at the start of the Internet Governance Forum — a U.N.-sponsored gathering that drew Net legends like Yahoo Inc.'s Jerry Yang and Tim Berners-Lee, known as one of the Internet's founding fathers. "It is a great moment for us," Kamel said of the domain name, which translates as "Egypt"…

... Yang said that while there are over 300 million Arabic speakers in the world, less than 1 percent of the content online is in Arabic. As part of the company's push to boost access in Arabic, Yang said Yahoo would offer its mail and messenger service in Arabic next year. He did not provide an exact date. Yang said there are approximately 325 million Internet users in emerging markets — a figure expected to grow 19 percent yearly through 2012. In all, about 75 percent of the world's population is still not online. Many of the new users from emerging markets "will need Web content, and want more content, in their native language and still others won't just be bound by language and barriers, but have other challenges such as reading, literacy," Yang said. The challenge "isn't just about getting as many people online as possible, but making sure that once they get online, they have something productive to do, something to gain, something meaningful to experience."

Yahoo! Jumps On Twitter Bandwagon To Improve Search
(Extracted from AP, 11/19/2009) Yahoo Inc. is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon in its latest attempt to get people to use its Internet search engine more frequently. Beginning Thursday, Yahoo will mine the short messages posted on Twitter to find fresher information about hot topics. Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. had earlier announced plans to incorporate Twitter messages into search results, but Yahoo said it will be the first among them to include such "tweets" on its main search results. The addition comes at a pivotal time for Yahoo. The company, based in Sunnyvale, California, is bogged down in a three-year financial slump partly because it has losing ground in the lucrative Internet search market to Google and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft. The Twitter twist is the latest sign of Yahoo's resolve to spice up its search results even as it prepares to lean on Microsoft for most of the technology powering its search engine. That transition is scheduled to begin next year. Microsoft so far is listing Twitter results in a special section of its search engine, Bing. Google, the Internet's search leader, also plans to include Twitter's chatter in its search results, but has yet to say when that change will occur or how it will do it. Yahoo is relying on Twitter to highlight the latest news about specific subjects. When a user enters a search request tied to breaking news, Yahoo will top the results page with four tabs -- one for direct links to news sites, one for photos, one for video and one dedicated to Twitter.

Exclusive: Yahoo! And Microsoft Poised To Finally Sign Definitive Search And Ad Agreement
(Extracted fry All Things Digital, 11/18/2009) Yahoo and Microsoft are poised to finally sign the definitive agreement that will govern the complex and far-reaching search and online advertising partnership that they struck in late July, said sources close to the situation. If all goes well, the various Microsoft and Yahoo execs–who have been ferreted away over the last weeks busy dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's on the massive document–could even turn in their deal homework to their bosses for signature by the end of the week. Yahoo (YHOO) officials declined to comment, while Microsoft (MSFT) has not gotten back to BoomTown as yet. In any case, getting the definitive agreement in place is a critical one in making the high-profile MicroHoo deal a reality and, of course, getting their anti-Google (GOOG) party started. So, when the pair blew through a deadline to complete it in late October, there were eyebrows raised all over Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Right Media Founder To Leave Yahoo!
(Extracted from the WSJ, 11/16/2009) Michael Walrath, who sold the online advertising exchange Right Media to Yahoo Inc. for $680 million in 2007, is the latest high-profile executive to depart the Internet company. Mr. Walrath, whose most recent title at Yahoo was senior vice president of advertising strategy, explained his decision to leave Yahoo in an interview. He said it was the right time to "move on in my career" and that he looks forward to "taking some time off and working with small innovative companies." A Yahoo spokesman thanked Mr. Walrath for his contributions and said the company has confidence in its "strong and experienced display advertising team."