Yahoo’s critical negotiations with Alibaba to sell part of its stake in Alibaba back to the Chinese company have collapsed according to All Things Digital, a report later confirmed by CNBC. Apparently the collapse includes Yahoo’s parallel and intertwined negotiations with Softbank t...

After the market closed Tuesday, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who’s been generally considered a pimple on the ass of progress since turning down Microsoft’s handsome $44.6 billion offer for Yahoo four years ago, resigned from the Yahoo board and “all other positions with the company.” ...

IP-short Google has gone back to the Big Blue well again for another 217 patents and patent applications. The transaction turned up in a search of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s patent assignment database the other day by SEO by the Sea, the blog that has been keeping tabs on ...

As organizations consider the benefits of bringing high-quality search to the workplace, it’s critical to assess the various factors influencing the ROI they seek. Google search solutions can add to your ROI and boost your bottom line when searching intranets, content systems and appli...

Yahoo is reportedly moving ahead with the idea of selling off a minority stake to a private equity company. The Wall Street Journal claimed Tuesday that Yahoo wants to have a deal in place by Christmas. Otherwise it will pursue other alternatives. The paper said Yahoo has gotten offe...

Microsoft has signed an NDA with Yahoo so it can look at its books, the New York Times reported Wednesday citing a person briefed on the matter. The move could translate into Redmond making a bid for the dysfunctional portal. Microsoft apparently got around Yahoo’s “no crosstalk” st...

The decision taken by some of the country’s State Governments to make a gTLD application will put Australia’s capitals on par with some of the world’s most innovative cities including, London, Paris and Tokyo. On June 20th, 2011 The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (...

Yahoo is reportedly proving itself the stickiest of creatures. After putting itself on the block, it now supposedly doesn’t want to get bought – again – like some nasty reprise of the Microsoft fiasco. Instead it maybe wants to sell its Asian assets – its positions in Alibaba and Y...

Microsoft might take another whack at buying Yahoo. Having been saved by happenstance from overpaying for the joint in 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday that Microsoft, private equity house Silver Lake Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, one of ...

Guess Yahoo is in the market for a new cloud/Hadoop chief having lost its chief cloud architect Todd Papaioannou to Battery Ventures where he will be entrepreneur in residence. He was only at Yahoo 14 months. According to what he told GigaOm, which broke the news, internal IT holds...

MPEG LA, the royalty-collecting agency for AVC/H.264 and other multimedia codecs, told Streaming Media that 12 patent holders have responded to its call for submissions from folks who think the VP8 video codec, a key element in Google’s “royalty-free” WebM codec widgetry, infringes on ...

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has been delegated to go and testify before the US Senate’s antitrust subcommittee in September. Google has been reluctant to send any of its managers but then the Senate reminded Google that it had subpoena powers. Google had offered its chie...

Google has confirmed in a regulatory filing that the Federal Trade Commission means to investigate its search and advertising business for abusing its dominance like the European Commission is doing. It got the subpoena last Thursday, the day the Wall Street Journal reported that the...

Google’s been sued in Paris for anti-competitive behavior by 1plusV, a French specialty search firm that also complained to the European Commission last year and again this year about the search giant’s alleged habit of blocking rivals and depriving them ad revenues by manipulating sea...

Opera founder Jon von Tetzchner is leaving the company because of differences with the board. He wrote in an e-mail to Opera staff that “It has become clear that the board, management and I do not share the same values and we do not have the same opinions on how to keep evolving Oper...

The shoe that’s been dangling at the end of Washington’s toe for ever so long has finally dropped, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly ready to serve Google with civil subpoenas, kicking off what the paper says will be a “wide-ranging, for...

Those who are into search engine optimization typically do a lot of activities to enhance the web visibility of the client’s website. They will change the meta tags, particularly the title, description, keywords, and the alt tags. They will change the HTML coding of the page to make it...

The Federal Trade Commission is going ahead with an antitrust investigation of Google, according to Bloomberg. The wire service reports talking to three people “familiar with the matter” who said that the FTC has told “hi-tech companies to gather information for the probe.” The sto...

Google has formed a new group called WebM Community Cross License initiative in order to protect its WebM video codec from patent attacks. Under this collaboration, group members will license WebM-related patents to each other under royalty-free terms. So far sixteen companies are invo...

Google is losing its product development chief Jonathan Rosenberg, who reportedly felt he couldn’t give the company’s brand new retread CEO Larry Page the open-ended commitment to stay on the job that Page wanted. Or so the story goes. Rosenberg was planning to leave in 2013 when his ...

Google got its way. The Justice Department isn’t going to oppose its $700 million acquisition of ITA Software, which provides the data for airline tickets to airlines and online travel companies, a purchase the agency has been reviewing since last July. But unlike Google’s equally o...

Remember way back when the Internet first became popular? Its main use seemed to be downloading videos of monkeys doing weird things and people having accidents on their skateboards? The Internet was young and it was fun. Then things got serious. The Internet had to get a job, move ...

Already under investigation for antitrust in Europe, Google could face a broad parallel investigation of its dominant search business in the US by the Federal Trade Commission, Bloomberg said Monday quoting two unidentified people “familiar with the matter.” A heck of a way for L...

Microsoft filed a formal complaint with the European Commission Thursday charging Google with unfair practices in search, online advertising and smartphone software, a broader raft of charges against the search giant than the EC is believed to be currently investigating. It is the fi...

Baidu, China’s dominant version of Google, is building its own Chrome OS-like lightweight mobile operating system, the Financial Times said Tuesday after a chat with Baidu’s CEO Robin Li. It appears to want Baidu to open a “web search box” within a second of turning on a smartphone o...

Firefox 4 has been officially out since Tuesday – albeit hurriedly because of IE 9’s appearance last week. It’s got an overhauled Chrome-like UI, hardware acceleration, a souped-up JagerMonkey JavaScript engine, support for HTML 5, CSS3, WebGL and the controversial WebM codec plus a ...

Google’s outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt, who’s supposed to step down next month in favor of Google founder Larry Page, may get to scratch his well-known political itch. Bloomberg says the Obama White House may consider him to replace Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, who will be nominated to g...

Google is trying to sweet talk the European Commission out of declaring Google an abusive monopolist but has yet to put a concrete proposal on the table according to Reuters. The EC has been investigating the company since three European concerns, including a Microsoft subsidiary, fi...

Cloud Expo, Inc. announced on Thursday that Cloud Expo 2011 New York, the 8th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, will take place June 6-9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City. The International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world’s leading Cloud-...

To chase and catch the elusive goddess, Innovation, and fend off clever rivals, Google means to hire 6,200 people this year, which would represent roughly another 25% increase in its workforce after last year’s, more than it ever has before. Where it’s going to hire these people is u...

Outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt is only going to stick around as executive chairman for a year after he turns the company over to co-founder Larry Page, 37, on April 4, according to the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, who wrote the book "Googled." Eric reportedly started getting antsy af...

Inspired by the recent list of who got the most US patents last year, patent watcher Florian Mueller did a flyover of Google’s patents. It was a short trip. Google only holds 576 US patents altogether, 282 gotten just last year – in a world where IBM is now doing better than 5,000 ...

The Google boys are growing up. They’re bouncing their adult supervisor. CEO Eric Schmidt, who twittered “day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!,” will cede his title to Google co-founder and president of products Larry Page on April 4, the company said in a surprise annou...

Microsoft Corp. has released an all-comprehensive free web development kit called WebMatrix to create, customize and publish websites to the Internet. Meant for designers of varying skill levels ranging from students to professional developers and agencies building data driven SEO frie...

Bloomberg followed by the Wall Street Journal said Thursday that the Justice Department is working on an antitrust suit to stop Google’s $700 million acquisition of ITA Software, which provides online flight and ticket information to popular Internet booking sites. It would be the se...

Vancouver-based ENC Security Systems, which is supposed to make “un-hackable” Encrypt Stick flash drive software, has released an Encrypt Stick 5.0 Private Browser, a digital privacy browser that it claims is the safest way to browse the Internet. Its timing couldn’t be better consid...

Europe’s antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia told the European Parliament Tuesday that the Google investigation is likely to be a “difficult case,” Bloomberg said, and apparently one that absorbs a lot of resources. The European Commission couldn’t say whether Google will be forced to tell...

How’s this for scary. Google has cut a deal with the European Patent Office (EPO) to turn its still primitive machine translation widgetry loose on about 1.5 million patents because the Europeans can’t agree on a common language. French, English and German aren’t good enough for Spain ...

Chicago-based "social buying" site Groupon will not, after all, be acquired by Google for approaching $6 billion. That's because Groupon's investors and its CEO Andrew Mason have reportedly ended the "direct negotiations" between the two companies that Reuters was already reporting on ...

Google is reportedly ready to shell out $5 billion-$6 billion – evidently more like $6 billion – to buy two-year-old Groupon. The All Things Digital blog says the bid works out to $5.3 billion down and $700 million in earnouts unless negotiations fall apart. That’s more than Go...