Fire Eagle is a Yahoo! service that is able to update an user’s physical location. Currently it is in invite-only since the service was launched in March this year.

Currently, an user can easily update her location through the availability of the twelve (12) third-party applications such as brightkite, DOPPLR, Firebot for Twitter, Loki for IE / Firefox, Plazes and etc. And on the other hand, her location data can also be made available to other location platforms. Put simply, if you seriously want people know where on earth are you, and want people to respond to your location, Fire Eagle can be a great platform for you.

In technological setting, Fire Eagle takes what your input to the third-party applications that they supported and then create more value for you, such as weather information or shopping guide around your location, etc. With respect to the privacy issue, you can either hide your location or even purge your location information completely from the Fire Eagle database, which I think this is a big promise that Fire Eagle provided to everyone of their users. Furthermore, to keep you continue in using the service with faith, there is a Fire Eagle setting that you can select how often you’d like to share your location with others, in the options of the following: once a month, or once in every three months, or never. And you feel you’re in total control of your location data, hopefully your destiny as well.

Yahoo! shows its seriousness about Web analytics, in spite of the mid of Microsoft’s bid. Today Yahoo! announced that they are entering the agreement to acquire IndexTools, an establish Web analytics firm. How this acquisition will change the advertising game? Apparently, there is currently no specific indication on how this buy will help Yahoo! in the pursuit of leadership in the online media arena, but it absolutely help Yahoo! in further putting itself in the advertising game against Google. On the contrary, there is a viewpoint pinpointed by ZDNet that it might also served as a strategy to ask for a better price from Microsoft. But you might ask, what attracted Yahoo! from IndexTools? I think that IndexTools, apart from its existing products, is the forthcoming Rubix, an analytic and market segmentation engine. Much has been written in the blogosphere about Rubix, some said it’s look like a strong challenger to the Omniture Discover, a very high-end Web analytic offering.

Obviously, this acquisition showed that Yahoo! has been on a shopping spree, and they’re not paying too much attention to the Microsoft’s bid. Although there are no news on the cost of acquired IndexTools, but the winner will be Yahoo!, in view of this acquisition will give Yahoo! the product it needs and set up a solid footprint in the Web analytics world.

To learn more about what IndexTools is doing, check out the video clip as embedded in below.

Much has been written about Microsoft’s unsolicited offer for Yahoo!, but it’s seemed that Microsoft believed the value of Yahoo! has been dropped since the offer was first made in January. What will be Microsoft’s next step? On April 5, Microsoft sent a letter to Yahoo! board, setting a three-week deadline, i.e. April 26 for an agreement to be made. The full text is listed as below. From now on we know it is a make or break for Microsoft.

April 5, 2008
Board of Directors
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Members of the Board:

It has now been more than two months since we made our proposal to acquire Yahoo! at a 62% premium to its closing price on January 31, 2008, the day prior to our announcement. Our goal in making such a generous offer was to create the basis for a speedy and ultimately friendly transaction. Despite this, the pace of the last two months has been anything but speedy.

While there has been some limited interaction between management of our two companies, there has been no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement. We understand that you have been meeting to consider and assess your alternatives, including alternative transactions with others in the industry, but we’ve seen no indication that you have authorized Yahoo! management to negotiate with Microsoft. This is despite the fact that our proposal is the only alternative put forward that offers your shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.

During these two months of inactivity, the Internet has continued to march on, while the public equity markets and overall economic conditions have weakened considerably, both in general and for other Internet-focused companies in particular. At the same time, public indicators suggest that Yahoo!’s search and page view shares have declined. Finally, you have adopted new plans at the company that have made any change of control more costly.

By any fair measure, the large premium we offered in January is even more significant today. We believe that the majority of your shareholders share this assessment, even after reviewing your public disclosures relating to your future prospects.

Given these developments, we believe now is the time for our respective companies to authorize teams to sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement on a combination of our companies that will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders, creating a more efficient and competitive company that will provide greater value and service to our customers. If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board. The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.

It is unfortunate that by choosing not to enter into substantive negotiations with us, you have failed to give due consideration to a transaction that has tremendous benefits for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees. We think it is critically important not to let this window of opportunity pass.

Sincerely,

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Office
Microsoft Corp.

Vlingo, a startup that specialize in providing voice-powered user interface is announcing a whopping $20 million in a round B financing. This round was led by Yahoo!, joined by existing investors Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners. According to Vlingo (PDF), they’ll use the capital to fuel international expansion and continue its product research and development. As part of the deal, a Yahoo! nominee will join the company’s board. In December 2006, Vlingo also received $6.5 million in Series A financing from Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners.

Vlingo has a pre-existing relationship with Yahoo!, as they are the provider for the voice recognition for Yahoo!’s oneSearch mobile search service (PDF). Many startups are trying to invent new technology to improve the existing mobile technology arena in the face of disruptive technologies and trends. Vlingo has a distinctive mobile speech technology whereby users are allowed to speak their queries instead of writing text formats on their mobile phones. The integration of Vlingo into Yahoo!’s oneSearch will help to bolster mobile search services particularly when users can speak their queries into the search box prepared by Yahoo! oneSearch.

Vlingo, Ma.-based, was founded in 2006, having just launched a beta version of its voice-powered interface in August last year and was named as one of IDC’s “Ten Emerging Mobile Players to Watch” in this year.

You can visit the Vlingo-enable Yahoo! oneSearch at http://m.yahoo.com/voice.

When I was a student studying management long time ago, I thought that if companies are robots, whether or not they have social responsibilities wouldn’t matter. Apart from this, when management gurus analyze company of choice, they usually begin by looking at the activities of a particular company and examine whether the business has undertook its social responsibility. Yet not many companies sufficiently spend time and money in carrying out their responsibilities in the society.

On this topic, I just found that Yahoo! China has done their part, at least in building a site to promote the social awareness of the China people there. Of course, to promote their own users in this aspect is a demanding, and yet idealistic standard, but it seems that they have the aspiration to achieve this goal. On the landing page of Yahoo! GongYi (mean charity), we can find the up-to-date charity news, case studies, such as Chinese Universities students help to make a green planet, and etc., GongYi video site, latest GongYi activities, and finally, the list of philanthropists.

There are two very interesting stories listed on the site. The first one is a survey article, ask the China people whether or not they willingly to pay $20 each to set up a plant foundation, and another article stated that at least five (5) China billionaires have donated more than $100 million each in the past years. In many of these news and articles, I found that while a lot China users were concerned with the issues of philanthropy, such as how to make our planet a better home, curb the poverty, and etc. and they did showed that they’re willingly to spend sufficient time in doing all these. With the launched of this Yahoo! GongYi, I hope they have planted the seeds, and hopefully what we do today will make our tomorrow better.

via [Sina Tech]

Microsoft PressPass has published a text format of an e-mail sent by Kevin Johnson, president of the Microsoft Platforms & Services Division to his employees pertaining to the Microsoft/Yahoo! merger plan. The e-mail discussed about the most popular issues such as arising benefits, staffing, culture, branding, and etc. There is certainly no any statement can be found on Microsoft’s next strategic plan, in a worst-case scenario, if Yahoo! and Microsoft mutually can’t reach on a transaction.

via [AFP]

Yahoo! has launched a new Web 2.0 site for teachers. The site namely as Yahoo! for Teachers is aimed to be a place for educators to find, create, and share standards-based classroom materials, and most important, it is free and without any charge. At this moment, visit to this site required a login ID and password, you can use the user name and password as provided by this blog (click here). After you login, you’ll be prompted to register with this site by keying in your own Yahoo! ID, or navigate this site by explore the projects initiated by the registered teachers there.

On the landing page, you’ll find all the relevant information pertaining to schools, subjects, or even educators. Put an example, if you want to find a school located somewhere near your house address, simply use the Peer Network Map developed by Yahoo! will solve your problem. The Peer Network Map list all the schools available in a single particular zip code, and beside each icon of the school, you can also find who else was already joined the school, the teachers’ profile/portfolio. From the teacher’s portfolio, you can browse her recent project, or any public document available on the portfolio. One of the projects I found on the site is relevant to a Southeast Asian countries, i.e. Singapore. It list all the information such as fact sheet, Website, and text clipping about Singapore. Of course, these type of data are also available if you googling on the Web, but this project present a teacher’s viewpoint on what she believes will interest the readers. For instance, the document in this project is about Sungei Buloh Wetlands. This is a place where you can find a very unique flower, or bird. For each project, you can find the comments made by other teachers.

One notable feature I found on this site is the introduction of Gobbler. Upon you install the Gobbler, it help you easily organize Web pages, images and text clippings from other Websites on the Internet by the offering of the drag and drop functionality. You can thus drag an image you came across from other site and drop it to your project within a single click.

Overall, I find this site showed the creative innovation of Yahoo! towards the education industry. However, there’s still not clear on this site’s business operating model, not like infiLearn (now GlobalScholar). Other than creating a teachers’ network, it’s not easy for Yahoo! to generate revenue from the purpose of this site.

Yahoo! Video, created in year 2006 has a new relaunched version. According to Yahoo! Video blog, more features have been added to the site for the sake of the users, i.e. bigger file size that one can upload, supports a 16:9 cinematastic player, and a “myweb” section has been provided. However, there are things that I think that they should improve, such as to private the videos uploaded which temporarily Yahoo! Video not allowed, for some users that want to share their videos with peers only, this is a needed version. Also, video type and format should include the RMVB file type, I see that this video file type is gaining ground as more and more quality movie are available in this type, and when compare to MPEG 1 or 2, this type of video file appeared to be much smaller, about one-third of the size.

One of the features that sound very interesting is what Yahoo! called an “experimental release,” an ability to see other people watching the same video, assume that their Webcams are also linked to the service. This is what I don’t understand at this moment, but carefully evaluate Yahoo! Video, I found that in order for users to embed their favorite videos to other sites or blogs, the “Embed Code” will only be appeared after the video finished playing.