Before there was an iPhone, Android and App Store, there was Yahoo! Go. Launched in 2006, Yahoo! Go was an application offered news, mail, weather, traffic, and Yahoo! search from a mobile device. Today, Yahoo is announcing that Yahoo! Go will be shutdown on January 12, 2010.
The app seemed to be ahead of it’s time when it launched but now is useless thanks to Yahoo creating prettier, more powerful, personal content-focused apps that specialize in products, such as Flickr, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo released three versions of Yahoo! Go but hasn’t released a new version in the past year. The last iteration of the app included a mobile widget platform and was available on select Nokia and Windows Mobile devices
HDTVs are increasingly becoming Internet appliances as much as they are televisions. The latest trend from all the major manufacturers are to include widgets and local network access which is pushing the limits of the custom CPUs. This is why LG has shifted focus away from making the central CPU itself, and outsourced the work to ARM.
LG has reportable chosen the ARM11 MPCore Processor to do the dirty in upcoming HDTVs. This chip is a multi-core CPU that, along with the ARM Mali graphics chip, should eliminate everyone’s main complaint about on-TV widgets: lag.
First announced at CES, Yahoo!’s widget engine, Connected TV, is now shipping with the Samsung 7000 series LED HDTV, which starts at $2500. The 7000 series Samsung LED HDTVs can either be wired into your home network or connected through a wireless router that costs an extra $80 from Samsung.
The widgets essentially let you surf the Web while you’re catching up on some boob tube. There are shortcut buttons on the TV controller itself and new widgets can be downloaded via the Widget Gallery. Here you can find widgets for Twitter, USA Today Sports, Flickr, Netflix, Amazon, The NYT, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Weather and Yahoo! Finance.
At the Samsung press conference earlier today at CES 2009, Yahoo’s involvement with Samsung’s new HDTV line was revealed to be an integrated system of Widgets, based on a new Konfabulator engine. They went through it very briefly, but Flickr, news, finance, and other Yahoo services are fully available and integrated into an on-screen display, for use during usual TV watching. They call it Medi@ 2.0, a wholly buzz-oriented name, but you’ll probably just call it “Yahoo TV” or “The Stocks.”
Here’s a video of the interface in action — dramatized, it looks like, but a good indicator of what it should look like on your Samsung, should you choose to accept one.
Hey script kiddies, next time you steal some unsuspecting person’s password, you’d better be prepared to do five years in prison. That’s what the kid who “hacked” Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account faces, now that he’s been indicted by a federal grand jury.
The kid, now identified as David Kernell, a 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee, has been accused of accessing Palin’s e-mail account without her authorization.
The kid is screwed, in other words.
If convicted, the kid faces five years in prison, a $250,000 and three years of “supervised release.” No Facebook for him, I’m guessing.
So, kids, let this be a warning to you: don’t try to impress your friends by reading powerful people’s e-mails. To quote Denzel Washington from Training Day, this kid is federally f*cked now.
The following is the first entry in my BAFTA-winning series, “Privacy, piracy and the dark side of the Internet.” It’ll be slightly above average.
Beauty queen turned vice-presidenial nominee Sarah Palin had her Yahoo! e-mail account broken into last week. (Who uses Yahoo! e-mail?) It was a heinous crime, right up there with the Lindburg baby, and one that exposed her horribly boring personal life to the world. It was a political non-event: no saucy tidbits, no porno site passwords, no that-moose-deserved-its. But the likes of Fox News and Drudge used the opportunity to scare the pants off normal folks: “hackers!” “evil!” “danger!” And so on.
As a well-known security expert, I’m more than happy to offer a few tips and tricks to help prevent you from ending up like Palin over there.
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The very fabric of our democracy came under attack last week when a hacker broke into Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s e-mail account. Federal investigators have since been involved, and are closing in on a possible culprit, a college student at the University of Tennessee.
Investigators have tracked an IP address to student housing at The Commons in Knoxville, part of the University of Tennessee. It seems the student in question, 20, did, in fact, try to cover his trail by using a proxy server (provided by Ctunnel.com), but the Feds have already figured him or her out.
Next time, elite hacker, use something like Tor, which will help out at least a little bit.
Still, if found out, the hacker isn’t expected to face any serious jail time because of some sort of legal loophole.
I’ve wanted a bike for a couple months now and I think Yahoo! and Electra just made me forget about that James Perse bike that I’ve been attempting to steal from the West Village store. 20 specialized Electra bikes were dispersed to NYC, San Francisco, LA, Toronto, UK, Australia, Singapore, Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Vermont. Five of those Flickr bikes will be sent out on special assignments that will be decided upon by Yahoo! users. The rest were divvyed up between some of Flickr’s most prolific photographers and a select group of others.
So how does this thing work?
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It’s no secret that Yahoo has been struggling. It seemed they went one way and the rest of the web went another. Well, fine. They’re big enough to take to take a few wrong turns. Now however, they want to get on the same path that others like Facebook and MySpace have been following. To do this they need to attract developers – developers that have been flocking to other sites such as Google or Facebook. But to do that, they need to make things easier for developers in the first place.
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Today at CTIA Yahoo announced oneConnect for the Apple iPhone. The stand-alone app aims to aggregate all your social networks into one place. Naturally, all your favorites are included: Facebook, YouTube, Dopplr, Twitter, Flickr, even Friendster. Of course Yahoo being Yahoo, others are included too.
Read the rest over on MobileCrunch.
Patrick Barry, VP of Connected TV from Yahoo demonstrated the “Widget Channel”, which aims to seamlessly integrate the Internet with television. Yes, yes, I know we’ve all heard that one before. But this time, they tell us, it will be different.
The Widget Channel is non-intrusive. All previous attempts at marrying the web with TV have obscured the actual experience of watching television by forcing a browser or some other distraction upon the user. By utilizing a widget approach, apps can be integrated into the Widget Dock that can rest alongside the bottom of the screen, much like a news ticker. (The screen can easily be resized if you actually are watching something with a news ticker).
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Oh, Yahoo. Why do you make it so hard to like you?
Take this story. Yahoo is shutting down its music download store at the end of September, including the DRM validation servers. Without DRM validation servers, people who purchased tracks outright won’t be able to play them.
In other words, people will be left with useless files on their hard drives. Nice.
To be fair, it’s not like Yahoo is completely screwing its [former] customers. The company will provide coupons to download the previously downloaded (but now useless) songs again from Rhapsody, which will be DRM-free MP3s. That, or you can get your money back. Your choice.
Meh, to be honest, Yahoo is doing right by it customers, and this is more of an illustatrion of how silly DRM is more than anything else.
HP, Intel and Yahoo have teamed up to create the Cloud Computing Test Bed, creating a distributed computing platform for third-party research and application building. There will be six data centers spanning the globe, with the three other partners being, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.
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Yahoo announced that effective Sept 30, they will be shutting down the servers needed for customers who need to reauthorize their legally purchased music. Yahoo previously had announced the demise of their Unlimited Music Store.
DRM encoded tracks have caused a commotion since they were introduced as a piracy-fighting tactic. Users purchasing new computers and operating software upgrades have had to reauthorize their playlists each time. Not surprisingly, that came with a high degree of customer frustration.
As DRM finds its way out the door, more online music retailers are abandoning the technology. In a recent move, Microsoft announced they would shut down their servers in 2011. (After initially pegging an August date). Yahoo suggests that users burn their DRM tracks to CD while they still can. Thanks Yahoo.
Flickr’d. I’d pay money for a poster-sized version of this photo of Carrie.
Getty Images may soon buy your Flickr photos. The professional photo database has teamed up with Yahoo!, which owns Flickr, to look for great photos that it can turn around and sell to its clients. Of course, as photographer, you’d get a cut of the action if and when Getty buys your photo off Flickr.
Some of the comments on the Bits blog are all, “Waa, this will kill professional photographers/what incentive do they have now blah blah…” A Getty rep was quick to say that today’s advertisers are looking for authenticity as much as anything else, and Flickr is loaded with “authentic,” and “folksy” images.
Very cool, I think, and all the more reason to use Flickr.
Microsoft stopped by Yahoo’s apartment this morning to pick up a bottle of cologne, a pair of sweat pants, and the mountain bike that it had left there and found that Yahoo had stayed home from work. They got to talking and it seems that absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder, as the two companies are considering an alternative agreement which would “not involve a full buyout” of Yahoo by Microsoft, according to Reuters.
In a statement, Microsoft said it “is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative”…
…After Microsoft’s statement, Yahoo confirmed it was looking at a number of “value maximising” alternatives with Microsoft, and would assess offers made by the firm.
Details beyond that are pretty scant as this point, but isn’t it nice to see these kids try to work out their differences? They just needed some space, that’s all.
Just wanted to update everyone on the awkward slow-dance going on between Yahoo! and Microsoft. According to the New York Times, Microsoft apparently upped its offer to buy Yahoo! from the initial $31 per share to an undisclosed amount. Yahoo! believes itself to be worth at least $37 per share and The Times is reporting that “Microsoft suggested it was willing to pay more than $33 a share,” according to sources involved with the negotiations.
Yahoo! has been repeatedly declining offers from Microsoft, although co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang has said that it’s not because Yahoo! doesn’t want to strike a deal, it’s because Yahoo! feels that Microsoft’s initial bid “substantially undervalued the company.” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told his employees last Thursday, “I know exactly what I think Yahoo is worth to me. I won’t go a dime above, and I will go to what I think it’s worth if that gets the deal done.”
Just an update for those of you keeping score in the Microsoft vs Yahoo! potential merger/buyout/hostile takeover — I’ll keep this as short as possible.
Microsoft sent a letter to Yahoo! basically saying “We’ve repeatedly tried to buy your company. You have three weeks to sell. If you don’t, we’ll just buy a bunch of your stock.” Yahoo! sent a letter back to Microsoft basically saying “Your offer is weak, we’re not selling even though your initial offer was 62% above our market value. Make a decent offer and we’ll sell. Please don’t buy our stock.”
Yahoo! should just sell. It’ll get more money than if Microsoft buys out a bunch of its stock and replaces its board members. It’s going to happen either way. Get it over with and then we can be done with this and continue to use Google to search for stuff.
Full letters from Microsoft and Yahoo! after the jump…
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I love how other, unnamed blogs characterize Microsoft’s threat to pursue a hostile takeover of Yahoo! as “mean” or “oh man, they’re playing hardball now, watch out!” Like, if a company’s shareholders want a takeover to occur, but the board doesn’t, and the bid goes though, it’s a hostile takeover. That’s it. It’s not like Ballmer is running into Yahoo! HQ and taking the building over by force.
But, we’re not really concerned with financials here, so, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. Just a peculiar thing I noticed while listening to some random band I found on What.cd and planning the rest of my day.
