Harvest Business and Internet Blog » yahoo

VMware Acquires Zimbra from Yahoo

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 02:14:20 +0000

So, VMware has officially annonunced that it is buying email and collaboration software vendor Zimbra which was acquired by Yahoo in 2007. Although financial terms of the acquisition were not divulged, some observers say that it is actually lower the amount Yahoo paid for the company when it was still a start-up in 2007. According to the Press Release obtained by AllThingsD , VMware will utilize Zimbra to further its mission in simplifying datacenter, desktop, application development and core IT services in the enterprise setting. Although, it might seem unimportant anymore for Yahoo, Zimbra has been leading the open source email and collaboration solution, boasting of 55 million mailboxes with 85% growth during 2009. But the thing is, Zimbra is operating in an environment where one of the major rival happens to be Google with its Google Enterprise solution. Under the terms of the agreement, VMware will still support Zimbra’s existing products and open source efforts while at the same time enhancing it to fit into VMware’s own product infrastructure. The deal also gives Yahoo the rights to continue utilizing Zimbra technology on its Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Calendar services. The deal will close end of Q1 2010. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . VMware Acquires Zimbra from

Yahoo! Goes Shopping With PriceGrabber

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:44:12 +0000

If you’re an avid Yahoo! user, you probably love the functionality of the homepage. Click any one of their tabs, like ’shopping’, and you’ve got a world of products at your fingertips. Well yesterday, Yahoo announced that as of March 11, 2010, Yahoo! Shopping is partnering with PriceGrabber . Moving forward, Yahoo! shoppers will be asked to sign up with PriceGrabber in order to take advantage of product searches and do what they love best: go shopping! What’s interesting here is that the Bing/Yahoo search deal didn’t cover Yahoo! verticals like shopping, travel, health, finance, etc. Brian Smith of SingleFeed tells us that “Here’s an example where Bing Cashback would have been a very good partner to ‘power’ Yahoo Shopping, but Yahoo decided to go a different route instead and partnered with a competitor to Bing. Not sure if this has happened with Yahoo’s other verticals.” What does this mean? Other Yahoo! tabs will probably start outsourcing their services by partnerning with related sites. Think Yahoo! Travel partnering with Kayak . And Yahoo! Health partnering with webMD . … You get the picture. Read the official letter from the Yahoo! Shopping team. Read more from Comparison Engines about the new partnership between Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Yahoo! Goes Shopping With

Tools to Use and Learn hCard Format – Learning Microformats

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:22:38 +0000

The hCard is a one-to-one representation of the vCard in XHTML format. It is served to turn contact information into a semantically correct HTML, Atom, RSS or any arbitrary XML file. I won’t try to describe why to use it. Quite a few people have done a great job detailing what hCard microformat is and why people should consider using it. One of the best step-by-step guides that any newbie will understand is “The hCard Microformat” tutorial published in 2007 . For those people who won’t learn anything until they are told this will affect rankings, I will only add that hCards are used by Google to create search snippets , (obviously) to rank businesses in local and geo-targeted search and is rumored to use the format more and more extensively. Besides, it helps search (and other) bots to aggregate all the web information about any specific person or business . This post shares some most useful and easy-to0use hCard tools for you to learn how to format n hCard, where to use it and how to take advantage of it. hCard

Facebook Beats Google as the Most Visited Site on Christmas Day

cgseo — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:36:52 +0000

In what could be a preview of an impending battle between Facebook and Google in the coming days, Facebook has beaten Google as the most visited website on both Christmas Even and Christmas Day, says a tweet from Hitwise’s Twitter account. It was the first time that Facebook become the number one site during Christmas Day. Last year it was Google as the most visited site with Facebook closely following behind. But come to think of it, it is not surprising for Facebook to be visited more both during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day since majority of people are spending their online time during those days probably greeting their Facebook contacts, sending Christmas wishes and greetings to their loved ones, friends and family who are not with them on those days. Facebook after all is more of a communication tool than Google. What made the event surprising was due to the fact that Facebook has been lagging behind both Google and Yahoo! Mail all through out the year in terms of site visits. It only goes to show that email is a thing of the past during these days, as Facebook and perhaps other social sites like Twitter are the more preferred ways of communicating online especially during special occasions. Most importantly it is also quite surprising that online users still visited Facebook despite the slew of privacy issues that came out during the year. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Facebook Beats Google as the Most Visited Site on Christmas

Tools and Resources to Learn Google Advanced Operators

admin — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:16:45 +0000

I find it sad that many people are absolutely unaware of Google advanced operators, or even if they do know about the advanced search, they never use it. I for one use Google advanced operators all the time: when doing on-page diagnostics; searching for backlink opportunities, doing competitive research, etc, etc So in this post I decided to share the best tools and tutorials that will help you remember and learn to use the advanced search (if you are not using it already): Advanced search

Yahoo to Shut Down MyBlogLog

cgseo — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:29:09 +0000

Still remember MyBlogLog? Sometime in 2006, it was one of the hottest social networking tool for bloggers because of one simple reason – it allows bloggers to put a face on their blog visitors. I remember using MyBlogLog for quite some time until Yahoo purchased it in 2007 and MyBlogLo started offering blog site analytics tools both as free and paid service. MyBlogLog was a pretty useful blog management tool back then. It’s widget feature was interesting. And it’s ability to show you blog-related trends and information was invaluable. Then somewhere along the way I lost interest in it and perhaps other users too. Although many continue to use it, somehow MyBlogLog lost its luster. Until now, ReadWriteWeb reports that Yahoo is finally shutting down MyBlogLog. Although there was no reason cited yet. Yahoo is probably just doing what is right. MyBlogLog’s lost its relevance today. Does it also show that blogs are becoming obsolete? Perhaps yes, and perhaps no. Blog as a social networking and communication tool is no longer applicable. There’s Facebook and Twitter for that. Blogs’s uses are now reduced as a source of factual information. Going back to MyBlogLog, question now is, what will happen to the accounts of those who still use it. To blogs who rely on MyBlogLog services for their management and administration aspects? What will happen to those paid subscribers, if there are any still? Let’s wait for official announcement from Yahoo for answers to this question. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Yahoo to Shut Down

Analyze Your Current Off-Page Stats with SEJ Tools

admin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:55:28 +0000

Last time I shared a quick tip on how SEJ tools help to analyze your design . Today I am going to share another feature that allows to quickly collect your off-page stats (I say quickly because that’s actually the best part about the tool: there’s nothing there you can’t do yourself but with it you’ll save much time). Quality analyzer (the feature hides behind RESEARCH tab) is the tool that for any given URL generates the following report : The number of pages indexed by Google (as reported by SITE: operator); The number of pages indexed by Yahoo (as reported by SITE: operator); Backlinks in Google (Google’s link: operator); Backlinks in Yahoo; .EDU links (in Yahoo); .GOV links (in Yahoo); Domain age; Domain expiration; Google PageRank; Alexa Traffic rank; Presence in Dmoz. While I understand there are more similar tools, there are a few things I like about this report: Quick links to details (many similar tools lack this basic feature): click through to detailed results on Google or Yahoo; Easy scoring : I like it that 100 is taken as the maximum score, this makes it easier to understand how much you still need to catch on; Up to a point : only necessary information; it doesn’t list any extra superfluous info. All in all, that’s an easy way to evaluate where your site currently stands. Enjoy! Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Analyze Your Current Off-Page Stats with SEJ

Google’s 2009 Acquisitions : Focus on Mobile & Collaboration

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:36:41 +0000

I was reading up on Google acquisitions yesterday and although Google’s acquisition this year is not as many as previous years, particularly 2006 and 2007, Google’s acquisitions in 2009 certainly made sense with their landmark acquisition of AdMob as their most expensive buy. But looking at Google’s 2009 acquisitions from a quality, and not quantity perspective, we see that the company is focusing its takeover of other companies in two major directions : Mobile & Google Apps. The speeding up of the web is essential to growth of mobile computing, whether on the netbook or smartphone, and judging on where Google has put most of its research and development in 2009 : Google Chrome OS, Google powered netbooks, Google Droid Phone and Android Mobile OS … the ability to condense data into a stream which can make the most of our current 3G and mobile networks’ definition of mobile broadband … while also enhance the usefulness of cloud computing, both are essential to Google’s future. Here’s a look at the companies Google acquired in 2009 : On2 – Acquired on August 5, 2009 for $106,500,000 ; On2 is a video compression applications company. As of today, Google has not made any move yet on how it is going to make use of On2, but utilizing it as part of Google Wave and Google Video (which is being tested in GMail Chat) could make cloud conferencing more of a streamlined and less expensive possibility and assist with the adoption of Google Apps by businesses and governments (Washington DC and Los Angeles are currently saving millions using Google Apps). AdMob – Google’s most expensive acquisition of 2009 made it to spend $750,000,000 last month. This could very well fit into Google mobile advertising business and AdMob is the preferred monetization tool of mobile application developers who use AdMob to earn money with free iPhone apps and other downloadable mobile tools. Google will use AdMob to syphon part of Apple’s monetary market in 2010 and integrating AdMob into Google AdSense is an important part of Google’s long term strategy to corner the mobile development market. Gizmo5 – Acquired the same day when Admob was acquired, Gizmo5 is a VoIP company. Google had to spend $30,000,000 for this company, obviously to beef up its Google Voice service, which is again, an essential part of not only Google’s mobile aspirations, but also Google Apps. Teracent – An online display advertising company bought for an undisclosed amount. Google is definitely going to use this for its AdSense program and further expansion into the world of display advertising … or the DoubleClick side of AdSense. While Teracent may not be an obvious mobile oriented acquisition, it will assist Google in better monetizing display advertising by assisting Google’s advertisers with putting together display ads which bring results and sales. The more money Google and its advertisers bring in, the more profitable Google becomes. In my opinion Google beefing up its advertising is a direct target on the Yahoo & Microsoft partnership, as both companies, especially Yahoo, have strong display advertising networks and power display advertising on various online newspapers. Now that Google is bringing the news onto the mobiles and netbooks in an easy to read fashion with Google Fast Flip (the mobile connection), expect Google to make a strong push to work with these same publishing outlets. AppJet (Etherpad) – This online collaboration tool is obviously geared for Google Wave, an essential part of Google Apps and cloud communication. DocVerse – Although still in the planning stages, it looks like Google will soon be acquiring DocVerse, another collaboration tool which allows users to work together around Microsoft Office documents, much in the same manner that Google Docs allows contributors to work on Docs on Spreadsheets. Yet again, another jab at Microsoft and way to streamline applications and make Google Apps an even stronger service in 2010, especially as Microsoft upgrades Office Live. There has been talk of an acquisition of Yelp by Google over the weekend, which could be the largest Google acquisition since YouTube, if not the most important acquisition by Google ever. ( Update: It looks like the deal is off, as TechCrunch reports that Yelp walked away from the negotiation table ). Yelp would be the central offering of Google’s mobile services and would finally complete Google Local with a Google powered review service, instead of its aggregation of other services. With Yelp off the table however, and Google apparently sitting on over $500 million to spend before the end of the year, are there any other companies they should be acquiring? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google’s 2009 Acquisitions : Focus on Mobile &

How to Insert Page Security Alerts Into Google Results

cgseo — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:56:37 +0000

With so much important private information we store at our computers and send to our co-workers, secure browsing is very important. For us, search marketers, there is another benefit of seeing online security flags while we browse: this works as an additional help for SEO diagnostics because security flags can easily be the reason of low rankings. So this post lists four tools that insert security report right within Google SERPs for you to see if there are any issues even before clicking through: Website link Notes Download link LinkExtend Aggregated results Download SiteAdvisor Desktop Download MyWot Registration required Download Browser Defender – Download LinkExtend FireFox

Bing’s Last Hurrah for 2009, an iPhone App

cgseo — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:15:43 +0000

What could be a more fitting way for Bing to end the year on the right note but to release its very own native iPhone app. It’s free and available now at the iTunes Apps Store (iTunes Link). Key Features of the Bing iPhone app include: Daily image from Bing.com Easy to access voice search Tips and tricks on the home page “Locate Me” functionality Ability to add pushpins and save locations Show multiple locations on a single map The Bing iPhone app adds to previous Bing-related iPhone apps released by Microsoft which include – Bing for Windows phone, BlackBerry, Sidekick and select BREW-based devices on Verizon and Bing for Mobile . It also competes with rivals Yahoo Mobile and Google Mobile iPhone apps. Downloading Bing iPhone now and will see how it works and update this post. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Bing’s Last Hurrah for 2009, an iPhone