Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on January 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

The last two years have been big years for Yahoo on many levels, but particularly when it comes to companies they have acquired. Hot start-up companies are often times looking for their big payday from giants like Yahoo. Those giants in turn gain from many of these start-ups in terms of growth. In fact, I think you could say that Yahoo has this strategy in mind: growth by acquisition.  Some of these acquisitions have turned out to be a great catch, and others have managed to fade away. With each acquisition comes the hope of a new targeted audience that will help the company grow to new levels.  Let’s take a look at some of the acquisitions Yahoo has made over the last two years :

Back in early 2005, Yahoo began their acquisition extravaganza and managed to sweep up Flickr for 40 million. Flickr has now become one of the most popular (if not- the most popular) photo managing, and sharing sites on the web. After Flickr was acquired, they experienced a significant amount of growth, and according to Alexa, they rank the 38th most visited site on the web over the last 3 months.

Another big buy in July 2005 was Konfabulator, the “widget engine” that Yahoo renamed to ‘ Yahoo Widget Engine.” This quickly became popular simply because of the thousands of widgets that they have available. This continues to grow, and in April Yahoo Widget Engine 3.1 was released.  New widgets are consistently being created making ‘ Yahoo Widget Engine’ more useful each day.

Social bookmarking site Del.icio.us ended the year of acquisitions for Yahoo in 2005 when they paid a rumored 15-30 million for the social bookmarking service. Del.icio.us grew from a reported 300,000 subscribers when it was acquired to a reported 1 million subscribers today.

Other Yahoo Acquisitions of 2005 that we haven’t heard much about (if anything):

• Stadeon – Part of the expansion of Yahoo! Games business
• Dialpad – technology used for Yahoo! Messenger with Voice
• Blo.gs – Lets you keep an eye on your favorite weblogs
• Alibaba – Hong Kong based e-commerce/e-auction company.
• Upcoming.org – Social Events calendar.
• Whereonearth 
• TeRespondo

2006 included the acquisitions of:

• Jumpcut –  Online video solution
• adInterax – Media design/advertising
• Bix.com – Like the YouTube for contests
• SearchFox – RSS aggregator

It will definitely be interesting to see what Yahoo! does with their list of 2006 acquisitions, but also what we might see added to the list for 2007. They’ve just been turned down by Facebook after a 1.6 billion dollar offer. Any predictions on what 2007 might bring?

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 09, 2009 by CyberNet.

I told you earlier in the week that a redesign was coming today, and I wasn’t lying. Hopefully when you see it for the first time you recognize how much we were pushing for simplicity. We moved common navigation-bar items like “about us” into the footer since a majority of users will never need them, and at the same time we made subscribing to our site via RSS, Twitter, and email much more prominent in the header area.

My goal was to give you a design that flows easily with your eyes, and minimizes distractions as much as possible. This is a tough thing to balance because I need to make things convenient, but at the same time weigh what features I think people will use. And then I have to try and present those features in a way that won’t annoy the people who don’t want to use them.

–The Homepage–

Let’s start by looking at the homepage. Here I tried to think about what I’d want on the homepage if I was a reader. Previously we had about 7 articles on our homepage most of which could be read in their entirety without ever clicking a link. If you’re reading a bunch of articles all at once that works out great, but it can take awhile to load if we’ve included some large images in our posts.

To get over this obstacle I tried to find a good median. What I came up with was displaying the latest article in all its glory right there for you to read, and then all subsequent articles are shortened up in a way that lets your eyes quickly skim past them looking for topics that interest you. Plus you should see that the page loads significantly faster since your browser is downloading a thumbnail that’s pulled from the article instead of the full resolution images. To help put the significance of this into perspective: the new homepage that has 10 articles is about 55% lighter in size than our old homepage displaying 7 articles.

–Article Pages–

When reading articles you may notice that the content area is significantly larger than what it previously was. This gives us an opportunity to include bigger screenshots in our articles, and will hopefully mean we have to thumbnail photos a lot less.

The main thing that I want to highlight, however, is the “share” button located at the bottom of each article (assuming you have JavaScript enabled). In there is where you’ll find options for bookmarking an article, viewing tags, and seeing a few related articles. If you’re a registered user (and are logged in) this is also where you can turn comment tracking on/off or CyberMark an article. Here’s a brief overview of those features for those of you unfamiliar with them:

• Comment Tracking – This will let you follow new comments on articles and even get email notifications when a new comment is posted. You can choose to follow new comments on all articles, only articles you comment on, or only articles you explicitly select.
• CyberMarks – This is our own internal bookmarking system. It lets you save your favorite articles where you can go back and sort or search through them to find what you’re looking for.

Both of these features have been completely rewritten, and perform much better than they did before.

–Commenting–

Our comment system has received a rather significant overhaul. We decided to move to a threaded comment system, which means you can reply to comments that other users leave. There’s a downfall to a system like this that I’m very much aware of. Some commenters like to take advantage of threaded comments by always replying to the first comment on the page, which ensures that their comment will show up above many others. I hate that, which is why I made sure I have the ability to “de-thread” comments that are unrelated the parent comment.

Threaded comments also posed another issue for people tracking new comments. If you get notified that there’s a new comment on an article how are you supposed to know which one is new? Sure you can go through them all looking at the dates/times, but when comments are threaded this becomes very difficult. That’s why we now “flag” all new comments so that you’re able to find them in a heartbeat.

We also managed to rewrite our custom AJAX comment system to work with the threaded comments. It was a little trickier than I had anticipated, but I feel like it works pretty well. After leaving a comment you’ll also notice that the page scrolls to where your comment was just posted on the page.

And then there is comment editing. We have migrated to a specialized WordPress plugin for editing comments (with a few custom hacks I through in), and editing comments should be much more reliable for our registered users now.

Note: For avatars we dropped support for MyBlogLog. Now you’ll either need to use Gravatar , or registered users can head to the account settings to provide a URL for an avatar you want to use.

–Searching–

I knew I had to do something about our search system because even I got frustrated trying to find an article with our search system. So now our search engine will sort results by relevance making it a lot faster at hunting down what you’re looking for.

We also tried to put some intelligence behind displaying the search box on the page you’re viewing. For example, if you’re viewing our home page or an article you’ll see the search box tucked away into the pull-down menu at the top of the page. If, however, you’re going through our archives we assume you’re looking for something specific and will therefore expand the search box to aid in your hunt. And we know what a pain it can be at times to work with those tiny search boxes, which is why we super-sized ours.

–And More–

• We’ve thrown a few new elements into the sidebar, including a better summary of unread comments and recent CyberMarks for users that are logged in. A little further down the sidebar you’ll also see some of our most popular articles (by traffic) in the last 7-days.  
• The account management pages are the same in terms of functionality, be I rewrote all of them to make them perform better
• In the footer we still have a nice list of our active All-Stars. These are registered users that actively participate in commenting and send us tips.

–Conclusion–

So I hope you enjoy the new site! For the last month I’ve spent 40-50 hours a week working on the redesign (in addition to the 40-50 hours at my full-time job), which is why article posting slowed down quite a bit. I’ve got a lot of comments to catch up on, and I have a feeling you’ll be seeing some more great stuff roll out of our site in the coming weeks.

Drop us your thoughts on the new design in the comments below.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Don’t you just love weddings? The songs, the people, food, and of course, the beautiful bride and groom who are really the stars for the day. It is two become one from that auspicious day forth, as both of them share the same family name, not to mention bank account (although some couples do take a different approach). Most weddings would also see the ceremony which features an exchange of rings to signify their unending and unbroken love for one another, and with the $150 Interlocking Ring Set, it would be the ideal rings for Lego lovers.

Why do I say so? Well, the Interlocking Ring Set is obviously inspired by Lego, and it would make for quite the gift for those who want something special this coming holidays. Specially created by Etsy user Shannon Conrad, these are hand-crafted rings which have been made from 100% recycled and locally sourced sterling silver. These are hand cast, and one Lego brick is sacrificed each time a ring is created, since the original brick would be destroyed. Pretty cool stuff, really. I can imagine placing one of those Lego figurines on top of the ring as a topper of sorts that will really deliver quite a comical effect.

Interlocking Ring Set Shows That You Both Truly Belong Together original content from Ubergizmo.

Ever since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced back in August that he is going to leave the top job at Redmond within 12 months, there has been a lot of speculation about who is going to become the next leader of the world’s biggest software company. At Microsoft’s shareholder meeting earlier this month, the company’s co-founder and chairman Bill Gates said that whosoever is appointed will have a complex role to fill. He also mentioned how unique the company is in this aspect, in its history spanning over three decades, Microsoft has only ever had two CEOs, Gates and Ballmer.

The latest report from Bloomberg suggests that the board’s special committee is leaning towards Ford CEO Alan Mulally and internal candidate Satya Nadella, who is currently the executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise group at Microsoft. Outgoing Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and Microsoft business development head Tony Bates are reportedly “in the mix,” though the report claims it is unlikely that they’ll be offered the job. The board is said to be in favor of Alan Mulally given his legacy as a “turnaround expert,” while he initially denied any intention of moving away from Ford, Mulally has reportedly warmed up to the idea now. No timeframe has been provided as yet in which Microsoft will make the announcement of its new CEO, but rumor has it that the company wants to wrap up the transition by the end of this year.

Microsoft Reportedly Edging Towards Alan Mulally And Satya Nadella For CEO Slot original content from Ubergizmo.

3D-printed underwear is still pretty new as we highlighted one company who is able to produce a pair using the combination of Cosyflex printing technology. 3D-printed underwear has finally gone mainstream as Victoria’s Secret recently unveiled a one-of-a-kind 3D-printed lingerie piece during this year’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. (more…)

Victoria’s Secret Debuts 3D-Printed Lingerie During Fashion Show original content from Ubergizmo.