Hasta La Gadget!

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

Yahoo is responding to Google’s co-op, a platform that allows you to customize your search experience by introducing Yahoo! Alpha – in beta. Much like Google’s version, Yahoo Alpha will enable you to create your very own personalized search engine homepage.

Using a drag-n-drop interface (think NetVibes), users are able to create their search engine page. If you visit the new Alpha site, you’ll notice that it searches Yahoo, but also provides search results from services like Flickr photos, Yahoo!7 Answers, YouTube, Yahoo!7 News Search, and Wikipedia.

You can even build your own search module using sites of your choice, assuming that the site provides the search results in the form of a RSS feed.

Essentially, it’s a tool that will help you perform multiple searches at one time by taking the results from the different sources and aggregating them all onto one page. While it is much like Google’s co-op, it’s also a lot like Google’s test site Searchmash, with a very similar interface(comparison above).

All in all, it’s a convenient way to search when you have an assortment of results to choose from like photos and videos.

Source: Digital Inspiration

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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Sometimes it seems like the worlds of science and marketing are in a constant struggle to present us with the future described in science fiction. Whether its flying cars, the OS from Minority Report, or robots that play “rock, paper, scissors,” the old saw is true: you can’t fight progress. And now it looks like Yahoo Japan has jumped into the fray, with a little help from Comel, a Japanese company that manufactures billboards. The two firms are collaborating on electronic signage that photographs passersby, analyses it using NEC’s facial analysis technology, and guesstimates his or her age. Once the demo is confirmed, the device spits out appropriate advertising content. According to the poorly translated press release, the “face image data” is then erased, saving only a record of the passerby’s age and sex — so you Civil Libertarians can rest easily. Right.

[Via Trading Markets]

Filed under: Displays

Yahoo Japan plans facial recognizing, content personalizing billboards originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on May 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

Back in March Yahoo redesigned their personalized homepage (My Yahoo), to give it a new Web 2.0 look and feel.  It was a huge improvement, but at the time they said they weren’t done yet. They promised new features, and just last night some of those features started rolling out.

There’s a lot of competition in the personalized homepage arena with Google putting a big focus on theirs, but also with Netvibes and Pageflakes who thus far, have been very successful startups and have been able to hold their own.

Changes you’ll notice with My Yahoo:

• Improved calendar module with read/write functionality.
• Improved bookmarks module (now you can add new bookmarks right from the module).
• More content to choose from: List of blogs and additional sources from around the web.

The screenshot below shows what the calendar looks like. You’ll also notice the new “My Netflix” module (screenshot from TechCrunch):

My Yahoo looks great, and it’s easy to use.  For the casual, everyday user, I’d say that they ought to be pretty satisfied.  For the more involved (more geeky) users, I think Yahoo is still lacking in features for them.

I used My Yahoo many, many years ago and then eventually stopped using it.  More recently when Netvibes came around I decided to give it a try. If I had to choose between My Yahoo and Netvibes, I’d stick with Netvibes because it caters to the more involved user.

What’s nice is that there’s competition, and everybody is stepping up their game because of it. People tend to like the personalized homepages, and I think they’ll only continue to get better as everybody tries to one-up the others.

If you’d like to learn more about the changes at My Yahoo, you can read through My Yahoo’s “about” section for details. Overall, the changes are nice.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This article was written on May 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Earlier this week we showed you how you could take advantage of Firefox 3’s built-in support for web applications. To be more specific we demonstrated how you can preview iCal calendars using 30boxes.com, and thanks to Lifehacker it looks like you can do the same thing for MailTo links.

By default Firefox 3 includes support for Yahoo! Mail with the MailTo links, but using any other email service will require a little bit of work. So below we have instructions on registering either Yahoo! Mail or Gmail as the default handler for MailTo links.

Here’s a MailTo link that you can test the new system on once you get it all setup:

tech@cybernetnews.com

–Yahoo! Mail–

Mozilla made it easy for all of the Yahoo! Mail users out there by including it as on option out-of-the-box. Here’s what you have to do if you’re using Yahoo! Mail:

Open the Firefox preferences, switch to the Applications tab, and look for the “mailto” option in the list. Next to it you should see a drop-down menu, and when expanded there should be an option to Use Yahoo! Mail:

–Gmail–

1. Type about:config into the address bar, and change the gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost value to true by double-clicking on it. You don’t need to restart your browser after doing this.
2. Click this link to add Gmail as the MailTo handler. It’s just a snippet of JavaScript.
3. You should see a little bar pop down from the top of the window asking for permission to have Gmail handle your MailTo links. Click the Add Application button.
   
4. Go back to about:config and set the gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost back to false. If you don’t do this any website can attempt to register protocol handlers in Firefox 3, which could pose a security issue.

Note: If clicking on a MailTo link opens an external application (or another service) you’ll need to refer to the steps under the Yahoo! Mail section above for changing the default handler to Gmail.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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This week, we learned President Obama’s anti-trust chief pick said Google, and not usual suspect Microsoft, may be sent directly to jail for monopolistic behavior. My oh my, how the tables have turned, eh?

“For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” said Christine A. Varney, Obama’s pick to head the U.S. government’s antitrust division (ouch!). To which I say, has she seen those cute new Windows “I’m a PC” ads with the toddlers? If anything, Microsoft is adorable these days.

“[The U.S. economy will] continually see a problem — potentially with Google [because it already] has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising,” she said.

The comments were made all the way back in June during a panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute, but we’re only hearing of them now, most likely because Varney is set to be confirmed by the Senate very soon.

But even as Varney was stretching her legs with lofty antitrust rhetoric last year, she was also praising the Google for being a “spectacular innovator” that dominated the industry with “terrific work” and that obtained its monopoly through lawful business practice. They were the kind of comments that inevitably set up a “but…” statement, and lo and behold, here it is:

“[Google is] quickly gathering market power in what I would call an online computing environment in the clouds. When all our enterprises move to computing in the clouds and there is a single firm that is offering a comprehensive solution, you are going to see the same repeat of Microsoft,” she said.

Related to all this is an article I keep thinking about as I learn more about the all-but-confirmed legal onslaught that’s growing larger in Google’s HUD. In Wired’s current 3mm thin issue, there’s an article called “The Plot to Kill Google,” which starts off with Google lawyers preparing to enter the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust wing, of all places. The discussion was about, wait for it, online advertising. This time with Yahoo. The Wired story took place in October, so the legal wrangling has actually already begun.

Google, for its part, has already started preparing a defense. Bloomberg reports Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in an email response that stiff competition “is literally one click away” on the Internet. Customers are also free to search the internet using any engine they wish, he said, and nothing Google does prevents that from happening. “Cloud computing is really in its infancy,” he said. “There’s going to be rich competition in that space for a long time to come.”

My personal thought on all this? It’s what happens when your sea floor mapping platform discovers Atlantis. [Bloomberg via ComputerWorld]