LONDON (LEO)—: A British judge has ruled that Google cannot be held responsible for defamatory words that appear in results on the popular Internet search engine.
Justice David Eady said that Google is not a publisher because searches are carried out entirely by computers and the search engine does not choose the terms itself.
The case was closely watched because the United Kingdom is perceived as having particularly stringent libel laws.
The ruling came in a suit by Metropolitan International Schools Limited, a British company which offers distance learning courses and trades under the brands of SkillsTrain or Train2Game, and previously as Scheidegger MIS.
MIS sued both Google UK Ltd. and the parent company, Google Inc., and Designtechnica Corp., incorporated in Oregon. The company's Web site hosts bulletin boards and forums that have carried allegedly defamatory complaints about Metropolitan International Schools.
Google cannot be "regarded as a publisher" for what its searches discover on the Web, the judge said in his ruling handed down Thursday, noting that Google had prevailed against similar suits in the Netherlands two years ago, and this year in cases in Spain and France.
MIS had won a lower court order that Designtechnica and Google should answer the suit in London, but that was thrown out by Eady. The plaintiffs have "no reasonable prospect of success," he said.
"When a snippet is thrown up on the user's screen in response to his search, it points him in the direction of an entry somewhere on the Web that corresponds, to a greater or lesser extent, to the search terms he has typed in," Eady said. "It is for him to access or not, as he chooses."
Google Inc. said in a statement that the verdict reinforces the principle that search engines are not responsible for content that is published on third party Web sites.
The judge "made clear that if someone feels they have been defamed by material on a Web site then they should address their complaint to the person who actually wrote and published the material, and not a search engine, which simply provides a searchable index of content on the Internet," it said.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Apple Downplays Fiery iPod Incidents....
(LEO)--:An exclusive KIRO 7 Investigation reveals an alarming number of Apple brand iPod MP3 players have suddenly burst into flames and smoke, injuring people and damaging property.
It’s an investigation that Apple has apparently been trying to keep out of the public eye.
It took more than 7-months for KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy to get her hands on documents concerning Apple’s iPods from the Consumer Product Safety Commission because Apple’s lawyers filed exemption after exemption. In the end, the CPSC released more than 800 pages which reveal, for the very first time, a comprehensive look that shows, on a number of occasions, iPods have suddenly burst into flames, started to smoke, and even burned their owners.
Owners like Jamie Balderas of Arlington, Washington, who contacted KIRO 7 in November of 2008.
“At first I thought, how in the heck did I get burned? Right there?” she told Clancy, while pointing to a penny-sized, round burn on her chest. “Then I remembered that I had my iPod right there.”
Balderas says her brand new iPod Shuffle overheated while she was running days before, leaving her with a small burn right where the iPod was clipped to her shirt, next to her skin. “My skin started burning really bad, like it was a bee sting that wouldn’t stop.”
Concerned, Balderas says she called Apple, wondering if such burns were common. She even sent the company photos of her wound. But Balderas says she was told by an Apple customer service representative that her burn was an isolated incident. She says she asked Apple if she could get some documentation on how many other times this had happened, and what Apple was doing to correct the situation. But Balderas claims the Apple customer service representative told her that she “wouldn’t be able to have access to it.” Jumping online, KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators found plenty of complaints about iPods overheating. Bloggers post photos of their charred and melted iPods. And in Japan, the government even issued a warning to consumers citing "a number of accidents in which iPod Nanos" overheated and sparked, injuring two people.
That led Clancy to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the Consumer Product Safety Commission last December, asking to see all complaints related to iPods and burns or fire.
When the documents finally arrived more than seven months later, they included more than 800 pages of information, including 15 burn and fire-related incidents blamed by iPod owners on their iPods. One of the owners found in the documents was Haylie Mooney of Portland, Oregon. She spoke with Clancy recently about what happened with the iPod she received for Christmas, 2007.
“I picked it up and it was really hot, and so my first instinct was to drop it so I didn’t burn myself. But I looked at my hand and it was red and it started to get swollen.”
Mooney is now 14 years old, but says she remembers the incident well. “It was like touching the inside of an oven. It was very hot.”
Haylie’s mother, Tami Mooney, called Apple to complain. She claims she got the run-around. “I was so frustrated because frankly, they didn’t care. They didn’t care that my child was burned. They didn’t care about the possibilities that other children were burned,” she told Clancy at her Portland-area home. “I asked them, has this been happening? Is this new? And they said, we haven’t heard of this one yet.”
But by then, Federal records show that Apple did already know it had problems with its iPod batteries causing fires and burns.
Detailed in the documents Clancy obtained was the story of an iPod overheating “causing damage to home and harm to minor son” in Pennsylvania in 2005.
In 2006, a 17-year-old Illinois girl awoke to find her iPod Nano “smoking and sparking.” A Staten Island man "sustained a minor shock and some redness to his left hand" when he yanked his iPod Shuffle from the USB port after noticing "sparks and a reddish/orange glow, " Also in 2006.
That same year, an iPod "caught fire aboard a ship with over 2000 persons onboard."
In 2007, fire alarms at a home in New York went off after an iPod Nano started smoking. According to the CPSC report, smoke was "billowing" out of a teenage girl's bedroom because her iPod had "caught on fire," had "somehow fallen on the chair next to the desk," causing the chair to "smolder."
Also that year, in Atlanta, Daniel Williams' Nano suddenly burst into flames while in his pocket. He spoke about the incident to KIRO 7's sister station, WSB-TV. “So I looked down and I see flames coming up to my chest, about here,” he told a reporter in October of 2007.
In 2008, a Michigan couple awakened by smoke alarms and rushed into their sleeping son's room to find his iPod smoking and melted.
Six other similar claims are also detailed in the CPSC documents obtained by KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators. The complaints concern various iPod models, some charging at the time, some not. Some were older models, some brand new.
So far, no serious injuries have been reported to the CPSC, but Tami Mooney of Portland believes it's only a matter of time. And she says she was angry to read the reports Clancy shared with her, especially since many of them were filed after she had notified Apple about what had happened to her daughter.
“That’s what I’ve been afraid of, is that that could have been a dead child because Apple didn’t care to fix it. I’m horrified to learn it’s still going on.”
Gordon Damant is a fire scientist and 30-year California state regulator. He believes, when it comes to iPods, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and the potential for great harm.
“Whenever you have a fire event of any kind, it can be potentially very serious,” he told Clancy recently while Damant was visiting Redmond, Washington, for the annual National Association of State Fire Marshals conference.
“If a person has a device, is wearing a device that malfunctions it could ignite their clothing. And once a person’s clothing becomes ignited, then you have potential for rapid flame spread.”
Damant believes, as CPSC investigators detail in the documents, that the iPods’ lithium ion batteries could be the source of the problem. Millions of lithium ion batteries were recalled by Dell and Apple in 2006 because over-heating problems in laptop computers caused fires. But the Consumer Product Safety Commission is not recalling iPods.
After conducting its own preliminary investigation, the federal agency determined that, with more than 175 million iPods sold, “the number of incidents is extremely small in relation to the number of products produced, making the risk of injury very low.”
Nick Marchica, who worked for the CPSC for 28 years, explained it to Clancy this way: “The feds, the government guys came in. They looked at this thing and they said, 'not yet. Might be a problem down the line if we get more information, but not yet.' We can’t ask this company to recall the product.'”
Others disagree.
“When is enough, enough?” Damant asked Clancy, while examining the 800 pages of documents she obtained. “Looking at what you have here, it would clearly seem to me that the potential is there for them to do something because, in the past, they’ve negotiated recalls with very much less information than they’ve provided to you.”
While interviewing Balderas back in November, Clancy asked the Arlington woman what her biggest concern is. Balderas quickly said, “there’s millions of these out there, and as a parent of five children, all of my children have at least one (iPod). And they use these, and sometimes they listen to them at night when they’re in bed. And what if the iPod is lying in bed and the sheets catch on fire? I mean, this is worst case scenario, but I would feel terrible if I hadn’t tried to do something to help.”
Tami Mooney of Portland echoes the sentiment. “They need to recall them,” she told Clancy. Apple needs “to figure out, trouble shoot to the point that they know exactly what the problem is and pull them all.” Clancy pointed out that, with more than 175 million iPods sold, that could have devastating financial consequences for Apple. Mooney countered, “What’s it going to cost them if they kill a child and find out that there are these reports out there and Apple did nothing?”
Of all the people interviewed for Clancy’s report, including three consumer safety experts, all of them agree that the public should at least be aware of this potential problem, no matter how rare the cases might be.
Clancy asked that same question of Apple: should its customers know about this? Apple refused to comment, and refused to answer all of the other questions Clancy has been asking of the company since November.
But the documents Clancy obtained indicate future action, including a recall, is possible. Apple has been notified by the Consumer Product Safety Commission that it is the California company’s obligation to “inform the Commission of defects associated with this product which could create a substantial product hazard under 15 U.S.C 2064(a).” The documents further reveal, if Apple “receives any information regarding other potential defects or hazards, it must report this information to the Office of Compliance and Field Operations immediately.” And that the CPSC staff “will assess any new information concerning this product to determine if action should be taken to protect the public.”
One of the reasons the CPSC gives for not taking action now is because “the current generation of iPods uses a battery which has not been shown to have similar problems.” When asked by Clancy, when this “current generation” of batteries started being used, and what type of battery it is, Apple would not comment. But earlier this year a lawsuit against Apple was filed in Cincinnati because, the lawyer claims, an iPod Touch, one of Apple’s newest edition of iPods, also powered by a lithium ion battery, exploded and caught fire while in a teenager’s pocket. The suit claims the boy suffered second-degree burns to his leg, and that the iPod was off at the time. This incident is not included in the CPSC’s file.
We'd also like to hear if a similar incident has happened with your iPod, so post your comments below.
It’s an investigation that Apple has apparently been trying to keep out of the public eye.
It took more than 7-months for KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy to get her hands on documents concerning Apple’s iPods from the Consumer Product Safety Commission because Apple’s lawyers filed exemption after exemption. In the end, the CPSC released more than 800 pages which reveal, for the very first time, a comprehensive look that shows, on a number of occasions, iPods have suddenly burst into flames, started to smoke, and even burned their owners.
Owners like Jamie Balderas of Arlington, Washington, who contacted KIRO 7 in November of 2008.
“At first I thought, how in the heck did I get burned? Right there?” she told Clancy, while pointing to a penny-sized, round burn on her chest. “Then I remembered that I had my iPod right there.”
Balderas says her brand new iPod Shuffle overheated while she was running days before, leaving her with a small burn right where the iPod was clipped to her shirt, next to her skin. “My skin started burning really bad, like it was a bee sting that wouldn’t stop.”
Concerned, Balderas says she called Apple, wondering if such burns were common. She even sent the company photos of her wound. But Balderas says she was told by an Apple customer service representative that her burn was an isolated incident. She says she asked Apple if she could get some documentation on how many other times this had happened, and what Apple was doing to correct the situation. But Balderas claims the Apple customer service representative told her that she “wouldn’t be able to have access to it.” Jumping online, KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators found plenty of complaints about iPods overheating. Bloggers post photos of their charred and melted iPods. And in Japan, the government even issued a warning to consumers citing "a number of accidents in which iPod Nanos" overheated and sparked, injuring two people.
That led Clancy to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the Consumer Product Safety Commission last December, asking to see all complaints related to iPods and burns or fire.
When the documents finally arrived more than seven months later, they included more than 800 pages of information, including 15 burn and fire-related incidents blamed by iPod owners on their iPods. One of the owners found in the documents was Haylie Mooney of Portland, Oregon. She spoke with Clancy recently about what happened with the iPod she received for Christmas, 2007.
“I picked it up and it was really hot, and so my first instinct was to drop it so I didn’t burn myself. But I looked at my hand and it was red and it started to get swollen.”
Mooney is now 14 years old, but says she remembers the incident well. “It was like touching the inside of an oven. It was very hot.”
Haylie’s mother, Tami Mooney, called Apple to complain. She claims she got the run-around. “I was so frustrated because frankly, they didn’t care. They didn’t care that my child was burned. They didn’t care about the possibilities that other children were burned,” she told Clancy at her Portland-area home. “I asked them, has this been happening? Is this new? And they said, we haven’t heard of this one yet.”
But by then, Federal records show that Apple did already know it had problems with its iPod batteries causing fires and burns.
Detailed in the documents Clancy obtained was the story of an iPod overheating “causing damage to home and harm to minor son” in Pennsylvania in 2005.
In 2006, a 17-year-old Illinois girl awoke to find her iPod Nano “smoking and sparking.” A Staten Island man "sustained a minor shock and some redness to his left hand" when he yanked his iPod Shuffle from the USB port after noticing "sparks and a reddish/orange glow, " Also in 2006.
That same year, an iPod "caught fire aboard a ship with over 2000 persons onboard."
In 2007, fire alarms at a home in New York went off after an iPod Nano started smoking. According to the CPSC report, smoke was "billowing" out of a teenage girl's bedroom because her iPod had "caught on fire," had "somehow fallen on the chair next to the desk," causing the chair to "smolder."
Also that year, in Atlanta, Daniel Williams' Nano suddenly burst into flames while in his pocket. He spoke about the incident to KIRO 7's sister station, WSB-TV. “So I looked down and I see flames coming up to my chest, about here,” he told a reporter in October of 2007.
In 2008, a Michigan couple awakened by smoke alarms and rushed into their sleeping son's room to find his iPod smoking and melted.
Six other similar claims are also detailed in the CPSC documents obtained by KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators. The complaints concern various iPod models, some charging at the time, some not. Some were older models, some brand new.
So far, no serious injuries have been reported to the CPSC, but Tami Mooney of Portland believes it's only a matter of time. And she says she was angry to read the reports Clancy shared with her, especially since many of them were filed after she had notified Apple about what had happened to her daughter.
“That’s what I’ve been afraid of, is that that could have been a dead child because Apple didn’t care to fix it. I’m horrified to learn it’s still going on.”
Gordon Damant is a fire scientist and 30-year California state regulator. He believes, when it comes to iPods, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and the potential for great harm.
“Whenever you have a fire event of any kind, it can be potentially very serious,” he told Clancy recently while Damant was visiting Redmond, Washington, for the annual National Association of State Fire Marshals conference.
“If a person has a device, is wearing a device that malfunctions it could ignite their clothing. And once a person’s clothing becomes ignited, then you have potential for rapid flame spread.”
Damant believes, as CPSC investigators detail in the documents, that the iPods’ lithium ion batteries could be the source of the problem. Millions of lithium ion batteries were recalled by Dell and Apple in 2006 because over-heating problems in laptop computers caused fires. But the Consumer Product Safety Commission is not recalling iPods.
After conducting its own preliminary investigation, the federal agency determined that, with more than 175 million iPods sold, “the number of incidents is extremely small in relation to the number of products produced, making the risk of injury very low.”
Nick Marchica, who worked for the CPSC for 28 years, explained it to Clancy this way: “The feds, the government guys came in. They looked at this thing and they said, 'not yet. Might be a problem down the line if we get more information, but not yet.' We can’t ask this company to recall the product.'”
Others disagree.
“When is enough, enough?” Damant asked Clancy, while examining the 800 pages of documents she obtained. “Looking at what you have here, it would clearly seem to me that the potential is there for them to do something because, in the past, they’ve negotiated recalls with very much less information than they’ve provided to you.”
While interviewing Balderas back in November, Clancy asked the Arlington woman what her biggest concern is. Balderas quickly said, “there’s millions of these out there, and as a parent of five children, all of my children have at least one (iPod). And they use these, and sometimes they listen to them at night when they’re in bed. And what if the iPod is lying in bed and the sheets catch on fire? I mean, this is worst case scenario, but I would feel terrible if I hadn’t tried to do something to help.”
Tami Mooney of Portland echoes the sentiment. “They need to recall them,” she told Clancy. Apple needs “to figure out, trouble shoot to the point that they know exactly what the problem is and pull them all.” Clancy pointed out that, with more than 175 million iPods sold, that could have devastating financial consequences for Apple. Mooney countered, “What’s it going to cost them if they kill a child and find out that there are these reports out there and Apple did nothing?”
Of all the people interviewed for Clancy’s report, including three consumer safety experts, all of them agree that the public should at least be aware of this potential problem, no matter how rare the cases might be.
Clancy asked that same question of Apple: should its customers know about this? Apple refused to comment, and refused to answer all of the other questions Clancy has been asking of the company since November.
But the documents Clancy obtained indicate future action, including a recall, is possible. Apple has been notified by the Consumer Product Safety Commission that it is the California company’s obligation to “inform the Commission of defects associated with this product which could create a substantial product hazard under 15 U.S.C 2064(a).” The documents further reveal, if Apple “receives any information regarding other potential defects or hazards, it must report this information to the Office of Compliance and Field Operations immediately.” And that the CPSC staff “will assess any new information concerning this product to determine if action should be taken to protect the public.”
One of the reasons the CPSC gives for not taking action now is because “the current generation of iPods uses a battery which has not been shown to have similar problems.” When asked by Clancy, when this “current generation” of batteries started being used, and what type of battery it is, Apple would not comment. But earlier this year a lawsuit against Apple was filed in Cincinnati because, the lawyer claims, an iPod Touch, one of Apple’s newest edition of iPods, also powered by a lithium ion battery, exploded and caught fire while in a teenager’s pocket. The suit claims the boy suffered second-degree burns to his leg, and that the iPod was off at the time. This incident is not included in the CPSC’s file.
We'd also like to hear if a similar incident has happened with your iPod, so post your comments below.
Sony's ban hammer challenged in court....
(LEO)--:A new lawsuit against Sony claims that banning players from the Playstation Network not only causes pain and suffering, but violates their First Amendment rights to free speech.
When you get banned from an online service like the Playstation Network or Xbox Live, odds are that your behavior warranted your booting. Well, that, or you could've just mentioned your sexuality in your profile. In the case of the former, though, a San Jose man has filed a lawsuit against Sony Computer Entertainment America because his banning from the Playstation Network has apparently caused him a significant amount of pain and suffering.
Erik Estavillo, who was banned from the online service due to his behavior while playing Resistance: Fall of Man, filed the suit earlier this month. Exactly what his behavior entailed isn't specified, though Estavillo claims that he was "exercising his First Amendment Rights to Freedom of Speech in the game's public forum when he was banned from, not only [Resistance], but also banned from playing all other games online via the PlayStation Network." Based on that statement, it sounds like Estavillo was doing some trash-talking, which led to his ban.
The meat of the complaint, however, is based on the fact that SCEA's ban equates to theft in Estavillo's eyes. This is because he bought a number of pre-paid points that he can no longer access now that he's banned. Estavillo's complaint also reveals that services like the Playstation Network are his main way of socializing, as he suffers from agorophobia (fear of crowds), as well as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Major Depression, and Crohn's Disease (an auto-immune disease that attacks the digestive tract).
He is currently seeking $55,000 in punitive damages; SCEA has yet to respond to the suit itself.
When you get banned from an online service like the Playstation Network or Xbox Live, odds are that your behavior warranted your booting. Well, that, or you could've just mentioned your sexuality in your profile. In the case of the former, though, a San Jose man has filed a lawsuit against Sony Computer Entertainment America because his banning from the Playstation Network has apparently caused him a significant amount of pain and suffering.
Erik Estavillo, who was banned from the online service due to his behavior while playing Resistance: Fall of Man, filed the suit earlier this month. Exactly what his behavior entailed isn't specified, though Estavillo claims that he was "exercising his First Amendment Rights to Freedom of Speech in the game's public forum when he was banned from, not only [Resistance], but also banned from playing all other games online via the PlayStation Network." Based on that statement, it sounds like Estavillo was doing some trash-talking, which led to his ban.
The meat of the complaint, however, is based on the fact that SCEA's ban equates to theft in Estavillo's eyes. This is because he bought a number of pre-paid points that he can no longer access now that he's banned. Estavillo's complaint also reveals that services like the Playstation Network are his main way of socializing, as he suffers from agorophobia (fear of crowds), as well as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Major Depression, and Crohn's Disease (an auto-immune disease that attacks the digestive tract).
He is currently seeking $55,000 in punitive damages; SCEA has yet to respond to the suit itself.
Yahoo launching front page open to others' content....
(LEO) -- A significant redesign is finally coming to the Yahoo.com home page, one of the most well-traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company's search page will follow suit starting next month.
Yahoo plans to let people in the United States start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon.
The revamp lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others' such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's senior vice president for consumer experiences.
These applications are available on the left side of the page under a customizable section called My Favorites; hovering over them with the mouse pointer makes each application and its accompanying advertising pop up.
"We're pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience," Bhat said. "In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experience come first."
The effort is a centerpiece of Yahoo's effort to revitalize its core business: showing content and accompanying advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo's profitability for years has trailed that of its main rival, Google, which depends chiefly on search ads for revenue, and Yahoo faces increasing pressure from Microsoft's online business and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.
The company also hopes for more success with advertisers. "We're creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context," he said, demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie showtimes locally tailored for a particular user.The My Favorites feature will arrive on Yahoo's search page, too, making the search site and results shown on it into more of a portal to access content. Yahoo faces search pressure from dominant Google and now to a certain extent from Microsoft's Bing, too.
Even if it consummates a possible search and advertising deal with Microsoft, being able to show its own display ads in applications adjacent to search results could help the company extract more money from its search operation.
Long-coming changes
Newer Web sites change rapidly, but Yahoo proceeds at a relatively glacial pace to change its site, visited by a whopping 340 million people monthly.
Yahoo announced the new front page plan in October 2007, recognizing that people wanted to get to other destinations on the Net besides Yahoo's. It began "bucket testing" it a year afterward, trying variations of the new page on randomly selected users, some of whom squawked at the changes and their inability to revert.
New Chief Executive Carol Bartz has been trying to light a fire under the company's developers, but even this revamp is only is the beginning beta testing on Tuesday.
The change will arrive in the U.K., France, and India later this week, in Spain and Mexico next month, and in Asia next year, Yahoo said.
Users had no choice about earlier tests, but now they'll be able to select it as default on their own by visiting http://yahoo.com/try new or clicking on Yahoo promotions for the change.
"The home page was tested by thousands and thousands of people. We got tons of feedback -- tens of thousands wrote about what they liked and didn't," Bhat said. "It was really key to helping us figure out what worked and didn't."
The new home page will become default for others when beta testing is done "in the coming months," Yahoo said. The revamped search pages will enter bucket testing in August, meaning that users can't choose to use or not use the new design.
More changes
Opening up Yahoo's content to other sites' operations -- and letting other sites use Yahoo data can use such as Facebook-like status updates -- is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy.
That effort, under way for well over a year, is designed to increase users' activity on Yahoo, to draw more people to Yahoo, and to make the company a better partner for advertisers.
There are about 60 applications available now, and more are being added daily, Bhat said. Users can create their own, too.
Also coming in August will be the ability to select what type of news people can see, with a slider that moves on a spectrum between "fun" and "serious," he said.
In addition, Yahoo is revamping its mobile site. One big feature: when users customize Yahoo for use with regular computers, that customization will carry over to their mobile version.
Bhat wouldn't share details about whether the new home page fares better, either in terms of user engagement or revenue. However, because Yahoo plans to make its official home page announcement Tuesday while detailing second-quarter financial results, it's possible Bartz may be more forthcoming than Bhat.
Bhat did indicate, though, that things are moving in the right direction for the company.
"Our experience in our test indicates that people are excited about this home page. They feel this meets their needs and is fresh new look for Yahoo," Bhat said. "We are designing the page around users. What we do know when design page that users like, they tend to get more engaged."
Yahoo plans to let people in the United States start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon.
The revamp lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others' such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's senior vice president for consumer experiences.
These applications are available on the left side of the page under a customizable section called My Favorites; hovering over them with the mouse pointer makes each application and its accompanying advertising pop up.
"We're pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience," Bhat said. "In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experience come first."
The effort is a centerpiece of Yahoo's effort to revitalize its core business: showing content and accompanying advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo's profitability for years has trailed that of its main rival, Google, which depends chiefly on search ads for revenue, and Yahoo faces increasing pressure from Microsoft's online business and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.
The company also hopes for more success with advertisers. "We're creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context," he said, demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie showtimes locally tailored for a particular user.The My Favorites feature will arrive on Yahoo's search page, too, making the search site and results shown on it into more of a portal to access content. Yahoo faces search pressure from dominant Google and now to a certain extent from Microsoft's Bing, too.
Even if it consummates a possible search and advertising deal with Microsoft, being able to show its own display ads in applications adjacent to search results could help the company extract more money from its search operation.
Long-coming changes
Newer Web sites change rapidly, but Yahoo proceeds at a relatively glacial pace to change its site, visited by a whopping 340 million people monthly.
Yahoo announced the new front page plan in October 2007, recognizing that people wanted to get to other destinations on the Net besides Yahoo's. It began "bucket testing" it a year afterward, trying variations of the new page on randomly selected users, some of whom squawked at the changes and their inability to revert.
New Chief Executive Carol Bartz has been trying to light a fire under the company's developers, but even this revamp is only is the beginning beta testing on Tuesday.
The change will arrive in the U.K., France, and India later this week, in Spain and Mexico next month, and in Asia next year, Yahoo said.
Users had no choice about earlier tests, but now they'll be able to select it as default on their own by visiting http://yahoo.com/try new or clicking on Yahoo promotions for the change.
"The home page was tested by thousands and thousands of people. We got tons of feedback -- tens of thousands wrote about what they liked and didn't," Bhat said. "It was really key to helping us figure out what worked and didn't."
The new home page will become default for others when beta testing is done "in the coming months," Yahoo said. The revamped search pages will enter bucket testing in August, meaning that users can't choose to use or not use the new design.
More changes
Opening up Yahoo's content to other sites' operations -- and letting other sites use Yahoo data can use such as Facebook-like status updates -- is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy.
That effort, under way for well over a year, is designed to increase users' activity on Yahoo, to draw more people to Yahoo, and to make the company a better partner for advertisers.
There are about 60 applications available now, and more are being added daily, Bhat said. Users can create their own, too.
Also coming in August will be the ability to select what type of news people can see, with a slider that moves on a spectrum between "fun" and "serious," he said.
In addition, Yahoo is revamping its mobile site. One big feature: when users customize Yahoo for use with regular computers, that customization will carry over to their mobile version.
Bhat wouldn't share details about whether the new home page fares better, either in terms of user engagement or revenue. However, because Yahoo plans to make its official home page announcement Tuesday while detailing second-quarter financial results, it's possible Bartz may be more forthcoming than Bhat.
Bhat did indicate, though, that things are moving in the right direction for the company.
"Our experience in our test indicates that people are excited about this home page. They feel this meets their needs and is fresh new look for Yahoo," Bhat said. "We are designing the page around users. What we do know when design page that users like, they tend to get more engaged."
Mystery impact leaves Earth-size mark on Jupiter....
(LEO) -- Jupiter is sporting a new scar after an unseen object hit the gaseous planet this week, NASA scientists say.
An amateur astronomer in Australia noticed the new mark -- seen through telescopes as a dark spot -- on the planet early Monday and tipped off scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, who then confirmed it was the result of a new impact, NASA said.
It's not clear what the object was that crashed into Jupiter's poisonous atmosphere.
Glenn Orton, a JPL scientist, told the magazine New Scientist that it could have been a block of ice from somewhere in Jupiter's neighborhood, or a wandering comet that was too faint for astronomers to have detected before impact.
The object created a mark on Jupiter that has the about same diameter as Earth, though the object itself was probably only 50 to 100 miles across, said Anthony Wesley, the amateur astronomer who first noticed the scar.
The mystery object was likely moving at speeds of about 50 to 100 kilometers (31 to 62 miles) per second when it struck near Jupiter's south pole, Wesley told LEO.
"That generates an unbelievable amount of energy when it collides with pretty much anything, but especially with something the size of Jupiter," he said.
It is only the second time scientists have been able to observe the results of such an impact on Jupiter. The first happened 15 years ago, when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke into 21 pieces and hit the planet's atmosphere.
"Given the rarity of these events, it's extremely exciting to be involved in these observations," JPL astronomer Leigh Fletcher said in a NASA interview.
Thermal images taken by NASA show the scar as a bright spot, which means the crash warmed the lower atmosphere in that area, New Scientist said.
Researchers also found hints of higher-than-normal amounts of ammonia in the upper atmosphere. The Shoemaker-Levy comet also churned up extra ammonia, the magazine said.
Jupiter's new spot isn't likely to last long -- probably just one to two weeks, Wesley said. He pointed out the impact scars from the Shoemaker-Levy debris lasted only two to three weeks before disappearing.Seeing an Earth-sized spot appear so tiny on Jupiter's surface led to some to wonder Tuesday whether our planet might be in danger of a similar collision.
But Wesley said that shouldn't be a concern because Jupiter functions almost like a celestial vacuum cleaner, sucking up any objects that would be of danger to Earth and its neighbors.
"Jupiter is doing a very good job in scooping up a lot of this material that's still floating around in the solar system," he said.
"It's just got so much gravity as it swings around the outer part of the solar system, it can really pull in and swallow up many of the cometary objects and debris left over from the formation of the solar system.
"So it's doing a good job in keeping us safe by cleaning out a lot of these bits and pieces."
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun and the largest in our solar system.
Its colorful atmosphere is 86 percent hydrogen and 14 percent helium, with tiny amounts of methane, ammonia, phosphine, water, acetylene, ethane, germanium, and carbon monoxide. The chemicals are responsible for producing the different colors of Jupiter's clouds.
The temperature at the top of those clouds is about 230 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (145 degrees below zero Celsius), but it is far hotter near the planet's center. The core temperature may be about 43,000 degrees Fahrenheit (24,000 degrees Celsius), hotter than the surface of the sun.
The most outstanding feature on Jupiter's surface is the Great Red Spot, a storm of gas that swirls at a speed of about 225 miles (360 kilometers) per hour at its edge. The spot -- which has been shrinking -- has a diameter equal to about three times that of Earth.
An amateur astronomer in Australia noticed the new mark -- seen through telescopes as a dark spot -- on the planet early Monday and tipped off scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, who then confirmed it was the result of a new impact, NASA said.
It's not clear what the object was that crashed into Jupiter's poisonous atmosphere.
Glenn Orton, a JPL scientist, told the magazine New Scientist that it could have been a block of ice from somewhere in Jupiter's neighborhood, or a wandering comet that was too faint for astronomers to have detected before impact.
The object created a mark on Jupiter that has the about same diameter as Earth, though the object itself was probably only 50 to 100 miles across, said Anthony Wesley, the amateur astronomer who first noticed the scar.
The mystery object was likely moving at speeds of about 50 to 100 kilometers (31 to 62 miles) per second when it struck near Jupiter's south pole, Wesley told LEO.
"That generates an unbelievable amount of energy when it collides with pretty much anything, but especially with something the size of Jupiter," he said.
It is only the second time scientists have been able to observe the results of such an impact on Jupiter. The first happened 15 years ago, when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke into 21 pieces and hit the planet's atmosphere.
"Given the rarity of these events, it's extremely exciting to be involved in these observations," JPL astronomer Leigh Fletcher said in a NASA interview.
Thermal images taken by NASA show the scar as a bright spot, which means the crash warmed the lower atmosphere in that area, New Scientist said.
Researchers also found hints of higher-than-normal amounts of ammonia in the upper atmosphere. The Shoemaker-Levy comet also churned up extra ammonia, the magazine said.
Jupiter's new spot isn't likely to last long -- probably just one to two weeks, Wesley said. He pointed out the impact scars from the Shoemaker-Levy debris lasted only two to three weeks before disappearing.Seeing an Earth-sized spot appear so tiny on Jupiter's surface led to some to wonder Tuesday whether our planet might be in danger of a similar collision.
But Wesley said that shouldn't be a concern because Jupiter functions almost like a celestial vacuum cleaner, sucking up any objects that would be of danger to Earth and its neighbors.
"Jupiter is doing a very good job in scooping up a lot of this material that's still floating around in the solar system," he said.
"It's just got so much gravity as it swings around the outer part of the solar system, it can really pull in and swallow up many of the cometary objects and debris left over from the formation of the solar system.
"So it's doing a good job in keeping us safe by cleaning out a lot of these bits and pieces."
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun and the largest in our solar system.
Its colorful atmosphere is 86 percent hydrogen and 14 percent helium, with tiny amounts of methane, ammonia, phosphine, water, acetylene, ethane, germanium, and carbon monoxide. The chemicals are responsible for producing the different colors of Jupiter's clouds.
The temperature at the top of those clouds is about 230 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (145 degrees below zero Celsius), but it is far hotter near the planet's center. The core temperature may be about 43,000 degrees Fahrenheit (24,000 degrees Celsius), hotter than the surface of the sun.
The most outstanding feature on Jupiter's surface is the Great Red Spot, a storm of gas that swirls at a speed of about 225 miles (360 kilometers) per hour at its edge. The spot -- which has been shrinking -- has a diameter equal to about three times that of Earth.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)