“These women were sort of caretakers for everybody in their lives,” stated Amy Iorio, VP of Yahoo! Lifestyles in reference to internal research that suggested women are looking for a site that relates to the content and communication that they are interested in. “They didn’t feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them — as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter. They were looking for one place that gave them everything.”

Yahoo! announced today that they have launched a web site called Shine that is intended to appeal to women between the ages of 25 and 54.  Yahoo! hopes to earn revenue from advertisers that are looking for avenues to campaign towards that specific demographic. 

What makes this move interesting is the number of competitors that have benefitted already from serving this demographic.  This includes Glam Media Inc. and iVillage.  Earlier this month, I also wrote about Carolyn & Co., a company started by the former judge of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice and is sponsored by Yahoo! Small Business.

Yahoo! Shine has several categories aimed towards appealing to this specific demographic.  These categories include Fashion, Beauty, Healthy Living, Entertainment, Parenting, Love+Sex, Work+Money, Food, At Home, Astrology, and Speak Up.  Speak Up is a blog written by Annette Cardwell, Managing Editor of Lifestyles/Tech at Yahoo! that focuses on a Question of the Day feature where readers provide their stance on random topics such as whether you would report a co-worker looking at XXX material at work. 

One of Yahoo!’s core strengths is execution.  The company can quickly create portals and gain enough interest to make deals with high-end campaigns.  Last year, Yahoo! launched OMG.Yahoo.com, a celebrity gossip site that is competes with AOL’s TMZ.com.  I thought that the site wouldn’t take off as much as it did, but KMart has a Style Off campaign that sponsors the site. 

I would not be surprised if companies like Victoria’s Secret or Forever 21 sponsors Shine since they cater to the same demographic.  Let’s not forget to mention that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AOL now own major advertising properties itching to expand their client-base.

Information Source:
1.) Associated Press: Yahoo launches site focused on women by Anick Jesdanun]

“They have a whole market that they are missing out on, and they need to make sure that the market is aware there is a Photoshop solution for them. As that market grows and becomes more sophisticated, hopefully it will generate money,” stated Ron Glaz, an analyst at IDC, a market intelligence firm.

Adobe Systems Inc. has made another dramatic move. After making at least 9 versions of their popular software, Photoshop, the San Jose, Calif.-based company decided to make their well-known software available to the web for free. This effort poses a threat to some of the other popular online photo editing companies such as Picnik, Picasa, and SnipShot.

This is not the first time that Adobe has made a huge contribution to the web. A few years ago, Adobe acquired Macromedia, the makers of Flash. Today Adobe Flash is the foundation for all online video sharing web sites like YouTube and DailyMotion.

With Photoshop Express, users can crop/rotate/tweak/resize/edit photos. Adobe is also providing users 2GB of space to host their photos for free. After editing photos, Adobe Photoshop Express users can build galleries in a grid or 3D format.

Photoshop Express is available at: http://www.photoshop.com/express/

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Adobe Unveils Webtop Version of Photoshop. Picnik Is Not Scared by Erick Schonfeld

“Effectively, YouTube has become an ad-effectiveness, or an insight-effectiveness, tool,” stated Tracy Chan, YouTube Product Manager. “YouTube has millions of viewers every single day, and has become the world’s largest focus group.”

YouTube is introducing a new feature called YouTube Insight. The new feature will entail several new tracking abilities for those who want to advertise on the video sharing site. YouTube Insight can be used for bands to when to strategically set concerts or release videos. YouTube will be officially launching this feature later on today.

YouTube Insight provides insight on how a video is doing over time and geographically. YouTube Insight will show a breakdown percentage of the countries that viewers are coming from and how long a video takes to perform well. An example that The New York Times provides is that YouTube Insight has the ability to show whether videos peak on Fridays of winter months. How many times was a video started, but not finished? YouTube Insight answers this question as well.

Marketers will also have information regarding whichs states that users come from. This will enable artists or marketers to target certain audiences for their videos. Let’s say that a majority of my video watchers come from Texas, I will consider filming a video in Austin or making a promotional campaign around the Longhorns.

Upcoming features will include how visitors were refered to specific videos.

Below is a short demo video of Insight:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo6HBKTyIzQ[/youtube]

Information Source:
[1] The Official Google Blog: Insight into YouTube videos by Tracy Chan, Product Manager of YouTube

Despite all the drama that has been happening with Jimmy Wales, Rachel Marsden, and former board members of The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia has attracted further donations. The latest substantial donation was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the amount is at $3 million.

This donation will be paid out at $1 million per year over the course of 3 years. One of the latest initiatives by The Wikimedia Foundation is to assign Flagged Revisions to Wikipedia content which essentially serves as how credible certain content is within the open source online encyclopedia.

The funding will also be used to support other initiatives for providing Wikipedia offline such as in the forms of DVDs or books.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation originates back to 1934 around the same time that Sloan was President and CEO of General Motors Corporation. In 1892, Sloan enrolled at M.I.T. , the institute that now bears his name as part of their Management program.  About 31 years after graduating, Sloan took the President position at GM and retired in 1956.  For the 10 years after that, Sloan devoted his time to philanthropic activities.

The Wikimedia Foundation was started in 2003 by Jimmy Wales as a non-profit charitable orgnization based in San Francisco, Calif.  The Wikimedia Foundation has 19 employees devoted to wiki-based projects.  Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Information Sources:
[1] paidContent: Wikipedia Gets $3 Million Sloane Foundation Grant by David Kaplan
[2] MIT.edu Background  – About MIT Sloan
[3] Wikipedia: Wikimedia Foundation

Dave Morin, a Senior Platform Manager at Facebook answered questions at Snap Summit earlier today. During Morin’s keynote, he gave updates regarding Facebook Chat, preferential treatment for certain applications, the fbFund, OpenSocial, and a payment system.

Around a week ago Facebook first showed a video of how Facebook Chat would work. This allows friends that are online to chat with each other similar to AIM. Morin stated that the new feature should be available by sometime next week.

The NCAA Bracket application on Facebook powered by CBS also was given preferential treatment by Facebook. Facebook capped the number of users that can be invited per day on a given Facebook Application. The number for a given application was capped at 20 users per day, but the CBS application was granted the ability to invite 100 users per day. The difference is that CBS paid Facebook to sponsor March Madness on their site.

Users weren’t happy with the CBS application since it had heavy flaws with tracking the winners and losers of the bracket and had a hard time tracking who was winning in the tournament. In turn, this directly affects who would win CBS’ $10,000 prize. Will Facebook continue to give preferential treatment to certain applications? “I can’t say it won’t happen again,” stated Morin.

The fbFund made a few investments in application developers. The average investments made were roughly $200,000. The fbFund was set up by Facebook, Accel Partners, and the Founders Fund.

Will Facebook become part of Google’s OpenSocial? Only “if it becomes interesting” quipped Morin. OpenSocial is Google’s response to Facebook Applications for creating a universal platform to work across several social network platforms.

And lastly, Facebook will be introducing a new payment system within the coming months. The payment system will be a way for application developers to collect bills directly from their users.

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch: Facebook Tidbits From Snap Summit In San Francisco by Mark Hendrickson

“Viewdle’s unique facial recognition technology is the most reliable and user-friendly video search product I have ever seen. KIT Capital’s investment in Viewdle is in line with our strategic goal of creating a best-in-class ecosystem of IPTV enablement for corporate clients in international markets — where we see higher growth rates for online video. We believe that ROO’s partnership with Viewdle will be a key competitive differentiator for both companies,” stated Isaza Tuzman, CEO of ROO.

Viewdle’s proprietary video facial recognition technology has attracted KIT Capital to provide them with an undisclosed amount of funding. Through the deal, Viewdle will be partnering with ROO. ROO is an online video advertising network. ROO will have access to Viewdle’s technology. According to TechCrunch, Reuters currently uses Viewdle to identify the people in their video archives.

Below is a sample of Viewdle’s technology being used:

Reuters calls the Viewdle-powered feature, Search-in-Video. The URL for the feature is: http://reuters.viewdle.com/searchm.

“Competition in the marketplace generally protects consumers and I have no reason to believe that this won’t happen here,” stated Justice Department Antitrust Chief, Thomas Barnett.

Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. (NASDAQ:SIRI) has received the approval it needs to purchase XM Satellite Radio (Public, NASDAQ:XMSR) for $4.59 billion. The Justice Department has given both companies antitrust clearance on the basis that consumers have choices. This includes audio on mobile phones and other personal digital music players. There is still one hurdle left: the FCC. Both companies have to get approval from the Federal Communications Commission.

CEO of Mel Karmazin made a promise to the government that if both companies were to combine, they would give consumers options such making certain channels available “a la carte.” And consumers would be able to block adult content and receive refunds for channels that they don’t want. This promise made by Karmazin may influence the FCC decision.

Sirius and XM Satellite radio charge roughly $13 per month to subscribe to their services. If both companies merge, the monthly price for their services is undisclosed.

Earlier this month, AOL made it clear that XM will not be power AIM Radio or Winamp starting on May 1st. This partnership break is related to AOL’s shift in advertising effort. AOL Radio will now be powered by CBS. CBS Radio will be taking over the advertising sales for AOL and will be splitting revenues.

Going forward, I think AOL Radio is going to suck. I was just comparing XM Radio’s channel listings with CBS Radio. XM stations are unique and have more interesting options compared to CBS. AOL wasn’t making much money from the XM Satellite Radio deal so it may have made sense for them to switch. I have a feeling that I may not be the only one that is going to stop listening to AOL Radio though.

Information Sources:
[1] Engadget: XM / Sirius merger approved! by Nilay Patel
[2] Washington Post: AOL, CBS Team Up For Radio, Advertising by Cecilia Kang

“The folks at Forbes really understood our business,” said Steve Woit, Founding Publisher of Xconomy, a blog that has become a part of the Forbes network. “A larger network, whether it’s Google or others, has to deal with every industry and large consumer sites.”

Google Inc., the $136 billion advertising and search engine behemoth has become the king of the hill and left other skinny companies looking up from the valleys.  In search, Google takes the lead over Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Live.com.  In software, Google is battling against Microsoft, who uses its dominant operating system as leverage to push their browser and desktop applications.  Google’s YouTubeis competing against a number of media conglomerates that came together to create Hulu, a video site that streams TV shows for free.  Now in advertising, Google will see competition from traditional publication companies, most notably Forbes Inc.

Forbes, the New York City company best known for their magazine publication, started in 1917.  This publication is lists what companies are best to work for and who the richest people in the world are.  The advantage Forbes has is that rich people enjoy reading their magazine.  Rich people also work for companies that have money for advertising campaigns.  It makes sense for Forbes to gain additional revenue by acting as a broker for these rich people to advertise on web sites of interest. 

Starting this Spring, Forbes will be selling advertisements for 400 different financial blogs.  If any of these financial blogs run Google Ads and suddenly switch to Forbes’ platform, obviously Google’s revenue will take a hit.  Now that Google’s advertising firm, DoubleClick has cleared regulations and they spent roughly $3 billion acquiring this firm, I’m sure that they won’t take too kindly to their advertising clients being poached.  After all, the first rule of business is to protect investments.

[Information Source - Associated Press: Media cos. battle Web portals on ads by Anick Jesdanun]

“Being a woman in business is never easy. Being a mother is never easy. But trying to juggle both is particularly challenging,” stated Carolyn Kepcher, founder of Carolyn & Co. Media and former EVP of Trump Organization and former judge for Donald Trump’s TV show, The Apprentice.

Carolyn has started a new company called Carolyn & Co. Media, a web site that promotes women to achieve career goals and will launch a social network for women to network and share lifestyle resources and stories.

Carolyn started the company with Jen Marr, who spent time working at a health care company previously. Other members of the team include Jessica Lim and Domenica de Fazio. The site will be officially launching this Spring.

On the Today Show yesterday, Carolyn made the announcement that she would be starting the site and has partnered with Yahoo! Small Business to provide a grant to women entrepreneurs. Three women will have the chance to win $20,000 in cash/services. These 3 women will also receive guidance from other successful business owners. And out of these 3, the more business-savvy woman will receive an additional $10,000 in October. The grant program is called ‘Seeds for Success.’

“Yahoo! is committed to helping remove obstacles to small business success. As with our new unlimited Web hosting service, we believe there should be no limit to women’s opportunities to create business success online,” stated Susan Vobejda, VP of Marketing for Yahoo! Small Business. “The ‘Seeds for Success’ grant program will help shine a spotlight on the powerful combination of inspiring women, breakthrough business ideas, and the unlimited reach of the Internet, provided by Yahoo! Small Business.”

The grant information is available at: http://seedsforsuccess.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/.

I’ve never used Blogdigger until I read this article, but I’m impressed by the way it’s designed.  Blogdigger’s homepage and search results are just as clean and organized as Google.  Below is a screen shot:

If I designed this site, I’d narrow that huge Google Ads script at the top of the search results.

Blogdigger will be making an official announcement soon that SonicMountain, the parent company of Odeo will be acquiring them.  Blogdiggers’s search technology will be integrated into Odeo and the founder/CEO of Blogdigger, Greg Gershman will join Odeo as the VP of Search and Engineering.

Odeo will be relaunching in April.  Odeo searches will use Blogdigger’s technology to search for audio and video files. Blogdigger will run independently and will continue to index blog posts.  Blogdigger started around 2003 and it was one of the first RSS-based blog search engines according to ReadWriteWeb.

The acquisition amount was undisclosed.

Odeo was started by Evan Williams and Noah Glass.  Evan and Noah both started Audioblog and Pyra Labs previously and received funding from Charles River Ventures.  But then Williams bought back Charles River’s equity and revamped Odeo.  About 3 months after Evan Williams wrote in his blog that Odeo was for sale, Sonic Mountain acquired them.  In September 2007, Sonic Mountain also bought FireAnt, a video RSS aggregation media player and website.

Fooooo is a video search engine company based in Japan and supports various languages.  On Fooooo’s homepage, there are popular videos aggregated from all over the web.  Fooooo aggregates videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, Veoh, imeem, Stage6, Revver, and Metacafe.  Each video is categorized and has an RSS feed available for each category.

Categories include News, Sports, Pets & Animals, Comedy, Entertainment, Animation, Music, Ads & Businesses, Auto, Art, Games, Movies & TV, People & Blogs, Science, Events, Education, and Sexy.

This is Fooooo’s second round of funding at $1 million.  This makes Fooooo’s total funding at $2 million.  Fooooo’s parent company is Bank of Innovation.  This round of funding was provided by Japanese venture capital company, Cyberagent.

The company was started in January 2006 and is based in Tokyo.  Tomohiro Higuchi is the President and the Directors are Daisuke Tanaka and Hiroshi Tomishima.

CafeMom is a social networking site for moms and is also a site for parenting.  The New York-based social network company announced that they have raised additional funding at $12 million.  This round of funding was provided by Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.  Since the site has launched, CafeMom raised $20.3 million total.

CafeMom has several sponsors that have created ad campaigns around their social network.  Clients include Nestle, Unilever, Kraft, Disney, J&J, and Best Buy.  According to CenterNetworks, ad campaigns run for about $200,000-$500,000 on average.

Recently CafeMom released a feature called Hot List.  Hot Lists encourages moms to submit parenting-related news and to “Bump” them.  The feature is a blatant Digg replica.

CafeMom receives about 6 million monthly visitors and 120 million page views [Source: Mashable].

Xie Wen resigned as the Yahoo! China CEO in 2006. Xie was only on the board for 6 weeks total. Zeng Ming, a Senior VP of Alibaba at the time stepped up as CEO to replace Xie. Xie remained as a consultant of Yahoo! China for a while after. But now Xie has stepped back into a role where he will be overseeing a web company. However, his new startup is a copy of an already proven model. Xie has started a company called Yiqi, which is a replica of Facebook.

This is not the first time that a big shot in China has embraced Facebook. Last November, Li Ka-Shing, a billionaire in Hong Kong invested $60 million into Facebook. Li Ka-shing is the chairman of Cheung Kong Holdings and Hutchison Whampoa Limited.

Facebook has been replicated several times before too. StudiVZ, a German clone of Facebook was acquired for €100 million in January 2007. And in October 2006, Oak Pacific acquired Xiaonei, another Chinese version of Facebook.

Yiqi will be powered by Tanjian-based data mining company, Hylanda. Because the marketplace is already saturated of Facebook replicas, Yiqi probably won’t take off. They will also have to compete with MySpace China, a News Corp. subsidiary that recently partnered with Youku, a video-sharing site similar to YouTube but with a core focus on Chinese entertainment. In other words, it’ll be an uphill battle for Yiqi.

Earlier today, TechCrunch filmed a video (via mobile device) that shows a demo of how Facebook’s future chat application will work.  There will be an option on the bottom right of a given Facebook page to pull up a buddy list to discover which buddies are currently logged on.  Any user will be able to message their buddies through the chat application.  The presenter narrating in the video is Peter Deng, product manager of Facebook Chat.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWYMJWpWQhs[/youtube]

Before Facebook launches the chat application, it may be subject to change.  The Chat application is expected to fully roll out in the next few weeks.  But in the meantime, the social network plans to introduce an increase in more advanced privacy controls tonight.  The privacy controls include restricting specific fields of your profile.  This is different than a limited profile.

A limited profile is when you restrict specific people from viewing entire areas of your profile. For example, I filled out personal information on Facebook like a paragraph abuot me and my favorite music and movies for my friends to see.  But I don’t want my friends, Fabio or Joe Schmoe to see it.  First, I would have to select personal information to be not viewable for anyone in my limited profile.  And then I would have to put Fabio and Joe as people who are only allowed to view my limited profile.  But if I wanted Fabio to be able to see my favorite music, but not know what my favorites movies were, this was not possible.  These new advanced security features make that possible.

This security improvements do not seem like the most exciting, but it definitely beats MySpace’s security abilities.  And that is something that I think Facebook has in common with their biggest investor, Microsoft Corp.  Both companies prioritize the privacy of their users.

I’ve been using WordPress for about 4 years now.  Every time WordPress releases an update, it’s exciting.  I feel this way because I have no problem saying that WordPress is the most influential and powerful open-source platform of our time.  I feel that it has a more profound affect on the open source world today than Wikipedia.  Wikipedia’s ‘open-sourceness’ is still controlled by a designated community of moderators whereas WordPress allows it’s users to express their individuality.

Other blogging platforms cannot be compared to WordPress.  I used Xanga for a while but it seems like that blog platform company has their own agenda.  After Google acquired, Blogger, it seems like not many additions were made.  Blogger is bland compared to WordPress.  You can modify the hell out of your WordPress look & feel to fit your personality.

There were a couple of limitations with previous versions of WordPress.  WordPress’ back-ends did not have an easy way to setup photo galleries.  And switching between the Wordpress Visual and Code editor forms were choppy too.  This becomes especially noticeable when embedding Java scripts.  Hopefully new versions of WordPress will address this issue.

On the WordPress blog, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress announced the new features of WordPress 2.5.  These features include:
“A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times.”

The most exciting part in the list above is the multi-file upload and galleries.  As an obsessive blogger, my hope is that WordPress will have the same abilities that Engadget’s content management system (CMS) has.  The rate that Engadget creates photo galleries makes it seem easy.  See what I’m referring to [here].

WordPress’ parent company is Automattic.  For previous Automattic coverage, refer to http://pulse2.com/category/automattic/.