The company behind one of the biggest search engines in the world is poised to make you an offer.  They are worth $16 billion on paper and earned closed to $7 billion by the end of 2007.  What will they pay you?  The answer is made clear in an SEC statement filed by Yahoo!

Carol Bartz, the new CEO of Yahoo! will be earning $1 million per year before taxes and withholdings.  Bartz will also be eligible to make an annual target bonus of 200% of the annual salary based on company performance.  She will also be granted stock options of 5 million shares.  In terms of time off, Yahoo! will offer Bartz 4 weeks of vacation per year, 10 paid holidays, and 2 personal floating holidays.

The SEC document also acknowledges that President Sue Decker will be resigning and Jerry Yang will be assuming the role as Chief Yahoo! once again.

The first thing I thought of when reading this document was that this was an impressive salary to be receiving as a CEO, hired from an external company.  But then I remembered Terry Semel’s compensation…

In June 2007, Semel resigned as CEO of Yahoo! due to shareholder dissatisfaction of his salary.  In 2006, Semel’s salary was $1, but he had stock options worth $70 million.  Semel made over $500 million through his tenure at Yahoo!  Semel was granted options of over $110 million as a bonus to join Yahoo!  Semel still has another 18.6 million unexercised stock options in Yahoo!

Clearly the position that Yahoo! is in right now isn’t as good as it was before.  If Bartz is able to undo the mistakes that Semel and Yang made in the past, then I’m sure she’ll see a substantial amount more heading her way.

[via ZDNet]

Now that Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs has stepped out of the limelight for six months, it is time to get know some of the iPhone company’s other executives.

HubDub is a poll company that asks users to make intellectual predictions such as “Phoenix Suns @ Denver Nuggets – who will win?” and “How many times will Obama use the word ‘Change’ in his inauguration speech?”  The Scotland-based startup has raised $1.2 million in Series A from venture capitalists in the UK and other angel investors.  HubDub receives about 250,000 unique visitors and 100,000 predictions per month.

HubDub also has a partner platform where they add polls to news sites and blogs.  Some of their partners include Reuters and The Huffington Post.  The more predictions you get right, the more HubDub Dollars you win. The more HubDub Dollars you win, the higher you climb on the leaderboard.  And then you win bragging rights.

HubDub is run by Nigel Eccles, Tom Griffiths, Chris Stafford, Rob Jones, and Lesley Eccles.

[via alarm:clock]

Google has announced that they will not be supporting several of their services any longer.  This includes Google Video Uploads, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, Jaiku, and Mashup Editor.  The search engine company is shutting down the aforementioned services in order to keep efforts focused on core products and services.

Google Video blog post written by Michael Cohen: “In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video. Don’t worry, we’re not removing any content hosted on Google Video — this just means you will no longer be able to upload new content to the service. “  Google Video will just become another video search engine and I’m assuming anyone that wants to upload videos will be routed to YouTube.

Google Catalog Search blog post written by Punit Soni: “In recent years, Catalog Search hasn’t been as popular as some of our other products. So tomorrow [January 15, 2009], we’re bidding it a fond farewell and focusing our efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.”  Google Catalog Search started in 2001 using OCR to search text of product catelogs, magazines, newspapers, etc.

Google Notebook blog post written by Raj Krishnan: “Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don’t fret, we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up.”  Although Google Notebook will no longer be supported, they recommend using other Notebook-like services such as SearchWiki, Google Docs, Tasks in GMail, and Google Bookmarks.

Google Code blog post written by Vic Gundotra: “As we mentioned last April, we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License.”  Dodgeball will be discontinued in the next couple of months.  And the Mashup Editor will be shutting down in favor of the App Engine infrastructure.

Regretfully due to economic conditions, Google had to lay off a large number of contractors and about 100 recruiters.  Google has also had to relocate engineers from external offices to headquarters at Mountain View, California.

“Our long-term goal is not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core,” stated Alan Eustace on The Google Blog.

The economy as a whole has created turbulent times for the search engine company, but rest assured I expect them to bounce back as we see start seeing changes on Capitol Hill.

Even though iTunes will be going DRM-free through iTunes Plus, your information still isn’t private.  Your e-mail address is still associated with the songs that you purchase and download on iTunes, despite being DRM-free.  So you can share your music with friends and family, but make sure that they do not end up on file sharing software like Limewire or Mininova.  Because the songs will be able to trace you down.

To check to see if certain files are yours, open the iTunes Plus file on your computer using a text editor software (such as Notepad).  There will be quite a bit of gibberish in the file, but do a CTRL+F (Find) and search for your email address.

iTunes use files that are AAC, not the usual .MP3 type.  Although some music players support this format, others may not.  Fortunately iTunes can convert the AAC/.M4A files into MP3.  iTunes has already started supporting DRM-free songs with 256 kbps quality.

Mozilla will be delaying the third beta of Firefox 3 due to a large number of remaining bugs to fix.  This setback will not affect the release of the final version of Firefox 3.1.  Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 was expected to launch on January 26, but it will now be released on February 2.  This will be the last beta release for Firefox version 3.1.

“Right now we’re not expecting this to delay our shipping target of late in the first quarter,” stated Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox.  There are about 15 bugs blocking the Beta 3 release.  One of them has to do with a new privacy mode setting within Firefox, a feature that is similar to what is available in the Google Chrome browser.  Several bugs have to do with the ability to drag tabs within the browsing window. The Beta will also include a faster JavaScript engine.

“Of course, Mozilla will continue to abide by our policy of only shipping software ‘when it’s ready,’” added Beltzner, “meaning that we’ll never publish a release that doesn’t meet our strict criteria for quality, stability and performance.”

[via PC World]

Police in Queenstown, New Zealand took footage from a security-camera of a burglar breaking a safe at a local tavern and posted it on Facebook.  Viewers of the images and movie posted by the police onto Facebook were able to identify the man and rat him out.  He was in cuffs the next day.

The burglar is 21 years old and broke into the pub on Monday.  From there he spent some time trying to break into the safe using an angle grinder.  After he couldn’t get it open, he gave up and left.  Before he left, he looked right at the camera.  The name of the suspect was not released.

The Queenstown police are calling this their first Facebook arrest.  The Queenstown police department established their social media presence about two months ago.  “It’s pretty popular, isn’t it, this site?” stated Constable Sean Drader.

Recently Facebook was used to identify a man that ate at a seafood restaurant in Melbourne and then ran off without paying the $323 bill.  Facebook was also used for the first time to serve a court order based on profile activity last month.

Gadget writer for Wired, Brian Chen put together a video on how to hack a netbook to run Mac OS X. It turns out Apple wasn’t too appreciative for this video. At first Brian thought Apple was planning on suing Wired, but it looks like they just received some sort of take-down notice. For the purpose of experimentation, Brian loaned his MSI Wind Hackintosh for Wired’s Giz Gallery.

The video gives a step by step guide on putting the Apple operating system on the netbook.  This includes surfing over to The Pirate Bay to get the Mac OS X software, installing a code to make the USB drive bootable, and opening the netbook using a screwdriver to swap the WiFi card.

Although the video has been removed from Wired, Gizmodo captured the video and archived it for us to see. Gizmodo pointed out that since Apple sent Wired a takedown notice and stirred up some controvers, more people will see it now.