GigaOM

Summer is generally a slower time for news and this summer is no exception. But the kind folks at Microsoft, Yahoo and Carl Icahn’s investment firm are charitably offering up a form of entertainment with their ongoing Let’s Make a Deal saga.
The latest installment is a letter to shareholders from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang that [...]

The battle over Yahoo’s search business as witnessed over the last few days seems both ridiculous and petty. And it takes the attention away from what is Yahoo’s true value: a media aggregation platform. Yahoo is the place a lot of people — some 400 million — visit to get their news, sports scores and [...]

Today saw the first of at least two Congressional hearings concerning managing privacy on the web in relation to online advertising. The hearing today involved executives from Google, Facebook, Microsoft and startup NebuAd as well as the Federal Trade Commission and two public policy groups. For a complete listing, check out the hearing, although it [...]

Mippin (formerly Refresh Mobile), whose browser-based site presents content specially designed for mobile consumption, says it has named a new CEO and reached a milestone of 500,000 users. But I question its ability to survive.
The London-based startup’s service also learns what users like and recommends stories based on their previous interests. I call it a [...]

Remember back in the Dark Ages before text messaging, when a teenager (let’s call him Jerry Yang) might get a best friend (maybe call him Carl Icahn) to call another friend (say, Steve Ballmer) using three-way calling? With Yang sitting silently on the line, the goal would be for Icahn to goad Ballmer into saying [...]

Powerset founder Barney Pell used to turn blue in the face telling people how superior his company’s approach to search was, yet now he’s selling the firm to Microsoft for a rumored $100 million. The move is not, however, simply a reflection of how well Powerset was doing but of how much money the company was faced with spending in order to compete with Google.