You might have read this by now, but our Board has unanimously concluded that Microsoft’s proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo! and our stockholders, believing that it substantially undervalues Yahoo!. Here’s the press release and updated FAQ.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Did you know that in any given week, technology stocks represent at least seven of the ten most-searched quotes on Yahoo! Finance? We did, and that’s why today we launched Tech Ticker — a new video initiative from Yahoo! Finance focused entirely on technology investing. Some consider the tech sector the fantasy sports of the investing world, and clearly our users are hungry for more in this area.

Reporting from both the Silicon Valley and the NASDAQ MarketSite broadcast studio in New York, we plan to provide the most in-depth technology investing coverage on the web. Expect Tech Ticker to be both quirky and opinionated. Our renowned editorial team couldn’t be stronger:

• Sarah Lacy, Correspondent, Silicon Valley: A 10-year Valley veteran, you may read her biweekly BusinessWeek.com column titled “Valley Girl.” She literally wrote the book on the business and culture of the Silicon Valley.
• Aaron Task, Correspondent, New York: He covered Wall Street for a decade at TheStreet.com, is a frequent guest on major business news programs and his daily podcast “The Real Story” was an award winner on iTunes.
• Henry Blodget, Contributor, New York: You know the history. Now meet Henry Blodget 2.0, author of the award-winning blog, Internet Outsider and now CEO of Silicon Alley Insider. Outspoken and battle-tested, Henry will never be at a loss for an opinion.
• Andy Kessler, Contributor, Silicon Valley: A former Morgan Stanley analyst, Andy turned $100 million into $1 billion as co-founder of a technology hedge fund. He began his career designing chips at Bell Labs and is now a best-selling author.

And me — I’m Diane Galligan, executive producer of Tech Ticker. I’m especially excited to join the Internet’s #1 finance website after nearly a decade of producing financial news with CNBC and CNN.

Expect 4-8 video segments a day, including breaking market analysis, CEO interviews, and even documentary style editorials. If you’re thinking this sounds a lot like FinanceVision, it’s not. We’re offering short video-on-demand clips that are focused on a single sector of the market, rather than live streaming coverage of the entire stock market. FinanceVision was actually ahead of its time. We hope to learn from their experience, and take advantage of the many ways the Web and Web video have since evolved.

The videos can be found on the Tech Ticker site, or in the headline feeds of the tech stocks we cover. And what about our coverage of Yahoo!? The answer is simple. We have not only the freedom, but the mandate, to call it as we see it.

You can go to http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker see for yourself. Let us know what you think is working, what’s not and what you want to see. In the meantime, check out the video below for an inside look at what Tech Ticker’s all about with Sarah Lacy.

Hope to hear from you — and enjoy!

Diane Galligan and the Tech Ticker editorial team

From plumbers to accountants, corner markets to day spas, Yahoo! has been proudly helping small businesses succeed online for more than eight years. Today we’re taking our commitment to a new level and doing something we’ve never seen done before.

Beginning today, Yahoo! Web Hosting has gone “unlimited.”

Yahoo! Small Business customers have told us loud and clear that they want getting online to be as easy and painless as possible. Instead of worrying about things like “how many visitors can my site handle?” and “how many pages can I build?,” they’d rather focus on growing and running their business.

Our new Yahoo! Web Hosting plan offers unlimited disk space, unlimited data transfer, unlimited email storage, and 1,000 email accounts — all for $11.95 a month. This is shared hosting, so we won’t become the new home of General Motors any time soon. But for the very large majority of our small business customers who simply want a professional-looking site in hours, the hosting-purchase decision has suddenly become significantly easier.

Now small business owners can focus on growing their businesses and driving traffic to their sites, feeling comfortable that their hosting package will grow with their business.

Don’t know the first thing about web design? No sweat. We’ll continue to include award-winning, easy-to-use web site design tools that help business owners with little or no technical chops quickly build great-looking sites. You’ll also get a free domain name, 24×7 phone support, and a new 30-day satisfaction guarantee. And to help customers find these businesses online, Yahoo! Small Business will automatically optimize your site and submit it to top search engines. (I can think of a pretty good one.)

If you’re an existing customer, you’ve probably already received an email invitation with the option to migrate to this new plan. If you’re not an existing customer and want to get online, visit our site for more information.

Now go spread out. There’s plenty of room.

Guy Yalif
Director of Web Hosting Products, Yahoo! Small Business

Photo from dmax3270

Last year, shortly after I assumed the role of Yahoo! Music’s General Manager, we started saying publicly that we were “de-emphasizing” our premium music offering, Yahoo! Music Unlimited. The fact of the matter is that building a great premium music service takes a huge amount of resources and effort, and it was taking energy away from our important main offerings, music.yahoo.com (the Web’s #1 Music destination), music videos, and LAUNCHcast Radio. Around 25 million people visit Yahoo! Music each month. Relatively speaking, a small percentage of those use Yahoo! Music Unlimited, yet an large portion of our resources were being poured into this service. It was clear to us that we needed to make a major strategic shift.

It wasn’t an easy decision. We’re huge fans of Yahoo! Music Unlimited and those customers include many of our most loyal and valuable. We wanted to be sure those users had the best on-demand music experience available on the Internet.

As a result, we’re pleased to announce Rhapsody as our exclusive partner for on-demand music. Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscribers will have a chance to easily take their music catalogs and migrate to Rhapsody. Later this year we will be integrating Rhapsody into music.yahoo.com, so you can continue to use Yahoo! Music for music discovery, news, videos, lyrics, radio, concerts, blogs, and more, and always be a click away from music on-demand. Also, our subscribers will finally have access to the best off-PC experiences such as Rhapsody for TiVo, Sonos, and Control 4 in the living room.

We hope being able to take your Yahoo! Music Unlimited collection to the best subscription service on the Web — the one which works on PC or Mac, Firefox or Safari as well as TiVo, Sonos, etc. — at the Yahoo! Music Unlimited price, is an acceptable outcome. We sincerely apologize for any hassle and thank you for joining us in the Yahoo! Music Unlimited run. It was a wild ride for all of us.

I’m sure a question many people are going to ask is if this means Yahoo! is backing away from online music. Au contraire. It is a major strategy shift but we’re still investing in our music business as evidenced by my second bit of news: our acquisition of FoxyTunes. FoxyTunes is the world’s most popular media toolbar, a plug-in for either Firefox or Internet Explorer. FoxyTunes adds useful functionality to more than 30 media players, including iTunes, Winamp, and Pandora. With FoxyTunes you can easily control your media player from the place you spend most of your time, your Web browser, and jump from a track playing in any media player to lyrics, biography, videos, or more music in a single click. What’s more, the innovative “Signatunes” feature helps you express yourself via your music tastes by automatically inserting signatures into your favorite email program (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail), social network messages (Facebook, MySpace), or blog authoring/commenting platform, based on the currently playing track.

For an excellent tour of FoxyTunes’ far-reaching functionality, please see the screencast on FoxyTunes.com.

While it doesn’t tell the whole story, this news, along with the recent news of our Web Media Player (for a great example of the player in use, check out Aurgasm.us), points the direction for a new Yahoo! Music. We’re focusing on delivering relevant music experiences on the Web and are happy to be partnering with Rhapsody to bring you a simple, integrated, on-demand music experience.

If you’ve never used Rhapsody, check out my best of 2007 playlist on Rhapsody now for free. And be sure to control Rhapsody.com and learn more about each artist with FoxyTunes. ;)

Enjoy,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Microsoft made an unsolicited proposal to acquire Yahoo! yesterday evening. Since then, we’ve gotten quite a number of questions about what this means for Yahoo!. Right now our board of directors is evaluating the proposal and looking at all of our strategic alternatives, including maintaining Yahoo! as an independent company.

A review process like this is fluid and can take quite a bit of time, so while there’s not much we can say right now, we did want to refer you to this brief FAQ for more information.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Our job in Search is to be the starting point for our users to find what they need – and sometimes even the things they didn’t know they needed. To help celebrate all of the cool, useful and quirky things we’re discovering across the pond, Yahoo! Europe hosts an annual “Yahoo! Finds of the Year” awards. It’s where the Europe search team scours the Internet for the most innovative, humorous and useful websites, and with a panel of judges and the greater public, vote on our favourites.

The awards originated in the UK and this year we decided to go European: Yahoo! Germany, Italy and Spain have all launched their own version of “Finds of the Year” – Yahoo! Entdeckungen 2007, Le Rivelazioni del Web and Web Revelación – representing the region’s rich and entertaining Web endeavours.

The UK winners include a social networking site with a twist – a site for dogs and their pooch personalities. Users raved about an eco-shopping site created by a chap named Nigel, full of innovative and wonderful environmentally friendly products. My particular favourite is the staple-free stapler. And the people’s choice winner was Move Me, a site that captures a to-do list for when you move house and adds it all into a neat calendar for a step-by-step guide to a stress-free move!

Germany’s first ‘Finds’ awards, “Yahoo! Entdeckungen,” had great examples of Web 2.0 in action, including a cool new approach to exploring the German capital and sites that capture the essence of ‘friends of the web.’ The online-community hausgemacht.tv was a double-winner: it was a favourite for both the jury in the category “Zeitgeist” and the public vote. hausgemacht.tv delivers convenient DIY videos, ranging from tips on housekeeping to cars and health.

In Italy, if you want math as your friend and not your enemy or are keen to discover and share your passion of shoes with other like-minded souls then Yahoo! Italia’s “Le Rivelazioni del Web” is the place to go.

And with “Web Revelación,” Yahoo! Espana chimes in with revelations ranging from a website reminding you of those little things that your friends and family borrow and never give back, to a karaoke platform to an operating system developed by two young Spanish engineers.

The awards across UK, Germany, Italy and Spain really capture the ingenuity, creativity and fun that are out there on the Web for all to discover. So sidle up to our Search bar and go find something cool today!

Jeff Revoy
VP, EU Search, Local and Social Media
London, UK

Ask just about anybody that’s used the Internet and they’ll most likely agree; I have too many accounts to keep track of. Not only do I have to keep track of my username and password for every site, I usually have to go through the same find-my-friends dance for the places I go as well. There’s got to be a better way to define who I am on the web.

When I first started searching for a solution to this problem I looked long and hard at what was out there already. That’s when I found OpenID. Over the past 5 years I’ve been active in the world of open source and identity and as the current Chairman of the Board of Directors for the OpenID Foundation, we’ve been working hard to make the web a more “open” place. OpenID is an open technology (developed much in the same way that Mozilla’s Firefox or the Linux kernel is) that has been built by an amazing group of individuals. The goal was simple; create something that allows users to quickly and easily login to any site with just one username and password.

Today’s announcement by Yahoo! supporting OpenID is the realization of three years of hard work from this extremely passionate community of developers. I have never met a more committed set of people focused on doing “the right thing” all the time. In the coming months, the community will continue to formalize around the OpenID Foundation. It’s the home of OpenID and a place for this community to thrive.

Yahoo! has really made a big leap with the support of OpenID. More than just supporting another open protocol, they are embracing the concepts around the open web; the idea that users not only own their data but that they should be in complete control of their digital identities. Traditionally this has been a difficult concept for companies, sites and users to grasp. The ever-changing reality is that not only is this good for users, its just plain good for business.

I couldn’t be more excited to see this happen and it’s going to open a door of opportunity for users and developers alike. We’re already seeing innovative ways to secure your identity, communicate and even engage in the political discourse. We’re only scratching the surface on what OpenID is going to enable as a key component of the open web.

I know we don’t have all of the answers to how this will all play out. Today is another step forward in the long walk to a better experience for the user. One thing is for sure; the best is yet to come.

Scott Kveton
Chairman of the Board of Directors
OpenID Foundation

One of my favorite quotes hails from Karl Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.”

That’s why I’m at Yahoo! today. I run the ESP (Early Stage Product) team within Connected Life and my job is to imagine and invent the future of Yahoo! for social and mobile media for this group. We’re working to change the world by connecting all of us to the people and things we care about in ways that aren’t possible today.

Jerry Yang helped us imagine that world during the CES Industry Insiders keynote he delivered this morning, illustrating what’s possible as Yahoo! becomes a more open platform. People want to get relevant content, services, and connections wherever they are. A great example of this is Yahoo! Go 3.0, which Jerry and Marco Boerries, who heads Connected Life (my boss :-)), unveiled today. Not only is the new UI beautiful and simple, Yahoo! Go 3.0 is now open to let me access the services I want, whether they’re from Yahoo! or from third party developers.

We’ve created an open platform that enables developers, publishers, and advertisers to deliver mobile widgets that work in Yahoo! Go 3.0 and ultimately on any mobile browser. The platform creates distribution opportunities that never existed before in mobile applications—a developer can write once and publish to hundreds of devices. That has massive potential to change the mobile industry and how we live our mobile lives. It allows consumers not only to get the Yahoo! services they love, but also eBay, MySpace, and MTV... and I’d bet thousands more soon to come.

Then Jerry walked through a vision demo showcasing the possibilities of a more open Yahoo!, in this case focused on one of our key starting points, Yahoo! Mail. He showed how a smarter inbox could prioritize the most relevant connections in his life, both from Yahoo! and multiple social networks, and make all of his communications (email, IM, SMS, voice, status text, photos, etc.) simpler to manage. He then walked through how Yahoo! as an open platform—using Yahoo! Mail, Flickr, Yahoo! Local and Maps, and third party applications like Evite and eBay—could let you tap into the collective tastes, interests, and knowledge of the people you know and of the rest of the world. His example was trying to corral a bunch of very different friends, family, and execs for an awesome dinner. He was able to discover and explore what millions of people find interesting in Las Vegas (via Flickr and our TagMaps prototype) and what his dinner guests might enjoy as well.

Although co-founder David Filo’s recommendation was the Burger Palace (OMG, this vegetarian is glad we’re not going there), Jerry could easily find the best place we could all go together based on everyone’s interests (cuisine, entertainment, etc.) and what Yahoo! knows about the world. David Filo then came out and shared how making Yahoo! an even more open platform is going to power this vision for the future.

You should really catch the archive. If you missed the webcast, you can watch it here:

We’re all using multiple connected devices, communicating with each other, sharing our interests, our content, our social connections, and the places we care about. What Jerry, David, and Marco showed today is how a more open Yahoo! will help us live the connected lives we really want.

Marc Davis
Social Media Guru
Yahoo! Connected Life

Our second data center in Central Washington is open for business! Earlier this month we hosted more than 250 local community members and officials, contractors, and construction crew in Quincy, Washington to celebrate the opening of our first data center built from the ground up. We take great care to find the right combination of fiber connectivity, network availability, low cost of power, land and operations, and a skilled workforce to operate a state-of-the-art facility when looking for new data center locations. In Quincy and nearby Wenatchee (where we opened a data center last November), we not only found all the right resources, we were also embraced by a welcoming community.

Whether you’re checking your email or sending one, our data centers are making that action possible behind the scenes. These data centers support all our servers and network connectivity, which means access for you to all our products around the world. Greening our data centers has also been core to the company’s overall carbon neutral efforts this year and innovations in the design and operations of our new data centers help us meet our promise to be an environmentally responsible business.

The coolest part (no pun intended!) of the new Quincy facility is that it takes advantage of a cooling technology that saves energy costs every year and is sourced by 99% renewable power. A substantial amount of energy is used to cool Yahoo!’s server infrastructure. Typical data centers use air conditioning year-round, but Yahoo! is exploring technologies that include high-efficiency air-conditioning systems that use water-based chillers combined with using cold external air to cool the inside of the data center about ¾ of the year (we’re pushing for more). Our goal is to operate our Washington facilities with a 100% zero-carbon footprint by using renewable hydroelectric energy, investing in additional carbon-offsets, and producing zero water waste through chemical-free water treatment and water recycling.

We’re proud of the continued infrastructure improvements we’re making to increase our control of operations and energy-efficiency, and we’re just getting started with the Quincy facility. More than 330,000 man-hours have gone into completing the project, and we couldn’t have done it without the community’s support and the incredible commitment from the building and construction crews – hopefully the beginning of a long relationship with many more celebrations to come. When addressing the crowd at Quincy’s grand opening, our Co-Founder David Filo and Vice President of Operations Kevin Timmons reiterated the long-term investment that these data centers represent for Yahoo! and the opportunity to further support our growing community of users, like you. So the next time you send an email or do a Yahoo! search, you can rest assured that our data centers are working fast and furiously (juked up on renewable energy) to make your Yahoo! experience a seamless one.

KC Mares
Director of Data Center Strategy

Did you know that when Oprah Winfrey joined Barack Obama on the campaign trail last week, his Yahoo! Buzz rating (based on the volume of people who searched for variations of his name) shot up by more than 40 percent? Or that a much wider margin of voters are literally putting their money on Giuliani as the Republican candidate than are supporting him in the polls?

That’s the kind of insight we thought Yahoo! users would find interesting when evaluating this year’s election. It’s why we launched the “political dashboard,” a site that offers some interesting trends of the moment, as well as a state-by-state and candidate-by-candidate data analysis to give even the most hardcore political junkies their campaign fix.

It’s a part of our Election 2008 news site, and gives you a comparative snapshot of the most important campaign data, ranging from aggregate poll data, fundraising information, and even “prediction market” statistics from Intrade (an Irish-based website that uses a stock market-like approach to let users predict the election’s outcome). The dashboard gives a national overview, as well as a state-by-state analysis of both who’s winning and who’s voting. And it’s all updated daily. This type of analysis allows you to track for yourself who’s rising (or falling) as the polls, and ultimately the votes, come in. For now, it’s focused on the presidential candidates, but we also plan to add in local election data as those races heat up in the states.

Of course, we’ve also included the Yahoo! Buzz metrics, which may be the most interesting data point in our minds. This is the first time search data has been presented alongside traditional campaign metrics — something no other major news site can offer.

Check it out for yourself, and let us know what you think.

Alan Warms
General Manager, Yahoo! News