Yahoo! turns 10

yahoo.gifCreated at first in April 1994 as Jerry and David’s guide to the World Wide Web turns later on, in Yet another Hierarchical Officious Oracle what will be known from now on as Yahoo!. The torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo was receiving, made the two founders realise they had a potential business on their hands. As such on March 2nd 1995, the pair incorporated the business and one month later they came across Sequoia Capital (the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems) who agreed to fund Yahoo with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.

It was the start of what will become one of the world’s most highly trafficked web site, one of the Internets most recognised brands, a company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 232 million individuals each month worldwide.

A short history of Yahoo!

Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta this summer

Beta versions of Internet Explorer 7.0 will be available this summer for Longhorn and XP SP2.

During his keynote address at the annual RSA Conference today, Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect at Microsoft Corp., announced continued innovation and technology investments including future enhancements for safer Web browsing, such as plans for a new version of Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows XP Service Pack 2 customers.

More details on Microsoft PressPass and IEBlog

Big fight… about.com

The fact that Primedia’s About.com is on sale is already old by now. Same that the final bids are due on Tuesday. The latest news on the case are mentioning no more no less than 5 (yeah five) huge bidders are in the game, as follows: Google (huh, no wonder:), Yahoo! (well if Google’s there, they should be too), AOL, Ask Jeeves (as Bloglines wasn’t enough) and last, but not least The New York Times itself. Big fight to follow if all of them are really in the game. The same rumors are saying that the asking price is $350 million to $500 million.

Weblog Awards

Along with 2005 Best Business Blogging awards mentioned by Dragos, you can also check out the 2005 Bloggies Awards. The final results will be available on March 14th, but meanwhile you can take a look at the nominees grouped in various categories as: best article or essay about weblog, best web application, best photography, best food weblog, best entertainment weblog, best weblog about politics, best writing, best community weblog, best designed weblog and so on.

Gmail Invites

It seems Dragos is right and Gmail is preparing for graduation since I see more and more Gmail users in the last couple of days getting 50 or more invites to give away. I got them too, so if you want any, drop me a line.

Search results in RSS

MSN search is giving us, as an alpha release, the option to get an rss file of the web search, with the option to get the search results right in your RSS reader.

Here are the step-by-step instructions in how to use it:

  • run your web or news search on the MSN Search or in MSN News Search
  • add the text “&format=rss” to the url
  • copy the full url into your RSS Reader.

Here are some samples for web search url:

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=Firefox&format=rss

or for news search:

http://beta.search.msn.com/news/results.aspx?q=Romania&format=rss
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MSN Spaces

Microsoft just open a new front in their war with Google, after the beta search engine or the upgrade in hotmail storage space. The recent launch of MSN Spaces, Microsoft free blog tool, their moving the war in blogsphere, trying to steal some of the share of Google’s Blogger.

The new tool is unfortunately forcing new users to grant Microsoft permission to “use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat” their Blog postings. In this case Microsoft practically owns the content and can modify it at will? I will probably stick to what i got so far, and try to keep myself away from Microsoft tools, as much as I can.