Efficiency is a business school idea that suggests a company is running smoothly. It’s absolutely terrific when you’re talking about a coal mining operation or a Supercuts. But when it comes to a company like Yahoo it’s not a positive. The Internet is still in its wild west days, and...

It’s been a long and winding road for Yahoo and Microsoft since Redmond’s first attempt to buy Yahoo for $45 billion two years ago, which ended up in the two companies a greeing to a complicated search deal in July, 2009. Today, the last hurdle to that deal has been removed, with government...

If you are still wondering why Google is pushing so hard with its new product Buzz , it is because it wants in on social traffic. For many sites on the Web, social traffic coming through Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace is beginning to rival, and in some cases overtake, search traffic as the single biggest...

We got a tip recently about a startup called BillFloat , which sports a rather limited website with nothing but a logo and a call for fresh engineers. The intriguing thing about BillFloat, however, was this sentence on the placeholder website: “We are a PayPal and Venrock backed startup re-defining...

“ The greatest trick Microsoft ever pulled was convincing Apple that Google didn’t exist. “ If Microsoft plays its cards right, that may be a statement we’re saying years from now. What does that mean? Aside from being a riff on one of the best lines in movie history, what I...

Though they’re not planning to unveil it until next week, Meebo has given us a sneak peek at their iPhone app. My immediate reaction? This will be my go-to messaging app on the iPhone. While there are no shortage of apps that now allow you to connect to a wide range of messaging networks, Meebo’s...

By Chris Scott Barr Over the last week or so, there has been some talk about Facebook launching a “Gmail killer” webmail feature. Various sites covered this and described how Facebook was looking to replace Gmail (and any other webmail client) with their new service. To be quite honest, I haven’t...

By Chris Scott Barr Over the last week or so, there has been some talk about Facebook launching a “Gmail killer” webmail feature. Various sites covered this and described how Facebook was looking to replace Gmail (and any other webmail client) with their new service. To be quite honest, I haven’t...

We haven’t heard much from PlayFirst since we covered the San Francisco-based casual gaming startup’s last funding round back in December 2007, but that doesn’t mean things aren’t moving for the venture-backed company. Earlier this year, the startup inked a major deal with Big...

There remains an ongoing desktop Twitter application war. Traditionally Tweetdeck and Seesmic have been at loggerheads for the lion share, although Tweetdeck has remained in the lead so far. Increasingly it appears that Seesmic is heading towards trying to be a much more mainstream application, for...

( Editor’s note : Centralized Web job boards are in decline. Dan Finnigan , CEO of Jobvite , explains why in this guest post. Previously, he was Senior VP at Yahoo and GM of HotJobs, and before that a Director on CareerBuilder’s Board as CEO of Knight Ridder Digital. Monster’s acquisition...

Google Maps has just launched a new and nifty feature: suggestions of similar places to your search query in maps. So if you search for Best Buy in your designated area, Maps will suggest (in the more information tab) nearby businesses and places that might be of interest to you, such as other Best...