Spooking Flipboard: Yahoo’s Livestand — Followed by Google’s Propeller — Set to Launch Next Week

Memo to Flipboard, Pulse, CNN’s Zite and AOL’s Editions: You might want to make some room in the crowded news and social reader space — you’re about to get some bigfoot company.
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Oracle, SAP and the Apotheker Sideshow

Why is Oracle so intent on putting former SAP CEO and new HP chief Léo Apotheker on the stand in the trial that will determine damages in Oracle’s long-running IP battle with its German rival? SAP insists it’s to create a “PR sideshow”–which is true to an extent. But sometimes there’s more to a sideshow than meets the eye.

Yahoo Demos Cool Etch-a-Sketch Mobile Search App and New Search Dude Shashi

BoomTown will be hoofing it elsewhere today, so I am missing Yahoo’s search event at its Sunnyvale campus this morning. Thankfully, I was at the Silicon Valley Internet giant earlier this week, getting a grilling from CEO Carol Bartz, and was able to talk to both Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Yahoo Labs and Search Strategy, and new hire Shashi Seth, the company’s SVP of Search Products. Both talked about what the items on today’s agenda–a six-months’ look back at Yahoo search innovations, its upcoming Olympics shortcut on the search page and a new mobile search app that uses a kind of Etch-A-Sketch drawing technology–using fingers, not keywords–to help users find stuff.

Liveblogging Bing Demo: No Donuts, Unlikely to Pay for De-Indexing Google, but Cool New Maps

BoomTown is awaiting a passel of Microsoft execs, who will be talking about a range of new features for Bing. I will be liveblogging, but I must say, I wish there were donuts.
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Yahoo Opens Its Open Strategy With Mail, Toolbar, My Yahoo and Media

After a week of bleeding purple, a heavily bandaged Yahoo has regrouped to roll out its vaunted Open Strategy. At an event in San Francisco today, the company introduced “socialized” upgrades to Yahoo Mail, Toolbar, My Yahoo, Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music. Each service now features social enhancements that essentially transform the experience of using them into one more akin to social networking.