Stern Named Head of New Strategery Role at Yahoo

The man who has been the Swiss Army Knife of Yahoo will be key strategy guy for Thompson, who clearly wants to do a lot of strategizing.
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Exclusive: Mickie Rosen to Join Yahoo as Audience Head

Yahoo is hiring former News Corp. and Disney online exec Mickie Rosen to run its Audience unit, which includes the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s powerful content sites, sources said. Rosen will report to Americas head Ross Levinsohn, who has worked with her before, both at News Corp. and Fuse Capital. The move is Levinsohn’s first management rejiggering since he took over last year, and there is likely to be more to come.

Binging in the Holidays (With Donuts!)

Microsoft announced a bunch of new Bing updates, most notably deeper Facebook integration and a coming update for the iPhone app that allows users to upload their own panorama images.

Catching Up With Factual CEO Gil Elbaz

When you want to build an application that uses lots of data, one of the fundamental questions is this: Where does the data come from, and how do you get it into the application? Gil Elbaz, the man who created what’s now Google AdSense, thinks he has the answer.

News Byte

Google's Hotpot Joins the Local Recommendation Crowd

Google entered the local recommendation fray yesterday with the launch of Hotpot, and despite what the name implies, it’s not just for Chinese restaurants. Hotpot combines the 50 million listings in Google Places with user ratings and personalized recommendations, and it has the advantage of being attached to the world’s largest search engine–but it’s late to the game, and Yelp is already the dominant player, having amassed a huge database of reviews.

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Networks Block Web Programs From Being Viewed on Google TV

ABC, CBS and NBC are blocking TV programming on their websites from being viewable on Google Inc.’s new Web-TV service, exposing the rift that remains between the technology giant and some of the media companies it wants to supply content for its new products.

iPad TV?

Could Apple’s future as a multichannel video distributor lie not with AppleTV but with the iPad? Might the “best of TV” iTunes subscription offering the company has been pitching to TV networks since last November be primarily intended for that device and not the company’s sleeper AppleTV platform?

eBay Bids to Fix a Security Hole

See? You don’t just have to be a buzzy social network to suffer through security problems. You can be a relatively staid Web 1.0 giant, too. eBay is warning developers who build programs that incorporate the online marketplace’s engine about a security breach.
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D7 Tech Demo: Siri

Many would-be augurs have been trying to pinpoint the moment the artificial intelligence overlord known as Skynet gets its start: Some may one day point to the launch of Siri. Siri is a virtual personal assistant, for your iPhone or computer, with a pedigree: It originated at the Stanford Research Institute and was spun out as an AI project financed by DARPA. Now, as an alternative to search, Siri is supposed to carry out tasks like finding your next outgoing flight or ordering a pizza by crawling the Web and conversing with the user, processing requests, responding and learning from the interaction. It will do this via a combination of technologies, including speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search.
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A Go-To Web Site for Home Buyers

Dipping a toe into the real-estate market these days can be tricky. Thankfully, the Web’s ability to demystify intimidating topics has brought what was once considered insider real-estate knowledge to the masses.
trulia