Yahoo Inc. has finally started to roll out new features designed to make its e-mail service more like the popular online hangouts Facebook and MySpace, following through on a promise made nearly a year ago.

With the additions announced Monday, Yahoo’s roughly 275 million e-mail users will have the option of setting up their accounts so they can highlight communications from other people with whom they have formed an online connection. Read the rest of this entry »

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Yahoo was hurting long before the financial crisis got everyone worried about a global recession. Now its pain has become more acute.

Yahoo said Tuesday that it would lay off at least 10 percent of its 15,000 workers as it tries to bring down its expenses. It said reduced marketing budgets had taken a bite out of its online advertising business, sending its net income for the third quarter tumbling by 64 percent.

The company also lowered its revenue projections for the remainder of the year and said it was too early to make forecasts for 2009.

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A few weeks ago, Yahoo began what may be its biggest overhaul of its home page. But if you are among the roughly 100 million Americans who stop by Yahoo.com every month, the odds are that you haven’t noticed any changes.

That’s because the job of revamping the Web’s most visited portal page is fraught with risk. If even a small fraction of Yahoo’s audience doesn’t like the changes, the company could lose millions of users and millions of dollars in advertising. So Yahoo is introducing changes in small stages and to small segments of its audience at a time, all while soliciting feedback from its users.

You could call it stealth innovation. The company’s goal is to end up several months from now with a completely different, and presumably better, front page — with its audience intact. The effort is as much art as science and seeks to balance the company’s desire to innovate with its fear of alienating users. And it offers an example of how online services are designed and improved in a world where a rival’s offering is just a click away.

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Yahoo Inc. is preparing to tweak several popular sections of its Web site, including its home page, during the next few months to accommodate more material from rival services as the Internet company tries to polish its tarnished franchise.

The makeover outlined for reporters Thursday represents a key step in Yahoo’s push to regain the momentum that it lost while being outmaneuvered by Internet search rival Google Inc. and more recent upstarts like the rapidly growing online hangouts MySpace and Facebook.

Yahoo’s previous dawdling crimped its profits during the past two years, leading to a dramatic downturn in its market value that triggered an unsolicited takeover bid from Microsoft Corp. this year.

Since Microsoft withdrew its $47.5 billion bid in May, Yahoo has been battling to boost its stock price, which recently sank to its lowest level in nearly five years. Yahoo shares climbed 85 cents, or almost 5 percent, Thursday to close at $18.55 — well below Microsoft’s last offer of $33.

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Yahoo has struck an agreement with LucidMedia in a move to enhance contextual display advertising on its Right Media Exchange, the companies announced Tuesday.

The arrangement comes as Yahoo and its competitors, which rely heavily on ad revenue, face a challenging environment as the economy softens and advertisers pull back. With the agreement, Yahoo is seeking to grab market share from Google and Microsoft.

Under the agreement, Yahoo’s Right Media will support buyers and sellers that use LucidMedia’s contextual advertising engine ClickSense. The arrangement will allow Right Media users to categorize their display advertising inventory, using targeted tags for any of Yahoo’s more than 60 vertical channels, such as automotive, finance, and sports.

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Capital Research Global Investors, one of Yahoo’s largest shareholders, has asked for a re-examination of Yahoo’s shareholder vote at last Friday’s annual meeting, the investment group’s parent company said Monday.

The request for re-examination suggests that the votes actually withheld for certain Yahoo directors, including the chief executive, Jerry Yang, may have been higher than reported.

Gordon Crawford, an influential portfolio manager for Capital Research, which owns about 6.2 percent of Yahoo’s shares, has been sharply critical of Yahoo’s board and management, and was believed to have advised funds under his control to withhold votes from certain Yahoo directors. Read the rest of this entry »

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