Yahoo Shopping. How do you know which sites are real?

A couple of friends of mine and I are planning a trip to Moncton for a weekend in April. So being girls, we’ve been looking at places to buy clothes from because PEI doesn’t have an overly great selection of clothes. A friend of mine found this site that has some pretty cute tops. She thinks it’s a real site because it has the Yahoo Shopping logo on it. I had never heard of Yahoo Shopping until Mr. Hyndman talked about it in class a few weeks ago.

I decided to look into this cute little store whether it was real or not. I couldn’t find the name of this store anywhere on Yahoo search. The store is called Hot Couture. You would think that if it were a store belonging to Yahoo Shopping that you would be able to find it, especially on Yahoo! Even when I looked in Yahoo Shopping, nothing came up. I’m not much of a risk taker, especially when my credit card is envolved and it looks to me like they only take Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. So my question is, how do you know whether a store is real or not? I think this fits in stollen identity.. or stollen credit card number.

So right now i’m in a little bit of a pickle. I can’t figure out whether it is real or not. It does state where it is located, an email address and a phone number. I guess the easiest way would be to call this number to see if anyone picks up although I’m not sure that’s the safest. If anyone has any ideas, let me know!

Is Yahoo!’s onePlace, the Right Place?

In class, we have briefly discussed topics concerning how to organize your web content through the use of bookmark sites (Del.icio.us) and RSS feeders. Competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft have taken content management to a new level by answering the need for management of mobile content. Yahoo! announced today its mobile-content management solution, onePlace. The tool’s objective is to create a better system to organize web information, similarly to RSS and bookmarks tools.

onePlace’s main objective is to strive for simplicity; the tool operates using a system similar to tagging and grouping, which allows users to create a category folder and link all relating information to that folder. The example Yahoo! is promoting is for traveling. Say you were traveling to Europe, you begin by creating a Euro-Trip folder. Then you can link to all the travel sites (ie recommended places to visit), related music, video clips, photos, search queries, etc. It’s like having your Del.ici.ous account only with more features, all available on your mobile phone. onePlace facilitates content portability even more, because now if you want to add useful information to your trip folder, and a computer is not close, you can just use your cellphone tool to add to the folder. Being that the phone is connected to the internet, onePlace also keeps information updated. So if your flight time was altered, onePlace would make an automatic update. Here’s a link to the press release, it includes all of onePlace’s anticipated features. Below is an idea of what the screen will look like.

Yahoo’s Bad Decisions……..

I was reading a post a couple days ago by Erick Schonfeld, talking about how after searching for The Pirate Bay (a Bittorrent search engine).  It was about how Yahoo no longer brings up The Pirate Bay, after they (The Pirate Bay) were raided by Swedish Officials.**aside**For those of you that don’t know what a Torrent is, it is a file that can be used to download media, for free, much like Kazaa or Limewire, but allows the users to post comments, view the contents of files, and see ratings from other users. (Much better than Kazaa or Limewire)**end of aside**I did the same search as Erick, but Yahoo provided me the link to this Torrent Search engine.  I don’t know if it was just a glitch by Yahoo, or if they did take it off their search result database or whatever, but still, this does not look to favorably on Yahoo.  If Yahoo wishes to remain a competitor with Google, they shouldn’t have blocked searches for certain webpages.  In my experience in the past (I use only Google now), if a search engine didn’t come up with desirable results, I would simply use a different search engine until I could find one that fitted my needs, and then I would favor the search engine over others that did not provide me with what I wanted.Even if Yahoo COULD get into trouble by “promoting” the use of free torrent search engines, they would most likely be able to get out of it in a legal case because they are not the ones providing the public with illegal movies, or music.  And on top of that, what is legal fees worth to a company that could potentially ruin they’re reputation if they try to dodge a bullet early? —Jerry  

Yahoo said that Rhapsody will handle its digital music

I was reading TechCrunch and found this article interesting “Yahoo to Shut Premium Music Service, Redirect Users to Rhapsody”. At first Yahoo was thinking to shut its premium music service back in September 2007. They were planned to shift Yahoo Music Unlimited to the Rhapsody service. It would transfer customers to Rhapsody over the coming months, while allowing subscribers to access their music library from a new Rhapsody account. Yahoo Music Unlimited plans came in at between $5.99/ month and $8.99 /month, compared to Rhapsody’s $12.99/ month charge.

Recently they have said on Monday that Yahoo music service will be now handled by Rhapsody America, an on demand subscription service run by RealNetworks Inc and Viacom Inc. “This really works to make Rhapsody much more available to a much wider audience,” said Sheeran, a senior vice president at RealNetworks

The acquisition was acquired after announced Microsoft Corp made a $44.6 billion bid on Friday to take over Yahoo. As a result it raises a question that… whether RealNetworks and Yahoo will be able to execute their new partnership if Microsoft succeeds in buying Yahoo. The reason is relationship between Microsoft and RealNetwroks were locked in a bitter and stretched anti-trust difference of opinion for eight years until Microsoft agreed to settle with RealNetworks for $761 million in October 2005. Also RealNetworks founder and chief executive Rob Glaser, is a previous Microsoft executive. Furthermore, Microsoft already has developed huge choices of digital music products and services, which include an online music store and its Zune digital media players.

Yahoo will now focus on ad-supported streaming music and music videos. RealNetworks and Verizon Communization planned to create a digital music service called Rhapsody America, which would be able to compete with Apple Inc’s successful iTunes Online Store.

—Romiz

Microsoft and Yahoo

I was just surfing the net and I came across an article stating that Microsoft has made an offer to buy Yahoo. It’s from Digital Home Canada. Heres’ what it says.

Microsoft today announced that it has made a proposal to Yahoo to buy the company for $44.6 billion dollars. Microsoft is offering Yahoo shareholders the equivalent of $31 a share in cash and Microsoft stock.

Yesterday at closing their stock(Yahoo) was valued at $19.18. But has a result of the announcement  Yahoo’s stock price his increased by almost 50%. Microsoft’s stock has decreased by 6%. Is this a good deal for Microsoft?  According to a writer from the Scripting News , they say,”Nahh. It’s like the dead leading the blind.” However, one of our required readers,Scoble, who coincidentally is an ex-employee of Microsoft, says this,

This gets Microsoft back into the Web game in a big way and puts a defense around Microsoft’s Office cash-generating-machine. I bet that some of Yahoo’s smartest engineers get moved over to the Office team to help build an online Office that’ll keep Google’s docs and spreadsheets from getting major marketshare inroads.

I agree with Dave Canvin’s post, this also has the potential to put some pressure on Google and may cause a “Web War”. We finally have two of the biggest heavyweights in the modern world possibly going toe-to-toe. What will happen next? Stay tuned, same Bat time, same Bat channel.

by

Tony Elliott