Online MBA Degree
Email address validation/verification and clean user list.
EMAIL ADDRESS VALIDATION / VERIFICATION for sending bulk emails/newsletters:
| SN | Approach | Pros | Cons |
| 1 | Using javascript function. | Using Javascript method to validate email address is fast. And as it runs in client side, it has nothing to do with the network traffic. | Javascript method can validate email address syntactically not semantically i.e. it can validate both abcd@yahoo.com and abc@yahoo.com correct. So you can just validate the email address but cannot verify it. |
| 2 | By sending user a test mail to check whether the email address exist or not. | A test email can be sent to check whether the email address exists or not. When you send an actual email, the email server MUST reply with a bounce message if account doesn't exist. And the best thing is that most email servers respond immediately, so you get bounce message within seconds. During the registration the system validates not only the domain name and syntax of the email address but also checks that the mailbox is valid. | Many mail servers lie about mail boxes these days, so spammers cannot find out if a mailbox exists.
If you 'spam' hotmail or yahoo for example, they will start bouncing back your emails late (few hours or more), or not at all. |
| 3 | Using handshake method. | Using handshake method. That is, just reach up to the email address, connect with the mail server, get the welcome note and disconnect without actually sending a test mail. Faster than the approach#2. Can check for the misspelled address. Validate the domain name and user can see the result then and there. | This method depends highly on the network condition and may give incorrect or delayed or no result. DNS failure and grey listing can wreak havoc in this method. It doesn't prove that the person that completed the form actually owns that email address. |
Most Trusted And Widely Used Approach:
Double/Confirmed opt-in method:
In this method, when a user registers in your web site with his email address, send an email to the user with a link and ask him to click the link in order to confirm the email address is valid and authentic. In case, if you do not receive the response from such user (i.e. no link is clicked in the email), you can conclude that, that user is fake.
Advantages:
1. It reduces the probability of spam complaints. The confirmation process will help to ensure that people are only subscribed to your web site with their consent. Thus significantly reduces chance of email being ignored as “spam”.
2. Cleaner list -- people have to use their real email addresses in order to confirm their subscriptions in your web site. This also eliminates misspelled email addresses or those with typos.
3. Potentially more responsive subscribers (Higher response rate). Those who are genuinely interested enough to confirm their subscriptions/registration may also be more inclined to respond to your emails.
4. Safeguard against being “blacklisted” on DNSBLs by various anti-spam organizations.
5. Faster delivery.
6. Eliminates the possibility that an erroneous or problematic address may be added to your email list, i.e., someone signing up with a spamtrap or somebody else’s address, thus “poisoning” your email list.
7. Reduces the probability of an email/newsletter being bounced.
Disadvantages:
1. The main disadvantage is that many people may not understand your confirmation message or may not want to go through the extra step. This may cause the loss of subscribers.
Google's new Buzz targets Facebook
Launching a frontal assault on Facebook, Google on Tuesday plunged deeper into the realm of social networking, introducing a sort of e-mail on steroids that will allow Gmail users to interact through multiple media and dig into the rich smorgasbord of services already available from the world's king of search.
Dubbed Google Buzz, the new feature enables Gmail users to create status updates ala Facebook, pull in Twitter tweets from friends, and corral a whole slew of elements — YouTube videos, Picasa and Flickr photos, Web links — into a Googlized version of virtual social interaction.
Pitting Google's full and formidable search and mapping arsenal against both Facebook and Yahoo, which has had a
At its unveiling at company headquarters in Mountain View, Bradley Horowitz, vice president for product management, said Buzz was Google's latest effort to foster social networking by cleaning out the Internet's clutter, a mess caused in part by social networking sites in the first place.
"The stream of messages has become a torrent," he said. "There's real content in that stream. But there is no way to parse that amount of information, that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime."
'Static e-mail' evolves
By embedding
Buzz directly into Gmail, Google engineers hope to streamline sharing and make it smarter, both online and through mobile devices. By clicking the Buzz icon, users will automatically "follow" friends they most often e-mail and chat with, tapping into anything they are posting, from Web links to vacation photos to real-time reviews on the taqueria where they just ate. The new feature lets you make your own Buzz posts public — and therefore searchable with Google — or private, accessible only to specified friends. And by harnessing its trademark algorithmic search and categorizing powers, Google will "score" the incoming updates into good and not-as-good Buzz. With Buzz on board, product manager Todd Jackson said, "it's no longer just a static e-mail but a live object in your inbox." Google software, he said, will collect feedback when users click on updates, and "we'll learn what you like. Organizing the world's social information has become a big problem — but it's the kind of problem Google loves to solve." Buzz, which will be available in coming days, is Google's direct response to Facebook's rapid rise since it started six years ago. With more than 400 million worldwide users, Facebook's large audience — whose posted information cannot be indexed by Google's search engine — threatens to siphon away some of the search giant's advertising sales. "This is a direct attack on Facebook," said veteran tech analyst Jeremiah Owyang with the Altimeter Group. Buzz "comes as no surprise because it's part of Google's mission to organize Web content for users, then become the intermediaries and put advertising around it. This is more of the same." Twitter's new rival Owyang said Buzz could be a threat to Twitter, "since Gmail is more mainstream, and users may adopt it faster than they've adopted Twitter." And he sees Buzz as possibly "disruptive to businesses." He used the example of mobile phone users disappointed in a yogurt shop, then having their real-time negative Buzz review show up in a Google search for that business. "And their Buzzes could show up higher in the search results than the business itself." Not surprisingly, Yahoo and Microsoft, two powerhouses coveting the social networking sphere, blasted Buzz within minutes of Tuesday's announcement at the Googleplex. Yahoo, whose approximately 303 million users dwarf Google's 176 million Gmail customers, sent out a release boasting, "It's been almost a year and a half since we first launched Yahoo Updates — a social feature that lets people share their status, content and online activities and stay connected to what their friends and family are doing on Yahoo! and across the Web." Uphill battle And Microsoft, practically gloating in a statement, said, "Busy people don't want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We've done that" with Hotmail, which has an estimated 369 million users. IDC analyst Karsten Weide, who studies the intersection of new media and the digital marketplace, said Google's new feature faces an uphill battle in breaking Facebook's domination of social networking or stunting Twitter's phenomenal growth spurt. "I'm not that optimistic about Google Buzz," he said. "It's similar to what Yahoo already does on Yahoo Mail — leveraging social connections that are already there in e-mail. But it's pretty much a flop because people who are likely to use it are already using Facebook and Twitter, so why use Yahoo?"
Google to build ultra-high-speed Internet networks
Trying to speed up Internet service across the nation, Google said Wednesday that it plans to develop an experimental broadband system in one or more communities that would stream Web-based content more than 100 times faster than what is commonly available to Americans today.
The company was vague about many details of the plan, including when it might be built and how much a customer might have to pay, saying only that "we plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people."
But the Mountain View search giant, while emphasizing that it is merely testing a limited system and has no intention of becoming a major broadband service provider, has long pushed for
Despite the lack of specifics, the idea drew praise from advocates for Internet access.
"Local governments have been creatively and actively trying to meet their urban, suburban and rural communities' broadband needs for more than 15 years," said Tonya Rideout, acting executive director of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, in a statement. "We welcome collaboration with Google."
However, Scott Cleland, a telecommunications analyst and frequent Google critic, said the vagueness of Google's plan raises a number of questions. Among them, he said, "will Google decide to build in the community that offers the most tax breaks and public subsidies?" Minnie Ingersoll, a Google product manager, said many details about the network will be worked out later. "Some of that will depend on the communities we end up partnering with," she said, adding that it could be one or several communities. Santa Clara might be interested, said Assistant City Manager Carol McCarthy. "We were talking about it at the staff level today," added San Carlos Assistant City Manager Brian Moura. "I think it's an intriguing idea." He noted that several local residents had called the city to say they already had nominated it for the experiment. Although Ingersoll said Google "will be funding the deployment of the network" and "would probably be laying some fiber as part of this," the cost to the company also remains uncertain because, she said, Google may work with other Internet providers to set up the system. She said Google's motivation "is to experiment and learn" and that the company intends to share what it learns with others. "We don't have plans to expand beyond the test-bed we're going to build with this." Google's blog said the system will be an open-access network, "giving users the choice of multiple service providers" and "Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the web and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York," said Google's blog. "Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3-D video of a university lecture. Universal, ultra high-speed Internet access will make all this and more possible." At 1-gigabit-per-second, downloading a typical movie would take about 30 seconds. By contrast, it would take about 35 minutes via some cable services, nearly six hours with DSL and more than six days via some dial-up Web connections. Given the growing popularity of Web video and other content that is hard to download without high-speed broadband, some analysts said Google has a good chance of using its experiment to prompt other Internet providers to offer speedier access. "The winds of change are kind of blowing in the direction they want them to," said Mike Jude, a consumer communications specialist with Stratecast, a division of research firm Frost & Sullivan. So Google will give other Internet operators an incentive "to at least do something along the same lines." Google has had mixed results with its previous efforts to provide communitywide Internet access. In 2006, the company launched a Wi-Fi network in its hometown of Mountain View, calling the move at the time "a way for us to give back to and engage with the community." But Google's efforts to provide free wireless Internet access throughout San Francisco fell apart in 2007, when Google's partner, EarthLink, backed out of the deal. Analysts differed on how much Google might eventually profit from the experiment. By prompting wide adoption of superfast Internet access, some said, more people might be encouraged to use Google and its services, such as YouTube. But in a note to its clients, research firm Broadpoint AmTech said, "we do not fully understand the rationale," adding that some Google investors "do NOT want to see (the company) going in this direction."
Microsoft, seeking comeback, to show phone software
NEW YORK — Microsoft is expected to announce a major revamp of its phone software Monday, in an attempt to regain momentum in a crucial market where it's been overshadowed.
CEO Steve Ballmer will be speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the world's largest cell phone trade show, and analysts expect him to reveal Windows Mobile 7. The software could be in phones by late this year.
The new software comes as Microsoft, dominant when smartphones were young, has taken a back seat to Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices among corporate users and Apple's iPhone among consumers. "They seem to have lost the world's attention in smartphones," said Dan Hays, who specializes in telecommunications at management consulting firm PRTM.
The new software is expected to be more consumer-focused than previous versions, with a simplified user interface, which could be borrowed in part from Microsoft's well-reviewed — but low-selling — Zune HD media player.
"If that thing had a phone in it ... that would be a pretty darn good device," said Charles Golvin, analyst with Forrester Research. "But my own judgment is that this is kind of their last chance. If Windows Mobile doesn't get it right this time around, they're probably toast."
Microsoft is famous, Golvin said, for sticking to its projects, version after version. But developments in smartphones are coming so fast that tenacity alone won't help.
microsoft facing up to the coming WIRELESS challenge COMING MONDAY: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to announce a new version of the company"s phone software Monday. Microsoft needs to recapture momentum in a crucial market where it has been overshadowed by Google and Apple. THE NUMBERS: Microsoft"s Windows ran 9 percent of smart phones sold worldwide last year, according to research firm In-Stat. That was down from 13.2 percent in 2008. WHAT TO LOOK FOR: Analysts say Microsoft needs to make its phone software easier to use for everyday consumers.
Google tweaks Buzz after privacy concerns
NEW YORK — As it introduced a new social hub, Google quickly learned that people's most frequent e-mail contacts are not necessarily their best friends.
Rather, they could be business associates, or even lovers, and the groups don't necessarily mix well. It's one reason many people keep those worlds separate by using Facebook for friends and LinkedIn for professional contacts, or by keeping some people completely off either social circle despite frequent e-mails with them.
Google drew privacy complaints this week when it introduced Buzz and automatically created circles of friends based on users' most frequent contacts on Gmail. Just days later, Google responded by giving users more control over what others see about them.
Google introduced Buzz on Tuesday as part of its existing Gmail service. The service includes many of the features that have turned Facebook into the Web's top spot for fraternizing with friends and family. Like Facebook, Buzz lets Gmail users post updates about what they are doing or thinking. Gmail users can also track other people's updates and instantly comment on them for everyone else in the social circle to see.
Whereas Facebook requires both sides to confirm that they are friends before making that relationship public, Google automatically does so by analyzing how often they've communicated in the past. Those frequent contacts become part of the circle of people you follow and who follow you.
And before Google made the latest changes, who's in those circles could easily be exposed to others without the user even realizing it. Suddenly your boss could discover that you've been corresponding with a rival company that happens to have some job openings. In response to the privacy concerns, Google said Thursday that it has tweaked Buzz so users can more easily hide lists of followers and followees. It also made it easier for users to block specific people from following their Buzz updates, such as links, posts, photos and videos. And it left the conversation open, saying in a blog post that it welcomed further suggestions "to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind." Privacy concerns intensify when Web sites get social because people want control over what information they share and with whom. Or at least they say they do, according to surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Their actions, however, can be contradictory. "Our surveys have shown that people send mixed messages about privacy," said Lee Rainie, director of the project. "When asked directly, they place a high value on it. They express a strong desire for control over their personal information and how third parties use it." But in their day-to-day activities, people are willing to go against their principles and share quite a lot in exchange for something they value. Companies navigating this environment, Rainie said, "are getting a series of messages from consumers that are sometimes hard to figure out." The issue of privacy has played out, sometimes loudly, as Facebook evolved over six years from a closed network for college students to a social hub for 400 million people around the world. In 2007, Facebook's since-discontinued tracking tool, Beacon, caught users off-guard by broadcasting information about their activities at other Web sites, including holiday gifts they just bought for those who could see the information. The company ultimately allowed users to turn Beacon off. Google, too, was quick to respond, something that won praise from Lauren Weinstein, a privacy advocate. "The thing hasn't been out a week," Weinstein said Friday. "It's going to take some period to hash out." GOOGLE BUZZ THE BUZZ: Google introduced a social hub called Buzz that automatically created circles of friends based on users" most frequent contacts on Gmail. THE COMPLAINT: Those frequent contacts aren"t necessarily your best friends. They could be business associates you might prefer to keep out of your circle. THE RESPONSE: Google is giving users more control. Among other things, it"ll be easier to block specific people from following your photos and other updates. Source: Associated Press
Google dismisses Justice Department objections
Taking a newly confrontational stance, Google has decided not to negotiate over the latest objections from the U.S. Justice Department about its plans to create an immense digital library of out-of-print works. Instead, it will ask a federal judge to approve the plan as is.
In a combative court brief, Google said its opponents have failed to ground their objections "in pertinent doctrine and offer no practical alternatives." The brief comes a week after the Justice Department complained for a second time that the plan is anti-competitive.
Approval of the settlement will "open the virtual doors to the greatest library in history," Google said in its brief. "To deny the settlement will keep those library doors locked while inviting costly, fragmented litigation that could clog dockets around the country for years."
The Mountain View Internet giant has been working for years and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the technology to scan millions of old, out-of-print books from around the world, saying that it hopes to unlock the accumulated wisdom of centuries as it creates a vast digital database that could be searched by anyone. Most of the books are stored in obscure university collections.
Google's ambitions have been delayed by a class-action lawsuit and now the opposition to the proposed settlement of that suit. Google's latest filing sets the stage for a hearing Thursday before federal court Judge Denny Chin on the settlement. Saying it was seeing substantial progress toward an acceptable settlement but that it still had significant copyright and antitrust concerns, the Justice Department last week suggested that Google and its partners continue to refine their proposal. Federal lawyers said such sweeping marketplace changes should be done through legislation, rather than through the settlement of a private class-action lawsuit. Few expect the long-disputed matter to be resolved by Chin's decision. "It could even get to the Supreme Court," said Pamela Samuelson, a University of California-Berkeley law professor who has rallied opposition by academic authors to Google's plans. —‰'Google is going for it,' is the slogan among the people I'm hearing," said Samuelson, one of several Bay Area lawyers scheduled to speak at Thursday's hearing in New York City. But after more than a year of negotiations and legal arguments, Google and its partners, including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, have elected to move forward rather than continue compromising. "We think we have a good shot at it, and we want to hear what the court has to say at this point," Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said Friday. "We think we've made substantial amendments that address the Justice Department's concerns, and we very much want to hear how the court views those." Joining the U.S. government in opposition to the proposed settlement are several state governments, France, Germany, and key Google business competitors Amazon and Microsoft. "The problem with this deal basically, it's not that it suffers from a deficiency or two, the problem is that it transgresses major areas of the law, including antitrust, copyright and class action, and the role of the courts and the limits of judicial power. There's a whole host of very important issues," said Gary Reback, a Palo Alto lawyer who represents the Open Book Alliance, a group that includes Amazon, Microsoft and an array of authors and library groups. But Andrew Gavil, a law professor at Howard University who has been following the case, said the judge is free to ignore Justice Department objections, and it is certainly possible he may do so. "When you have a settlement in front of you, the parties in front of you are essentially saying, 'We don't want to litigate anymore,' " Gavil said. For many judges, "there is a strong inclination to allow parties who want to walk away from litigation to walk away from it." Experts said the government's opposition makes Google's legal fight tougher. If the judge "is going to approve the settlement he really would have to do a good job of explaining why he's doing that," Gavil said. But neither is the government required to accept any ruling by the judge. If the Justice Department disagrees with Chin's ruling, it could file an appeal, or even file its own challenge in court to the settlement on antitrust grounds. Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. GOOGLE BOOK DEAL TAKING A STAND: Google has set a showdown with the U.S. Department of Justice with a court filing defending the $125 million settlement of a class-action lawsuit that the company reached with U.S. authors and publishers more than 14 months ago. WHAT"S AT STAKE: The Internet search leader is seeking the digital rights to millions of books. Justice Department and others believe the settlement would thwart competition in the book market and undermine copyright law. WHAT"S NEXT: Oral arguments are scheduled for Feb. 18 in a New York court hearing. Source: Associated Press
Google's convoluted search for China compromise
SAN FRANCISCO — Shedding China's shackles on free speech is proving to be easier said than done for Google.
The Mountain View-based company is still censoring its results in China a month after Google's leaders took a public stand against Chinese laws that require the removal of links to Web sites that the government deems subversive or offensive.
Citing the sensitivity of the talks, Google officials won't say how the negotiations have been going since the company issued its Jan. 12 threat to shut down its China-based search engine and possibly leave the country altogether. Google is demanding that the government tear down the so-called "Great Firewall" that seeks to keep China's citizens from finding politically sensitive information and images.
Google's top lawyer, David Drummond, initially said that Google would take a few weeks to meet with government officials before deciding what to do. But Google officials now say the company might parse its Chinese search results for several more months while it steers through a political and cultural minefield in search of a compromise with the ruling party.
Google's willingness to keep its censored search engine running for now is a signal that Chinese leaders haven't been as unyielding in the private talks as they have in public statements demanding obedience of the law, said Internet analyst Colin Gillis, who follows Google for BGC Financial.
"It's probably a positive
sign," Gillis said. "Google wants to find a way to stay there, and the Chinese government doesn't want Google to leave because that would be a black mark on them."
Even so, a compromise may still prove difficult because neither side wants to be seen as backing down from its principles. Each side would have to find a way to concede without appearing to capitulate, in keeping with the Chinese custom of "face saving."
To complicate things further, both the Chinese government and Google appear to be grappling with conflicting priorities.
China's ruling party recognizes that it needs technology innovators such as Google to help fuel the country's robust economic growth, but the government fears losing control if its citizens could read and see anything they want.
The tension within Google arises from the idealism of its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and its more practical, business-minded CEO, Eric Schmidt. Brin and Page, who combined still own a controlling interest in Google, have never felt comfortable about censoring search results in China. Although he didn't like the restrictions either, Schmidt has always seemed more willing to do whatever it takes to remain in such a potentially lucrative market.
"We remain quite committed to being there," Schmidt said about China three weeks ago, adding that staying will require operating under "somewhat different terms than we have."
Gillis and other analysts doubt China will bend enough to allow a completely unfiltered search engine. If that holds true, Google insists it will eventually shut down its China-based search engine, Google.cn, even though that could cost the company billions of dollars in ad revenue during the next decade.
As a fallback position, Google would still like to keep its engineering and sales teams in China, so it could take advantage of the country's brainpower and have staff to place ads on other Web sites in China and persuade Chinese businesses to advertise on Google in the U.S.
Those goals give Google another incentive to maintain the status quo for now, even if it realizes its demands are unlikely to be met.
The talks are occurring against a backdrop of computer security concerns, politically charged admonishments and intense media attention. All of those factors have complicated matters and made it more likely that the talks will be drawn out, Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Marianne Wolk said.
An alarming security breach triggered Google's rebellion against China's censorship rules after four years of quiet compliance. The company said digital bandits in China stole some of its computer coding and attempted to break into the e-mail accounts of Chinese dissidents.
Google vs. China
The conflict: Google has vowed to shut down its China-based search engine unless the country"s government eases requirements that some results be censored.
The status: One month after issuing its ultimatum, Google is still removing links that China"s ruling party doesn"t want shown.
The goal: Google is hoping to reach a compromise that either lifts the restrictions or allows the company to keep its engineering and sales teams in the country.
The outcome: It may take several more months to find out.
2009: Valley CEO pay down last year, but not by much
CEO pay fell in Silicon Valley last year, but it could have been worse.
The median pay package the valley's boards of directors awarded their chief executives dropped 5.6 percent, to $2.2 million, while overall pay among the Standard & Poor's group of 500 companies fell even more, 7.5 percent, to $8 million.
And though the recession hasn't spared the valley's CEOs, it did far worse damage to Wall Street, where CEO paychecks were down in the financial services industry by 38.5 percent as major companies vanished, zeroing out their leaders' pay.
But bonuses awarded to the valley's chief executives dropped sharply, falling 31 percent to a median of $242,000. That drop was bigger than what was seen among the S&P 500 group of companies, where bonuses were down 22.2 percent, said Alexander Cwirko-Godycki, research manager at Equilar, an information services firm specializing in executive compensation research that supplied CEO compensation data to the Mercury News.
The percentage of valley CEOs receiving bonuses, which are slightly more indicative than salaries of how boards view their CEOs' performance, fell from 87.3 percent to 73.6 percent.
"We saw significant declines in annual bonus payouts because performance was down last year, pretty much across the board," said Carol Bowie of RiskMetrics, a Maryland financial research service.
Even salaries fell among valley CEOs by 0.4 percent — they were up 2.1 percent
among the S&P 500 — and they could drop again this year as companies conserve cash in the midst of a dramatic slowdown in business.
Overall CEO pay was down in the valley, but while "2008 was a challenging year for everyone, companies in the technology and health care sectors seemed to fare better than most," Cwirko-Godycki said. "CEO pay levels in these industries were fairly steady, and even increased among the largest companies."
For the first time ever, a majority of the CEOs running the valley's 150 largest companies received stock awards, which include restricted shares and performance shares. Performance shares tie the vesting of stock to performance targets.
The median value of those awards was $309,259 last year. They made up 25 percent of pay, a 1 percent increase, continuing a climb that began in 2004.
"It's one area where we do see a change in the valley's compensation culture," Cwirko-Godycki said. "Silicon Valley is becoming more similar to everyone else."
Taken together, stock awards with some kind of string attached — restricted stock and performance shares — found their way into the pay packages of many more CEOs here. Last year, 53.6 percent received such stock, up from 42.7 percent in 2007.
"As Silicon Valley matures, the options-rich environment of past years is fading, at least among big companies in this survey," Cwirko-Godycki said.
Contact Pete Carey at pcarey@mercurynews.com.
Biggest cash compensation package
(Salary and bonus)
Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard: $26,044,577
Smallest cash compensation package
Steve Jobs, Apple: $1
Smallest overall compensation package
Joseph Liu, Oplink Communications: $158,545
Biggest raise
Thomas Werner, SunPower: 1,238 percent, to $7,078,029
Biggest pay cut
Lars Dalgaard, SuccessFactors: 84 percent, to $630,000
Motorola says it will split in two in early 2011
Struggling technology company Motorola said Thursday it plans to split in two in early 2011 — with one half containing its consumer-focused mobile phone and television set-top box products, and the other holding divisions that target business customers.
The split will give current shareholders a share in each new company, which will be roughly the same size in terms of annual revenue at $11 billion. Both halves will be publicly traded.
The move gives the company's two co-CEOs, Sanjay Jha and Greg Brown, separate companies to run. Jha will concentrate on Motorola's entertainment and consumer-oriented devices, including smartphones like the Droid, and Brown on high-tech business solutions.
"We believe this configuration is cleaner and more compelling for customers and investors," Brown said in an interview. "We do anticipate that both business segments will have positive operating cash flow moving forward."
The move is a change from plans the company announced in late 2008 to spin off only its handset unit by the third quarter of 2009. It put that plan on hold as the recession deepened and sales deteriorated.
Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Ill., rode high for a few years after introducing the wildly popular Razr flip phone in 2005, but as the phone's popularity faltered, the company struggled to develop a worthy successor, and losses piled up in its cell phone division.
Two newer phones based on Google Inc.'s
Android operating system, the Cliq and the Droid, have been well-received, and Motorola said it shipped 2 million units in the fourth quarter. Motorola's Android-based Devour will go on sale in March through Verizon Wireless.
Five Silicon Valley companies fought release of employment data, and won
Google, the company that wants to make the world's information accessible, says the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released.
So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and Applied Materials. These five companies waged an 18-month Freedom of Information battle with the Mercury News, convincing federal regulators who collect the data that its release would cause "commercial harm" by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. A sixth company, Hewlett-Packard, fought the release and lost.
But many of their industry peers see the issue differently. The Mercury News initially set out to obtain race and gender data on the valley's 15 largest companies, and nine — including Intel, Cisco Systems, eBay, AMD, Sanmina and Sun Microsystems — agreed to allow the U.S. Department of Labor to provide it.
"There's nothing to hide, in our view," said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel, which contacted the Mercury News to share its employment data after learning of the newspaper's federal FOIA request filed in early 2008. "We just felt that we're very proud of the (diversity) programs we have in place and the efforts we put forth, and we don't have any trouble sharing it."
Experts in the area of equal employment law scoffed at the idea that public disclosure of race and gender data — for example, the number of black men or Asian women in job categories such as "professionals," "officials
& managers" and "service workers" — could really allow competitors to discern a big tech company's business strategy. A bigger issue, they said, is the social cost of allowing large, influential corporations to hide their race and gender data. "One of the main ways that we track how society is doing in terms of race relations, in terms of eliminating discrimination, in terms of promoting diversity, is by looking at statistics," said Richard Ford, a Stanford University law professor who is an expert in civil rights and anti-discrimination law. "But if we can't get the data, we can't know if it's a problem or not." John Sims, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and an expert in FOIA law, called the objections of Google, Apple and other companies "absurd." "The whole debate on affirmative action is based on the question, 'Is racial discrimination a thing of the past, or is it still going on?' " Sims said. "These companies are very interesting to look at, because they are new and they are not just in the rut of what they were doing 50 years ago, because they didn't exist 50 years ago." The Labor Department data ultimately obtained by the Mercury News shows that while the collective work force of 10 of the valley's largest companies grew by 16 percent from 1999 to 2005, an already small population of black workers dropped by 16 percent, while the number of Hispanic workers declined by 11 percent. By 2005, only about 2,200 of the 30,000 Silicon Valley-based workers at those 10 companies were black or Hispanic. In addition, among the roughly 5,900 managers at those companies in 2005, about 300 were either black or Hispanic — a 20 percent dip from five years earlier. Women slipped to 26 percent of managers in 2005, from 28 percent in 2000. Companies such as Google and Apple are particularly crucial to study, Ford said, because many of the nation's civil rights laws were written in the 1960s for a different workplace than the information-driven jobs of today. The Mercury News initially asked the Labor Department to release so-called EEO-1 race and gender data for the 15 largest companies ranked by sales in the newspaper's SV150 Index. Following an appeal lodged by the Mercury News against the six companies that objected, the Labor Department released Hewlett-Packard's data after the company failed, government lawyers said, to provide a detailed objection "when we requested its views." But the Labor Department accepted arguments filed by lawyers for Google, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and Applied Materials that release of the information would cause commercial harm. The department declined to share the text of the detailed arguments made by the companies. "Such data can demonstrate a company's evolving business strategy," William W. Thompson II, an associate solicitor with the Labor Department, wrote in the agency's notification of its final action. "The companies have articulated to us that they are in a highly competitive environment in which less mature corporations can use this EEO-1 data to assist in structuring their business operations to better compete against more established competitors." Google recently announced that it donated $8 million over the last two weeks of 2009 to help underrepresented minorities follow careers in technology, including the donation of laptops to more than 600 high schools, and donations to groups such as the National Society of Black Engineers. Still, the company declined to release any racial or gender breakdown of its 20,000 workers. "As we've previously said, we don't release this information for competitive reasons," a spokeswoman said.
Yahoo's founders plan to sell up to 5M shares
Jerry Yang transferred three million shares this month in the Sunnyvale, Calif., company he co-founded into a blind trust managed by a third-party trustee.
The trustee will determine when and to what extent the shares will be sold or disposed, according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The trust will terminate by the end of the year.
Co-founder David Filo set up a plan to sell up to two million shares of Yahoo over a 12-month period starting in May. His stock will be sold according to a prearranged schedule at market prices.
Yahoo said Yang and Filo made their plans in compliance with Rule 10b5-1 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The rule lets executives set up plans to sell shares at specified future dates to avoid charges of insider trading should they want to sell stock at time when they might possess meaningful insider information.
Shares of Yahoo rose 42 cents, or 2.8 percent, to close at $15.22 on Thursday.
Yahoo fights for search market
Yahoo executives previewed a grab bag of new features on Wednesday to demonstrate what they called a commitment to reinvent Internet search, even as new research showed the Sunnyvale company lost more ground to its rivals last month.
One new feature was timed to coincide with this month's Winter Olympics: Type an Olympics-related keyword on Yahoo and you'll get a box that pulls together embedded video and links to news, photos, schedules and a running tally of medals, along with the usual assortment of links to other Web sites.
Other ideas are still in the works. Yahoo executive Larry Cornett showed reporters a smart phone application that would let users search a neighborhood for restaurants or other amenities by pulling up a map and then using a finger to trace a line around the neighborhood on the phone's touch-screen.
Yahoo is also working on an e-mail feature that could automatically offer search links for keywords from current events — for example, linking to a video of Conan O'Brien in an e-mail that mentions the talk show host who recently left his job.
"You have to rethink what is search," said Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search. He said the company wants to help Internet users get useful information "without even knowing they're searching, without having to go to an empty
box and type in the keywords." That strategy, said Yahoo senior vice president Shashi Seth, "is what we're betting the farm on." It's a big bet. The market research firm comScore reported this week that Yahoo's share of the Internet search market fell from 17.3 percent in December to 17 percent in January, after declining or staying flat every month last year. Google continued to dominate the market, although it slipped from 65.7 percent to 65.4 percent, while Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, increased its share from 10.7 percent to 11.3 percent. "Overall, the trends continue to be very strong for Bing and remain very bad for Yahoo," investment analyst Ben Schachter of Broadpoint AmTech wrote in a note to clients, adding that he doesn't think the decline is over yet. Yahoo said last summer that it planned to overhaul its search offerings in an attempt to stem a downward slide in its business. The company had negotiated a deal that gives Microsoft a slice of advertising revenue in exchange for using Bing as the behind-the-scenes engine for generating Yahoo search results. New CEO Carol Bartz said that would let Yahoo focus on providing the best overall user interface and "search experience." Since then, Yahoo has been working on ways to provide easy access to a rich array of results — including news, video and even social networking feeds — instead of just serving up static Web links. "So you have kind of a one-stop shop right here," Cornett said Wednesday. Google and Microsoft are racing to offer similar features. But Yahoo executives insisted they have edged ahead in the depth and breadth of their offerings. The company already offers packages of information about hot news topics, similar to its new Olympics offering, and is expanding its offerings on TV shows, celebrities and other subjects. While insisting that high-quality content will draw users and create new opportunities for Yahoo to sell advertising, executives also said they are working on new services for advertisers that they hope will increase revenue. These include giving advertisers more control over ad placement, new kinds of multimedia display ads and even a tool that makes it easier for advertisers to import their Google ads to Yahoo. "We understand that we have to try harder to earn their time and energy on our platform," said David Pann, Yahoo's vice president of search advertising.