My sources say Yahoo Philippines is ‘quietly’ setting up its local office at the Net One Center Net Cube Center building at the Fort in Taguig City. This confirms rumors that their office will be completed before the year ends. Jojo Anonuevo, Yahoo’s senior director for business development, is also said to be in the country. Anonuevo was the President of game publisher Mobius until June last year when he joined Yahoo. Interestingly enough, Mobius is housed in the same building.

Update: Jojo Anonuevo’s new role is General Manager for Philippine Operations and apparently has relocated back to the Philippines. It also appears that Aileen Apolo’s counterpart will not be Jonas delos Santos as I have speculated, but someone named Chris Concepcion. Watch the video below to get to know the two and what their plans are for the Philippine market. Note that Chris calls himself “the Yahoo representative here in the Philippines”. Jojo is the one on the left and Chris on the right.

Update 2: Yahoo has job openings for Partner Account Manager, Communications Specialist and a Search Editor & Analyst. Exact address of the office is 14th Floor Net Cube Center, 3rd Avenue corner 30th Street, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig City.

This is sort of a preemptive post since I said in my earlier one that the contest will end on May 8. Now is May 6, what’s the hurry? First of all, the day after I started the contest, AJ, always faster than a speeding bullet, made his entry here. His answer is Jonas delos Reyes. And guess what, he’s RIGHT!

To mark his Yahoo debut, Jonas makes his first official blog post on the Yahoo Philippines Answers blog:
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Last September, a few bloggers were buzzing about a certain job opening at Yahoo. Specifically, they were looking for an Online Community Manager for the Philippines, whose chores include:

• Online Community Management
• User Engagement
• Product Marketing
• Product Maintenance and Development

Yes, it’s safe to say they’re looking for an Aileen Apolo who likes to yodel.

Mike questioned why the position was based in Singapore and not here. A perfectly valid point, but Abe says it’s because they don’t have an office here yet. But now that it’s confirmed that they are setting up a Philippine hub, odds are that person will be assigned locally.

Word is it won’t be till next year that Yahoo will start building their office but are in the process of forming strategic alliances with local content providers. More importantly, some lucky guy or gal might have already been hired as our Online Community Manager. Question is, who is he/she?

Ya, WHO?

Expect a Yahoo! office in Manila by the second quarter of this year, says newly appointed general manager Jojo Anonuevo (of Mobius fame). Claiming to capture 85% of the 22 million-strong Filipino Internet population, Yahoo! is bent on dominating the online advertising market in the country, which it says will make up 5% of the total advertising spend here. Aside from that, the local Y! office will work on generating more content for Yahoo.com.ph through their content partners, which will most likely include Inquirer.net and Yehey. Yehey is rumored to start selling advertising for Y! since last year.

Smart business move on Y!’s part. If they really want a taste of the market, it’s a no-brainer to go to where the action is. Most definitely, Google has their work cut out for them. Will I be blogging about Google coming to the Philippines soon? Wait, they chose Malaysia right. Probably not in the near future.

Let’s try to hypothesize a scenario wherein Google tries to outbid Microsoft for online portal Yahoo! I think Yahoo! would take Google’s offer in a heartbeat, knowing that they are more culturally similar and both, in their own seemingly quirky ways, are pushing the limits of innovation on the web. Microsoft, on the other hand, stands to lose the only chance they have of carving a chunk out of the online advertising market that Google dominates. It will continue to make big bucks out of its software business, but all of that won’t mean anything when business, advertising, entertainment and should I say word processing are quickly shifting their gears to the Internet.
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I’ve been asking around several forums on what they think about Yahoo!’s search engine and how often they use it.

The results were, well, not that surprising. It looks like no one uses Yahoo! except for checking their emails, browsing groups or chatting on their messenger client. Not one used Yahoo! search as their primary engine. A few searched on it to check for SEO rankings or to search something that they couldn’t find in Google. When I asked if they noticed an improvement in Yahoo!’s search quality, all those who replied said they didn’t see any change. When I asked how its search quality compared to that of Google’s, at best, it was “slightly worse” than Google. No one found it at par or better than Google.

I want to determine how Yahoo! Search stands in the Philippine market, but don’t let my initial findings influence you. Please answer these questions by leaving a comment below:

1. How often do you use Yahoo! Search?
2. How does Yahoo!’s search results compare to Google?
3. Rank the following according to the frequency of your use of Yahoo!’s services: email, search, groups, messenger

Really would appreciate your cooperation. Thank you!

Yahoo!’s localization team badly needs a crash course in spelling.

Yahoo! Photos is officially scheduled to close down on September 20, 2007 to give way to their other photo sharing service, Flickr. A sad, sad day for its 30 million plus users. What is more sad though is there is no intelligible way to migrate your pictures to Flickr. They simply tell you to redownload your pictures to your computer or purchase them in a CD and go somewhere else. Curious though that they didn’t recommend Google Picasa. Come to think of it, it does make sense in a way. If you have a thousand pics uploaded on Yahoo! Photos, there is no way it will all fit within Flickr’s 10mb space limit. And Yahoo! Photos is BORING. I think it’s become a big burden on Yahoo! that they just want to get rid of it and focus on making real money from Flickr.
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Back at Techcrunch, Michael Arrington confirms that Google has acquired YouTube.

My thoughts:

There was word that although YouTube has dominated the online video sharing market, its founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen aren’t making serious money out of it and are actually living on credit. YouTube’s only future is to be bought out by something bigger, in this case Google, who beat out Yahoo! at the very last moments of the deal.

Google’s been aggressive in pursuing video as part of their advertising business that makes up most of their revenue. But what’s odd is that with their recent $1 billion agreement with MySpace who has their own video sharing space, it’s interesting to see if Google will be allowed to display video ads alongside MySpace’s. Looks like a conflict of interest in the horizon. The numbers tell it all. About 70% of Youtube’s traffic comes from MySpace. If Google decides to insert advertising in all of YouTube’s videos shown on MySpace, they get instant free advertising, right? MySpace appeared to be surprised by the whole buyout event, so it’s safe to say they’re already pondering the same thing.

So far, YouTube captures about 34 million users a month, while MySpace’s own tube gets 17 million but they’re catching up very fast. If and when MySpace decides to get rid of all YouTube videos from their site, that will spell trouble for Google. And honestly, online video buffs will be put off when they begin to see advertising in YouTube videos. Hey, that’s the one major reason they watch stuff on the Internet. No ads!

On the bright side, Chad and Steve are now about $200-$300 million richer. I can practically see them swimming in a sea of liquefied gold in this video they made post-Google:
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Here’s a cool way to figure out just how “big” a fish you are in the ocean that is the World Wide Web. Uses backlink information from Yahoo!

Find out if you’re a Big Fish. Sad, I’m just a small smelt.

Related Link: Debt Consolidation free quote

Google won over MySpace with a hefty $900 million revenue-sharing deal that will allow the search engine to provide its search and advertising services to the latter’s 70 million-plus users. That also means MySpace dumping its current ad provider Yahoo! who also made a bid but fell short to that of Google. With the social network being the most accessed website in the US, Google is given wider exposure to a younger audience and more revenue opportunities through its AdWords clients.

The winner? Google. Although Myspace’s dreams of making good money had just come true, its long-term prospects are still put into question. Remember. It’s Google using MySpace to make money, NOT the other way around. The numbers tell the story. Ratings have it that MySpace’s traffic grows an astounding 300% annually, easily overtaking Google. So if you think I’m insinuating that Google’s merely using MySpace and stopping it from making its own search engine, you’re right.

Certain terms of the deal stipulate that the $900 million sum be paid in three years as long as MySpace does its part in keeping traffic up and enticing new users, among others.

Google announced three new features to its instant messaging software, Google Talk:

File Transfer
‘Bout time. Its absence may have been the reason why many have stayed away from it. It’s reported that only 44,000 were using Google Talk, or 1% of total market share — way behind MSN Messenger (60%) and Yahoo! Messenger (23%). People like to chat and share stuff, it’s a given fact.
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I fell too much in love with my customized Alleba email courtesy of Gmail for domains that I completely neglected to do my piece on Yahoo!’s new beta mail interface. What better time to do it when I’ve slightly gotten over the whole Gmail affair.

I have been using Yahoo! Mail Beta for slightly over a month now. No, I didn’t lie about my zip code just to try it, as I am aware that only the French and the Germans get to use it.

First, the bad stuff. My biggest and initial complaint with the new interface is it’s slow as hell. To think I am on DSL — but then again it’s PLDT Mydsl (which explains a lot). But that’s already beside the point. While I was logging in, this weird kid on a bouncing ball appears on the screen:
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