Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Yahoo announced that it will sell its core assets to Verizon for a mere $4.8 billion. This is only slightly more than Verizon paid for AOL — another washed up dot-com-era company — last year. Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $125 billion in 2000. Over the next 16 years, it steadily tumbled — mostly due to inaction and missed opportunities. You could fill an entire MBA course with case studies of all the strategic blunders Yahoo has made. I’ll save you some student debt and give you the skinny right here, in just 5 minutes. Mistake #1: Yahoo confused being in the right place — at the right time — with being smart. If Yahoo had launched a year or two later, they probably would have been irrelevant. They rose to dominance in large part by benefitting from what Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham — who worked there —  called a “de facto ponzi scheme”: “Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo’s revenue growth. So they invested in new ...

Saving that parting email from your first love in your inbox? Well, chances are, after you pass away, your spouse and the entire family will know about the long-held secret. This is because web email services like Hotmail and Gmail do not let users specify what should happen to their messages when they die. In fact, email services owned by internet giants like Google and Microsoft have a policy of keeping your data after you die and letting your next of kin or the executor of your estate access it. These services can hold tens of thousands of messages. Accounts with Gmail can hold up to 7GB — or roughly 70,000 emails with a small to medium picture attached to each and they archive the messages you’ve written as well as received. When it comes to deleting the data, Microsoft’s Hotmail will remove an account if it is inactive for 270 days, while Gmail leaves the responsibility to the next of kin. Of the top three providers, only Yahoo refuses to supply emails to anyone after the user ...

Although we credit Google, Yahoo , and other major search engines for giving us the system we use to find the information we seek, the concept of hypertext came to life in 1945 when Vannaver Bush urged scientist to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all man kind. He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex. But there is a long list of great minds that have given us the information system we now use today. This article illustrates some of them. Here is the History of the Search Engine: Ted Nelson Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution. While Ted's project Xanadu, for reasons unknown, never really took off, much of the inspiration to create the WWW came from Ted...

Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are vying to buy Rediff.com India Ltd., the Hindustan Times reported citing an unnamed source. The paper said the potential takeover could value the Mumbai, India-based news, entertainment, shopping and search site at close to $1 billion. In addition to Mountain View based Google and Sunnyvale based Yahoo , the paper said Time Warner Inc.'s America On Line unit may be a suitor. Besides the Web site, Rediff.Com India limited publishes two weekly newspapers aimed at Indian-Americans, India Abroad and India in New York. Rediff share price has risen recently on speculation that the company may be a takeover target. It’s possible that Rediff could be in talks, but speculation that it’s Google or Yahoo that is looking to acquire Rediff is exactly that: speculation, and with no basis in fact. On recent history, Google and Yahoo are actually unlikely suitors; although Rediff’s market cap and therefore rough takeover price of $738.9million would put it into the...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. is shutting down Yahoo Photos, an online photo storage site, and asking users to move instead to its Web 2.0 photo sharing site, Flickr, a Yahoo official said. In June, tens of millions of registered users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of various options including upgrading to Yahoo's Flickr service or various outside-photo storage sites, according to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. Yahoo also will offer consumers the option of loading their photos on competing sites when users are notified next month. Outside sites include PhotoBucket -- the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp.'s MySpace -- or more conventional photo printing and storage site such as Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly Inc. or Snapfish, he said. "Flickr will get top-billing, of course," Butterfield said in an interview late on Thursday about the plan to give users multiple alternatives. Butterfield and co-fo...

Each day, around the world, millions of people log into onlysearch engines to, well, search for study. The other day I logged into a search engine and typed, just for the heck of it, the words “pudgy dogs”. And, voila, I got scores of hits. Now, what next for search engines, in the age of social networking? I spoke to Rod Brachman, vice president, worldwide research operations at Yahoo! Research. Dr Brachman has been, as they say, around the block. He was earlier director of the information processing technology office at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, and is considered an authority on artificial intelligence. I asked him where online search was headed. “Search engine companies are now beginning to look at social networks. At Yahoo!, we have started doing some research on how social networks work. Frankly, social networks, though popular, are quite crude in their technology,” he said. What’s Yahoo! area of focus in this? “We don’t yet understand how online social groups...