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Yahoo! reported
earnings yesterday and oh, what a quarter it was.
In fact, quarterly profits nearly quintupled. How many
times a month can one actually use the word "quintupled?"
The Internet bellwether reported net income that rose to $373
million, or 25 cents a share, helped along by its sale of
shares in Google. Excluding the gain from the share sale,
fourth-quarter net profit rose to $187 million, or 13 cents
a share, from $75 million, or 5 cents, last year. Revenue,
excluding fees Yahoo! pays to advertising partners, rose to
$785 million from $511 million a year earlier.
Revenue derived from marketing services, including branded
and Web search advertising, increased by 67 percent to $911
million. Fees revenue, which includes high-speed Internet
services provided with SBC Communications, rose 52 percent
to $129 million. Listings revenue from businesses including
HotJobs rose 15 percent to $38 million.
Yahoo! also reported 8.4 million paying subscribers, up about
800,000 from the third quarter. The company projected that
revenue, excluding fees it pays to advertisers, will range
from $765 million to $805 million in the current first quarter.
For the full year, it said revenues would be $3.37 billion
to $3.57 billion.
It looks as though marketers are pushing more of their money
from TV to the Web. In fact, Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel said yesterday
that he believes that 2004 was the year "in which we
witnessed the beginning of a tipping point in advertising"
whereby marketers followed consumers right onto the Web. If
that is the case, 2005 may be the year that analysts' forecasts
of some 25 percent growth in online advertising come to fruition.
For Yahoo!, the news is great. The only thing better, perhaps,
is its imminent Broadway debut. What? Yes, Yahoo! hits the
Great White Way in March. Stay tuned.
Google releases photo software
GOOGLE released free software for organising
and finding the hundreds or thousands of digital photos often
stored on users' hard drives.
Using technology developed by Picasa, which Google bought
last year, the new software will try to make keeping a photo
collection and editing pictures simple even for beginners,
Picasa general manager Lars Perkins said.
Rather than requiring users to import individual photos from
their drives, the Picasa software automatically detects them
as they are added - whether sent via email or transferred
from a digital camera.
Picasa tries to do away with complexities such as file names
and folders. Photos are dumped into one bucket, sorted by
date, but the software can quickly pull photos from date ranges
or events as requested. In the new version, users will be
able to mark the best pictures with a gold star and search
only for those.
Picasa initially cost $US29 ($38) but became a free download
after its acquisition by Google. Version 2 of Picasa will
also be a free download.
The new software will have better tools for restoring colour
and removing red eyes.
New editing features include the ability to make the sky bluer;
to blur the background and focus on a subject; or to rotate
photographs slightly to compensate for any camera tilt. All
changes can be reversed, and the software stores different
versions without requiring users to perform a "save as"
command and rename the file.
Captions are automatically attached to the photo file so that
they go with the photo to web sites and CDs.
Picasa is not Google's first venture onto the desktop. Though
the company got its start as an internet search engine, Google
released in October a desktop search tool that automatically
records email, web pages and chat conversations and finds
Word, Excel and PowerPoint files stored on the computer.
Picasa 2 is available only for Windows and requires Microsoft's
Internet Explorer browser, version 5.01 or higher, or Mozilla
Firefox.
The Associated Press
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