Carl Icahn will never give up! How will he when the software giant Microsoft is backing him and the entire shareholders speak his language? Billionaire investor and shareholder Carl Icahn filed a definitive proxy statement today nominating slate of nine directors to replace Yahoo’s current board members including its Chief Executive Officer, Jerry Yang.

On Sunday, Icahn and Microsoft Corp. jointly proposed for a restructuring of Yahoo board and its executive ranks and the sale of the search business to Microsoft. Microsoft can not be more shameless by backing Icahn in getting the deal done at any cost.

Icahn’s slate of directors recommended to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission obviously includes a list favorable to Microsoft and Icahn. The list would obviously speak and act what Icahnsoft orders.

The slate includes Adam Dell, managing general partner, Impact Venture Partners, Mark Cuban an entrepreneur and others. The persistent and adamant Icahn stated, “We believe that now is the time to enter into a significant transaction with Microsoft,” on a letter to Yahoo shareholders. He also stated that his current best-friend Microsoft would purchase all of Yahoo or its search business if the current board is replaced with Icahn’s own personal favorites.

Have you visited Yahoo lately? Their home page now features a cool animated logo for the cause of Breast Cancer. Doesn’t that sound sweet? The logo animates a dog carrying a pink ribbon, the symbol for breast cancer awareness. The dog places the ribbon on the letter “Y”. This is followed by two kids appearing from behind the logo carrying similar pink ribbons.

Clicking on the logo, one would lead to a page which provides testimonials and stories from breast cancer survivors, expert advices on prevention and treatment of breast cancer, health news and tips and also access to health groups and videos.

Yahoo along with MySpace and Google would be forming a OpenSocial Foundation to ensure neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial being a community-governed specification for building social applications on the internet. OpenSocial Foundation would be an independent non-profit entity.

OpenSocial would be handed over to the new organization by July 1. Yahoo! Inc Vice President for Platforms, Wade Chambers mentioned, “Yahoo! believes in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users,” and also stated “Our support builds on similar efforts with the OpenID community and will expand the opportunity for developers and publishers to benefit from an open and increasingly social web.”

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Yahoo Inc. would be moving its Eurpopean headquarters located in London to Switzerland within 18 months. The search giant headquarters would now be near the shores of Lake Geneva.

This move would consist of a 5% work force move and is a part of its ongoing international business stratergy to deliver better financial results, increase its performance and efficiencies and to increase its competitiveness.

It should be noted that Yahoo Inc competitor Google Inc recently opened up their new European Research and Development center in Zurich.

Twitter For Location or the FireEagle platform has open APIs which can send and receive data. It can stream your location information. This can help third party web services gather vital information about your location even without asking from you.

FireEagle, built entirely on Ruby on Rails, a open source framework is an insight from the search product from Yahoo, ZoneTag. This platform would provide information on where you live, the city name, the zip code and can control peoples information on their location.

FireEagle also provides privacy features where a user can log off tracking of their geo location and can also delete all information stored related to their travel. This would be greatly useful in mobile applications like cell phones and Nokia phones with Symbian s60 might carry one of these.

Yahoo announced that it would be soon allowing third parties enhance the Yahoo Search Experience. This might give a new look to search results and might even be the future search list model.

Codenamed “Search Monkey”, the Open Search Platform would provide set of Yahoo APIs which would help third parties and developers modify a search result on Yahoo either by adding additional information, adding images or providing deeper links.
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Sources from inside stated that Yahoo has already started firing the employees. The cut down is wide spread across all divisions and different locations. However, they did mention that the firing is based on performance ratings and not in a plan to close the entire opterations.

Search engine optimizers have reported of Yahoo Search index and algorithm update. The last time Yahoo had an algorithm update was on December 3rd 2007.

Some webmasters have reported that their traffic has increased with better rankings and better indexing. However, people who had their rankings high for several months even years are disappointed with their rankings in top 5 positions moved towards 30’s and 40’s.

This as search engine observers believe should be due to an update on the search engine’s algorithm. Lets hope for better rankings.

The financial status of Sunnyvale-based company Yahoo Inc went down further in the end of 2007 and as a result, the company has planed to lay off 1,000 of its employees.

However, Yahoo has not informed which areas of expertise would be reduced. It should be noted that Yahoo chucked out 650 employees way back in 2000 during the dot-com break down.
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Yahoo! Co-founder and the fifth-biggest stakeholder lost half a billion dollars losing investor confidence with the company losing out to competitors and reduction of employees.

Jerry Yang took over as the search giant’s Chief Executive officer in June last year. With a 4 percent stock in Yahoo, Yang has been experiencing the pain in the reducing stock by about a third to $1 billion in the past seven months. Yahoo! further dropped 8.5% in the end of January 2008. The 39-year-old CEO along with his co-founder, David Filo got into the billionaire ranks in 1999 with Yahoo! shares rising up threefolds.