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Yahoo defections aren’t news. But people trying to get hired there? Stop the presses!

That’s the gist of this blog entry at headhunter firm BINC.

BINC Chief Executive Boris Epstein writes:

“So it’s obviously no surprise that Yahoo is in trouble right now and people are leaving in droves. That’s why I was so surprised to hear one of my candidates tell me that he’s currently interviewing with Yahoo right now. WHAT!! Why is he interviewing with Yahoo? It’s like somebody jumping on board Titanic mid sink.”

The candidate’s reasoning is that Yahoo is investing its resources into making a last-stand effort to avoid a takeover by Microsoft. Epstein doesn’t buy it though, and then he goes on to provide a list of the top 9 reasons people give for leaving Yahoo:

1. Want to escape before Yahoo gets acquired by Microsoft

2. Lack of innovation at Yahoo

3. Excessive bureaucracy

4. Seeking job stability and expect more layoffs

5. Want to be bigger fish in smaller pond elsewhere

6. Yahoo has lost its focus

7. Volatility of stock price after Microsoft offer

8. Poor management

9. Long hours and on-call nights and weekends

And I’ll offer one to round out the list:

10. Google is hiring

Motorola has reportedly reorganized its struggling mobile-phone business in anticipation of plans to spin it off into a separate publicly traded entity.

Rob Shaddock

(Credit:
Motorola)

Although Motorola, at press time, had not yet put out a statement on the changes, they appear aimed at developing products more quickly in response to consumer demands, according to reports by Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.

Motorola has reportedly combined two categories of phones, mid/high-tier feature phones and multimedia phones, into a single segment, according to the Tribune.
And among a group of executives named, Rob Shaddock, a senior vice president of mobile devices, was named head of consumer products, according to the Journal and Reuters. The Journal added that John Cipolla was promoted to senior vice president for mid- to high-tier products; Steve Lalla will oversee teams focused on mass-market phones; and Todd DeYoung “was given responsibility for ensuring the company’s cell phones match its overarching strategy and are being directed at the right market.”

Motorola has seen its handset market share plummet, mostly due to a lack of compelling new products. In January, amid pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, the company said it would consider separating its handset business from the rest of the company in an effort to increase shareholder value and revive the struggling business. Late last month it officially announced the plan and has since announced a round of layoffs.

This wouldn’t bother me at all, except that the comment includes personal reflection, such as this passage that appears verbatim in both posts: “Maybe I will get more bullish on Google when they get around to assigning someone to answer my phone calls or when their operator tells me that their marketing department does not have a phone number.” A quick Google search didn’t turn up any more copies of the same comment, but what’s the deal guys?

They now devote more than 10% of revenue to R&D.
They are innovating at a terrific rate: They have instant messaging in the works, the Answer service similar to Naver/Yahoo, a developing financial section similar to Google, some new social media acquisitions coming that will modernize them and likely steal a load of Tencent’s traffic.
They have advertising solutions that can be tailored–as opposed to Google cookie-cutter stuff- for any biz.
They have a 30% no-count rate for click-throughs on ads (Google is 10%) to fight click fraud.
They have opened their API to new analytics companies (they will formally announce a partnership with Omniture next week)..
Their bulletin board system just surpassed the 200,000,000 post mark.
They dominate mp3 download searches and are leveraging that into BRANDED deals with music companies and artists. IF you took away ALL their mp3 searches that everyone ******* about, you’d only take less than 8% of their market share…
They are not the Yuppie stuffed shirts running Google. I have access to decision makers at Baidu and don’t have to wade through layers of people who think they are too important deal with me….
They are open to new ideas: our company now has a strategic partnership with PRNewswire and are co-investigating a tool with Baidu that will change the face of online news releases….

The comment first appeared under Lonnie B. Hodge’s name on Rick’s Little Red Blog. Hodge is CEO of CultureFish and The Professor at Onemanbandwidth, a long-running China media blog. There, Hodge has criticized an article that painted Baidu inaccurately as an “upstart” engine and may have been inaccurate in its portrayal of Baidu’s music search. (Mea culpa: By reporting on articles with similar material, I may have perpetuated inaccurate numbers, if they are indeed inaccurate.)

Whoever wrote the comment, its laundry list of reasons users and especially advertisers might like Baidu is informative. I just wish credit had been given to whoever was the original author. (Also there’s a “next week” below that doesn’t work on the second posting since it was more than a week after the first.) Here’s the list:

After all, I find this to be a pretty persuasive list, though I won’t likely switch to Baidu anytime soon, while they’re still censoring large portions of search results, even though I realize that’s not a top concern of many Chinese users. I had e-mailed CultureFish’s public address hoping to get in touch with DeGeest to clarify some information before I discovered the repetition, by the way. I’d still be curious to find out about some sources, especially for the music downloading issue that I’ve written about.

On Sinobyte the comment appeared under the name of David DeGeest, one of Hodge’s coworkers. The comment was different only in that it fixed a few typos and was prefaced with a good rebuke of a xenophobic comment that had appeared above and managed to misspell “develop” while saying “men from the east” aren’t that smart.

I was all ready to highlight what seemed like a very insightful comment on this blog by a co-founder of the advertising company CultureFish Media on the merits of Baidu, China’s leading search engine. But then I remembered Rick at CNET Asia had asked readers for reasons to love Baidu. Lo and behold, the same comment appeared there under the name of a different CultureFish exec (and prominent blogger).

Here’s a look at its basic specs:

After hitting the European market earlier this year, Edifier’s bulbous iF500
iPod/iPhone speaker system speaker is making its way across the Atlantic to both the U.S. and Canada.

(Credit:
Edifier)

The five-driver iF500 speaker system will retail for $249.

All-in-one audio system for iPod,
iPhone, and other portable audio players
Five-driver speaker system incorporates vibration and resonance control technologies coupled with low-frequency porting and midrange-tuned cavities for smoother cleaner audio
Digital FM radio
Aux input for connecting other audio devices
Signal-to-noise rate: 85dBA
Power output: RMS 10W x 2 + 32W (subwoofer)
Bass driver unit: 5.75 inches, magnetically shielded
Midrange driver: 2.75 inches, magnetically shielded
MSRP: $249 Edifier makes some interesting-looking audio products that also sound pretty good, but they don’t always make it to the U.S. We look forward to trying the iF500 out and should get a review sample soon.

At $80 a year, Lumosity isn’t exactly cheap when compared with Nintendo’s Brain Age series, but you don’t need to buy any extra hardware and the creators continue to add new games. There’s also a two-week free trial you can play without entering any credit card information.

Earlier today I started out my brain-training session with a game called Bird Watching. It’s meant to track your attention, but it ends up being a very strange mashup of Nintendo’s Duck Hunt meets hangman, where the goal is to not only shoot a picture of the bird that pops up on the screen for half a second, but also remember the letter that flashes in the center of the screen. These letters begin to fill out the name of the bird, and it’s your job to guess before you’ve captured all the letters–a process that (hopefully) uses a number of parts of your brain.

I’m a happy owner of a Nintendo DS and one of my favorite games for it is Brain Age, which lets you do a variety of small puzzles and arithmetic to hone your mental fitness. If you don’t feel like shelling out $130 for Nintendo’s hardware, there’s Lumosity from Lumos Labs, a Web service that offers a similar multitude of small mental exercises that run right in your browser and are actually really fun.

The real hook of the service is the stats tracking, which will keep track of your mental scores indefinitely and do analysis of your cognitive prowess based on how you’ve been scoring in each title. Like Nintendo’s Brain Age series, it gives you some of this information in a four-way chart, as well as plenty of line charts that hopefully are getting better each day.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Following bird watching my heart rate went up about 30 beats with Speed Match, a game that pits you against a variety of symbols in the hopes of figuring out whether the symbol you’re looking at is the same one that came before. To navigate you simply have to use your keyboard’s arrow keys. It’s quite a bit more fun than Word Bubbles, another game that makes you type words that start with the three letters they give you. Scrabulous players will mop the floor with this one.

You have various games to choose from. Seen here is ‘Lost in Migration,’ a game that challenges your cognition skills.

The other games were not nearly as memorable, including one that has you type in the direction of the middle bird seen in flying formations (apparently to test reaction time), as well as a mine-sweeper-like game that has you navigate a garden to get to a flower while avoiding space aliens.

Lumosity comes with nearly a dozen “games” to play, with each one working out a different aspect of your mental prowess, including memory, cognitive control, processing speed, and the all-important attention. As you play, your scores are tracked and grouped together in an progress chart that you can dig into and try to figure out what’s been improving–or what needs some work. Games will also let you know when you haven’t performed as well as you usually do by tracking your historical performance.

‘Speed Match’ was my favorite game of the bunch, forcing you to remember if what you're looking at is the same as what came before it. (click to enlarge)

There’s another way besides certain popular video games to emulate your favorite guitar heroes–have them teach you themselves.

It’s not only for guitarists however. There are videos instructing aspiring drummers, keyboard players, and more. But the site is heavily geared toward the guitar, which also happens to be the instrument of choice of the site’s founder and Grammy Award nominee Tim Huffman.

But it wasn’t an easy or a quick process. Huffman said he spent several years getting the company’s legal ducks in a row. Now iVideosongs.com has master licensing agreements with five of the biggest music publishers in the world. Both artists and publishers get a direct royalty payment for each video downloaded, according to Huffman. Also, there’s no DRM on any of the songs. They can be downloaded to any device.

An Atlanta-based start-up is launching iVideosongs.com on Tuesday at the Demo Conference in Palm Springs, Calif. Users can pay to download videos of famous guitarists and expert music teachers giving detailed musical instruction in high definition.

“It struck me, how could we take the best people and make them available to people everywhere, anywhere, anytime from a learning perspective,” he said.

(Credit:
iVideosongs.com)

Huffman started to take guitar lessons from an instructor as a kid, but became bored learning to read sheet music. “So I set out to learn popular songs by connecting with local musicians who were better than me,” he explained in an interview. He kept at it, eventually cutting his college career short to go pro, and in 1984 was nominated for a Grammy. Now after 25 years in the music business, Huffman says he sees a need for connecting artists to aspiring musicians.

(Credit:
iVideosongs.com)

For $9.99 each, artists such as Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jeff Carlisi of .38 Special, and Alex Lifeson of Rush, spend time demonstrating how to play all the different parts of some of their most famous songs. The lessons are presented in chapters–introduction, verse, chorus, bridge, outro–and titles can be sorted by skill level and genre. For $4.99, professional instructors will demonstrate a variety of songs, and basic instrument tutorials are available for free.

Though there are currently about 50 songs (60 percent are taught by instructors, the rest by the original artists) in the database, there are 300 lined up and ready to go. They will be released in small batches, and by the end of the year Huffman says he expects the catalog to reach 1,000 songs.

Microsoft and Visto, which provides mobile e-mail services, said Monday that they have settled a long-running patent dispute.

The case was slated to go to trial on March 10.

In 2006, Visto prevailed in a patent infringement suit brought against Seven Networks. The company ultimately was awarded about $7.7 million in damages.

Still unresolved is a patent suit brought by Visto against BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. Visto alleges that RIM violated four of its patents. That case is scheduled to go to trial in July.

The companies did not disclose details of the settlement; Visto had alleged that Microsoft violated its mobile e-mail patents. In a press release, Visto said it has entered into a licensing deal with Microsoft that involves “cash and non-cash consideration.”

See? The black hardly shifts from this angle…

Check out the review to find out. Also, be sure to take a look at more monitor reviews with new ones added every week.

You gotta love a good Super Patterned Vertical Alignment (S-PVA)-based display, don’t you? Well, you’re obviously not required to love them, but with their deep blacks, good viewing angles, and, for the most part, accurate colors, they certainly make it difficult to dislike them.

A monitor needs to have more than just great performance, however, to justify its price. Extra features and connection options can work wonders toward a monitor’s overall worth. With Dell recently lowering the price of its feature-rich, 24-inch UltraSharp 2408WFP to $450, can the 22-inch NEC be expected to compete?

Case in point: the NEC MultiSync P221W is a 22-inch, $390 S-PVA display that includes the aforementioned perks of most S-PVAs.

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $405.36 - $549.99
View the latest prices for NEC MultiSync P221W

(Credit:
Josh P. Miller/CNET)

“I am not a CEO,” OLPC Chairman Negroponte said in an interview with the magazine. “Management, administration, and details are my weaknesses. I’m much better at the vision, big-picture side of the house.”

The Cambridge, Mass., group aims to provide low-cost laptops to children in developing countries.

Negroponte has hired a headhunter to help find a CEO and hopes to have one named by April or May.

The group has faced its share of challenges in the three years since it was formed. Its XO laptops initially cost $188 each instead of the anticipated $100, some countries are scaling back their deployment plans and Intel recently quit, claiming OLPC was pressuring it not to compete with its own laptops.

In the wake of a nasty spat with former partner Intel, a reorganization, and mounting criticism, Nicholas Negroponte is looking for a chief executive for his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization, according to BusinessWeek.

Maybe a Bill Gates is just what’s needed to get OLPC back on track and focused.

He wants someone to help manage the organization “more like Microsoft,” according to the article, rather than like the “terrorist group, doing impossible things” it’s been until now.

(Credit:
Swann)

This has some interesting potential applications.

The ConnectCam is a 802.11G wireless network camera that lets users view their own surveillance video on their 3G phone (setup of the camera’s options requires a PC) from anywhere in the world, according to Swann. I really need to get my superiors to send me to New Zealand to test out this whole “anywhere in the world” thing.

4x digital zoom
Six infrared LEDs for night vision
Omni-directional microphone
MPEG4 and MJPEG compression formats supported

From the folks who brought you the creepy and simultaneously cool (depending on who’s using it) DVR flashlight, comes another 007-inspired piece of high-tech security gear. On Wednesday, Swann Communications introduced the IP-3G ConnectCam 1000.

The camera also features the following:

I would almost wish for something like this to happen, just to potentially drive some would-be criminals insane.

If someone was to break in to your house or business while you’re half a world away in Barcelona, for example, you could actually get on the speaker and pretend you’re god and tell them you can see everything they’re doing and that they will be punished for this. Or tell them that you have friends in high places and that you’ve just sent every cop in the city to your house.

The IP-3G ConnectCam 1000 is “coming soon” to Swann’s retail and online resellers for $299.99.

(Credit:
Swann Communications)

The camera can be configured to take a snapshot whenever it detects motion, and you can then have that pic e-mailed to an address of your choosing. The two-way unidirectional microphone allows remote communication between whoever is in earshot of the camera and the person monitoring it, whether from their 3G phone or PC.