MIH SWAT

The big news in Search last week was the final go-ahead on the integration of Microsoft and Yahoo’s Internet-search businesses.

The on-again, off-again deal by the two internet giants was signed back in July, but regulatory approval by the European Commission and the US Department of Justice only came through this week.

According to a joint statement made by the new Search Alliance, changes will start being implemented very soon. Microsoft is to power the search technology on both Bing and Yahoo but each site will continue to operate under its own identity;

“Implementation of the deal is expected to begin in the coming days and will involve transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo! becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally. Once the transition is completed, the companies’ unified search marketplace will deliver improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers through a platform that contains a larger pool of search queries.” From Yahoo’s official press release.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer previously described the move as a way to provide “real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company.” Unsurprisingly Google, which controls over two thirds of the search market in the US had tried to prevent a deal between its main search rivals. Back in 2008 when Microsoft bid almost $45bn to acquire all of Yahoo!, Google openly attacked the move as anti competitive and tried to sign its own deal with Yahoo Search Business. Google were eventually forced to pull out of that deal after the US Department of Justice questioned the antitrust implication of one company controlling what would have been an estimated 90% of the US search market.

Whether the new alliance will put a halt on Google’s burgeoning search market share remains to be seen. With a combined search market share less than half than that of Google, they certainly have their work cut out for them.

A few months ago i had the pleasure of getting to know the Android SDK and got to create a prototype Android game. For this reason I got to use a HTC Magic running a standard Android 1.6 or Donut as its known to the Android community. I have since rooted the phone and flashed the ROM with several community created ROMs. I had a ROM running HTC’s Sense User Interface(UI) , which is a layer on top of the standard Android UI. Since then I got tasked with creating an iPhone application and obviously I would need to use a iPhone as development phone. At this stage it dawned on me that nowhere on the tech blogs have I read a blog post describing a Android user having to adjust to the iPhone OS.

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From 25th till the 31st january, the 3rd. edition of Campus Party Brazil took place in São Paulo. The event, that is said to be the biggest one in technologic innovation, internet and eletronic entertainment, has been held since 1997 and happens in four different countries annually: Brazil, Spain, Mexico and Colombia.

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Coming back from a week in India, I was left with a few lasting impressions, which could be summed up in one word: ubiquity. Of people. Of noise. The organised chaos that is Delhi traffic. And energy – something that seems to have reached a frenetic level quite shocking to a laid-back Capetonian. This energy translated into some excited and stimulating debate in the classroom, which is where I found myself with 50 other Naspers employees at 8am sharp on the first Monday of 2010. For three days, we discussed mostly Internet and technology cases under the guidance of two HBS strategy professors, Bharat Anand and Felix Oberholzer-Gee.

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Web services are key elements in the fields of distributed software engineering and code reuse. They also play a very important role on the Semantic Web by providing data to semantic software agents, as described by Tim Berners-Lee:

“The real power of the Semantic Web will be realized when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs. The effectiveness of such software agents will increase exponentially as more machine-readable Web content and automated services become available. The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that were not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.”

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January brings with it the usual proliferation of lists predicting technology trends for 2010. I’ll add to the swarm by providing a short list of events which I believe will have a significant impact on the Web As We Know It in the coming year.

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With TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters and Michael Arrington speculating about the future of ICQ and in so doing giving many users, who have never heard of Naspers before, some insight into our mobile and online investments. This post does not comment on their speculation but instead will focus on the various Google Android applications developed by the companies MIH has invested in.

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This year I was honored by being invited to participate as a member of the PHP Community in Microsoft’s Web Developer Summit. I used the opportunity to represent the huge PHP community in Brazil and highlight the community’s work.

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The development team at DStv Labs, a division of DStv Online and MIH SWAT has recently been thrown together to look at some exciting projects in the New Media space. In keeping with the latest thinking around agile development frameworks, the DStv Labs team has adopted Scrum as the framework that will be used to deliver these projects.

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Have you ever come across a website and saw some really interesting aspects of the user interface ? Maybe it was a site design that looks like a flash site but was not? Or maybe you came across a site that had a visually appealing menu.

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