Business

<< Previous   of   Next >>   ADVERTISEMENT   CONTACT THE HERALD Mike Benbow, Business Editor benbow@heraldnet.com   Published: Sunday, August 17, 2008 Yahoo's Fire Eagle lets pals track their pals Yahoo Inc. is riding the wave of location-based services with the launch of a service intended to help users share their real-world location with their friends online. Yahoo made Fire Eagle available to the public this week. Previously, the service had been available in a private "beta" test since March. After signing up with a Yahoo ID, users can update their physical locations through Fire Eagle's Web site or from a cell phone with Fire Eagle's mobile site. They can then let the service interact with a variety of desktop, Web-based and mobile applications to let people know where they are. Early participants include Dopplr, a site for sharing travel plans, and Pownce, a site for sending messages and files. Yahoo said Fire Eagle gives users a range of privacy options for applications they use with it, and the site securely stores location information. Stix brings a Wii-like remote to PC: Looking at its size, shape, white wrist strap and B-button on the bottom, it's easy to compare the Stix with the Wiimote, the wireless controller for the popular Nintendo gaming console. Except the Stix is for your PC. The Stix comes from Playhut Inc., a toy company that also makes cute little indoor tents for kids. The Stix 200 remote, which began selling for $49.99 at Target, Costco and other retailers this week, promises to "redefine the PC and online gaming experience" with the motion-sensing controller. A stab at some of the 2D casual games available on Sphere, the game portal of Playhut subsidiary GoLive2, offers a bit of novelty and fun, though nothing as exciting as scoring that first strike in Wii bowling. For those who feel constrained by 2D games and want to do more than shake their Stix left and right, the company plans to release the Stix 400 for $59.99 in October (though it's already on sale on Amazon.com for a higher price.) The Stix 400 is compatible with 3D games and sounds more promising. "Wowbotz Bomb Battle," a "Pong"-like game but with shields and bombs, is as simple as the 1970s arcade classic, with players moving their Stix up and down in front of the monitor to hit a bomb back and forth with their opponent. Stix can work with any Web-based game, so long as either the player or the folks at GoLive2 map out the controls to translate them from the keyboard to the Stix remote. But it doesn't always work the other way around: To play "Bomb Battle," for example, you'll need Stix. Site lets you text reminders to yourself: It happens to everyone: A friend recommends a good book or movie, but by the time you get around to Googling it -- assuming you get that far -- you can't remember what it's called. A San Francisco-based startup called kwiry (pronounced "query") aims to help you remember such snippets of information with a free service that lets you text these tidbits from your cell phone to its site. "What we want to do is make the experience of remembering as simple as possible," said kwiry chief executive and co-founder Ron Feldman. After signing up on kwiry's Web site, you can start sending text messages to "kwiry," or "59479" on a phone's keypad. The messages can be about anything you want to follow up on. Feldman said he has seen users send reminders about books, products they want to buy and varieties of wine. When you're back at a computer, you can visit kwiry's Web site to see items displayed as links that can be clicked for related search results. Kwiry can also automatically send that information to your e-mail address. The site has several shortcuts intended to make remembering even simpler, including two added this week letting users more easily add items to their wish lists at retailer Amazon.com Inc. or DVD queues at Netflix Inc. Just type "Netflix" followed by the name of a movie you want to see, for instance, and watch that item get added to Netflix queue. Advice on buyout cost Yahoo $36 million: Yahoo Inc. shelled out $36 million in the first half of 2008 to the outside advisers that helped the company navigate stormy buyout talks with Microsoft Corp. and the ensuing proxy threat from activist investor Carl Icahn. Yahoo leaned on investment banks Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Moelis & Co., and the law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, after Microsoft made its initial $44.6 billion offer, which was made public in February. The negotiations collapsed in early May when Yahoo rejected an even richer $47.5 billion offer, but Microsoft came back later that month with an offer to buy Yahoo's search operations a la carte. As that failed, Icahn, who has a long history of challenging corporate boards, threatened to replace all of Yahoo's directors with his own hand-picked slate so he could negotiate a sale. Yahoo's $36 million tab, disclosed in a regulatory filing, amounts to about 5 percent of the $673 million in profit Yahoo reported in the first six months of the year. That total doesn't cover what the company spent in July, when Icahn and Microsoft joined forces to pitch another partial sale scheme, which the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company rejected. Later in July, Yahoo struck a deal that gives board seats to Icahn and two of his picks. Yahoo's spending on outside advisers did include litigation defense costs related to the Microsoft saga, according to the recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Associated Press

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