Webware

Yahoo's first annual shareholder meeting with Carol Bartz as CEO was largely uneventful, as she promised to turn Yahoo around by focusing on content and organization.

The actual business of the meeting was brief: all 12 nominees up for reelection to the board of directors were approved, three company-sponsored proposals were approved, and a shareholder "say on pay" proposal was rejected. Bartz spent most of the meeting talking about the work she has been doing to get Yahoo back on track, emphasizing that Yahoo has a strategy; it just needs to "execute"--business-speak for "not screw up all the time."

"We try to make sure we have 'wow' experiences for anybody who comes to a Yahoo site," Bartz said. She reminded shareholders several times that Yahoo is as much a content company as a search company, calling Yahoo "the largest online media company." This, of course, deflects comparisons to Google, who's stock has dramatically outperformed Yahoo's over the last several years.

Shareholders asked few pointed questions during their turn at the microphone. Bartz was asked twice to defend Yahoo's commitment to human rights in China, at a time when the Chinese government seems to be playing a more active role in cutting off Internet access to topics it doesn't like.

When asked whether her company is talking with Microsoft at the All Things Digital conference last month, Yahoo's Carol Bartz said: 'Yeah, a little bit.'

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)

She made it clear that Yahoo isn't crazy about such crackdowns, but also said "Yahoo was not incorporated to fix China."

One shareholder asked Bartz to stop "dumbing-down the home page," which tends to carry the celebrity gossip story of the day as its main item. Yahoo is working on ways to give users a "fluffmeter," as Bartz put it, where they could choose just how much Jon and Kate news they want to see when visiting Yahoo. Bartz didn't elaborate, but it seems that could come along with a home page redesign later this year.

And she nipped all speculation about Microsoft in the bud within about five minutes of her prepared remarks when she said "if we ever have a deal with Microsoft, it will be announced publicly, and until then there's nothing to say." That's a line straight out of a Public Relations 101 textbook, neither admitting nor denying that any such talks are ongoing, as Bartz has previously hinted to.

Bartz closed the meeting with a partial nod to the roller coaster ride Yahoo shareholders have been treated to over the past several years. "Thank you for being Yahoo shareholders, and thank you for having faith in us."

Earlier this week, as she prepared for her first shareholder meeting as CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz told a story about her favorite question she ever received at a shareholder meeting while at Autodesk: "Why, young lady, are you qualified to keep your job?"

Yahoo's Carol Bartz will face shareholders Thursday for the first time since she became CEO in January.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)

Bartz is unlikely to face such a question Thursday, just six months after assuming the top role at Yahoo following one of the most tumultuous years in the company's history. Bartz has shaken up Yahoo in her short time on the job; bringing in her own people with a cost-cutting mandate, putting the fear of God into the engineering team, and charming the business press with interview performances that call to mind what might have been the result if Lucille Ball and George Carlin had raised a techie daughter.

But shareholders will arrive at the Santa Clara Marriott with a key fact in mind: despite the relative calm of 2009 compared to the maelstrom of 2008, Yahoo seems to have little to show for the stability.

Revenue, earnings, and the all-important stock price are down from that tumultuous year; and even though the economy provides an understandable excuse, Yahoo's margins are still very thin, despite rounds of layoffs.

During its first fiscal quarter, Yahoo earned just $101 million in operating income on revenue excluding commissions of $1.16 billion. By contrast, Google earned $1.88 billion in operating income on revenue excluding commissions of $4.07 billion and AOL earned $150 million in operating income on revenue of $867 million.

How to turn things around? It seems Bartz is preparing to articulate a different vision of Yahoo than others have been used to hearing from those in purple. For example, she has suggested that search is not the be all and end all for Yahoo; an anathema to the establishment.

Instead, she has talked about acquiring social-networking companies and doubling down on attempts to court major advertisers to Yahoo's popular properties. Financial analysts love Bartz right now for her willingness to swing the hatchet on costs, and shareholders are likely to share an appreciation for her quest to get Yahoo's famously far-flung operations under some semblance of control.

The "it was like that when I got here" strategy only works for so long, however. Shareholders are likely to press Bartz on the chances of any kind of a deal with Microsoft, given that Yahoo's stock has languished far below Microsoft's best offer of $33 a share for the entire company last year. Heading into Thursday's meeting, it closed at $15.45.

Bartz has thus far been coy about her dealings with Microsoft, acknowledging that talks have taken place while insisting that Yahoo is a viable business on its own. A straight-out acquisition by Microsoft seems unlikely now, given the economic climate, but a search partnership does not appear out of the question.

However, the cost savings once thought to accompany such a partnership are less than many had thought, Bartz warned a few weeks ago. Some had thought Yahoo could save as much as much as $1.3 billion by agreeing to let Microsoft run its search-ad business, but Bartz put the figure at roughly $500 million in June.

If Bartz hangs onto Yahoo's search business, she'll need to explain how Yahoo can jump-start that portion of its revenue-generating strategy. Bartz has admitted that few people who aren't already on one of Yahoo's sites choose its search--98 percent of all Yahoo searches come from people already on Yahoo. That's still a lot of people, but with Google being Google, and Microsoft recording early success with the launch of Bing, Yahoo seems to be fading from the public's mind as a search option.

Still, Yahoo is the second-largest Web property in the U.S., and a revamped home page coming later this year might help draw more people onto the site, and therefore generate more searches and more impressions on display ads. Bartz seems to be hoping that a slimmer, more attractive Yahoo will gain traffic just as the advertising market hopefully comes back later this year and into next.

Thursday, she'll find out what shareholders think.

Cisco has debuted an iPhone application that can make use of the company's popular WebEx collaboration tool. The new app, available free from the App Store, allows users click to join and actively collaborate in WebEx meetings. A company statement reads:

"The online meeting experience gives users the ability to take advantage of simultaneous web and audio conferencing capabilities from Cisco on both the 3G mobile and 802.11 wireless (Wi-Fi) networks. The solution supports multiple telephony configurations including SaaS-based telephony from Cisco WebEx Meeting Center, premises-based telephony from Cisco Unified MeetingPlace, or telephony from Cisco's service provider partners. "

The company says that a future edition will allow users to transfer Cisco WebEx Meeting Center and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace conferences from the Apple iPhone 3G to an office environment and back, by transferring the audio to a Cisco Unified IP Phone and the web conference.

A video demonstration of WebEx for the iPhone is available at http://www.webex.com/iphone/.

If you're in need of a quick and simple way to share a document with a few other people at the same time, worth checking out is ShowDocument. It works with most major file types including PDFs, Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, and text files, and displays them in a simple Flash-based viewer and editor.

Once you've uploaded any file up to 2MB in size, you can mark it up with a pen and highlighter tool, along with a text box tool and eraser. There's also a small chat box to discuss changes, and everyone's cursor is tracked as it moves around.

Everything is delightfully simple to use, although one big problem we ran into with our testing was that anyone can control what's going on. This cropped up the most when one person was making an edit and someone else decided to take the reins and scroll to another slide. Whatever edit that person was making got ditched and there's little else you can do besides yell at them through the chat tool.

Ideally, future versions would allow some sort of presenter/viewer dynamic to keep someone else from overtaking the editing experience. To the service's credit, very few live collaboration tools handle user edit switch-offs with grace.

Also worth checking out is Vyew, Twiddla, Zoho and Yugma.

ShowDocument lets you do quick and easy real-time collaboration with others with no software required.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It's a 3-day weekend for some of us (thanks Columbus!), and oil is now under $80 a barrel. In other words, it's the perfect time for a road trip. If you're thinking about organizing an impromptu meet-up with far away friends, organizing a Craigslist buy, or just need to find a fair location for a child custody swap, you should check out MeetWays, a service that helps you find the a perfect mid-point.

Setting up a trip is very simple, you just plug in your address and the other person's and it picks the nearest freeway or main-road friendly midpoint. That way one person doesn't have to drive farther than the other, and there's no need for a calculator to do the math.

Besides finding the proper town for you to stop in, you can also have the service narrow down what types of places you'd like to meet. The entire system is built off of Google Maps, so you can dig a little deeper to get directions and reviews. It's also worth noting it's U.S. only for now.

[via Lifehacker]

MeetWays figures out a good midpoint between two locations and lets you search for local businesses there.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The meeting time broker TimeDriver, which has been in closed testing since I covered it back in January, will finally enter its public beta period on Monday. I had a chance to play with the product Thursday. For a lot of people, this service could be a great help.

TimeDriver is designed to help people who need to schedule a lot of one-on-one meetings. If you're interviewing job candidates, for example, or taking appointments with customers, you can set up either one-time or recurring blocks of time, and send people links that let them grab appointment times in those blocks that remain unclaimed.

You can also just put a link on your Web page or in your e-mails and take appointments from anyone. Yikes.

My time is yours. Live demo. Try it.

TimeDriver can link to Google or Outlook calendars if you want to make sure you're not booking appointments on top of your one-off meetings, and the system will then write appointments back into your calendar when people claim times. There are advanced options that can prevent people from scheduling last-minute meetings or from seeing more than a few time slots; you wouldn't want to look unbusy, would you? But there's no way to automatically enforce buffer times between meetings, which might matter if you make house calls.

The service has tools to send out blast e-mails to people (for example, job candidates you want to interview) and will track all their responses. Coming soon is a new Outlook plug-in that will let you send meeting requests from within your Outlook client itself; in the current version you can only manage mass meeting invitations from within TimeDriver.

My weekly demo timeslots.

TimeDriver is a different beast than a meeting negotiation product like TimeBridge, which allows for multi-person meetings and encourages a form of voting on best times to meet. That kind of solution is better for people like me who treat each meeting separately; TimeDriver is better for people who see one meeting as much like the next.

The basic TimeDriver service is free. Paid and enterprise versions will get additional features, such as calendar pooling--so multiple people can service appointment requests--analytics tools, and custom branding options.

Future versions may include variable privacy, so specific people or groups can see more detail of your calendar, or so some users need confirmation from you before a meeting is booked, but others don't.

I look forward to seeing this tool integrated into other online customer management solutions, like Salesforce.com. Or better yet, adopted by my dentist.

See also: Timebridge (review), Jiffle (formerly iPolipo; review), ScheduleOnce (review).

Tungle, launching today, may be the meeting coordination utility to beat. Like TimeBridge, Jiffle, and other products in this new category, it lets you block off a bunch of times for a meeting you want to have with a person or group of people, and then it handles all the back-and-forth while your attendees figure out which of the available times they want to grab. Once the meeting is booked, it enters the appointment into your Outlook calendar and sends the recipients calendar entries, too.

Tungle's success is in its design. If you're setting up a meeting, you can select whole swaths of potential times, even if you just want the person on the other end to pick a 30 minute slot. You can also do cool things such as drag blocks across days (for example, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesday through Friday) for open times. Tungle will excise times that you've already got booked (including times booked by other attendees on your Exchange server), and will make sure that your contact never gets the option to select times that are taken, even if they're scheduled after you send out the initial meeting request.

Tungle lets you create big blocks of potential times for meetings, but it won't double-book you.

Another unique feature: The capability to schedule two people into a meeting but not yourself--great for administrators. And you still get a confirmation when the meeting is set up.

When a meeting is finally locked in, the person or people you've scheduled get confirmation e-mails, and in the e-mails come calendar entries that auto-populate Outlook, Google Calendar, Entourage, and other scheduling systems.

Tungle lets you give some of your contacts access to your free/busy information so they can more easily initiate a meeting request with you. For people you'd rather keep at a more professional distance, you don't have to share anything about your schedule except episodically, when you want to set up a meeting with them.

It appears easy to use and mostly straightforward. I'm looking forward to giving it a shot. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the desktop application to run on my system. Outlook is a "finicky platform" Tungle CEO Marc Gingras told me before I fired up the demo on my own PC. Prophetic words. My cursed laptop also rejects TimeBridge, by the way. I don't know what it is that keeps scheduling helpers from running well on my computers.

For people setting up meetings, Tungle is Outlook-only so far. But as I said, it sends confirmation e-mails to attendees that many calendar applications can read.

Tungle is free. Premium services (such as scheduling meeting rooms) will be available eventually. The company also plans to make money by linking to third parties such as conference bridges.

Once we can get these applications stable on a PC, we'll compare them.

The meeting time negotiation service TimeBridge is adding a new Web-based component today. It now lets you set up a page, which TimeBridge hosts, that displays your free times. People who want a piece of your schedule can request an available time from those that are open. It's a good improvement to TimeBridge for service providers like consultants.

Previously, all of TimeBridge's scheduling communications were in e-mails. See review: TimeBridge makes scheduling easy.

Now anyone can see what a slacker you are.

As before, TimeBridge gets its free/busy data from your Outlook or Google calendar; if you're a user of one of these products, you don't need to adopt a new basic scheduling system to use the TimeBridge meeting negotiation service.

It doesn't look like the new hosted schedule is embeddable in Web pages or on social network sites as a widget, though. If I was a consultant using TimeBridge to let my customers book time with me, I would prefer it if they didn't have to leave my site to do so.

I've used TimeBridge on and off since November 2006, and I've found that the plug-in for Outlook has a conflict with the McAfee virus scanner that CNET installs on our machines. But the service is so potentially valuable to me that I've tried three different versions of the software hoping it'd be fixed.

Previously, TimeBridge added a free conference calling service, a nice and natural add-on to a meeting coordination product.

See also: Timedriver, Jiffle (formerly iPolipo; review), ScheduleOnce (review), and Ether (review).

I'm always privy to simple, one-shot tools that get the job done. ScheduleOnce is a good example of a meeting scheduling tool that's been designed with this in mind. The free service is set up to help you reach a consensus on a meeting time for multiple parties based on open time slots. Each user has access to a calendar, and depending on how open the meeting's creator has left the schedule, users can go in and note times they're free, or accept any slot that's already been noted as open. The app takes time zones, including various localized daylight saving times, and adjusts the schedule accordingly. That combined with the iCal and Google Calendar-like drag-and-drop time slot creator makes it supereasy for people to jump in, mark down a time, and be done with it.

You or your meeting participants can set up open time slots in an easy-to-use calendar. When everyone's added input, you can go in and find the best time to have the meeting.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The real draw to this app is its simplicity. There's no sign-up or registration required, and when it comes time to figure out what times are best, the app will designate each time slot with different symbols to give you a quick look at which times are free, which aren't, and a few that might be negotiable. You can also view this in a large calendar view in case you need to haggle with a single member who's flubbing up the operation. When it actually comes time to decide on something, you can either cut and paste the provided text into an e-mail, or do it right from the page. It's even nice enough to break down what times the meeting is at in each participant's time zone.

In addition to its general purpose app, ScheduleOnce has a private, white-label edition that companies can use inside their firewall, or mix in with pre-existing conferencing and meeting systems the likes of MeetMeNow and GoToMeeting. Ideally, I'd also like to see some integration with calendaring apps such as Outlook and Google Calendar to let people share a portion of their schedule without having to fill in any time slots, or plug the date right into their calendaring app of choice when a time has been chosen.

See also: Timebridge (review) and iPolipo (review)

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