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We interrupt your regularly scheduled tech deals to bring you this important bulletin...

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Yahoo's current headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Yahoo is apparently thinking about making a run for the border: the Sunnyvale border, that is.

Marketwatch reports that Yahoo is finally preparing plans for a parcel of land it acquired three years ago in Santa Clara, Calif., a few exits south on U.S. 101 of its current headquarters in Sunnyvale. The land has apparently sat vacant ever since Yahoo bought it in 2006 in hopes of expanding, which, of course, didn't exactly work out given Yahoo's financial performance over that time and the economic downturn.

It's not clear whether Yahoo wants to move the executive offices or just expand into that location. But the proposal submitted to Santa Clara officials involves a 13-building complex covering 3 million square feet, which means it's probably not going to be used as a satellite office for obscure divisions of the company.

It seems Yahoo is feeling confident enough about its business prospects to consider taking on a building project. The company released a statement about its plans for Santa Clara.

"Yahoo purchased 42.5 acres of land in Santa Clara in July 2006. We submitted initial plans to the City of Santa Clara to redevelop the property in August 2008 and plans are currently with the City to procure entitlements for developing the land. We are taking the proper steps to secure approval for the development of the land. We continue to evaluate our real estate portfolio on a worldwide basis to ensure it best supports our business."

Tim Berners-Lee at the Web 2.0 Summit.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--When Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, entered the room for the final interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, the audience stood up for him.

Appropriately so, since most of those present here Thursday owe their livelihoods to his invention. In an on-stage interview with Tim O'Reilly, the audience was listening to Berners-Lee not just for his perspective but his guidance. While not explicitly called out in the discussion, there was good advice in what he had to say. Here's what I heard:

Don't build your laws into the Web. "Technology shouldn't tell you what's right and what's wrong," Berners-Lee said. "The rule of law applies on the Web. It's a platform for humanity." He does not appear believe that it is appropriate to code local laws onto the global platform, preferring to leave enforcement to existing means--police and courts.

Fault-tolerance is vital. Responding to question from O'Reilly about the "404" page being one of the critical inventions on the Web, Berners-Lee said, "It was a trade-off and a design choice." But, he added, "The great thing is you can write a bunch of links and you don't have to wait" for them all to work. Building a tight system where everything is guaranteed to work is possible in smaller configurations but not on a global scale.

If you want it everywhere, give it away. The Twitter founders must have heard this message before they built their product. When asked why Berners-Lee never thought about charging for the Web, the answer was practical and capitalistic. "Because we wanted it everywhere," He said. "We wanted an URL for every page." And he got it. Ubiquity would not have been possible with competing, paid hypertext systems.

Large companies are the enemy. I'm interpreting here, from this statement: "I'm worried about anything large coming in to take control, whether it's large companies or government." For example, he said that large social networks like Facebook end up with undue control over communications because they are not open to other systems. As he said, in the old days of e-mail, you could e-mail anyone, anywhere, from any system. They all interconnected. With large, closed systems, users cede control to the owners.

Small open companies can topple big closed ones. Berners-Lee believes that if you have small companies that connect to each other in an open way (for example, small social networks using a standard to connect their networks), then it's possible that the lone, closed system, no matter how large, can fail.

Separate design from device. The growth of mobile devices is one example of how thinking about Web design for one size screen--a PC or laptop--can cut a product off from growth. Another: not considering the increase in the number of users with "huge screens" on which a design created for, say, and 800x600 Flash window, will appear tiny and weak.

Consider content as app. Thanks to HTML 5, which Berners-Lee calls a competing platform more than a content standard, Web pages can turn into widgets, and some apps won't be distinguishable from Web pages.

Forge trust. Berners-Lee says, "One of the whole gating factors of getting the whole world of Web apps to take off is trust." He says that when Web apps get data from different services and those services similarly reach out to others, how do users, customers, and companies ever learn to trust a single site? What's the solution? He doesn't know, but believes it's an opportunity: "If we get a really good solution to the problem, then Web apps will be amazing."

Make the Web work for more people. As Berners-Lee says, only 20 percent to 25 percent of humans uses the Web even though 80 percent "have signal," that is, they could get on the Web where they are if they had the tools or desire to do so. He believes that one of the reasons use of the Web is lower than its availability is that much of the Web isn't designed for all cultures. The World Wide Web Foundation is Berners-Lee's platform for pushing for more Web access for the world. He puts the challenge this way: "It's about figuring out what is the little thing we can tweak so that people can get online, 15 years before they would otherwise?" More people connected means more empowered people. Which, by the way, means more of a market for Web inventors.

Yahoo revenue is still down compared to last year, but stabilized in the third quarter while profits surged.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Updated 1:40 p.m. PDT with additional details from the release, and throughout at 3:45 p.m. PDT following the earnings call.

Yahoo's cost-cutting moves this year are starting to show up in the bottom line, as the company's third-quarter profit exceeded analyst expectations by a wide margin.

Revenue is still declining at Yahoo, which recorded $1.6 billion in revenue, down 12 percent from last year. Excluding traffic acquisition costs paid to partners, revenue was $1.1 billion, in line with analyst estimates.

But following several rounds of layoffs and belt-tightening, Yahoo's net income came in at $186 million, a 244 percent increase over last year's third-quarter net income of $54 million or $0.13 in earnings per share. And when you factor out special items, net income was $213 million or $0.15 in earnings per share. Analysts were looking for $0.07 in earnings per share on average, and even the most optimistic estimates didn't cross $0.10.

Some of the unexpected increase can be chalked up to Yahoo's decision to sell its 1 percent stake in Alibaba.com during the quarter, on which it gained about $98 million. UBS analyst Brian Pitz estimated that one-time gain accounted for about $0.03 in earnings per share, according to Tech Trader Daily.

But Yahoo has shed 2,000 jobs since the third quarter of 2008, now employing 13,200 people around the world. It has signaled a willingness to cut further, currently in the process of shedding divisions of the company that it no longer considers important to focus on others.

CFO Tim Morse--who led the call unexpectedly after CEO Carol Bartz came down with the flu--said that Yahoo will continue to wring costs from anything and everything. "There's a change occurring at Yahoo that will value that kind of work," he said, referring to efforts to find more efficient ways of operating Yahoo's core properties.

Yahoo's results will give further credence to the notion that Internet advertising is coming back after a dreadful year. Google's financial results last week signaled such a shift was in place, and while Yahoo isn't nearly as strong in search advertising, it is a major player in display advertising, which was not expected to recover as quickly as search advertising.

Morse said that Yahoo is starting to see some "loosening" of ad spending budgets as the economy recovers. Still, Yahoo is still a long way away from the revenue heights it reached last year and the needle is not moving in the right direction just yet.

Search advertising declined by 19 percent in the third quarter to hit $354 million on Yahoo's owned and operated sites, while display advertising declined 8 percent to $399 million. The good-news/bad-news scenario here is that while the rate of decline in the display business is slowing down, the rate of decline in the search business is increasing, perhaps fallout from Yahoo's decision to enter into a pending agreement with Microsoft to outsource search on Yahoo sites.

Morse, however, preferred to focus on the results as compared to the second quarter of this year. Looking at it that way, display advertising grew slightly and search advertising declined slightly. That's not anything to get excited about, but it's not as bad a picture as painted by the year-over-year comparisons.

Getting back to the Microsoft deal, Morse said Yahoo still expects the deal to close early next year, reiterating the support the companies received Monday from the advertising industry. Yahoo knows the migration will take a while; it expects to move only one or two significant markets to the Microsoft search technology in 2009 if approved soon. However, Morse wryly noted that not only has Yahoo done this before--when it introduced its Panama search ad platform in 2007--but many of the engineers that worked on Panama now work for Microsoft.

The company said it expected to record between $1.6 billion and $1.7 billion in revenue during the upcoming fourth quarter, which would be a slight decrease compared to the fourth quarter of 2008. However, coming into the third quarter the financial community was only expecting Yahoo to record $1.2 billion during the fourth quarter.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Among the tech industry's up-and-coming, ad-supported business models appear to be out of fashion. Or at least that appears to be the trend among the companies that just graduated from the annual Boulder, Colo.-based incubator program TechStars. Representatives from some of those start-ups convened for an "Investor Day" at a Microsoft-owned auditorium here on Wednesday morning.

Founded by venture capitalists David Cohen and Brad Feld three years ago, TechStars accepts a total of 20 participants in both Boulder and Boston for a summer of development, seminars with industry veterans, and a small amount of seed funding. Thirteen of those 20 companies were advanced enough to earn spots at Wednesday's Investor Day, in which they offered short presentations to more than 100 members of the venture capital community who are actively interested in making early-stage investments.

And not a single one was offering a strictly advertising-supported business model, something that would've been pretty unthinkable not so long ago.

"(These companies) are the future of the entrepreneurial ecosystem as it evolves," Feld said to the audience midway through the morning. "We think these are all very fundable companies. In fact, most of the companies that you're seeing today are either well down the path of closing financing, or have closed financing, but for many of them there's still room."

Unlike the TechCrunch50 start-up pitch event earlier this month, none of these companies were actually launching out of a total stealth mode. Some had already experienced a sort of PR blitz--travelogue site Everlater generated some buzz when people were using it to map their plans for airline JetBlue's "All You Can Jet" promotion, and unofficial Twitter app store OneForty experienced the usual tech-blog mayhem earlier this week when it launched in private alpha and set off a flurry among the early-adopter crowd as people scrambled for invites.

But like TechCrunch50's array of start-ups, most of the TechStars lineup had productivity on the brain. Gaming and entertainment companies were limited to TakeComics, which aims to bring an iTunes-inspired business model to the digitization of comic books, and AccelGolf, a decidedly hardcore set of mobile and Web-based applications for avid golfers.

Business-focused applications were far more commonplace. Retel Technologies has built security-camera software enhanced with data and analytics, NextBigSound tabulates bands and musicians' popularity on social-media and music sites to roll up into a product sold to industry professionals; SendGrid offers e-mail marketing services to businesses at a variety of price points; and HaveMyShift, built by a former Starbucks barista, offers an exchange for hourly employees at major chain stores to swap and pick up shifts.

The companies were a mixed bag, and so were the entrepreneurs behind them: many fell into the young-entrepreneur stereotype of puppy-faced young men who could use a haircut along with that seed funding, but others strayed from the norm. OneForty's Laura Fitton is already a respected Twitter consultant; Raj Aggarwal, CEO of mobile data start-up Localytics, is an Apple veteran who had helped construct the original business model for the iPhone; and the founders of mobile contact management company Sensobi professed to earlier entrepreneurial experience in the chocolate industry.

Of the entire lineup, Everlater--founded by two childhood friends who had quit their Wall Street jobs to found the company--offered the closest thing to the typical ad-supported consumer model that was so ubiquitous in Web 2.0's heyday a few years ago, and even still, the founders plan to sell customized scrapbook and postcard products as well as offer branded packages to travel companies hoping to get their name out there.

A few other TechStars presenters said they hoped to use a free, ad-supported model as an entry point for the subscription services where they plan to make more significant money: video-based language learning system LangoLab, for example, hopes to strike deals with online video hubs like Hulu and then charge for access to lessons based around that "premium" content, and open-source forum software Vanilla charges for the hosted version of its product.

Granted, these business models still have their pratfalls: namely, the fact that they actually have to find individuals or companies who are willing to pay, something that often requires the formation of a solid marketing or sales department before profits can start to roll in. That was why many of them said they were looking to close early-stage funding rounds soon.

But those solicitations for funding were not lofty. Almost all of the TechStars presentations provided a target amount that they were seeking for their angel or Series A rounds (a few had closed rounds already), and the vast majority were south of $1 million--far south, in some cases.

Google has finally whittled down the more than 150,000 ideas submitted as part of its Project 10^100 to 16 themes that will compete for $10 million in funding.

It's taken far longer than Google had originally anticipated, but the results of the company's 10th anniversary project to solicit ideas that could change the world are ready for inspection. Google is asking the public to vote on the most worthy of the 16 "idea themes" that it has identified from the submissions it has received over the past year.

Google had originally planned to choose individual ideas, but was "overwhelmed" by the number of submissions, which took 3,000 employees to properly vet, according to Google spokesman Jamie Yood. In addition, many of the ideas were extremely similar or overlapping, so Google decided to emphasize project categories that resonated with the company, rather than individual ideas.

Some of those themes, and Google's comments on those ideas, follow below:

• Enhance science and engineering education: "Users from many countries agreed that encouraging science education was an ideal way to (ensure) the brightest future for technology development itself."

• Create more efficient landmine removal programs: "Fund global organizations that are developing efficient strategies for landmine detection and removal...Numerous suggestions for this topic include robotic, human, and animal-facilitated detection strategies."

• Create real-time natural-crisis tracking system: "Make rapid-response crisis-mapping data available to help policymakers better coordinate response efforts during hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters."

• Work toward more socially conscious tax policies: "Fund the most promising efforts to make the tax system more transparent and better at supporting societal sustainability and development...User ideas in this category highlight tax policy as a perhaps surprisingly fertile area in which intelligent, data-driven analysis could make a huge difference in the effectiveness of the public sector."

Now that the themes have been chosen, Google is asking the public to vote on the best ideas, the results of which will be submitted to a committee that will pick up to five ideas for funding. Google will undertake a RFP (request for proposal) process in order to solicit companies or organizations that can implement the chosen ideas, and those groups will receive the money.

Voting ends on October 8.

Seventy new products will be announced at the DemoFall 09 conference Tuesday and Wednesday. Looking over the lineup one finds, as usual, some companies refreshing existing product lines, many entering into crowded markets with marginally better if unexciting technology, and others having solutions for very specific vertical markets. But some, thank goodness, do sound more generally interesting. Some are trying to solve big problems in new ways, or are addressing emerging technology or business issues that other companies haven't yet even recognized as markets. And then there are those that sound too weird to work.

Those are the companies that I will be paying special attention to at Demo. Here they are, and why. Note that some of these write-ups are based on incomplete information from the companies, so the descriptions may not be exactly right. Watch CNET's DemoFall coverage for the latest updates and on-the-spot reviews.

Opportunity: Combating e-mail overload

Nubli EmailSmarts helps you wade through your in-box.

(Credit: Nubli)

Liaise and Nubli EmailSmarts are both showing products to combat e-mail overload. Liaise, for which I got an advance briefing, watches what you type in Outlook and when it sees you creating what looks like an actionable message ("Pam, I need those copies today!"), it creates trackable items flagged by person, date, and task. You can easily modify how the system flags items, and mark off items as they're done. More importantly, when you're going into a meeting with people, you can print out a list of everything you've committed others to. It works with Outlook so far, other systems to come later -- including, possibly, instant-messaging apps.

EmailSmarts works the other way. It prioritizes incoming e-mails to you based on some presumably brilliant algorithm that takes into account how you reply to people as well. Both Liaise and EmailSmarts are Outlook plug-ins. See also: Xobni (from the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008). Microsoft business development people are sniffing around at these apps, so there is an exit strategy for good e-mail add-ons.

Trend: Crowdsourced traffic data

TrafficTalk sounds basically like a voice chat room for people who are driving, with a focus on traffic. Obviously it'll put people in a room based on location and direction of travel, and possibly based on destination. (I can't help but think of CB radios.) Sounds a lot safer that using a screen-based traffic-reporting tool, although how drivers are supposed to monitor this and have their usual mobile phone conversations at the same time I don't get. See also: Waze, which will be showing an update at Demo.

Trend: Price pressure on cloud computing

The space you get is equal to the space you make.

(Credit: Symform)

Symform is an online data backup service for business, but instead of hosting its own storage servers, Symform give subscribers only as much online storage as they make available on their own network to others. Since Symform isn't actually providing storage, it can sell its service more cheaply than a standard online backup provider. Of course the data is encrypted. And since it's based on business-class servers, it sounds more reliable than Crashplan, which is a similar service for consumer PCs. But it'll be a tough sell. I expect that most businesses will pay the extra money to know who is storing their backups. (This is the "too weird to work" concept I was talking about in my intro.)

Opportunity: Modernizing online dating

DateCheck will make it easier to stalk, I mean, check out, prospective dates. The clever motto says it all: "Look up before you hook up." Of course everyone who uses the Internet checks out potential dates first via Google and Facebook. This just might make it easier.

Gelato is supposed to make creating a believable, sorry, I mean compelling, online profile easy. It scans your existing accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix to piece together a profile of what you're interested in, and it keeps it up to date for you. It also might be more accurate than what people say about themselves.

Emerging business: Personal data aggregation

OrganIP from Digitrad has a compelling pitch: It is supposed to connect you to the people you want using just their names. I have a feeling, though, that it will require that users register their names, possibly on the .tel top-level domain, since Digitrad also runs Yes.tel, which is a contact management service that connects your personal domain to your personal and social services like Skype, Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter.

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Dear readers: We are testing a new commenting system, JS-Kit's Echo, in this post. In addition to providing a more comprehensive sign-on system and real-time updating, Echo also collates comments on this story from other Web sources, such as Twitter. Check out the action at the end of the post. --Rafe

I've been a fan of Google Voice since I started using it in earnest back in March. I now give out my Google Voice number (get yours here, but be prepared to wait a bit before it arrives) more than my mobile phone or my desk phone, and even have it on my business cards now. The features are great, but what I really like is that the number is truly portable: I just point the service at whatever phone, or phones, I want to use that day and my calls arrive there.

With Google Voice apps for mobile phones, I can also make calls from cellular phones that show the Google Voice number in the Caller ID displays of the people I'm calling. That is the killer feature of this killer app. But the experience is not the same on all phones. I've tried Google Voice on four different platforms -- iPhone, Blackberry, Android phone, and PC -- and one clearly stands out above the rest.

Not surprisingly, it's Google's own mobile phone platform, Android. The iPhone has great potential, but until Apple pulls its head out of its Apps Store, it's denied to us as a Google Voice platform. You can still use Google Voice in the iPhone, sort of, via the Safari browser, as I'll explain below.

There is a Blackberry version of the Google Voice app, which is not as full-featured as the Android app, but that has certain important advantages for corporate phone users. Finally, there's the old full browser-based Web app, which is highly useful even when you've got a Google Voice-equipped mobile phone sitting on your desk.

Let's look at how the platforms stack up for Google Voice, in order from good to bad...

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Google is finally promising to shed light on its "Project 10 to the 100th" competition--announced last year as part of its 10th anniversary celebration--within a month: or just in time for its 11th anniversary.

Project 10 to the 100th is an attempt to solicit ideas that will change the world, focusing on the notion that "new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people," Google said when announcing the project last year. Five projects will be selected to receive a total of $10 million in funding, but choosing those five projects has taken Google much longer than originally anticipated. The announcement of the finalists has already been delayed twice, most recently in March.

"We received over 150,000 ideas from users which far surpassed our expectations," said Jamie Wood, a Google spokesman. "We've never managed a project like this and it's taken much more time than we imagined to judge and sort through the ideas."

Wood promised that "within a month" Google would announce the next phase of the competition. That will likely involve the release of 100 proposals for the public to vote on and choose 20 finalists, from which a Google board will choose the five lucky winners.