If you live in San Francisco, you must have noticed the new Yahoo! interactive ads in few bus stops around the city.  (Currently at 20 high-traffic bus stops) At each one of these bus stops there is one 72-inch touch LCD screen that allows the commuters to play games and compete other neighborhoods.

Players earn points for a local neighborhood that they choose from a pull-down menu, and at the end of the competition the winning “team” gets a block party with a performance by the band OK Go. The Derby runs through January 28, 2011.

Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Yahoo’s Ad agency. created the Bus Stop Derby campaign, which is built around four games that correspond to the features of the mobile apps for Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Sportacular and Flickr:

1. “Incoming!” is a race to sort color-coded mail as it slides down chutes
2. “Chatter Scatter” players text against time
3. “Sport-a-pult” is trivia-meets-target practice
4. “Snap Happy” is a 3-D puzzle

“Local’s going to be increasingly a big part of the content we push out, so it’s important for us to have both a digital and a physical presence in the local community,” explains Penny Baldwin, Yahoo!’s SVP Consumer Marketing and Brand Management. (Source)

What a great idea. This is the definition of an integrated marketing campaign. It is local and viral, people try the new mobile apps and it’s a way to fight for your neighborhood. Today Mission is number one! Let’s see who is going to win!

The games are not that much exciting but what else can you do when the bus is late.. Every bus stop is also a free Wi-Fi Spot. I’m really surprised by this innovative campaign by Yahoo! and Goodby Silverstein & Partners.

Read more about the “Bus Stop Derby“

I guess that most of you have noticed or read about the change in Flickr‘s logo.. Yahoo recently added “from Yahoo!” next to Flickr logo in order to enhance its brand through this very successful image and video hosting service. What yahoo did is very reasonable and it might help the company’s brand. Apparently this action is a part of its new campaign. Why Yahoo chose only Flickr and some others and not all of its websites? For example Zimbra and Delicious, two very successful websites, don’t have a yahoo logo in the header or the footer. I can understand that the audience of Zimbra is much different than the one of Flickr but Delicious focuses on the similar target market that Flickr does. Interesting..

Yahoo has several websites, services and divisions. It is quite difficult to have a uniformity across its websites but it is important. I navigated through several Yahoo websites and I noticed that there are some differences in the logos (old red and new purple) and in favicons (the small icon next to the web address). Yahoo has several logos: ‘a Yahoo division’, ‘a Yahoo service’, ‘this is Yahoo’ and ‘from Yahoo’. Why all these different? Some of them in the old red and some others in new purple.

With favicons, Yahoo has not a uniformity across its websites. In most of them we see the new purple Y! and in some others the old red one.

I like that Yahoo has a very modern logo. I also like that on the web purple means Yahoo! and they chose a unique and rare color instead of using blue that most companies do! But.. They need to pay more attention in uniformity across its websites..

Google continued to increase its U.S. search share dominance in October, widening its lead over Yahoo and Microsoft. In October, Google’s share of Web searches by people in the U.S. rose to 71.7 percent, up from 71.2 percent in September and 64.5 percent in October of 2007, according to market research company Hitwise.

At the same time, Yahoo’s share slipped to 17.7 percent, from 18.1 percent a month earlier and 21.7 percent a year ago. Microsoft’s share rose slightly in October to 5.4 percent from 5.36 percent in September, but the down from 7.4 percent in October of last year. Internet searches at Ask.com fell to 3.5 percent from 3.6 percent a month ago, and from 4.8 percent last year.

Hitwise bases its data on a sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users over four week rolling periods. The Microsoft figures include Live.com and MSN Search but does not include Club.Live.com.

The remaining 43 search engines Hitwise tracks accounted for 1.6 percent of U.S. searches in October.

Source: Macworld

Scour is a new search engine that combines the results of the most famous search engines: Google, MSN and Yahoo. You can also rate the results as you do in Pandora. By this, Scour is getting better!

The unemployment issue is getting bigger and serious! These are some of the Tech companies that fire 19,556 employees.

Source: Tech Crunch

This morning, all the employees of Yahoo had a surprise email from their boss. Jerry Yang, CEO amd co-founder of Yahoo, sent an email to all the Yahoo’s employees worldwide.

In the email Jerry Yang explained the reasons of his decision According to his words, Yahoo has to eliminate its costs by $400 millions!

The big economic crisis affects also Silicon Valley, the place that US invests its 70%!