Yahoo to be Featured on H.P. Computers

Yahoo to be Featured on H.P. Computers

This past Thursday, Yahoo reported that they had agreed on a deal with Hewlett-Packard to place Yahoo search and other Yahoo services on all HP computers being sold in the United States and Europe. These HP computers will feature an internet toolbar with a combination of HP and Yahoo features. Furthermore, Yahoo will be the default search engine on many Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 models, which are coming soon. HP consumer PC’s in North American will soon be equipped with an internet toolbar featuring Yahoo services, and Yahoo will be the preferred internet search engine for Internet Explorer 7.0. And effective immediately in Europe, Yahoo’s home page will be featured on consumer PC’s.

Yahoo and Google have been competing to win exclusive positioning of their services within the major hardware and software makers. Google has been anticipating this move by Yahoo, and realizes that HP users will gain instant access to Yahoo search, email, links, and other Yahoo services. To combat this anticipated move by Yahoo, Google has signed deals with Dell, software makers like Adobe Systems and Intuit, and media companies like News Corporation. However, Yahoo’s momentum has greatly increased with its recent partnerships.

Yahoo has made a multiyear distribution deal with Acer, the top PC notebook maker in Europe, which will place Yahoo services on Acer computers. Yahoo also has similar deals with major broadband communications providers in the United States, Canada, and Britain.

These two search engines, Yahoo and Google, have long been in competition with each other and are arguably the most popular search engines on the internet. These strategic partnerships that each company is making will increase their popularity to an even greater level and could possibly reduce the use of less popular search engines such as AltaVista and AskJeeves.
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Choosing A College, With Help From the Web

"Choosing a College, With Help From the Web"

Many high school students these days are turning to the internet and using search engines to find information about colleges. Sites such as The Princeton Review, the College Board, Kaplan, Thompson Peterson, and Counselor-O-Matic are helping students put together a list of potential colleges to consider. The site Counselor-O-Matic, which is offered by the Princeton Review, asks for academic information such as grades, class rank, SAT scores. However, the site also inquires about the students’ preferences for school size, surrounding environment, tuition fees, and other things of that nature. Sites like Counselor-O-Matic are free to students because they make money off advertising and by selling student information to potential colleges.

The U.S. has over 4,000 colleges and universities, and these sites are very good at narrowing down the choices for students so that they can find information on the schools which best fit their academic and social needs. It is also especially helpful for those students who seek very selective types of institutions. These search engines are also extremely helpful for those students who attend high schools where the ratio of students to counselors is very high.

College counselors, however, are not very enthusiastic about these sites. Most of them feel that while they are a good way to find preliminary information about potential universities, they are not good for actually choosing a final college to attend. This is because these search engines for the most part do not take into account each students particular emotions, campus cultures, and several other factors which can only be obtained through social interaction. For this reason, counselors are encouraging students to find large lists of potential colleges on these sites, and then to meet with them to discuss these colleges further.

Others however feel that these sites are adequate to use to pick out one’s college. And soon, many of these sites will be equipped with criteria that take into account students’ personal interests, emotions, campus lifestyle, and things of that nature. And with these types of changes, it is likely that there will be more and more students turning to the internet to help choose their future college.



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Are Heavy Internet Users Anti-Social?

"The Net Effect of Internet Usage"

A new report, The Statistics Canada study, suggests that internet users may indeed spend less time with friends and family, however it does not indicate that they are anti-social. The study asked people to keep a record for all of their activities over a 24-hour period, and the study distinguished between time spent online for personal use versus time spent for work or education purposes.
It was found that heavy internet users spend less time sleeping and relaxing, and that they tend to be home bodies. They also spend less time doing outdoor activities, going to movies, and doing volunteer work. However, shockingly, the study showed that although heavy internet users tend to stay home often, they are no more inclined to spend time with family than non-users. It actually showed that heavy users actually spend approximately 30 minutes less per day with loved ones than non-users. However, both heavy users and light/non-users said given more free time in a day, their first priority would be to spend more time with loved ones.
Statistics Canada also found that heavy internet users took part in their hobbies in solitude quite often. The study found that internet users spend approximately two hours more a day alone than do non-users. However, when internet users where asked about social groups, they reported having just as large a network as non-users. Although many of these users are alone in a physical sense, they communicate with others through various online methods.
The report suggests that people who spend a lot of time online are not anti-social; they are “differently social.” Heavy internet users also reported feeling more laid back and less stressed than non-users. These heavy internet users were on average 8 years younger than non-users, and 60% were male. Students and the unemployed accounted for a higher proportion of the heavy users than non-users.

Internet Junkie picture found here

First Posting

Hi everyone! My name is Joey Fight and welcome to my blog. I am a senior marketing and management major at the University of Delaware, and I am creating this blog as part of a class assignment for Information Technology Applications in Marketing. The theme of this blog is identifying internet users. I will be commenting on articles that focus on internet enterprises, consumer internet users, and what users are doing online. I hope you all find this blog informative and helpful in understanding more about users of the internet!

My first article was found in the New York Times and is entitled, "Facebook Feature Draws Privacy Concerns". Users of the popular high school and college website, Facebook, have been complaining about the recent changes the site has made to user’s homepages. Facebook, in an effort to save their users’ time perusing their friend’s profiles, began a news feed where each user’s homepage is automatically updated with changes in their friend’s personal profiles. This new feature does not reveal any new information that would otherwise be considered private, however it does inform people of the slightest changes to others profiles. Users are now complaining that information about themselves, which was once only available on their personal profile pages, is now appearing in a wider public setting for all to see. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, maintains that the intention of the news feed was to simply provide users with interesting information about their friends in a much more efficient fashion than before. However, he says that new privacy options are currently in the works and will be incorporated into Facebook for users who would like their information restricted to their profile. These new privacy options will include safeguards which will allow users to hide entire categories from the news feed feature; categories such as which online groups they belong to or classes they are currently taking.