Under Carol Baratz, the internet major plans to divest non-core assets to focus on its core advertising business.

New York City-based Monster Worldwide with 2008 revenues of $1.3 billion, holds around one-third of online jobs postings market share in the US and is the second largest online employment website in the US and Canada after rival Careerbuilder.com.

Both companies have also entered into a three-year commercial agreement, in which Monster will provide career and job content for Yahoo’s homepage in the US and Canada.

Monster will pay Yahoo a performance-based annual payments calculated by clicks and expressions of interest, subject to annual floors and ceilings. Following the closing of the transaction, Monster can negotiate similar traffic agreements with Yahoo’s global sites including countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, subject to certain limitations.

After being hired last year to head Yahoo, Bartz had undertaken a review of the struggling search engine company’s product portfolio and sold its Zimbra email business to VMware,  with HotJobs widely speculated to be next on the divestiture list.

But with corporate hiring in the US having virtually ground to a halt due to the global recession, the internet giant found no takers for the website.
Now with the economy poised to recover, Monster decided to acquire HotJobs now, lest a rival put in a bid.

For Yahoo the sale is a loss of $221 million, which it had acquired in 2002 for $436 million after beating a rival bid.

The acquisition will catapult Monster to the top spot in the online jobs-listings business. According to research group ComScore, Monster is in the second spot with 16.5 million users as of December, while HotJobs is placed third with 11.1 million users and CareerBuilder ranked first, with 16.6 million unique visitors.

Monster believes that the acquisition of HotJobs and the traffic agreement with Yahoo! will provide a number of benefits to jobseekers and employers by being able to offer employers a significantly larger pool of prospective candidates across diverse regions and industries.

“HotJobs with its significant customer base plus the traffic agreement are an ideal complement to Monster’s innovative recruitment solutions and global reach,” said Sal Iannuzzi, chairman, chief executive officer and president of Monster Worldwide. “These agreements, combined with Monster’s career Communities and our recently introduced 6Sense(TM) semantic search technology, will bring substantial new benefits for employers seeking more qualified candidates and job seekers searching for more relevant opportunities across a wider range of industries – globally.”

“Bringing together Monster and HotJobs creates even greater access and opportunities for both recruiters and job seekers,” said Hilary Schneider, EVP, Yahoo.

“The transaction with Monster enables us to continue to provide an important service to our users through the traffic agreement. Yahoo! remains focused on its core businesses and delivering exceptional experiences to users, partners and advertisers,” he added.

Yahoo! will continue to manage its broader Newspaper Consortium (NPC) partnership, including providing both search and display advertising, content distribution, and its ad-serving platform, to newspapers in its NPC.

Speaking at a regular news conference here a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said that ”wrongful accusations and pressure will not help solve this issue.”

He was responding to remarks made by president Obama in Washington on Wednesday at a meeting with Democratic senators.

The United States, Obama said, has ”to make sure our goods are not artificially inflated in price and their goods are not artificially deflated in price; that puts us at a huge competitive disadvantage.”

Economists are broadly agreed that the Chinese currency, the renminbi (RMB, also known as the yuan), is undervalued between 25-40 per cent against the dollar and other currencies. Under constant pressure from the preceding Bush administration the Chinese government decided to do away with the yuan’s peg to the dollar and allow the currency to float in a narrow band against the dollar and other currencies in July 2005.

The effect was immediate with the renminbi appreciating 21 per cent.

Software exports from the country are expected to rise to over $56-57 billion in the financial year 2010-11, from  $49.71 billion in 2009-10 and $47.16 billion in 2008-09, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) said in a release.

The Indian IT industry has emerged stronger from the global economic meltdown to post encouraging results and the domestic market for the IT industry is expected to witness 12 per cent growth in FY09-10, to reach Rs66,200 crore, according to NASSCOM.

For the financial year 2010-11, NASSCOM expects India’s software and services exports revenues to grow 13-15 per cent and domestic revenues to grow by 15-17 per cent.

The government’s IT spend is projected at Rs15,000 crore in 2009 and is expected to reach Rs25,000 crore by 2011. NASSCOM also projected a $9 billion business opportunity in e-governance in the country.

The IT industry in India will continue to be a net hirer and the direct employment is expected to grow 4.0 per cent and cross 2.3 million with over 90,000 jobs added in FY09-10, according to NASSCOM.

The Australian Federal Court in Sydney has ruled that iiNet could not be held responsible for unauthorised downloads of movies using its service.

The copyright case was filed jointly by a group of Hollywood studio majors, including Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox and Disney.

Hollywood studios argued that the Perth-based iiNet network, Australia’s third-largest ISP, had allowed “illegal” downloads of nearly 90 films and TV serials, including `Batman Begins’, `Transformers’ and `Heroes’, since June 2008.

The Hollywood group said that iiNet not only failed to take steps to stop illegal file-sharing by customers, but also breached copyright by providing data through its system.

“While I find that iiNet had knowledge of infringements occurring, and did not act to stop them, such findings do not necessitate a finding of authorisation,” federal judge Dennis Cowdroy said in his judgment.suit in Australia news

Open innovation—bringing ideas and solutions into your company from your partners, suppliers and customers, or tapping the “wisdom of crowds” through innovation markets – has gained favor as a way of creating value. Why? Because this new approach is delivering measurable results for its practitioners at a fraction of the cost of their old, proprietary methods. For example, a recent study conducted by Forrester Research with a $14B producer of consumer goods found that their use of the open innovation marketplace of InnoCentive produced an average of 74% return on investment with a payback period of three months. But despite the high-profile models heralded in the business press, very few companies understand what open innovation could—or should—look like for them.

The reality is that open innovation is hard. Even the best innovators may not be great open innovators, because it takes different skills and the ability to overcome different challenges. But the quest for open innovation does not have to feel daunting or to consist of random, one-off attempts to imitate the leaders in the field. What companies need is discipline: discipline to diagnose where in their businesses they can create the most economic value with open innovation; discipline to customize the variety of approaches to open innovation for their own use; discipline to design and execute the right types of experiments; and discipline to embed new capabilities, tools, and processes inside their organizations.

Those who get it right will reap the rewards.

Open innovation can help businesses more reliably discover new ideas and increase their speed to market. It can reduce risk in opportunity development and help shift from a fixed to a variable cost structure. And it can create tremendous benefits to reputation and brand by keeping companies on the cutting edge. It’s increasingly clear that open innovation is no longer an option. Businesses that don’t harness its power risk being left behind.

Google India has announced the launch of landmarks in driving directions for users of Google Maps. Users can now navigate around locations using Google Maps on their desktops and mobile phones using landmarks like petrol stations, banks, schools, railway stations, bus stops, local businesses, and traffic circles and signals. India is the first country globally to get this feature on Google Maps.

Indians are more comfortable finding way on the streets using landmarks. Typically many roads in India are not marked with road signs and even if they are, the signs are not visible. In some cases people do not even know the road names. Many times, people give directions to destinations using landmarks such as a petrol pump or a bus stop or a grocery shop! Google now enables this activity online to share with friends and family.

In India, Google has collected good landmark data through user-created “Points of Interest” in Google Map Maker. Google’s new algorithm determines which of these landmarks are most useful for navigation, based on importance, and closeness to the turns that the user is making and other available signals. With this launch, Google will now combine landmark data, counted turns (“the second right”), intersection names, and road names, and try to use whatever information is most relevant and useful.

Google is providing two kinds of landmarks – to identify where users need to turn, and to provide confirmation that they’re on the right track. Users can also make directions even better for millions of users in India by enriching landmarks data via Google Map Maker.

India’s newest mobile operator S Tel yesterday launched its services in the hilly state of Himachal Pradesh, and said it will spread its operations in the next few months to six category C circles of the country.

”After Himachal, we are soon entering Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Jammu & Kashmir, Assam and the North-east. With the number of mobile users to double by 2015, this is where the next wave of growth lies. Coming late, our advantage is advanced technology,” S Tel director P Swaminathan said while launching the service in Simla.

Executive officer Shamik Das added, ”The six growth circles with a population of 226 million people provide us a chance to deliver a tailored, relevant value proposition.”

Asked how many players among the 14 or more in the country will survive the highly competitive mobile market with tariffs still falling, Swaminathan said, ”I think barely eight players will survive in the long run.”

”The vision of S Tel is to be among one of the five top players by 2015,” he said.

Swaminathan said the company was looking at the bottom of the society as a target segment and had plans to span 50 cities and towns and 7,000 villages across Himachal Pradesh in just one month.

Rajesh Kamat, CEO of the year and a half old television channel Colors, last night became the Impact Person of the Year 2009 at a well-attended industry bash in Mumbai, hosted by exchange4media.

The 12 nominees for the impact Person of the Year 2009 were: Sam Balsara of Madison World, Subhash Chandra founder of  Zee Group, Haresh Chawla of Network 18, Arnab Goswami of Times Now, Samir and Vineet Jain from the current promoters of Bennett Coleman &Co, Rajesh Kamat of Colors, Kalanidhi Maran founder of of Sun Network, Harit Nagpal of Vodafone, Vikram Sakhuja of Group M, Ronnie Screwvala promoter of UTV Network, Uday Shankar of Star India and Rajiv Verma from HT Media.

Aaccomplished musician and sitar mastro Pt Ravi Shankar’s daughter, Anoushka Shankar,  who hersl f has won musical awards including the pretigious British House of Commons Shield in 1998, was chief guest at the event.

The impact Person of the Year Award was established in 2005, with its first recipient being Peter Mukerjea, who was then with Star India, followed by Rajdeep Sardesai in 2006, Vijay Mallya in in 2007 and Lalit Modi and Raghav Bahl in 2009 under th editorial choice category.

In July Colors completed one year on Indian television

Camera Plus Pro aims at making the iPhone the default camera for any occasion with its capturing, editing, sharing and managing options.
With features such as point zoom, timed capture, burst mode, filters, anti-shake, flash, crop and more, Camera Plus Pro provides the user with flexibility for capturing pictures and editing them.

“We set the bar pretty high when we released Camera Plus in October. With Camera Plus hitting close to 2 million downloads within a short span of time, we were inundated with fan mails and feature requests that got us working on a Pro version”, said Mr. Rohith Bhat, CEO of Global Delight. “Now with this new release of Camera Plus Pro, we have once again set the bar pretty high”, he added.

With the Point Zoom feature, users can zoom to a particular point on their screen with precision. Camera Plus Pro’s Timed Capture function enables the users to set a countdown timer for up to 10 seconds, enabling them to be a part of the pictures as well. Burst mode function captures multiple photos continuously with a choice of 3 to 8 shots at a time, with only a second’s difference between each shot.

Camera Plus Pro also provides a choice of 7 Filters; thus users can add that special touch to their captures. One can also get rid of blurry pictures with the Anti-Shake feature. Users can apply up to 3 varying degrees of Flash, which can also be selectively undone. Square and Circular Crop features enable the user to retain a portion of the capture that they want.

“The next important step on the way towards the integrated automotive group with Porsche has therefore been completed, as announced, before the end of the year,” Volkswagen said in a press release.

The €3.9 billion price is based on the enterprise value for Porsche AG calculated under a careful due diligence and valuation procedure, it said.

“The acquisition of the trading business of Porsche Holding Salzburg is planned for 2011. The creation of the integrated automotive group is then to conclude with the merger of Volkswagen AG and Porsche SE during the course of the same year,” it added.

Volkswagen had convened an extraordinary general meeting of its shareholders last week for the implementation of a comprehensive agreement signed in August and subsequent agreements signed in November.

“The combination of the two companies follows a compelling strategic, industrial and financial logic. For the Volkswagen Group, Porsche ideally complements the brand portfolio. The Stuttgart-based carmaker will allow Volkswagen to further expand its position in the premium business, which offers particularly strong earnings. In turn, as an independent brand under the roof of the Volkswagen Group, Porsche will have the potential for significant additional growth,” the release said.

The transaction will have a sustained positive effect on the Volkswagen Group’s earnings. With a return on sales of 10.3 per cent, Porsche AG is the world’s most profitable automobile manufacturer. Besides, the planned integration of Porsche in the Volkswagen Group and the associated closer cooperation will help realise significant synergies on both the income and the cost side. Volkswagen Group expects its annual operating profit to increase by some €700 million in the long term.