- Though Yahoo’s fourth quarter revenue and profit beat analyst estimates, its forecast for this quarter was significantly low enough — revenue between $1.02 billion and $1.08 billion versus a consensus of $1.13 billion — to send the Internet giant’s shares down 4% by yesterday afternoon. (Tech Trader Daily)
- Yahoo also laid off about 1%, or likely around 100-150, of its current global staff. “The personnel changes we are making are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo! For revenue growth and margin expansion and to support our strategy to deliver differentiated products and experiences to the marketplace,” read a company statement. “We’ll continue to hire on a global basis to support our key priorities.” The news comes roughly a month after it let some 650-700 employees go. (Business Insider)
- After weeks of speculation and reports, Verizon confirmed it will offer iPhone owners a $30 unlimited data plan, a temporary offer that will eventually give way to AT&T-like tiered pricing with data caps. Meanwhile, the Verizon iPhone hot spot feature will cost $20 a month comes for 2 GB of data, with an additional $20 for every gigabyte over that. (Wall Street Journal and CNet)
- Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said his goal for 2011 will involve building out the social network’s mobile presence. He also discussed the engineering challenges of developing for seven versions of the same product, including Facebook.com, m.facebook.com for feature phones, touch.facebook.com for touch-enabled phones, and the iPhone app. “You end up picking and choosing platforms even though your goal is to reach everyone,” said Taylor. (Inside Facebook)
- Intel chose musician Will.i.am as its new director of creative innovation. The producer and Black Eyed Peas frontman will contribute music and input on smart phone, tablet, and laptop development. (Los Angeles Times)
- Google plans to add more than 6,000 new employees this year alone, bringing the tally to 30,000-plus by 2012. (San Jose Mercury News)
- During a recent appearance, outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt said his “next decade at Google will be better than his previous decade,” suggesting that he’ll be sticking around for a while. He also discusses crowd-sourcing, smartphones and “zero click search.” (Coins2Day)
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- Sequoia Capital, considered by many to be the world’s best venture capital firm, raised $1.3 billion for its latest fund, according to a new regulatory filing. (Coins2Day)
- Amazon announced a new bulk email offering, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), as part of its Amazon Web Services. The cloud-based service is intended for developers and businesses who want to send out large batches of emails but don’t want to build a tool for doing that in-house. (TechCrunch)
- Game developer KingsIsle Entertainment, maker of multiplayer online game Wizard101, announced player traffic had increased 300% year-over-year bringing its registered userbase to 15 million-plus. As a result, the developer also plans to increased its staff by 25 percent this year. (KingsIsle)