Google recently made a gift of free WiFi to 47 airports across the US. Now Google’s nemesis Yahoo, also wants to be a part of the free Wi-Fi game, so they are offering it up in New York’s Times Square next year.

Yahoo says: “While Yahoo! is the place where your world meets the world online, over 500,000 of you take in Times Square each day and it’s become a central spot for New Yorkers and people around the world. We and our partners at the Times Square Alliance think it’s the perfect place to bring you free Wi-Fi service.”

It seems more than a bit odd to me that many, myself included, consider Yahoo to be down and out despite the fact that it sits comfortably in the second place spot for search. Google may be far above the competition in the search market, but Yahoo is still doing well.

Yahoo has announced what it calls the most significant redesign since the search engine launched nearly a decade ago. The new home page offers users a less cluttered look with less Yahoo services grafted on to muddy the waters.

They are always coming up with more ways to sell us things. Now a new type of billboard is on the way, displaying ads suited to your individual tastes as you by. The odds are pretty good that a fair amount of these ads will be for fast food and gadgets.

You can thank Yahoo Japan, who plans to install billboards with not only cameras, but also facial analysis tech to identify your age and sex. They will also display content like news and weather. I wonder if that facial analysis will tell teens they need Clearasil.

Samsung is turning to an online video partner in the same way LG and Netflix relate in order to begin bringing Internet to select flat panel HDTVs. Yahoo is the choice for Samsung in this venture and televisions from this relationship will be available sometime this year.

The new “Interent@TV – Content Service” from Samsung makes use of Yahoo’s Widget Engine to bring a variety of Internet-related content to the home media room screen. A host of Widgets wil be available, including Flickr, Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather and Yahoo! Finance, USA TODAY, YouTube, eBay and Showtime Networks, among others. Other services will be added over time.

In an attempt to keep in the good graces of the Justice Department, Google and Yahoo are looking into revising the deal for an advertising partnership between the two companies. An anonymous person close to the negotiations has said the revisions are drastically scaled back from the original talks.

The new deal would have an agreement term of just 2 years; much less than the original plan for 10 year. It also would limit the amount that Yahoo could earn from ads placed by Google to just 25 percent, which may help ensure Yahoo stays in the advertising game. Google advertisers would also have the option to opt-out of placing ads on Yahoo at their own discretion.

Since Yahoo and Microsoft broke off acquisition talks over the summer, Yahoo’s stock price has been tanking. Yahoo is working on an advertising deal with Google it hopes will help its stocks. In an effort to woo new users to its Yahoo Mail service, it has introduced a new feature.

The new feature is called Yahoo Calendar and it is a popup feature within Yahoo Mail. The application is built on the Zimbra platform, which is technology Yahoo acquired with the Zimbra purchase last year. Zimbra uses open standards allowing Yahoo Calendar to be compatible with other calendar services online.

This is one of a small fleet of GPS and cameraphone equipped bicycles that Flickr has deployed in select cities around the world. It’s purple, solar powered, pedal powered, GPS powered and it probably needs a little basket with a bow to complete the girl’s bike look. The bikes have handlebar-mounted cameraphones (Nokia N95s, based on the metadata in the Flickr photos) that will snap a shot every 60 seconds while the bike is in motion. Then the photos get uploaded with the geodata, to a special Flickr account.

I have no idea what the purpose is, other then publicity. I suppose they could partner with Nokia etc and start selling these bikes. They are likely to be a nice collectible in a few years, so if you have one keep it safe. And try not to get into too much trouble snapping pics of drug dealers and uploading them.

If your current email notifier isn’t doing a good enough job, you might want to check this one out. It will inform you when you’ve got new mail by lighting up in blue, red or green. You can assign each of the colors a different email client and you’re all set.

It even tells you the capacity of unread emails by audible alerts. And of course it’s shaped like your standard snail mail envelope. The software will work with Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook Express and any POP3 programs. Dream Cheeky does the email authentication for you, so you may want to be extra careful for your privacy.

Microsoft released a statement today that said it was “considering and has raised with Yahoo an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo.” Microsoft would not give details, but word is that sources at both companies agree that it involves Microsoft buying Yahoo’s search business as well as their ad business related to text-based ads. I hope Yahoo puts out soon, cuz I’m getting sick of hearing about it.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer issued a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang over the weekend stating that the company withdrawing its offer to Yahoo. Microsoft had raised its bid to well over the $33 per share, upping it by nearly $5 billion which was still not enough to sway Yahoo board members.

“Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” said Ballmer in the letter.

Flickr announced on Tuesday that it is has added video sharing to its popular photo-sharing online community. The new video sharing feature allows any pro members of the Flickr community to upload and share video clips with others using the same scope restrictions currently available for photo sharing.

The video clips can be taken with just about any device and can be up to 90 seconds in length or have a maximum size of 150MB. Even though only pro members can upload the video, all visitors will be able to view them depending on the share level given to the video. Flicker currently has about 42 million monthly visitors to the popular photo sharing site and hosts around 2 billion photos from around the world. Adding video content is a logical next step in further growing the sites popularity and may entice many people to upload videos with some sharing restrictions which might not have done with sites like YouTube where they are almost instantly public. The site will also have the ability to tag and geotag the videos and the ability to upload straight from a camera phone.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang on Monday shot back a letter in response to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s 3-week ultimatum for Yahoo to come to negotiations with a firm message that Yahoo has not changed their tune in regards to Microsoft taking over the search engine. Ballmer’s letter had spelled out plans for a proxy contest to unseat the exist Yahoo board of directors and that continued delays could reduce the $44.6 billion offer which would mean less for shareholders.

“Our board’s view of your proposal has not changed,” said Yang along with Chairman Roy Bostock. “We continue to believe that your proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo and our shareholders.”

Instead of going through the negotiations Yahoo has chosen to beat their exclamation points into swords and fight back against Microsoft. Yang continued in the letter stating that the offer and proxy contest would not be in the best interest of Yahoo and certainly not part of a friendly transaction as Microsoft first proposed.

Microsoft issued another letter to the Yahoo board of directors on Saturday with a deadline of 3 weeks for the company to accept the previous $44.6 billion takeover offer that Microsoft proposed in the beginning of February. Despite some recent talks between the two companies, an agreement has not been made and Microsoft is starting to lean heavy on the search engine firm’s board by threatening to go straight to the shareholders if necessary.

“If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board,” the letter read. “The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.”, stated Steve Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo.

Yahoo is bringing to the mobile space a product it feels will make it more convenient to manage your social communications in one place. This product is called Yahoo oneConnect and the company expects it will be available in the second quarter of the year.

Yahoo oneConnect is built around an open architecture which brings together email, instant messaging (IM), text messaging (SMS), and social networks into one central, mobile location. A centrally managed “socially-connected” address book will let one view status updates, photo uploads and the recent activity of contacts across various social networks. This same open design will let one talk across a range of popular online services.

And the show down continues…Yahoo rejects Microsoft’s take over bid, Microsoft looks like it will go forward with it anyhow:

“It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies. Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties.

We are offering shareholders superior value and the opportunity to participate in the upside of the combined company. The combination also offers an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.