With the $10 million-a-year revenue of Pluck.com, many companies have been trying to purchase the operation. The revenue generation of Pluck is generating demand for its purchase. In this regard, Demand Media succeeded in acquiring Pluck after more than two months of talking and negotiating. Pluck was purchased for more than $50 million. In fact, according to an inside source reported by mashable.com, the price was 75 million dollars in cold cash. Pluck is able to generate $10 million annually after its efforts in 2004 in raising $10 million in securing funding.

Although Pluck had a good start, it was not able to live up to the strong expectations of users and web observers alike. Because of this, investors were not very happy with its performance. An example would be the RSS reader they launched early. Due perhaps to poor subscription, such service was halted. After the failed RSS reader, they also launched Shadows, a social bookmarking site similar to Del.icio.us. Like their first website product offering, however, Shadows was not pursued. They made a comeback nonetheless by offering several products catering to online social networking and publishing blog content to big websites. Among their high profile customers is USAToday.

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Wundrbar manages to introduce a lot of innovations in the standard search bar of Google. Not only that, these innovations also impact the way that we do set our homepages. With the wundrbar search bar, it will prefix your keyword search with different commands depending on the kinds of results that you expect. You can also specify the website where you want to look for the information you are looking for. You might be looking for an article about the “Spanish Civil War”, you can type in “wikipedia Spanish civil war” in order to get the Wikipedia article for the Spanish civil war.

Another good thing with Wundrbar is that even if you type in keyword combinations that might not make sense, it will try to sort through these keywords and will ask you about possible things that you are looking for. When you choose among the options it gives you, you will be taken to another site that can help you with what you are looking for.

Personal accounts can also be searched through Wundrbar. Currently, Twitter and Google Calendar are the only ones being supported. Since the site is still in the Beta stage, we might see a number of improvements in the next few weeks and perhaps Wundrbar can became a good homepage and search bar, too.

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In its effort to further boost its operations and improve the reception of users to Facebook, the company hired Sheryl Sandberg as COO. Sandberg used to be the Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations of Google. She will be out of Google by mid-March and will start at Facebook by March 24.

Facebook hired Sandberg because of her extensive experience at Google in promoting its services and getting people signing up for them. For over six years, Sandberg’s hand worked hard behind the online sales channels of Google, especially for AdSense and AdWords. It is also worth noting that Sandberg has had a very colorful career—both in the public and private sectors. Amazingly, she used to work for President Bill Clinton as the Chief of Staff of the office of the Treasury Secretary.

With the expertise of Sandberg and the growing customer base of Facebook, she is expected to help the site derive profits from the customer base. Her work will include the management of sales, business development, human resources, communications, and privacy. She will report directly to Mark Zuckerberg, the young CEO of the company. This is good news for Facebook since it is expected to rake in profits after Sandberg implements her strategies. Google has been losing many employees to Facebook since last year.

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Microsoft Office Live Workspace is now in beta phase. If you access http://workspace.officelive.com, you will be able to edit Office documents and share them with the members of your team or with your friends. There is even a feature that allows you to synchronize the edited versions of the file being shared. This platform is hosted by Sharepoint and is Microsoft’s answer to Google docs and other web-based office applications.

Through MS Office Live, you can type your documents in a web-based word processor. Although it is inferior to the offline version of MS Word, it is pretty decent and allows you to write your documents neatly. This works best with Windows but not so much with Macs.

According to Microsoft, hundreds of thousands did sign up at the site to try this new offering. MS Office Live also offers several enhancements including activity panel, which shows the activities that you are doing in the workforce. Through the Notifications feature, you can be notified if changes have been made to your document or workspace. You can also copy direct links and allow bookmarking. The process of sharing has been improved and email addresses can be completed with lots of ease.

With the increasing popularity of web-based workspaces, are we seeing the end of offline workspaces? This remains to be seen as more and more of these applications are offered in the future.

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The California based search engine giant, Google is moving its European operations from the UK to Zurich. Google’s move to Switzerland makes for the third company to do so. EA and Cisco Systems have also relocated their European operations to the country as well. Some media sources claim that the move is partly due to special tax breaks the company will receive in Switzerland, even though it was reported in 2004 that the company was moving its European operations to the Swiss location. The new location is colorful and designed to enhance the creativity of its employees.

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Granny and Grandpa told us to save money so that we can get some money when we need it so badly. Keeping a savings account isn’t a bad idea. After all, you might want to buy a better laptop or any gizmo or perhaps you’re getting married soon and you need to start saving.

Do you remember the old piggy bank you used to have when you were a kid? Well, there might not be a lot of them left. The reason is that your piggy has become smart and decided to move from your closet into the internet. If you find it difficult to save, then go to SmartyPig.com and you’ll receive help in doing so. SmartyPig is a Web 2.0 bank that allows you to save money for whatever you want. You can set SmartyPig to deduct from your bank account the amount you specify.

If you are using Facebook, you can even get a widget to put there. If you are worried about hackers and how they can get access to your hard-earned money, then be assured that SmartyPig is insured by the FDIC and it is secure. With SmartyPig, you can keep to your savings goals and other people can also help you track your progress in saving your money.

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Around a thousand Yahoo US employees were removed from the roll of the company. Yahoo  downsized its operations in the United States. Yahoo plans on transfering many its operations to India. Offshoring is at it again. India teems with a horde of software developers and programmers and Yahoo appears to be poised to take advantage of this.

The company is in the process of setting up a new lab in Bangalore. This lab is meant to extend the research and development efforts of Yahoo. With the cut throat competition in web applications, Yahoo wishes to generate excellent applications and technologies in its drive to make the Internet simpler for end-users as well as for people and companies that advertise.

Washington Post reported that this lab in India will be run under the leadership of the previous head of Bell Labs India, Rajeev Rastogi. In addition to this, the lab in India will not only hire software engineers and app developers. It will also secure the services of social scientists and economists so that they can better analyze the emerging trends in the Web. Such findings will then be integrated with the applications they will develop. The number of employees to be hired in Yahoo India is expected to exceed 500.

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