TechBiz

By Antoine Gara

For Yahoo (YHOO) investors, what a difference a year makes?

There has been a lot of change, but not when it comes to the floundering tech giant's share price.

At this time last year, co-founder Jerry Yang still held a tight grip on Yahoo's board and its digital content transformation, battling with shareholders to retain the company's Asian assets. Yang has since left Yahoo. Last week, amid the lingering management and board reshuffle, Scott Thompson was ousted as CEO. That, in turn, settled a proxy contest with activist fund Third Point, leading up to Yahoo's sale of a 20% stake in Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba for $7.1 billion on Sunday.

Not to be outdone by chief rival Microsoft's (MSFT) Bing, Google (GOOG) is overhauling its search results to move beyond giving users mere information. The new goal is to give users knowledge, which is to say contextualized, more helpful information, and anticipate their next questions. Dubbed Knowledge Graph, the new feature is designed to help users find answers even more quickly and easily. (Microsoft owns and publishes TechBiz, an MSN Money site.)

Here, a concise guide to Google's radical changes.

By Howard Gold

Facebook's (FB) much-hyped initial public offering started out with lots of hope, but it ended with a thud. The stock barely closed above the offering price of $38 a share -- and only after the underwriters reportedly bought up enough stock to keep it in the plus column.

Why? There were four reasons.

By Eric Markowitz

On Friday, Facebook (FB) raised a record-setting $18 billion in its IPO, placing its value at a staggering $104 billion. Not bad for a start-up founded just eight years ago in a 19-year-old's dorm room. While the company's IPO has helped plenty of its investors get very rich very fast, it has also set the scene for several other companies to go public.

In the last year, there have been several Silicon Valley darlings to go public; Yelp (YELP), Zillow (Z), Pandora (P), and LinkedIn (LNKD), just to name a few. Facebook's IPO will certainly cast a long shadow against the next wave of tech companies waiting to hit the markets. The question, of course, is whether the IPOs will live up to their hype.

Pinterest, the popular social-media site that allows users to "pin" images from the web on a virtual billboard, has secured $100 million in new financing, a deal that values the company at a cool $1.5 billion. While that's well short of Facebook's (FB) $100 billion value, Pinterest's new investors apparently believe that the site, which has never turned a profit, can transform itself into a money-making machine. Revenue often seems like an afterthought in the tech world these days -- just think of Facebook's $1 billion purchase of the business-model-less photo app Instagram. 

Does Pinterest actually have the potential to be a cash cow?