Tech Industry Coalition Issues Statement Calling For Full Federal LGBT Rights

In response to the ongoing RFRA battles, a coalition of over 100 major tech industry corporations has issued a joint statement calling for full federal LGBT anti-discrimination protections.

The values of diversity, fairness and equality are central to our industry. These values fuel creativity and inspiration, and those in turn make the U.S. technology sector the most admired in the world today. We believe it is critically important to speak out about proposed bills and existing laws that would put the rights of minorities at risk. The transparent and open economy of the future depends on it, and the values of this great nation are at stake.

Religious freedom, inclusion, and diversity can co-exist and everyone including LGBT people and people of faith should be protected under their states’ civil rights laws. No person should have to fear losing their job or be denied service or housing because of who they are or whom they love. However, right now those values are being called into question in states across the country. In more than twenty states, legislatures are considering legislation that could empower individuals or businesses to discriminate against LGBT people by denying them service if it they felt it violated their religious beliefs.

To ensure no one faces discrimination and ensure everyone preserves their right to live out their faith, we call on all legislatures to add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes to their civil rights laws and to explicitly forbid discrimination or denial of services to anyone. Anything less will only serve to place barriers between people, create hurdles to creativity and inclusion, and smother the kind of open and transparent society that is necessary to create the jobs of the future. Discrimination is bad for business and that’s why we've taken the time to join this joint statement.

Signees include Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin, Yahoo, Netflix, Intuit, Uber, Salesforce, Cisco Systems, and PayPal. Hit the link for the full list.

Jason Collins Signs With Yahoo Sports

Outsports has the announcement from Yahoo:

At Yahoo Sports, we're always look to guide our readers to the best, most relevant, original content we can. And today I'm happy to welcome the latest addition to our lineup, former NBA player Jason Collins. Jason will provide original video programming for the Yahoo Sports studio including basketball analysis for both the upcoming men's NCAA basketball tournament and the NBA. Jason played 13 seasons in the NBA. During his career, he competed at center and power forward for six franchises: the Brooklyn Nets and New Jersey Nets, Washington Wizards, Boston Celtics, Atlanta Hawks, Minnesota Timberwolves and Memphis Grizzlies. Jason was an All-American at Stanford University and played in the Final Four his freshman year. Jason will debut on Yahoo Sports "Tourney Bracket Live" show on March 15 at 7:30pm ET.

Nate Silver Compiles Prop 8 Donations By Staffers At Major Silicon Valley Companies

Using a Los Angeles Times database of donations to the 2008 Proposition 8 campaign, stats guru Nate Silver has compiled a list of how the staffers of major Silicon Valley tech companies weighed in with their wallets.

The list includes Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Cisco Systems, Apple, Google, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Oracle, Yahoo, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Symantec. I limited the search to donors who listed California as their location. In total between these 11 companies, 83 percent of employee donations were in opposition to Proposition 8. So Eich was in a 17 percent minority relative to the top companies in Silicon Valley. However, there was quite a bit of variation from business to business. At Intel, 60 percent of employee donations were in support of Proposition 8. By contrast, at Apple, 94 percent of employee donations were made in opposition to Proposition 8. The opposition was even higher at Google, where 96 percent of employee donations were against it, including $100,000 from co-founder Sergey Brin. There isn’t much data on Mozilla. Only four Proposition 8 donors listed it as their employer: Eich, who donated in support of the measure, and three others who opposed it.

Silver notes that his result does not include those who chose to donate to either side of the campaign without disclosing the name of their employers. About 12% of those in the database did not.

How To Out-Onion The Onion

JMG reader Cemre Gungor created the above for his Facebook page.

Yahoo Buys Tumblr

The New York Times reports:

The board of Yahoo, the faded Web pioneer, agreed on Sunday to buy the popular blogging service Tumblr for about $1.1 billion in cash, the companies announced Monday, a signal of how the company plans to reposition itself as the technology industry makes a headlong rush into social media. The deal would be the largest acquisition of a social networking company in years, surpassing Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram last year.

Tumblr reportedly hosts about 100 million blogs. Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005. Today's deal will earn 26 year-old Tumblr founder David Karp an estimated $250M.

Dumbest Poll Ever

Seriously, Yahoo? Source.

Thursday 10pm: ABC News To Host Romney Speech Reaction Webcast

Tomorrow night after the conclusion of Mitt Romney's RNC acceptance speech, I'll be participating in a live webcast sponsored by ABC News Digital. The moderator will be former GLAAD executive director Joan Garry. The discussion will be hosted on Google+ and live-streamed on YouTube and Yahoo. I'm not yet familiar with the other panelists and haven't looked at how Google Hangout works, so I'll fill you folks in on those details tomorrow. Things won't begin until Romney is finished, so the posted start time is speculative.

Top Google Exec Named Yahoo CEO

Yahoo went fishing in the executive offices of rival Google for their new CEO.

The appointment of Marissa Mayer, who was employee No. 20 at Google and was one of the few public faces of the company, is considered a surprising coup for Yahoo, which has struggled in recent years to attract top flight talent in its battle with competitors like Google and Facebook. Ms. Mayer, 37, had for years been responsible for the look and feel of Google’s most popular products: the famously unadorned white search homepage, Gmail, Google News and Google Images. More recently, Ms. Mayer, an engineer by training whose first job at Google included computer programming, was put in charge of the company’s location and local services, including Google Maps, overseeing more than 1,000 product managers. She also sat on Google’s operating committee, part of a small circle of senior executives who had the ear of Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Mayer's predecessor at Yahoo resigned in May after only four months on the job when it was revealed that he'd lied about his academic credentials. Yahoo has had seven CEOs in the last dozen years.

Your Unique Value

It looks like you're worth about $18/month to Google. Or is per year? Confusing. I'm also not sure where the Twitter revenue even comes from.

(Via - Business Insider)

Search Engine "Death Penalty" For Sen. Kay Hutchinson (R-TX)

Sen. Kay Hutchinson (R-TX) is running for Texas governor against incumbent Rick Perry and her campaign staff thought it was a good idea to embed thousands of invisible search term meta-tags on her campaign site, including "rick perry gay." Oh, hilarious! The folks at Google and Yahoo didn't like that so much and have given Hutchinson the "death penalty," completely removing her site from their search results. Hutchinson's staff is blaming a vendor.

Hutchison's campaign initially told the Austin American-Statesman that "a vendor sold them on a tool that generates the phrases hourly or less in an attempt to divine the most frequent Web searches made by individuals who search online using one or all of the terms 'Rick Perry,' 'Kay Bailey Hutchison' and 'Texas'"--and plenty of people search for "rick perry gay." The tool was allegedly used to help make banner ad buying decision, said the campaign, a claim that makes little sense on its face. Why would such a list be inserted in the website's source code unless the goal was to draw search traffic to the site?

"Kate Hutchinson asshat." "Kate Hutchinson bukkake." "Kate Hutchinson sex tape." Whee!

(Tipped by JMG reader Atomische)

Yahoo Pulls Plug On GeoCities

Remember ten years ago when Yahoo! paid $4.6 billion for GeoCities?

A posting on a Yahoo help page for GeoCities on Thursday said the service was no longer accepting new customers and that it will be closing later this year, with more details about how individuals can save their data coming this summer. The move comes a few days after Yahoo said it would lay off nearly 700 workers, or 5 percent of its workforce.

I'm just surprised to learn people still have GeoCities sites.

Microsoft Bids For Yahoo

Microsoft has made a $44B bid for Yahoo!, which has been struggling of late and is set to lay off over 1000 employees.

Microsoft said the booming online advertising market "is increasingly dominated by one player" -- a reference to Google -- and suggested that with Yahoo under its wing it could better compete in the bonanza.

Online advertising sales will double from 40 billion dollars in 2007 "to nearly 80 billion in 2010," it forecast. Yahoo would offer Microsoft a search engine to compete with Google, a popular web portal for email, shopping and news, as well as one of the most recognized brands among online users. Microsoft said a combination of the companies would lead to cost savings of 1.0 billion dollars per year.

Garsh, I hope this helps Microsoft finally make some money. Seriously though, just about anything that further pushes the wealth of Bill Gates, the single greatest philanthropist in the history of mankind, is more than fine by me.

Microhoo?

Microsoft and Yahoo! are in merger talks, with Microsoft reportedly prepared to offer $50 billion for Yahoo, in a move seen as a challenge to Google's dominance of internet advertising. Last month Google further entrenched at the pole position when it purchased branded placement experts DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. A merged Microsoft/Yahoo would still trail Google in search market share, who currently gets over 48% of all search requests.

MSN-Yahoo? Microhoo? Bah.