Yahoo has postponed its annual meeting from July 3 to "around the end of July," citing a planned proxy fight by Carl Icahn and the need for regulators to review the company's proxy materials. The decision comes as board member Edward Kozel resigned and Yahoo nominated the other nine directors for re-election in the face of Icahn's proxy fight. Icahn has already selected his board members, which include Frank Biondi and Mark Cuban. The Internet media company also disclosed in a regulatory filing that shareholders other than the Icahn planned to nominate candidates to its board. Yahoo said it did …

Larry Page went to Washington yesterday to promote Google's plan to operate a new generation of wireless devices over the so-called white spaces that exist between broadcast television channels. The Google co-founder highlighted the benefits of making white spaces available to low-power wireless devices, saying it would give consumers Web connections with greater range and speed. "If we have 10% better connectivity in the U.S., we get 10% more revenue in the U.S., and those are big numbers for us," Page said, adding: "I think it will make a huge difference to everybody." He worried, however, that the debate's …

Silicon Alley Insider talks with Microsoft about its new Live Search cashback scheme, a strategy that blogger Henry Blodget deemed impressively savvy on the day of its announcement, but one that would ultimately fail. After going over the new plan with the software king, his opinion doesn't change much. Microsoft thinks that search is "klugy", or clunky, awkward, and imminently improvable, and that it's Microsoft's manifest destiny to change it. The company also its assets give it some kind of unique leverage to capitalize on that change, declaring that Microsoft will usher in a new era of search on …

Sources tell Kara Swisher that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is taking a more "realistic" attitude toward the situation facing the company, and that both he and fellow co-founder David Filo understand they have few options and that a transaction needs to happen, soon. Maybe it was the subtle combination of Carl Icahn's proxy battle, the public admonition of several major company investors or the gentle prodding of Yahoo's independent directors-who Swisher said now preside over the company's meetings like "adult supervision"-that are spurring Yang and Filo into action. The most likely outcome, she said: a full sale of Yahoo's …

Can Google maintain its heady growth? The question weighs heavily on the company's stock price, which fell Wednesday following the announcement of Microsoft's Live Search cash back plan. Speaking at the annual Goldman Sachs Internet Conference, Nick Fox, Google's director of business product management defended the company's search growth, stressing "significant opportunities across the board." He pointed to four search revenue drivers: query volume, ads per query, quality, price per lead, and the fact that many queries still don't carry ads. "A small portion of our queries have ads... we see that as a pretty significant opportunity," Fox said, …

As oil prices rise and the economy slumps further, more and more marketers are looking overseas for cheaper, and sometimes smaller, production houses to create their Web ads. One beneficiary of the trend has been San Jose, Costa Rica-based avVenta Worldwide, which does behind-the-scenes production on Web ads. AvVenta's rates are between 20 and 50% lower than what agencies pay for similar work in the U.S. These production houses usually don't come up with the creative ideas, nor do they polish the ad copy or pick which pictures or graphics go where, they simply execute a Web site, digital ad, …

The New York Times wonders how Google, the Web's dominant search player, could dispute that adding Yahoo, the No. 2 player, as a search marketing client would be against antitrust regulations. The proposed partnership would see Yahoo using the search king's sophisticated advertising technology to drum up better returns from a portion of its search results in exchange for giving Google a small cut of advertising revenues. Some analysts estimate that such a partnership would bring Yahoo an additional $1 billion a year in cash. Many of the same analysts also believe the proposed deal invites regulatory scrutiny. "Up to …