Yahoo on Thursday said that by year's end, it would offer more than 400 hundred downloadable casual games for free. The games, which will come from such publishers as Anarchy Big Fish Games and Sugar, will have advertising integrated into them. In-game ad network operators Double Fusion and NeoEdge will sell and integrate ads into the expanded Yahoo Games portal. So-called "casual games" are often simple puzzle or card games that are easy and quick to play, and have a short learning curve. Solitaire, Tetris and Bejeweled are classic examples; women between the ages of 35 and 54 tend to …

Yahoo is beginning a public beta test of a customizable search engine for third parties today. Called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), the service allows anyone with an independent Web site to build a search box whose results can be tweaked and displayed in any manner chosen by the customer. Cnet says that at its core, BOSS enables others' search innovation by using Yahoo search as platform to build on. But Yahoo also shares in the profits from the results. As report author Stephen Shankland says, "It's also the most significant example to date of Yahoo Open Strategy, the …

Silicon Alley Insider contributor Lucas Gonze says that ad-supported streaming music services like iMeem and MySpace's soon-to-be-revamped MySpace Music can't possibly survive unless the major record labels, whose content they've licensed, change their pricing demands. Gonze says it's a question of basic economics. The labels are asking for a penny per minute. If the average song lasts 3.5 minutes, and one ad is shown per song at the rate of one penny per stream, you're talking about a CPM of $10. Not only is this unreasonable, Gonze says, it still doesn't take into account other costs. The hefty royalty fees …

The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin, on the prowl at the Allen & Co. media mogul confab in Sun Valley, writes on his DealBook blog that Carl Icahn, the corporate raider who aims to take down the Yahoo board and then sell the company to Microsoft, is prepared to sell for even less than the $33 per share Microsoft offered during negotiations this spring. "He just needs a number that starts with a three," one mogul said of Icahn, who threw down roughly $25 a share for his stake in Yahoo. Well, good luck with that, says Silicon …

Today, the day before the iPhone 3G is released in the U.S., Apple is opening its new online App Store for iPhone software. As The New York Times points out, today is the day when Steve Jobs & co. begin their assault on the next generation of computing: the Web-connected smartphone. The App Store opens with more than 500 downloadable software apps, including games, educational programs, mobile commerce and business productivity tools. And 25% of the first 500 apps will be free; 90% of the commercial apps will sell for $9.99 or less. According to report authors John Markoff and …

Read Write Web takes a long hard look at the financials of the seven biggest Internet stocks (excluding AOL) and 20 mid-tier players and determines that there is no Internet bubble. Using Yahoo Finance data, RWW's Bernard Lunn posts each company's market capitalization, price earnings growth, revenue growth in the last 12 months, cash, and 52-week change in stock price. He finds that the top seven Internet companies-Microsoft, Google, Cisco, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon and Adobe-have an average PEG of 1.4. PEG is widely used as an indicator of a stock's potential value. The lower the PEG, the more undervalued the …