British Telecom has purchased the Web telephony platform Ribbit for $105 million. According to Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick, this one is a great fit, because Ribbit can bring click-to-call functionality to any Web application. Significantly, Kirkpatrick says that Ribbit could help move the stuttering telecom giant forward. Ribbit is essentially a platform that lets developers add click-to-call functionality to Web applications. The key is its well-built developer platform. "Even with giant research and development budgets, established companies are increasingly hard pressed to compete with the innovation brought to market by a whole world of developers once those developers are …

Oil baron and billionaire investor, T. Boone Pickens, dug into Yahoo's management for failing to sell all or part of the company to Microsoft Corp. Pickens bought 10 million Yahoo shares in May in the hope that an acquisition was forthcoming -- thanks in part to the proxy charge led by Carl Icahn. However, on Monday he said he got tired of waiting for a deal and sold his entire holding at a $50 million loss. "I think that Yahoo management was pathetic," Pickens told the San Francisco Chronicle. Pickens' comments echo those of some other investors who were …

Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo are joining forces to create an experimental network that lets researchers test "cloud-computing" services projects that would reach billions of users at once. According to Reuters, "the goal is to promote open collaboration among industry, academic and government researchers by removing financial and logistical barriers to working on hugely computer-intensive, Internet-wide projects." In other words, HP, Intel and Yahoo are funding a massive cloud-computing research project, where the goal is to create a level-playing field for conducting that research -- i.e. a platform that doesn't belong to Google, Microsoft or Amazon. As Prabhakar Raghavan, the head …

Madison Avenue is borrowing tactics from Wall Street, as major Web companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google enter the online advertising exchange business. The move reminds The New York Times of the time when technology came to the stock exchange, and started serving up more sophisticated financial instruments. Joe Zawadzki's Mediamath is one such firm that's leveraging ad exchanges to buy and sell ads instantaneously. "Right now it's more the in-the-moment, taking advantage of the spot market with aggressive bid management," Zawadzki said. "But we're certainly thinking about where that goes later in terms of secondary markets, derivatives, options, hedges, …

Somehow, in the midst of the Microhoo mess, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has managed to keep his job, withstanding months of shareholder ire over the botched deal, and even outlasting the scary advances of corporate raider Carl Icahn, who he and the Yahoo board settled with 10 days ago. Nevertheless, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld says that Friday's shareholder meeting will be no cakewalk for Yang, as he may still need to win over the company's largest shareholder, the Capital Group, which owns 16% of the company through two funds: Capital World Investors and Capital Research Global in Investors. Recently, Gordon Crawford, …

Google has long deflected accusations of becoming a "content company", but with last week's launch of Knol, a Wikipedia competitor, Google may not be able to deflect those accusations much longer, says Read Write Web's Bernard Lunn. In a contributing post on Silicon Alley Insider, Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis makes a similar argument, but Lunn points out that Calacanis is especially conflicted about the matter because Knol is a direct competitor to his Mahalo. Calacanis takes the view that Google is the closest thing we have on the Internet to an operating system. Lunn agrees and says that …