In a shock move, Yahoo announced a settlement today that puts billionaire investor Carl Icahn on the company's board, and expands its total number of seats to 11. The two remaining seats will be chosen by the board from a list of nine candidates who were going to run as part of Icahn's slate. Former AOL Chairman and CEO Jonathan Miller is part of that list, and is widely expected to be named one of the three new board members, along with Icahn. Also, as part of the settlement, Yahoo said eight of its current board members would run for …

Microsoft launched Live Search CashBack in June, and after its first full month of operation, comScore shows a 15% gain in search volume for the search giant vs. the previous month. As TechCrunch's Michael Arrington points out, "this erases the previous month's losses, bringing Microsoft up to 9.2% overall search share." Live Search Cashback lets advertisers offer users a direct rebate for purchases made through Microsoft's search engine. The product shifts the advertising model from cost-per-click to cost-per-action, giving a lot of the revenue earned from advertising back to users. As Arrington says, "Live Search Cashback isn't designed to grab …

"Piracy is generally bad for business," The Economist proclaims. "It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellectual property and tarnish its brand...stealing other people's R&D, artistic endeavor or even journalism is still theft." This is a principle that's well worth defending, the paper says, but when it comes to illegal file-sharing, "companies have to deal with the real world" -- a certain amount of piracy is going to continue, so why not use that knowledge to your advantage? According to BigChampagne, a research firm that measures file-sharing, around 20 times as many music tracks …

Google CEO Eric Schmidt continues his big talk about monetizing YouTube with little to show for it in actual dollar terms. Last Thursday, Schmidt acknowledged that patience was the key to finding a way to monetize the online video-sharing site. Once Google does, Schmidt expects "to hit the mother lode," Cnet said. "There will be new monetization forms," Schmidt said during Google's disappointing second quarter earnings call. "That is what we are seeking. That is the holy grail. When we find it, it (monetization) is likely to be very large because of the scope and scale of YouTube." So far, …

Just 15% of online Americans have heard of Hulu, the joint online video venture from NBC and News Corp.'s Fox, says a recent study from Solutions Research Group, but those who have like the service a lot. Hulu users say they most like the ability to search and find both old episodes of TV shows and recent ones they missed. Hulu visitors also like that the service operates as something of a free online digital video recorder. Their biggest complaint: that Hulu only offers the most recent episodes of certain shows. The SRG report also finds that the average age …

"Silicon Valley is in for a long overdue reality check," says GigaOm's Om Malik -- one that could be on the horizon, given the spate of weak(ish) second quarter earnings from major Internet advertising firms. The signs from display ad firms are particularly bad: ValueClick on Thursday lowered its Q2 forecast from $170 million in revenues to between $162-$164 million. It then cut full-year 2008 sales guidance by 10%, citing weakness in display and lead-generation. The news from Time Warner's AOL should be similarly bad, Malik says, as Pali Capital in a blog post forecast "AOL's display advertising revenues down …

Fresh from its poor second quarter earnings report, Google is aiming to boost overseas revenues through the acquisition of Russian contextual ad firm ZAO Begun. TechCrunch reports that the search giant has agreed to pay UK-based Rambler Media $140 million for the firm. Rambler owned a 50.1% stake in Begun, but agreed to by the rest of it in order to sell to Google at a profit. The UK company will net about $50 million from the deal. As part of the deal, Rambler will now use Google AdSense for its search and contextual services. Google is particularly eager …