Like many publishers seeking additional revenue streams, the online division of The New York Times is launching a Groupon-like daily deal service. TimesLimited will go out via email to subscribers looking for offers on high-end goods and services from The Times' advertising partners. "The focus on the high-end market closely aligns the service to Gilt City, Gilt Groupe's luxury-focused daily deals platform," Mashable notes. "It's our take on the group buying space, with a focus on premium products and experiences offered for a limited time and in limited quantities," a spokesperson for The Times tells Mashable. "These will …

In an effort to focus on other regions, Yahoo is in "advanced" talks to leave its Japanese joint venture, Reuters is reporting. Sources say a deal to transfer Yahoo's 35% stake in Yahoo Japan to Softbank Corp -- which already controls 42% of the unit -- could come within weeks. If and when the deal goes through, sources suggest that Yahoo will hone in on China, where it owns about 40% of prominent Internet company, Alibaba Group, the parent company of Alibaba.com. Yahoo's plans for China, however, remain unclear. What is known is the rocky relationship between Yahoo, …

While unwilling to discuss the fate of specific sites, Google Fellow Amit Singhal admits that a few might have had their search rankings unfairly devalued after last week's algorithm change. "Any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm -- and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate -- we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent," Singhal tells Wired.com. "That's exactly what we are …

In direct response to Google adjusting its search algorithm to suppress content farms, Mahalo has reportedly cut its staff by 10%. In less than a week, "The Google changes have led to a significant dip in our traffic and revenue," Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis and president Jason Rapp told staffers in an email obtained by ContentNetworks.com. "It's hard not to be disappointed, since we've been spending millions of dollars on producing highly professional content." Mahalo's heads are also re-evaluating their freelance content production, "pausing it in the near term and determining how to best produce the high-quality educational …

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of local review giant Yelp, claims that Google has given him an ultimatum: Either let the search giant continue including Yelp's excerpted reviews on Google Places pages, or remove Yelp all together from Google's index. "Google's position is that we can take ourselves out of its search index if we don't want them to use our reviews on Places," Stoppelman tells The Telegraph. "But that is not an option for us ... as we get a large volume of our traffic via Google search." "Poor, poor Yelp," jokes ReadWriteWeb regarding Stoppelman's lament. "What …

Not since the mid-'90s has there been so much investor excitement over digital music services, The New York Times reports. Web radio service Pandora just filed for an IPO to raise $100 million, while Europe's Spotify is reportedly in the process of raising $100 in private equity. "And those are just the big fish," The Times notes. "Since the end of last year, at least $57 million in venture capital has gone to digital music start-ups, ending a recent financing drought and setting up an array of young companies." What's driving interest in such a tricky industry where …

The Obama administration is reportedly pressuring The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to give foreign nations more say over the Web's operations. The California nonprofit, which, as The Washington Post puts it, "operates the Internet's levers," has long faced pressure from world powers to put the United Nations in charge of the Web. Commerce Department officials, according to WaPo, "prefer a nimble private-sector organization to run the Web's addressing system, but the government doesn't believe ICANN is listening enough to the international community." As a result, Commerce "worries that other countries might soon lobby en masse …

In the hopes of reinvigorating its brand and various product offerings, Yahoo spent a $159 million on investments and acquisitions in 2010, reports paidContent, citing a new 10-K filing. "The company does not say how that total was allocated, but it had said in a previous SEC filing that it had spent $114 million to purchase three companies during the first nine months of the year," according to paidContent. "Its only buy set to close during the fourth quarter was its acquisition of ad startup Dapper, which suggests it spent $45 million to buy that company." Yahoo also …

Streaming video service Boxee just closed a new round of funding worth $16.5 million. Pitango and Softbank led the round, along with existing investors General Catalyst, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures. Boxee has now raised a total of $26.5 million in funding. In 2009, VentureBeat's Anthony Ha says he "wondered if Boxee was a little ahead of its time, and if the demand for Web content on TVs just wasn't there yet." Boxee founder and CEO Avner Ronen told him that a generation gap was developing, with younger viewers seeing the Internet as the center of their …

How are paid TV companies competing with the rise of online video services from Hulu to Netflix? Quite differently, it appears. Despite possessing the most robust platform for delivering video online, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts tells The Wall Street Journal that the company has no plans to extend its services to customers beyond its cable footprint. "Where we can add value ... is taking our existing customers and giving them full access to all content online because they're subscribers," Roberts says. By contrast, satellite operator Dish recently told investors that is was talking to cable networks about acquiring …