At the Insider Summit, Carlo Catajan, product manager at Yahoo, said the company is looking at ways to make emails more "dynamic." For example, if a person wants to rate a movie watched last night on Netflix, he or she can do so within messages and without leaving the Yahoo Mail ecosystem. Gmail has run Netflix tests to propel more functionality in an inbox, and Yahoo is looking at similar options. "We're looking into innovating the email message itself," Catajan said, referring to more options than reading and sending. Catajan said the initiatives are likely to come …

Yahoo Monday confirmed hiring ex-Microsoft exec Blake Irving as chief product officer. He will report directly to CEO Carol Bartz and be responsible for the vision and strategy behind the company’s global consumer and advertiser product portfolio. In a statement, Bartz said Irving, brings “genuine large scale Internet expertise from a mature company known for world-class technology.â€� Joining Yahoo on May 17, Blake is replacing Ari Balogh, the company’s current of products and technology, who will depart in June. Before his most recent stint as a professor at Graziadio School of Business and Management in Malibu, Irving oversaw …

Buick says it will be one of only six companies to advertise on The Wall Street Journal’s application for Apple’s new iPad, which launched April 3. Said Craig Bierley, Buick and GMC’s director of advertising and sales promotions said, in a release, “We believe Wall Street Journal readers will be some of the first to purchase the latest technology from Apple.â€� Buick says the ads, touting the LaCrosse sedan, are placed between each section of the digital paper, “After each article and when swiping past certain pages,â€� per the company. Users can tap the touch screen on the …

At the MediaPost Email Insider Summit, Dan Lewis, senior product manager at Microsoft’s Hotmail, is offering a preview of research the company has done on consumer email behavior. Some findings: -90% of all email is “legitimate spamâ€� -the average person has about 3 inboxes, gets about 200 emails a week – and deletes 30% of those -they say they want to read about 60% -85% of people check their inbox more than once a day The reasons why people use email -- related to commercial email: 1) for online shopping 2) receiving billing statements from utility …

Bruce Biegel, a managing director at Winterberry Group, is giving an opening keynote at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit. An investment banker, he says there have 68 transactions in the email space since 2003. The first phase involved the likes of Experian wanting to establish a foothold, for example, and acquiring CheetahMail in 2004. Large companies wanted to buy into the digital conversation, so to speak. Next, Biegel said, came a “financing phase.â€� That helped Constant Contact go public. That phase is still continuing, by the way, with ExactTarget, raising a massive amount in 2009. ExactTarget “won …

SIS Round Table Recaps Day 2 The round table sessions following day 2 of the Search Insider Summit were just as thought-provoking as the sessions.  Here is the update - eCommerce Advertiser Round Table: Matt Lawson, Director of Marketing, Marin Software led this roundtable and provided the following notes: Themes:

• Social Media Influencing Search: How do you measure it?  How do you manage it?
• Organic social media efforts require investment and there is no formula for the number of posts, tweets, etc that work.
• Keys are to identify experts within the company …

MediaPost's Search Insider Summit closed Saturday with a look at how Ball State University students might re-engineer Google if given the opportunity. Jen Milks and Michelle Prieb, project managers at Ball State University, shared the findings. I'll share them with you this week. The basics include turning search into a personal assistant, recommendations, and personalization. It also means tweaking the query page. They want a relationship with the search engine by combining social and search.

Growing Tea Party organizers tried to make it official: Having a Fox News anchor do some of its heavy lifting-- that is, raising money. But Fox News executives got wind of the operation and put the kibosh on Sean Hannity, cancelling a taping of his show at a Cincinnati-based Tea Party event Thursday – this, according to the Los Angeles times. Event organizers were said to be using tickets to fund future events, with Hannity's Web site also offering up links to purchase tickets. Hannity went back to his New York studio for his Thursday show -- looking …

WSJ's BoomTown blogger Kara Swisher hears Yahoo is making a renewed push for hot social location service Foursquare, with M&A head Andrew Siegel back in New York today meeting with Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley. The company which has already turned down several $100 million + offers so far but Yahoo apparently isn't giving up hope. A Silicon Valley powerhouse wooing a New York-based startup, that's a switch.

Demand Media, a startup that mines online search engine data to generate thousands of videos and web stories a day -- what some call a “content farmâ€� -- has hired Goldman Sachs to explore an IPO, The Financial Times reports. The company could file for an IPO as early as August, the paper says, citing “people familiar with the plans.â€� Founded by former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt, Demand has created a system through which writers and programmers are assigned stories or projects based on a software algorithm, which determines the interest of web visitors and calculates potential revenues from …