PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast

My guest on today’s show is Bradley Horowitz.

As one of the senior players in yahoo!, Bradley helped manage Yahoo!’s Flickr acquisition and the integration of Flickr into Yahoo!. Bradley also looked after the Yahoo! Toolbar and Desktop Search.

More recently Bradley has shifted roles and he now heads up Technology Development within Yahoo!s Search and Marketplace Group.

Before working for Yahoo!, Bradley was the founder of Virage.

Here are the questions I asked Bradley in the interview and the times at which I asked them:
Who you are and what do you do in Yahoo!? 0:44

What is your take on web 2.0? 2:47

Yahoo’s acquisitions in the last year (Flickr, Del.icio.us, SearchFox, etc.) seem to be all web 2.0 companies - Yahoo! are obviously out to try to dominate this arena… - 5:15

How do you hope to make a profit from this? - 7:02

Yahoo’s biggest competitor or threat? - 8:39

What was Yahoo!s greatest achievement in 2005? 10:38

What do you have planned for 2006? 13:32

Yahoo! Maps and Publisher are incredibly US-Centric any plans to address this? - 14:30

Any plans to index podcasts using something like speech to text? - 17:14

Have you seen what Riya is doing at the moment? - 21:17

Robin left the following questions:
At present you index & search text very well and now the beginnings of good video search are emerging with on-screen ocr, close captions, speech recognition and iconography/iconology, shot/frame/scene boundaries, colour averaging etc…

At the same time, the human interaction with video has been a problem where the result set is hard to browse to see ‘quickly’ to judge if a result is relevant without actually watching the clip. Has Yahoo! anything up its sleeve to address this? - 22:04

At the same time Yahoo! seem to have a lot going on in the Mobile world, with much more expensive cell data rates in Europe than abroad (€26 average for 4MB in Ireland! Source: Sunday Independent), is this going to put a stub on the introduction of Yahoo! Mobile products on this side of the pond? - 24:11

Back to my questions again:

Yahoo! was at the receiving end of some negative publicity last year - In August, Ben Edelman outed Yahoo for funding Spyware developers, and in Sept, Yahoo! was accused by News.com of employing spyware tactics in its new version of its Instant Messenger app, does Yahoo! have a corporate Ethics Officer or a corporate Ethics statement that you follow? - 25:35

More bad PR in Sept when Chinese journalist Shi Tao was jailed for 10 years for posting “sensitive information” after Yahoo! turned over his Yahoo! hosted email account to the Chinese government - is this a case of Yahoo! putting profit before human rights? - 27:44

If this had happened in the US would Yahoo! have fought the government request in the courts? 30:37

Do you have a favourite gadget? - 31:25

Is there any Web 2.0 application you can’t live without? - 32:30

Are you Mac based or PC based? - 33:28

Finally, Do you unplug from technology often , to recharge yourself do you have any non-tech hobbies? - 34:09

Download the interview here (8.4mb mp3).