Report: Thompson Out, Media Man Levinsohn In As Yahoo’s Interim CEO

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We’re still confirming the news with Yahoo but AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher is reporting that as of tomorrow, Scott Thompson will be leaving his role as CEO of Yahoo, and getting replaced, on an interim basis, by Ross Levinsohn, currently the global media head. Thompson’s position has been mired in controversy since news broke the other week that he had lied about his qualifications — and that situation seemed to be going from bad to worse as the company failed to act on the news in any significant way — and Thompson remained in control.

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Digital Wallet Battle Heats Up As Visa And MasterCard Enter The Game

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This week, two of the major players in the credit card industry, Visa and MasterCard launched their online digital wallet services. Known as V.me (Visa’s) and PayPass Wallet Services (MasterCard), both are very similar initiatives which see the companies clamoring to become the credit card of choice for digital transactions, the way they fight today to be the credit card for all the other transactions taking place out there in the real world. And, to be clear, a “digital” wallet isn’t necessarily the same as a “mobile wallet,” although a digital wallet service could also be housed in a mobile app interface, as both MasterCard and Visa plan on offering in the near future.

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How big data will change networking

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Boundary CEO Gary Read What if you could know everything about your network? Instead of getting snapshots — albeit very rapid snapshops — you could see the path of every packet and run basic analytics on that stream of data in real time? It’s the difference between watching a Pixar cartoon as opposed to viewing a flip book

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Happy Mother’s Day: Punchbowl Partners With Amazon For Digital Gift Cards

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When party-planning service Punchbowl expanded into digital greeting cards last fall, it emphasized creating a beautiful experience, just as it did with its party invitations. But CEO Matt Douglas says that for some users, a key piece was still missing — you often don’t just want to send a card, but a gift too. That’s where the company’s new integration with Amazon.com comes in

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Connected Moms: Nielsen Says 54% Own Smartphones; 75% Use Facebook; 5M Visit Pinterest Monthly

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Nielsen has been running some research into different demographics and their impact in the digital world, and their latest — quite possibly as a hat-tip to Mother’s Day this weekend — is a look at U.S. moms , a group that you might have assumed would be technical luddites, but actually are holding their own very well, thankyouverymuch. It turns out that mothers are above average smartphone users, big fans of Facebook and Pinterest, and that the concept of a “mommy blogger” is actually a reality.

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British dotcom vet UpMyStreet sold, again, to Zoopla

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British property listings site Zoopla has bought the veteran local information website UpMyStreet, the two companies announced early on Friday — in a deal that appears to mark the end of the road for one of the UK’s oldest web brands. Zoopla, which is itself in the process of undergoing a merger with Daily Mail’s Digital Property Group , said it was a “natural fit” given the existing commercial relationship between it and UpMyStreet — which provides a database of localized information and service listings. Already, visitors to UpMyStreet are being redirected to Zoopla, and it’s not clear how the site will be integrated in.

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Consolidation Hits UK Local Sites: Zoopla Buys UpMyStreet, Folds It Into Its Own Property Pages

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The UK housing market has been on shaky legs for a while now — with tight lending conditions, unemployment and general consumer confidence all playing their part in slowing things down — and that is having the inevitable knock-on to sites built up to serve that sector: today brings news that Zoopla , one of the UK’s bigger property sites, is buying up a smaller competitor / data supplier, UpMyStreet , and folding the latter company’s business into its own. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it looks like the acquisition means curtains for the UpMyStreet brand, one of the oldest local-listings sites in the UK: if you visit that URL now you will see that the site now automatically redirects to Zoopla’s pages, with no sign of UpMyStreet branding to be seen. There is a quick splash, however, that appears on some pages that announces the sale: UpMyStreet had already been a strategic partner of Zoopla’s before the acquisition, providing supplementary information about property locations alongside Zoopla’s core real-estate listings service.  “ Zoopla has had a commercial relationship with UpMyStreet.com for some time and this acquisition is a natural fit for us and allows us to further extend our audience and reach for the benefit of our members,” said Alex Chesterman, founder and CEO of Zoopla, in a statement

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Embattled MP3Tunes cloud locker files for bankruptcy

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San Diego-based digital music locker provider MP3Tunes has filed for bankruptcy protection after a lengthy battle with major label EMI.

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GE And Quirky Team Up To Develop The Milk Jug Of The Future

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For just about a week now, GE and product development network Quirky have been running an interesting contest — they’ve challenged people to come up with ways to improve everyday objects by making them “smarter with software” . Unlike the traditional Quirky production and development process though, the winning concept will be fashioned into an actual working device by the end of the month.

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Meet Silk, the Semantic Web for the rest of us

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Almost since Tim Berners-Lee first came up with the original concept of the web, there’s been a new, improved version on the horizon: the much-promised Semantic Web . This, goes the thinking, is a way to make the online world more useful by categorizing everything on a page with a layer of extra information — data that can tell your browser that one particular series of numbers is a date, say, while another is a price.

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