Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Carol Bartz has a message for investors hoping for a quick fix at the slumping Internet company or for an online search partnership with Microsoft Corp. — don’t expect either to happen any time soon.

The no-nonsense executive hired by Yahoo five months ago got her latest points across Wednesday during an appearance at an investor conference hosted in New York by Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch.

Bartz has been trying to streamline Yahoo’s operations and improve its online advertising system since she came in January to replace co-founder Jerry Yang. While pointing to some progress, Bartz said it probably will take another year or two before Yahoo reaps the gains from her shake-up.

"For everything you can do in three steps, it will take Yahoo 22 steps," Bartz said.

Yahoo has reshuffled management and laid off 700 employees, or about 5 percent of its work force, as part of Bartz’s efforts to reduce bureaucracy and sharpen the company’s technology.

As usual, Bartz was peppered with questions about the on-again, off-again talks that Yahoo has been holding with Microsoft since 2006. Although she didn’t rule out the possibility of turning over Yahoo’s search operations to Microsoft, Bartz left no doubt she believes the company will thrive without Microsoft.

"Yahoo actually has a bright, bright future — possibly clearer and simpler — without the Microsoft connection," Bartz said. When the topic continued to come up, Bartz finally said, "Forget about the Microsoft stuff, it’s honestly not that relevant."

But Bartz clearly has given serious thought to the ramifications of a Microsoft partnership. The rivals have explored various combinations, including Microsoft’s $47.5 billion bid last year to buy Yahoo in its entirety, as they try to gain ground on Google Inc. in the lucrative Internet search market.

If Yahoo were to farm out Internet search to Microsoft, Bartz estimated that the company could save about $500 million to $700 million annually. But she indicated she had reservations about whether Yahoo could entrust such a key piece of technology to Microsoft, which has been losing money in its Internet division for years.

Responding to an investor question, Bartz said it probably makes more sense for Microsoft to sell its Internet operations to Yahoo — a concept that she said has raised with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. But she said such a combination probably would cause antitrust problems, especially in e-mail, where Yahoo and Microsoft run the two largest services.

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s online division and a former Yahoo search executive, declined to comment on the state of talks between the companies during an appearance at an industry conference in Seattle.

Microsoft this week unveiled its latest attempt to attract more online advertising with a revamped search engine called Bing.

Bartz doubts the upgrade will sway the current pecking order in Internet search, with Google holding a 64 percent share of the U.S. market, followed by Yahoo at 20 percent and Microsoft at 8 percent.

"It’s interesting, but not over-the-top interesting," Bartz said of Bing.

Yahoo shares fell 57 cents, or 3.4 percent, to $16.05 in Wednesday’s late afternoon trading.

Online video watching—is it massive or is it overblown? These days, it’s almost a political question. Traditional television distributors assure us that 99% of video is watched on a television screen, and a massive observational study concluded that people say they watch more online video than they actually do in order to sound "new and cool." Consumers "cord-cutting" their cable subscriptions en masse? That’s a "myth."

Meanwhile, YouTube’s audienceand content library just keep blowing up the charts. And TV streamer Hulu, just a gleam in NBC and Fox’s eye a couple years ago, is now a Super Bowl ad-driven household name and one of the biggest web success stories of the last year.

So what’s really going on in Web video, and how do we measure it? Counting a video play is more complicated than a simple load of a Web page, and page view stats are still not standardized.

YouTube, for one, offers public view counts on a per-video basis, but not overall. Meanwhile, the best Hulu does is tell us which shows are most popular on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis—no view counts attached. Various sites also have different ideas of what qualifies as a video view; many say a view happens anytime a video starts, something in-stream advertisers must just love.

TubeMogul, an independent video syndication service, just made a play at aggregating impartial data by launching a free analytics service that measures videos directly as they stream on 15 different video sites—but not the biggest ones.

The two big-name online measurement firms that offer dedicated video research, Nielsen and comScore, both use a combination of panels (where thousands of willing participants install software that monitors their Web habits) and active measurement, where they integrate a "tag" or "beacon" into a video host’s players.

Even though the two firms have similar methods for gathering data, their numbers can be very different. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that Nielsen does not count plays of video ads (though that must be hard to break out, given the growth of branded content and the fact that Web series are often distributed through ad units. But some disparities are harder to grapple with. Hulu, for instance, recently complained to Nielsen in a letter that was picked up by The New York Times. Nielsen showed Hulu losing audience in April, with a little more than a fifth of the audience that comScore counted.

Active measurement is the better method, because it helps accurately count views of embedded and protected content. But Nielsen and comScore only make the inclusion of embedded beacons available to paying clients of their market research. comScore says it’s willing to include sites that are "really interested," while a Nielsen representative explained, "This granularity in reporting is only made available to clients due to costs incurred with server infrastructure, client support, QA and daily (monitoring)."

If you look at the latest video stats from April, comScore says Americans streamed 16.8 billion videos, up 16% from the month before, to a new high. Nielsen counts 9.5 billion videos viewed, down 2.3% from the month before. Directionally (and that may be the best way to look at this data), both sites agree that video viewing is going up, but the video audience as a percentage of the overall Internet audience (at least in the U.S.) is pretty stable at around 70% to 80%.

I recently ran into the inexact science of it all when I asked Nielsen analyst Jon Gibs why the number of unique viewers his firm measured for April was down 2.5% from the year before, to 117 million. He replied the difference was excitement about last year’s election (which at that time was in the primary stage). "The election was driving up a lot of that consumption cycle," he said. I thought that was really interesting, so I asked for some follow-up numbers on the size of the video audience tuning in for election video. After looking into it further, Nielsen’s team found that political video wasn’t a huge factor, and a representative alternatively stated, "The 2.5% dip is simply due to minor fluctuations."

US President Barack Obama has announced plans for securing American computer networks against cyber attacks.

He said that from now on, America’s digital infrastructure would be treated as a strategic national asset.

He announced the creation of a cyber security office in the White House, and said he would personally appoint a "cyber tsar".

Both US government and military bodies have reported repeated interference from hackers in recent years.

Mr Obama pointed out that al-Qaeda and other groups had threatened computer warfare.

Acts of terror today, he said, could come "not only from a few extremists in suicide vests, but from a few key strokes of a computer – a weapon of mass disruption."

The president said the United States was particularly dependent on its computer networks and therefore particularly vulnerable to cyber attacks.

In 2007 alone the Pentagon reported nearly 44,000 incidents of what it called malicious cyber activity carried out by foreign militaries, intelligence agencies and individual hackers.

Security priority

Mr Obama said that protecting America’s digital infrastructure, the networks and computers everyone depended on every day, would be "a national security priority".

"It is now clear," he said, "this cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation."

He said the United States had failed to invest in its digital infrastructure. "We are not as prepared as we should be," he said.

In the past, no one US department was responsible for cyber-security, resulting in poor communication and co-ordination, he said.

The new cyber-security office will be a multi-billion dollar effort designed to restrict access to government computers and to protect systems – such as those that run the stock exchange and air traffic control – that keep the country going.

But Mr Obama emphasised that it would also help protect individual Americans, adding: "Millions… have been victimised: their privacy violated, their identities stolen, their lives upended, and their wallets emptied."

He pointed out that according to one survey, cyber crime cost Americans more than $8bn over the last two years. Worldwide, it was estimated that cyber criminals stole intellectual property from businesses worth up to $1 trillion.

"In short, America’s economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cyber-security," he said.

The Obama administration is also expected to create a new cyber command at the Pentagon with the dual task of eradicating potential vulnerabilities in America’s sensitive computer networks, while simultaneously creating ways to exploit them in the systems of potential enemies.

An influential study published last year suggested that having an offensive computer warfare capability would have a deterrent effect against would-be attackers.

Music streaming service Spotify is only a few months old but it has already attracted much attention from music lovers.

The site allows its members to create and listen to heir own playlists of songs streamed to them online.

The same peer-to-peer technology as found in file-sharing is used to deliver near-CD quality and tracks that playback almost instantly.

The service is free for listeners willing to hear audio and on-screen adverts (which appear between roughly every five songs), although users can otherwise pay £10 per month for a premium service which enables them to listen to songs without adverts.

Mobile streams

Spotify founder Daniel Ek has persuaded big record companies that it is possible to finance this service via adverts and subscriptions.

But it’s not really just about monetising through adverts, or through getting subscribers. The fact is they might buy the occasional ticket or merchandise," he said.

The site is not yet making any money in the fierce music market, but it has signed a deal to sell music downloads via online music store 7digital.

It also plans to launch on mobiles and expand to the US by the end of the year.

"The ability to take the music with you is definitely something we are looking at doing," confirmed Mr Ek. But he said he wants to make sure the site gets this "right" from the outset.

‘On the offensive’

We7 is another ad-supported streaming and downloading service that grafts a 10-second advertisement on the front of a downloaded song.

Co-founder and former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel has said that keeping labels, advertisers and users satisfied is a real challenge.

But digital music has come a long way over the last decade since the days of Napster being the main file-sharing host on the net.

The music industry’s initial response was to cry foul over illicit downloading and to go on the offensive against a new generation of file-sharers.

Changing models

A recent landmark court case saw the men behind The Pirate Bay sentenced to a year in jail after being found guilty of breaking copyright law.

They were ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

While file-sharing site Kazaa agreed to pay $100m (£53m) in damages to the record industry following a series of high-profile legal battles. The peer-to-peer network has now become a legal music download service.

Napster has also launched the world’s largest online music store offering tracks from all of the major record labels and independents.

But artists too are experimenting with innovative business models by offering their music free of charge online and making money from touring instead.

In 2007, Radiohead allowed fans to pay what they thought the band’s album In Rainbows was worth for a limited time.

While Groove Armada fans were able to receive the first track of their EP for free, with the offer of additional tracks the more songs they shared.