It's No "Game of Thrones" Finale, but Yahoo Logo-Palooza Ends Tonight

Here are a few choice things I wait for in rapt anticipation:

While "Game of Thrones" is on hiatus after its sensational "Red Wedding" finale, the next episode of "Orange Is the New Black" - which spouse and I are watching two at a time nightly, although I am considering sneaking by day to find out what Pornstache will do to Red.

The new iPhone, which will be unveiled next Tuesday at Apple's Cupertino, Calif. HQ - because I will upgrade to it, my older son will get my old one and my younger son will get his brother's old one as his first phone ever (it's a family of impatience over here).

Whenever anyone says they are "gladiators in suits" on "Scandal" or whenever its star, Kerry Washington as Washington fixer Olivia Pope, gives that long, sad gaze that comes from loving the wrong man who also happens to be President of the United States.

The Oreo version of Google Android - because I like Oreos. A lot more than KitKats.

And even - and I am ashamed to admit this - whatever the next cup-full-of-crazy thing Miley Cyrus gets into.

But, I'll be honest - except for the fact that I have to cover it at the time I would have been watching my daily dose of "OITNB" tonight - I will have to drastically gin up my excitement level over the new Yahoo logo that is set to be unveiled at 9 pm PT.

Doubtless, others have been pre-briefed on this new look, which was last changed a few years ago. But, for the rest of us, over the last month Yahoo has been showing 29 other logos it will not be using to get us all atwitter with expectation.

While I still don't quite get this move from a marketing perspective - it's like having a parade of all the people you decided not to marry before your wedding - there have been some design doozies in the bunch. That might have been the point: Show off all the bad so we will love, love, love the new one.

On that score, mission accomplished!

Such as this one from Day 2 that looks like an air freshener I declined to purchase last week at Safeway:

Or this one from Day 11, which looks like my grandmother, who had excellent cursive penmanship, wrote it (nothing says the future like a handwritten logo from the last century!):

Or Day 20, which resembles what happens when I let those kids of mine play on my computer and they screw up the fonts:

Or Day 28, which is pretty much a flat-out lift of the Yoo-hoo logo, a high-fructose corn syrup beverage I enjoy imbibing from time to time:

Finally, I really don't have one single clue about what's going on with Day 29:

Which, I think, is the goal of the marketers of Yahoo - after this parade of losers, we shall now get to gaze upon the gleaming new spouse that the Silicon Valley Internet giant will be wedded to for years to come. This jazz-hands rollout is very much in keeping with the tenure of new CEO Marissa Mayer, who is trying to generate as much excitement around Yahoo as possible as part of her turnaround efforts.

Presumably, this logo for the new Yahoo will be just the ticket! We'll see - but, until then, I am going to go and see what Crazy Eyes is up to, which is one sure thing to be interesting.

How to Make Lots of Web Video, Really Fast: Get Rid of (Most of) the Humans

Image copyright Rainer Plendl

Heads up, professional video makers: Robots may be coming for your jobs.

We've already seen that software can replace human beings who used to write and edit news stories. Now, Wochit, an Israeli-born startup, is trying to do the same thing with video news.

And it's quite possible that you've seen some of its work already: Wochit's stuff is running on big portals like Yahoo, and on many smaller sites, via distributors like Grab Media.

Wochit can take prewritten stories from outlets like Reuters and turn them into videos by assembling an appropriate mix of images, clips and narration. Human beings touch the video twice during production - once when a "moderator" quickly scans the clip to make sure the basic elements are in the right place, and once when someone reads the voice-over copy.

Wochit said the entire process takes an average of 10 minutes, and that lets the company make hundreds of clips a day.

The results have been getting better throughout the year. Now they're quite passable. Here's how Wochit handled a story this morning about President Obama and the Too Big to Fail banks:

No one's going to mistake this stuff for a "60 Minutes" report. But, depending on the use case, it may certainly be good enough. Wochit is aimed at Web video, where lots of people are looking for ad-friendly clips that users might also click on. But in the not-so-distant future, I can see this stuff working on conventional TV, too.

Eventually, Wochit CEO Keith McAllister said, the company wants to set up a self-service system where anyone could feed it text and get a usable video. If a brand like, um, AllThingsD wanted to add our own narration (or whatever), we could do that, too.

This is likely worrisome for some human beings who currently get paid to edit and produce news videos. But humans have been grappling with the pros and cons of automation for a long time.

And if you want to put a sunnier face on it, feel free to paraphrase my take on it when I wrote about the possibility that Narrative Science's story-writing robots might take my job: "The trick for content makers like myself is to find work that only content makers like myself can do - work where human qualities like experience, judgment and creativity get rewarded. And if we can't do that, we ought to be doing something else, anyway."

Here's a quick interview I conducted (but didn't edit) with McAllister last week:

U.S. Opposes Tech Companies' Requests to Disclose Surveillance

The U.S. Department of Justice is formally opposing requests by technology companies to disclose more information about the frequency with which they are contacted by the U.S. government to give up user data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Responding to petitions from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and LinkedIn, the government shut them down, as expected, because it said disclosures would pose a risk to national security. It's unclear when a ruling will come in the secret court inside the Justice Department headquarters where the case is being held.

"Such information would be invaluable to our adversaries, who could thereby derive a clear picture of where the Government's surveillance efforts are directed and how its surveillance activities change over time," the brief said. "If our adversaries know which platforms the Government does not surveil, they can communicate over those platforms when, for example, planning a terrorist attack or the theft of state secrets."

Google said in a statement today, "We're disappointed that the Department of Justice opposed our petition for greater transparency around FISA requests for user information. We also believe more openness in the process is necessary since no one can fully see what the government has presented to the court."

And Microsoft: "We will continue to press for additional transparency, which is critical to understanding the facts and having an informed debate about the right balance between personal privacy and national security."

Yahoo's response: ""We are disappointed with the Justice Department's decision to bar us and other Internet companies from publicly disclosing the specific number of user data requests that we receive from the U.S. Government under national security statutes. Yahoo and many other technology firms have made the commitment to share the number and type of government requests we receive for our users' data through regular reports. The U.S. Government's decision to block our ability to share with our users more granular information related to national security requests ultimately breeds mistrust and suspicion-both of the United States and of companies that must comply with government legal directives. As we've said before, the United States should lead the world when it comes to transparency, accountability, and respect of civil liberties and human rights. We urge the U.S. Government to reconsider this decision and grant our petition for greater transparency around national security requests for user data."

And LinkedIn weighed in: "LinkedIn deeply respects and supports the U.S. government's strong interest in, and its obligation to protect, national security. However, we believe this interest must be weighed against transparency and accountability. We firmly believe that what we are seeking - the disclosure of the number of U.S. national security-related requests that we receive - is consistent with national security interests, the law and our commitment to transparency."

In its brief, the government rejected the companies' arguments about First Amendment rights and said that public debate around surveillance was a justification for more transparency.

It said: "Contrary to the companies' argument that they have a First Amendment right to disclose this sensitive national security information, it is well-settled that prohibitions on the disclosure of classified information, such as the ones contained in this Court's orders, satisfy the First Amendment. The Government has a compelling interest in protecting such national security information from disclosure, and the prohibitions on disclosure are narrowly tailored to protect that interest."

And, regarding all the public outcry since the Edward Snowden disclosures about widespread data collection: "Although the Government has attempted to release as much information as possible about the intelligence collection activities overseen by this court, the public debate about surveillance does not give the companies the First Amendment right to disclose information that the Government has determined must remain classified."

Oh, and for good measure, the Justice Department also said that decisions about declaratory relief were out of the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, where the dispute is being held.

Here's the brief:

Motion Declaratory Judgement 131002

How Digg and Betaworks Built an Ad for a Steve Carell Movie in a Day

If you scanned Digg yesterday, you might have seen an ad for "The Way, Way Back," a new movie where Steve Carell "plays an awesome jerk."

No big deal. The news aggregator has run lots of ads in the past. What's interesting is the company that built the ad - Digg owner Betaworks, using other parts of Betaworks' collection of new-media startups.

Here's the story, told via Digg general manager Jake Levine: Last Thursday, Digg talked to Graham Retzik, who heads up digital marketing for Fox Searchlight; Retzik was looking for a way to give "The Way, Way, Back," a small movie with a few big names, a quick push.

Digg's solution: Build an ad built on top of Betaworks' Tapestry app, using Betaworks' Giphy, a GIF search engine/producer.

Retzik said yes, and a Betaworks "creative SWAT team" went to work. A day later, they had produced this, which has run on Digg and Tumblr - Betaworks' first seed investment (Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that the ad had also run on the Betaworks-backed Bloglovin network):

This is Betaworks' first "cross-brand partnership," Levine says. But I would expect to see more to come.

Yahoo Plans Splashy New San Francisco Digs (And Dreams of Neon Billboard's Return)

Justin Sullivan, Getty Images News

According to multiple sources close to the situation, Yahoo is close to signing a lease for a splashy new San Francisco outpost to keep up with the fast growth of other Web companies that have opened high-profile offices here.

Yahoo's Mayer apparently is hoping for a big PR announcement of the space in San Francisco, much as she did with the recent news that the company was opening new digs in Times Square in Manhattan, in the former offices of the New York Times.

Mayer apparently likes old media locations. While the company has been looking at a number of locations in an increasingly tight office real estate market in San Francisco, it has zeroed in on a large amount of space in the famed San Francisco Chronicle building at 5th and Mission Streets.

That is now the location of Square, the high-profile online payments company which did a handsome redo of its office there. It is expected to vacate and move to an even swankier new space nearby by the end of September.

It's not clear if Yahoo has actually signed the lease there or how many floors it will take, but sources said that the deal is in advanced stages.

Yahoo, whose main headquarters are in Sunnyvale, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, already has a large location in San Francisco that houses several hundred sales, engineering and other employees over three floors.

But it is located in a nondescript office tower in the duller financial district of the city and not in the more hip environs south of Market Street, which has seen a major renaissance over the last two years due to the opening of numerous Internet companies.

That's where companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Square and also many Sand Hill Road venture firms have built dramatic and highly designed offices. In addition, companies with existing big Silicon Valley campuses, such as Google, have also located fast-forward spaces in San Francisco.

In fact, the search giant is apparently now dramatically expanding its footprint at its SF HQ in Morgan Stanley's Hills Plaza building, which is right at the foot of the Bay Bridge on the city's waterfront.

As does Google, so copies Yahoo these days - from free food to trendy offices.

In fact, sources said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer - who was a longtime Google exec - has been eager to up the company's attractiveness to younger entrepreneurs, which includes providing appropriate urban digs within a stone's throw of twee coffee roasters and ironic donut purveyors.

There are, obviously, no molasses, Guinness-soaked pear donuts easily found in Sunnyvale.

Yahoo has tried to create some hipster cred in the big city before. In 2006, it founded an incubator space in San Francisco called Brickhouse, to foster fast-forward ideas. But it ended up shuttering it two years later due to cost-cutting.

The same expense-chopping was to blame for the end of the iconic Yahoo billboard on the eastbound lane of the Bay Bridge - a retro motel-style one with many quirky mottos, including, "A Nice Place to Stay in the Internet" - that the company gave up in 2011 after a decade. It has since been rented by Clear Channel to the Gap's Old Navy.

According to sources, Yahoo's marketing head has told employees that the company has been trying hard to reclaim its past glory, in neon lights at least.

I emailed Yahoo for comment, but horses will fly - it could happen! - before I expect any kind of substantive response from PR at the company.

Yahoo Video Head Erin McPherson Heads for Maker Studios, the Giant YouTube Network

Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images Entertainment

Erin McPherson, the Yahoo executive who has been in charge of the portal's video efforts, is leaving the company. She's going to Maker Studios, the giant YouTube network that's trying to build a business outside of the world's biggest video site.

People familiar with McPherson's plans said she is going to be Maker's "chief content officer," reporting to executive chairman Ynon Kreiz. I've asked Yahoo and Maker for comment. (Update: Maker has issued a press release announcing the hire.)

(Second update: Yahoo has now confirmed the hire. "We can confirm that Erin McPherson is leaving Yahoo," a company spokeswoman wrote in an email. "We thank Erin for her many contributions to Yahoo and wish her all the best.")

Maker represents a group of video makers - like PewDiePie, YouTube's biggest star (for now) - who generate four billion views a month. All of those views are generated on YouTube, but Maker, like other big YouTube players, is trying to build a business that also makes money from sources outside YouTube - like sites Maker owns and operates.

In September, Maker raised a $26 million round, which came less than a year after it raised $36 million from investors including Time Warner.

McPherson's move follows former Yahoo media head Mickie Rosen's departure this summer. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who has been wooing celebrities like Ryan Seacrest to join her rebuilding effort, has been looking for some time to hire a media executive with big credentials from the TV world.

Yahoo bundles up its fantasy games into a new Fantasy Sports app for Android and iOS

Yahoo has launched its newest Fantasy Sports app for iOS and Android that comes with a new redesign and mobile drafting. This is the first app that integrates technology from the company's recent acquisitions, Bignoggins Productions and Loki Studios.

In a blog post, Yahoo's Product Director of Mobile Fantasy Sports Ron Belmarch writes that users can sign up, draft a team, and win the league championship from wherever they are. The app also includes notifications to help keep fans up-to-date on what's happening with their favorite team.

The company says it recognizes that Draft Day is one of the most important dates for fantasy football players. The updated app includes mock drafting capabilities to prepare users for the actual thing - and it's not just for football as this feature will be implemented soon for basketball, hockey, and baseball.

When the time comes, users (or managers, as they're called) will be able to handle the competition and get the players they want from any device they have. Mobile drafting lets them pick players, set their queue, check the results, and even chat with other managers to perhaps plan a strategy or execute a trade.

This mobile app is the first since Yahoo acquired Bignoggins Production and Loki Studios earlier this year. Players should be able to see the integrations when they use the Fantasy Sports app.

With Bignoggins Production, the technology behind its popular Fantasy Monster and Draft Monster apps has been used in the Fantasy Sports app. Yahoo acquired Loki Studios for its location-based mobile gaming offering.

Yahoo Fantasy Sports for iOS and Google Play

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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Yahoo Creates Wish List For Your Desired User Names

If you're itching to shed that old, embarrassing Yahoo username in favor of something a little more age appropriate, we've got good news. Mayer and Co. have just opened up a wish list to request inactive usernames. Plug in your five moniker requests (in order of preference) by August 7th, and if you're first in line for an account that hasn't been used in over a year, it'll be yours by the middle of the month. Once the search giant sends a message to your inbox, simply click the included link within 48 hours and the re-purposed account will be yours. After the initial period, folks will be able to add usernames to a watch list, and will be alerted when they become available. Worried that password recovery messages sent from other services to reused addresses could be a security issue? Yahoo is too.

Read the full story at Engadget.

Yahoo Still Has Lots of Money to Spend on Acquiring Start-Ups

Yahoo just released its mixed Q2 earnings, and a few sentences may have given the answer everyone was waiting for - yes, Yahoo still has plenty of cash to pursue more acquisitions. Evidence of this lies in the company's share buyback program. "During the second quarter of 2013 Yahoo repurchased 25 million shares for $653 million," one can read in the release. Those are part of a bigger $5 billion program. These shares can be reissued and sold for cold cash any day. Back in September 2012, Marissa Mayer decided to sell 40 percent of Yahoo's stake in Alibaba for $7.6 billion. $3.65 billion was set aside to reinvest in Yahoo shares, proving that the company is confident in its own future. "We are happy to announce that as of today we have essentially completed our commitment to return $3.65 billion from our Alibaba Group proceeds to shareholders, repurchasing a total of 190 million shares," wrote CFO Ken Goldman in today's earnings release.

Read the full story at TechCrunch.

The Yahoo Influence: Tumblr Stops Indexing Porn Blogs (But Won’t Police Them)

Tumblr has quietly stopped indexing adult-oriented blogs in search engines and in Tumblr's internal searches, a move that has raised new questions about whether the popular blogging service will crack down on porn in the wake of its acquisition by Yahoo. An FAQ doc for adult-oriented blogs, apparently published in the past couple of months, distinguishes between blogs that have occasional adult content and those that publish it regularly. The former continue to be indexed in search engines; the latter are not. Valleywag, which reported on the changes today, accused Tumblr of beginning to push porn into "an internet sex ghetto." But it's unclear how broadly the updated policy is being applied. Searches for porn Tumblrs on Google and on Tumblr itself continue to yield results by the thousands. And the same social features that help other Tumblrs go viral - following, liking, and reblogging - will continue to surface new porn content on Tumblr even if porn blogs disappear from search engines.

Read the full story at The Verge.

AllThingsD Week in Review: BlackBerry Is Just Resting, and YouTube Goes Mobile First

In case you missed anything, here's a quick roundup of some of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. Amid great uncertainty, BlackBerry publicly pledged this week that it's not dead yet and, in fact, will rise again. Meanwhile, a new suitor for the once-dominant mobile company emerged: Lenovo is confidentially exploring BlackBerry's books as it mulls a potential bid.
2. Since April, Yahoo has made a big push around its Facebook-esque "stream ads" that show up within the scrolling feeds of the company's finance, sports and news pages. Sources this week said that it's an even bigger initiative than previously thought: CEO Marissa Mayer hopes stream ads will one day be Yahoo's greatest driver of new revenue.
3. This week, security outfit QuarksLab claimed that Apple's messaging service iMessage was not secure, and could be opened up by either curious Apple employees or by a government mandate. But on Friday, Apple vehemently denied that claim.
   
4. After a decent Q3 earnings report, Google showed a little bit more of its hand re video plans. CEO Larry Page announced new numbers that suggest mobile is more important to YouTube than ever.
5. Sources said Twitter plans to significantly update its direct-messaging product in the near future, bringing it to the forefront as rival messaging apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp continue to thrive.
6. Who wants an iPhone 5c? Apparently, about half the number of people who want the more expensive 5s. Make no mistake, it's still selling like an iPhone, but a growing chorus of supply-chain-trimming rumors suggest that Apple's expectations for the device might have been too high.
7. A long list of tech titans and well known companies are supporting the nonprofit Code.org as it tries to bring computer science to more schools. But two names in its first educational program might jump out more than others: Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, who will be leading coding tutorials during Code.org's worldwide "Hour of Code."
8. After Apple CEO Tim Cook hired and then fired retail head John Browett last year, the question of who would replace him became hotly debated. Now, we finally have an answer: Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts, who will join in the spring.
9. It's already possible to send cash to friends or relatives online through services like PayPal or Venmo, but this week, Square unveiled its entry in the field. In All Things Reviewed, Walt Mossberg reviewed Square Cash and found it to be "simpler and more private" than its established competitors.
10. IBM turned in disappointing earnings on Wednesday, and it's worse than a quarterly problem: The longtime No. 2 software-revenue company in the world, behind Microsoft, has now slipped in the rankings. Its replacement? A press-release-happy Oracle.

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Hands On With The Seven Best Fantasy Football Sites And Apps

With the NFL season just a week away, fans are poring over stats, trash talking their friends, and gearing up for the real season: fantasy football. The national phenomenon has spawned five seasons of a TV show, The League, has NFL teams refitting their stadiums so that fans can track their teams more closely, and costs businesses billions of dollars a year due to distracted employees.

So, easily distracted employees, here are the coolest and most useful places to play fantasy football out there-from the household names like ESPN to a small startup that's doing fantasy exclusively on your phone. I didn't rank them because a lot of deciding "which one is best" depends on what type of player you are and what fits you.

ESPN

ESPN has been my go-to for years now. It has an awesome interface that's easy to use-especially the drafting tool, a great mobile app that it's improved this offseason, and solid player rankings. ESPN's Livecast, which shows you the scores of all the NFL games alongside your fantasy matchup in real time, is a godsend. ESPN is my personal favorite, and whether you're a fantasy rookie or a seasoned veteran, you really can't go wrong with it.

Yahoo

The old Yahoo fantasy football app was like watching the Oakland Raiders play. You could tell it was supposed to be (fantasy) football, but man it was awful.

The company redid their app this summer, and it's a huge improvement. One of my leagues just switched from ESPN to Yahoo, and I have to say the two are about even so far for me. Yahoo has a nice, easy to navigate mobile app, and had a really smooth drafting tool. Yahoo even gave out report cards for each team grading their drafts right after it concluded, which was a fun little feature. The app itself prominently displays links to Yahoo's other mobile apps, which is smart and may further Yahoo and CEO Marissa Mayer's refocused on the company's mobile apps.

Check out our new @YahooFantasy app - thanks @TIME for the rave review! http://t.co/ieA3VZdl1Q

- marissamayer (@marissamayer) July 30, 2013

Fleaflicker

In football, the flea flicker is a trick play where the running back takes the ball and runs towards the line before turning and pitching it back to the quarterback who then throws it downfield. Fleaflicker the site is anything but a trick play-more of a dive straight up the middle. The old school site hearkens back to a simpler time, before mobile apps and big ESPN and Yahoo sites with beautiful displays, when people drafted on big boards in their basements, adding up stats on pencil and paper.

Fleaflicker goes with a clean, simple spreadsheet look that does a good job of feeling like old school fantasy football, while still offering real-time scoring and other modern-day features. It's super customizable for the hardcore fans out there, but also has a really simple interface for the beginners.

Fanium

Fanium has an interesting take on fantasy, going solely mobile. The interface is super simple, with very little information. But this is a double-edged sword, as there are few stats or insights to look up if you really want good info on your players.

I participated in a Fanium draft (8 teams, 16 player each), and each player was given up to eight hours to make their selection. The draft went from Thursday afternoon to Tuesday morning, as not everyone was right near their phones all the time. I had mixed feelings about the draft-it felt a lot like fantasy football for people who find fantasy to be a chore. I love gathering together and smack talking during a few hour-long draft.

In many ways, Fanium is the antithesis of Fleaflicker and My Fantasy League-it's not customizable, with rigid preset roster sizes, and is missing some of the classic elements of fantasy football, like kickers and defenses.

At first, I didn't like it. It felt like fantasy football for people who don't like fantasy football. But it is a really fast, lightweight app, which is awesome if you're out all day Sunday checking your fantasy team while watching the games. Fanium is a great intro to fantasy football, as it isn't much of a time commitment or too much to understand, but still maintains the key awesomeness of fantasy. It could also be a great accompanying app, with the more hardcore players using something like Yahoo or ESPN and the more casual fans using Fanium. We know Yahoo loves to make acquisitions, even fantasy football startups...

The Best Of The Rest: NFL, CBS, FOX

These three are fine places to play fantasy football. I just don't understand why you'd play on one of these sites when the experience you're looking for will be better on ESPN or Yahoo. All three have pretty good unique content and offer the typical fantasy settings and features that veteran players are used to. CBS and the NFL have nice mobile apps, but I strongly prefer Yahoo's and ESPN's. Fox doesn't even have a mobile app (seriously, what are you doing, FOX?) for their fantasy game.

The Future

Most of the smaller offerings out there are slight tweaks on the existing game. If a startup really wants to make an impact in this space, they need to make their core offering different. Several options immediately jump out:

Despite the comparable popularity in college football, no one has really cracked a good way to make fantasy football fun and engaging for college teams. The leagues are inherently very different, and current fantasy is largely based off of the NFL style-win as many games as you can to make the playoffs, keep your team healthy, then ride hot players and some luck to a championship (or so they tell me-being an Eagles fan, I can't confirm anything about winning championships). But the college game is very different-strengths of schedules and conference matter a lot more, and the goal is to go undefeated and land in the top two-err, four-spots to compete for a championship. Basing a league off of this would be an interesting departure from the typical NFL-centric leagues.

Most of the people I know who do play a version of college fantasy football have made their own systems for tracking and awarding points, as fans are left with very few options if they want to really customize their leagues. Give users an insane amount of options-essentially just the software and storage for whatever league they want to create-and you could grab a nice niche of fans who want to branch out and do their own thing.

And fantasy leagues have failed to capture the impact of individual defensive players on the game rather than merely defensive units. One running back typically has a much larger impact on a fantasy game than an entire defensive and special teams unit, which is obviously not how the actual games work. Offensive players are much easier to track, as their individual accomplishments can be recorded by how many yards and touchdowns they have, whereas solid defensive coverage or touchdown-saving tackles are harder to objectively measure. But sports statistics are getting more and more advanced, and someone will be able to figure this thing out sooner or later-might as well be the little guy or they have no shot in the long run against ESPN and Yahoo.

And as much as NFL Red Zone has attracted diehard fans who want to watch every touchdown, the bridge between fantasy football and watching games live leaves much to be desired. Whether its DirecTV and its Sunday NFL ticket package, ESPN and its potential web-based TV, or another company, users would go bonkers if their fantasy rosters were connected to live games on their TVs. Sportvision, the company that created the first down line for TV, is working on technology that would allow viewers to see their players highlighted on the field (you can see Sportvision's early mockup of this above).

Well, that about does it for me. Good luck out there, and don't draft Aaron Hernandez. Once you've picked a site to host your fantasy league, Eliza Brooke has you covered with six tools to help you dominate your opponents.

Images via: here, Boston.com, Tumblr, and Gawker.

Gmail dethrones Hotmail as the world’s largest email service

Google announced today via its official blog that Gmail now has more than 425 million active users around the world - a gargantuan feat considering its humble beginnings as a beta release in April 2004. Google's announcement today means that Gmail is now the word's largest email service, blowing past Microsoft's Hotmail for the first time. Yahoo Mail used to be the king of email services. But both Hotmail and Gmail got Yahoo Mail users deviating the course.

I can still remember using Yahoo Mail first prior to moving to both Hotmail and Gmail. Last year in July, during its 15th-year anniversary, Microsoft announced that its Hotmail users have grown to 360 million active users, becoming the then world's largest email service. Meanwhile, web analytics company comScore reportedly said that Google "has way less unique visitors and still gives the edge to Hotmail and Yahoo".

Venturebeat notes comScore's latest numbers from May where Hotmail has over 325 million unique visitors, while Gmail only has 289 million users. Andrew Lipsman, Vice President of comScore told the publication that their data was based on global unique visitors, which means that some users are left out, particularly those who access their email via mobile devices and Internet cafes.