Jerry Yang has always been viewed as one of the great visionaries in Silicon Valley. Thirteen years ago he started a company with a funny name that changed the world, became a billionaire, and always seemed smart enough to leave the actual running of the place to someone else — until one day a little more than a year ago he utterly lost his way.

Google launched Gmail voice and video chat, making it simple for people around the world to chat in high-quality video for free right within Gmail. All you need is a webcam and a small web browser plugin, and you can start video chatting with your friends, family, and coworkers on Gmail and Google Apps. Gmail voice and video chat lets you start a video chat without switching to another application or signing up for another account. And if you don’t have a webcam, you can simply chat by voice. We’ve made it easy enough that your mom — or your employees — will actually use it.

Internet media giant Yahoo has released an updated edition of their BrowserPlus technology.

BrowserPlus is used by web publishers to make it easier for their visitors to interact online.

Lloyd Hilaiel, a member of the BrowserPlus team at Yahoo wrote in a blog post about this new technology: “What’s better about the upload? To start, it’s easier for end-users to select the files they want to upload. You can drag and drop files or folders directly into your Web browser. An enhanced ‘File Browse’ implementation supports file multi-select as well as folder select.”

YouTube, the largest video-sharing website, will show full-length television shows and films from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s archives in its latest step to boost advertising revenue by adding professional programing, the company told Reuters on Sunday.

The site, owned by Google Inc, plans to make the announcement about the new partnership on Monday.

MGM Studios will kick off the partnership by posting episodes of its decade-old “American Gladiators” program to YouTube on one channel.

On another channel, MGM will post full-length action films like “Bulletproof Monk” and “The Magnificent Seven” and clips from popular movies like “Legally Blonde.” These will be free to watch, with ads running alongside the video.

Digg founder Kevin Rose on Friday shined light on a stormy economic landscape, saying the climate is right for launching Internet startups.

Difficulty getting financing means fewer competitors entering the market and that there will be more media attention focused on young technology firms, Rose told those gathered at a Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

“It will be one of these little valleys where I believe it will be a great time to do something new,” Rose said of the economic meltdown blamed for tightly clamping credit markets and venture capitalists’ wallets. “Funding for consumer-oriented Web companies is going away and there will be a lot of opportunities out there.”

Employees want anywhere, anytime access and IT departments now have more wireless choices than ever to give them just that. Which should you choose? We gathered representatives of each of the three major mobile broadband technologies into a live chat room and asked. Our shoot-out panel was led by Network World Wireless Alert Newsletter writer and analyst Joanie Wexler. The participants were Edgar Figueroa, executive director of the Wi-Fi Alliance; Dan Warren, director of technology of the GSM Association; and Dr. Mohammad Shakouri, vice president of marketing of the WiMAX Forum.

Mozilla has completed work on its private browsing mode, the feature the organisation delayed the launch of 3.1 to implement.

Private browsing mode allows users to surf the web without leaving any traces of their session on the computer. The company was initially reluctant to include the feature, putting it on hold for four years.

However, with its introduction in Chrome, Safari and the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla relented, adding “four to five weeks” to the development of Firefox 3.1 to include the feature. The completion of the private browsing mode is considered a major milestone towards the release of the latest version of the browser.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Communications Commission voted Tuesday to open up unused, unlicensed portions of the television airwaves known as “white spaces” to deliver wireless broadband service.

The vote is a big victory for public interest groups and technology companies such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. that say white spaces could be used to bring broadband to rural America and other underserved parts of the country.

Users of Google’s Gmail service can now send text message chats to mobile phones using the webapp’s built-in Chat feature.

Google is adding the experimental functionality through Gmail Labs. To turn it on, go to the Labs tab within Gmail’s settings. Or, just click on the little green Erlenmeyer flask icon next to your e-mail address at the top of the page in Gmail. If you don’t see the option right away, check back later — Gmail product manager Keith Coleman, who demonstrated the new feature for Webmonkey, says it will be made available in Labs to all Gmail users Thursday evening.

Blogrush, the blog link swapping service launched by internet marketer John Reese in 2007 has shut down.

The service delivered links via a widget placed on each participating blog, with users getting link exposure on other blogs based on how many impressions the widget had on their own sites. The service was highly popular among SEO and internet marketing blogs during its peak, according to Reese delivering 3.4 billion links.