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My oldest email address, circa 1996, is with Yahoo -- just three letters. I joined Flickr in October 2005 and Tumblr in May 2008. Three years ago, I stopped paying for Yahoo Mail, mostly abandoned the photo-sharing site and essentially stopped blogging at the social network. But I'm psyched now. Maybe former Googler Marissa Mayer can save the grandpa dot-com after all.

Today colleague Wayne Williams asks: "What will it take for people to care about Yahoo again?" "May 20th" is my answer. On the same day that Yahoo bought Tumblr for a cool $1.1 billion cash, the rickety dot-com gave Flickr the biggest makeover ever. Subscribers get 1TB of storage, on a site suddenly beautifully modern and supported by a hot, Android app. Google CEO Larry Page, Mayer just thumbed her nose at you.

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Today, one of the best music streaming services (excuse the opinion) gets just a bit better. Pandora has been around since 2000, offering customers free and paid solutions for creating custom stations and discovering new music. Now the streaming service wishes to offer more to its customers.

Pandora founder Tim Westergram announces the debut of Pandora Premieres, a new station that brings unreleased music to customers a week in advance.

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Despite what some folks would lead you to believe, sheer numbers are actually meaningless when it comes to app stores. That's just a marketing ploy. It's the quality that matters and not the quantity. After all, if you can't get the software that you need, does it really matter if there are 100,000 more apps out there? I'm inclined to believe that the answer is a resounding "No".

Windows Phone has this very same problem -- 145,000 apps available but major titles are still avoiding its Store (no, I'm not going to mention Instagram). Microsoft tried to fix this issue a couple of times before, including paying developers to beef up the ecosystem. Late-yesterday, the software giant has decided to step in again with the new Porting Challenge.

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If you’ve installed multiple operating systems on a PC then normally, when your system starts, you’ll have to choose the one you need from a boot menu. And while this isn’t difficult in any way, it can be a minor irritation, especially if you’re switching between operating systems on a regular basis.

Install Reboot-To, though, and you’ll have another option. When you need to restart your PC, just choose one of your installed operating systems from the Reboot-To menu -- Window Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Ubuntu (wubi) and Ubuntu Server (wubi) are supported -- and it’ll reboot directly into that OS, without you ever seeing the boot menu at all.

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The first stage of developing an app involves no technical skills at all, it's also the hardest, and that’s coming up with an original idea. There are already thousands of apps out there so you need to make sure that what you’re proposing hasn't been done before. Or at the very least that you have a new and original twist on an idea that will make it stand out from the crowd.

It's important to note that just creating an app isn't going to make you money, research by Canalys in 2012 showed that some two-thirds of apps received fewer than 1,000 downloads in their first year. The store pages have many thousands of "zombie apps" which still appear on the websites but never get downloaded.

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Yahoo is a media and technology giant. It is claimed that around 700 million people still visit Yahoo websites every month, and yet I personally can’t remember the last time I went to a Yahoo site, and I don’t know anyone who uses Yahoo for search, email, or news -- or visits the fabled Yahoo home page.

To me Yahoo mostly exists in the past, largely forgotten and gathering dust. I have photos stored on Flickr, but I haven’t uploaded anything there for ages. The last time I tried Yahoo -- following a lackluster revamp of the site -- I stumbled across broken link after broken link and gave up.

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Research company IHS iSuppli has released figures showing that solid-state drives are set to claim 33 percent of the storage market by 2017. Over this time total worldwide sales of SSDs are expected to rise from 31 million units in 2012 to 227 million.

The growth is being driven by demand for ultrabooks and other slimline systems which need powerful, compact drives. Sales should also be helped by the falling price of flash memory and the faster performance and lower power requirements of SSDs. Increasing numbers of systems being launched with convertible and touch screen formats is likely to push things further too.

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On Tuesday, two and a half months after the first beta was released, Opera announced that its new WebKit-based browser for Android is now available as a "final version". This is just one step towards a Presto-free Opera as, in mid-February, the Norwegian company revealed that it will slowly adopt the WebKit rendering engine across all of its browsers.

Opera for Android, among other new features, emphasizes content discovery by allowing its users to find (and read) various articles straight from the browser's homescreen. Folks simply have to select their areas of interest, such as arts or technology, and Opera displays a number of stories from "relevant global and regional sources". This is similar to what Flipboard and other apps deliver.

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IntelliBreeze Software has released Gmail Notifier Pro 5.0, a major update of its Windows tool for monitoring various online accounts via the Taskbar Notification area. The tool, which allows personal users to monitor up to two supported accounts without registration, offers more than simple Google Mail notifications, and version 5.0 extends this support further by adding Microsoft Exchange and SkyDrive notifications to its feature list.

Version 5.0 also adds a built-in local RSS feed server, allowing users to pipe notifications from the program into RSS readers on other platforms, including smartphones as well as computers.

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Cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud. This fairly innocuous word has become one that is bandied around with abandon, often with the misplaced notion that it adds an element of 'cool' that was not previously present. But is working in the cloud all it's cracked up to be? Is it necessary? Should you care about it?

You don't have to think back all that far to remember a time when simply being online seemed like a fairly alien concept -- never mind actually working online. When the concept of Active Desktop was added to Windows 9x the notion of staying online throughout the day just to see the desktop update with the latest weather forecast, news, stock prices or other data was unimaginable.

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Flickr is the service Yahoo forgot about between its latest Mail and homepage redesigns. It's boring, outdated, bland, ugly and uninviting and these are just a couple of the words that cross my mind right now. Thankfully, Flickr wants to change all that with the latest revamped version, announced late-yesterday. You know, maybe the cool kids will want to hang out again.

The biggest change comes from the new website, which drops the old design. It's now fresh, simple and modern and gives the cloud service character. Big photos in the stream, menu bar on top and the usual suspects on the right -- Explore, Flickr Blog and a list of people you may (want to) know -- dominate the uncluttered experience. Friends get a similarly-styled profile page which emphasizes shared content.

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The big day is almost here. Microsoft reveals the new Xbox at an event held on its Redmond, Wash.-based campus tomorrow, and speculation runs rampant around the web. We do not even know the name of this next-generation console, let alone what capabilities the device will come with.

However, if you can not wait for the news stories to break then there is good news if you should happen to be a Windows Phone 8 user. The software giant announces a special app for its smartphone operating system that enables users to watch the event live right from wherever they happen to be -- which will be the workplace for many. Sorry employers.

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They may be just about the most primitive form of computer animation there is, but animated GIFs can still be fun, and genuinely useful, so it’s a shame they’re not more widely supported on the PC. Most programs will just display the opening frame, at best, leaving you to guess at everything else.

There are ways around this, to some extent. Right-click a GIF in Explorer, for instance, select Open With > Internet Explorer, and a browser window will open and play the animation. This is a long way from being convenient, though, so if you’d like easier playback -- and a lot more besides -- then you’re sure to prefer 7GIF.

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For even the most security minded individuals and organizations, malware continues to be a serious problem. It is all well and good knowing that your system has become infected and ensuring that you have the tools to perform a clean-up operation, but the key to avoiding future problems is determining the source of infections.

This is what Sourcefire aims to achieve with its new Network File Trajectory and Device Trajectory techniques. The company points out that in modern work environments the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) model is becoming increasingly common. It is one thing to protect your own machines, but quite another to secure any device that may connect to a network.

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When I was young, and I dare not discuss when that was, I owned a Fiat X1/9.  The relationship with that car ended badly, but I shall always remember it as the car I was driving when I met my wife. Fast-forward a few (okay, more than a few) years and the car company is regaining popularity, but no longer as the little sports car I referred to as the "poor man's Ferrari". Today the company announces a new partnership with Microsoft to bring Windows EmbeddedAutootive to its vehicles.

Despite the polarized reactions to Windows 8, Microsoft continues to see success with the Embedded version of the operating system, with Home Depot announcing adoption of Embedded 8, and now the Italian car maker.

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