LevelUp.com, a Spanish-language video gaming portal that caters to Mexican, Latin American, and US Hispanic markets, has landed a deal with Yahoo! Mexico to power its video game content channel. Update: The company says that it is powering a separate game channel called “Juegos”.

Our English speaking readers may not be familiar with LevelUp, but the site’s parent company Busca Corp is quite well established: it powers Playboy’s Mexican portal, the Spanish-language version of MSN’s Video Game section, and has a deal with Terra Networks. BuscaCorp’s top property is LevelUp, which the company says is Mexico’s top video game website. LevelUp recently broke into the Alexa 2000.

With the new Yahoo homepage that was previewed last July and is now rolling out more broadly as part of Yahoo’s new “It’s Y!ou” branding exercise, the main Yahoo homepage is taking on more of the personalization features on MyYahoo. There are all sorts of handy widgets in the left-hand column ranging from Facebook status updates to Gmail to any news feed (just type in a URL like Techcrunch.com and it will add the feed). When you hover over any of the widgets, a box opens up covering most of the homepage with information from that widget.

Today, Yahoo is making it possible to add applications made on the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) to that sidebar as well. One of the first apps it is launching with is from personal finance tracker Mint, with its Budget by Mint widget. Other YAP apps launching today on the homepage include A-Z Wine Pairings from MyRecipes & Snooth, Books weRead by WeRead, Brain Trainer by Lumosity, a social version of the Flood-it game by LabPixies, kaChing’s virtual stock portfolio app, Movies by Flixster, and WordPRess QuickPress. YAP is part of Yahoo’s Open Strategy that it kicked off last year.

It appears that a few days ago there was a slight change to Flickr’s logo: an addition of a small Yahoo logo to the right side so it reads “Flickr from Yahoo.” In response, many Flickr users have taken to the photo-sharing site’s forums to express their horror at Yahoo’s branding on Flickr.

The underlying fact is that Flickr users, many of whom are techy hipsters, just don’t mix well with “middle America Yahoo” as Bartz put it a few days ago at the unveiling of Yahoo’s $100 million marketing campaign about “Y!ou.” Bartz said to a roomful of journalists and bloggers:

Yahoo Product Manager Michael McNeely leaves a cryptic Twitter message in response to my “Can We Please Have Jerry Back?” post earlier this evening that is critical of Yahoo leadership. He says “I wish I could fully respond to this…”

Me too! Do you agree with me, Mike, and are venting your frustration? Or are you aware of exciting new Yahoo product plans that will turn the tables on Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Twitter, etc.?

Last November we all knew Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang would be stepping down after a disastrous tenure as CEO. He spurned Microsoft without realizing the consequences, and he had no ability to describe an alternate path for the company. We weren’t alone in calling for his dismissal, and the hope was that Yahoo would find the right leader to restore their former glory. They didn’t.

In the few months between Jerry’s resignation and the beginning of the Carol Bartz era at Yahoo, there was much speculation in Silicon Valley about who might lead the once great company. People I spoke with thought Yahoo would go one of two ways. The first would be to try to find the great product visionary to lead the company forward. Their Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (Mark Zuckerberg may someday be on that list). With the right product vision Yahoo could push boldly into new territory and renew its bid to create a lasting brand and company. The second way to go would be to hire someone to sell the company, whole or in parts, and maximize shareholder value in the short run.

It’s pretty clear Yahoo went with door number 2 and chose someone who could negotiate a deal over the next great product visionary of our time. You can’t really blame them – true visionaries are by definition rare. And it’s unlikely they’d want to go to swim upstream at Yahoo during the hard rebuilding years.

So in came Bartz, and the deals started happening. We’ve mostly kept quiet. Any new CEO deserves a honeymoon phase, and Bartz barked at journalists to keep their opinions to themselves on her first day at Yahoo: “It’s been too crazy. People outside Yahoo deciding what Yahoo should do, shouldn’t do. That’s got to stop.”

Yahoo unveiled a new branding campaign at a press conference in New York City, centered around personalization and connecting directly with consumers. The Web company’s new tagline is, “It’s Y!ou” (with the awkward Yahoo exclamation point in there). Yahoo wants to make the Web personal and it is emphasizing the various ways it does that through the Yahoo home page, search, and individual properties. The company will be spending “more than $100 million” on this new branding campaign, CEO Carol Bartz reveals.

Yahoo is so big that the only way it can speak directly to individuals is to make the message more about them than about Yahoo. Other slogans in the new campaign include “The Internet is under new management: Yours” and “The Internet has a new personality: Yours.” Just sticking the word “you” in an ad doesn’t make it any less generic, but Yahoo hopes to follow up on this promise by personalizing the Yahoo experience for each user. This extends to search, which rolled out a number of new features more broadly which were previously being tested (including SearchAssist, and enhanced results from SearchMonkey).

Every month since its launch, Microsoft’s Bing search engine keeps taking a little bit of market share. In August, Bing gained 0.4 percent to end the month with 9.3 percent of search query volumes in the U.S., according to comScore’s Qsearch estimates. Meanwhile, Google’s share came down 0.1 percent to 64.6 percent and Yahoo/s remained flat at 19.3 percent.

In other words, Bing showed the only significant gain, while everyone else stayed relatively flat. That $100 million marketing campaign must be working, or maybe it’s the improvements Bing is making to the search experience, or maybe it’s both. Whatever it is, it is translating into nearly a half-point market share gain every month for the past three months.

A video took the web by storm today entitled “Incredible, amazing, awesome Apple.” Basically, it boils down Apple’s latest event into a series of superlatives. It’s a funny video because Apple really does have a pattern of using these types of words over and over again in its demonstrations. Cynics will say this is how Apple brainwashes the masses into buying their products, and gets people jazzed about the tiniest features. But I think there’s something much deeper here.

While certainly there is some element of hearing something so many times that you start to believe it, that’s nothing new, any good salesman will do the same thing. But why I think the tactic works so well with Apple is because they actually believe what they’re saying. Just watch Steve Jobs in that video. It sure seems like he’s damn sure that what he’s talking about is amazing. He’s excited about it. So is Phil Schiller and the others on the Apple team. And that excitement translates on a level unseen.

Flickr has long had a way to note other users’ pictures that you think are worth saving. But the “Add To Faves” function is rather single serving, and not very social like the rest of Flickr. Today, the service is launching a new feature called “Galleries” to expand your interaction with others’ photos.

Basically, Galleries allow you to curate up to 18 photos from anywhere on Flickr into your own hand-made gallery. Previously, if you wanted to make a group of pictures surround something, you could only do it with your own. With Galleries, if you wanted to make a collection of the 18 best pictures taken at TechCrunch50, for example, you can easily do that, no matter who took the picture.

Yahoo is about to raise approximately $150 million by selling 57.48 million Alibaba.com shares, according to a term sheet obtained by Reuters earlier on Monday. The Internet giant is selling the large chunk of shares at HK$19.80-HK$20.30 each, which represents a 4-6.4% discount to the stock’s closing price of HK$21.15 on Monday and the entire 1.14 percent stake Yahoo held in Alibaba.com, which is China’s largest B2B marketplace.

Yahoo announced a little over 4 years ago that it would purchase a 39% stake in the e-commerce giant’s parent company for US $1 billion – which it will be retaining – plus Yahoo’s Chinese assets (worth about US $700 million). Alibaba in return took charge of Yahoo! China, while Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma remained in charge of Alibaba Group. Yahoo China recently underwent a significant restructuring, during which its popular classified listings service Koubei was taken and moved to Taobao.com.

Earlier this week Yahoo sent out an email to Yahoo Publisher partners (third party sites that display Yahoo cost per click ads). The email says they should expect new pricing adjustments “based on our assessment of the quality of traffic coming” from their sites.

Yahoo (and its competitors) make adjustments to CPC payments out to publishers based on the perceived “quality of traffic.” Supposedly these payments are credited to advertisers, but there is really no way to know. The changes Yahoo implemented appear to make more dramatic adjustments to outbound payments.

The result of the change, say two publishers we spoke to, is a drop in already-low revenue payments.

The email is below:

Another day, another former Yahoo VP going to work for Microsoft. This time it’s Eric Boyd, a former VP of Engineering at Yahoo, who more recently held the same title at gaming startup Mochi Media. Boyd is leaving Mochi to run the Silicon Valley ad group for Microsoft, after being recruited heavily by former mentor Qi Lu, who now runs online services for Microsoft, we’ve learned. [Updated below]

This is a very important role for Microsoft as it is the group that will be absorbing the 400 Yahoo employees who are coming over when the Microsoft/Yahoo search advertising deal is finalized. The key for Boyd will be transitioning them into Microsoft’s team.

Aviv Refuah, the young CEO of the public Israeli company Netex Corporation, has managed to score a US patent on an internet search option developed by the company he founded that could well force major Internet search players like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to cough up royalties for future use of the technology.

Refuah, who started the company 12 years ago when he was barely 17 years old, is careful not to overestimate the awarding of the patent and the possible outcome for now, but that didn’t stop the company’s stock from soaring yesterday.

The technological centerpiece of the patent, referred to as ‘www.addressing’, basically allows internet surfers to type a site’s name directly into the address bar or search box and get rerouted to a website straight away, without getting search results to choose from first.

Despite having one of the most popular online photo services in the world, Flickr has done things the hard way on the iPhone. That is to say, for browsing photos they’ve made you go through their optimized website, and for uploading you had to do it through email. Both worked fine, but were not as seamless as a native iPhone application. Now they have that as well.

Yahoo’s Flickr app has just gone live in the App Store. After only a little bit of time using it, I can tell that I’m going to like it. The main screen is a fairly mesmerizing slideshow of photos from your contacts on Flickr. There is an upload button that is easily accessible right on the main page, and the upload process is nice and easy. You can obviously name your picture and give it a description, but you can also easily manage what set to put it in, and what tags to give it. And the privacy settings are very clearly displayed on the upload page.

AOL, under new management and with a spinoff IPO on the horizon, continues to fill out its executive ranks.

The newest hire: former Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse will join AOL as President of Internet and Mobile Communications. Garlinghouse will report directly to CEO Tim Armstrong.

Garlinghouse will take control of AOL’s mail and instant messaging products. He’ll also head AOL’s Silicon Valley operations in Mountain View and serve as west coast lead for AOL Ventures. Bebo, acquired by AOL in early 2008, is now part of AOL Ventures.

Residents of San Francisco are a bit put off by the temporary closure of the Bay Bridge this holiday weekend. For the next 2+ days, the short bridge commute between the city and the East bay is closed, forcing people to take 30 mile detours through Marin County to get to Oakland, Berkeley and beyond.

This is a perfect opportunity to test the map products on the major Internet portals. Who noted the temporary closure and helped users figure out the next best route?

The short answer – Google wins. Yahoo a close second, and Microsoft Bing fails in this particular test.

Yahoo India has decided to shut down SpotM, the social network it launched less than a year ago in India. According to the site, SpotM. which never exited private beta, will be shut down on Sep. 1. Yahoo launched SpotM as a social network for the 16-24 age bracket in an attempt to capture the growing market in India.

It appeared that SpotM had potential to take off due the popularity of social networks in India and the addition of a few differentiating features. Yahoo said that SpotM would allow users to make friends with other users and if they wanted, to make those friends private so other users wouldn’t know about the relationship. SMS integration with anonymous chat would let users correspond via SMS without revealing their phone number.

There’s always been a tension in search between organizing information for users and getting out of the way so they can get to that information as quickly as possible. With text links, getting people to the correct page as fast as possible usually produces the best experience. But when it comes to video, which is a self-contained form of information, a better search experience is to be able to play the video right in results. Otherwise, in addition to clicking back and forth until you find the video you want, you are also adding the delay of playing the video.

Video search sites like Blinkx and Google Video (yes, that is still around) figured this out ages ago. And Bing’s video search lets you play a video simply by hovering over the thumbnail, or you can click to enlarge for a more satisfying viewing experience.

Now Yahoo is finally getting with the program.

Yahoo has just officially acquired Maktoob, a very popular Arabic web portal that offers services including search, payments, social network, and auctions. Rumors of an aquisition have been building for months, and in the last hour they reached a head as news of an impending press conference broke. The price hasn’t been announced, but our sources say $85 million.

The MaktoobBusiness Twitter acccount notes that the deal will unite “Yahoo’s 20 million users from the Arab world with Maktoob’s 16 million”, with Vice President Ahmed Nassef stating that it will bring “a sea change in the industry.”

When you are late to the game, trying to rename it doesn’t win you any points. Today, Yahoo announced that it is finally adding basic status updates to its Mail and Messenger products, which it is calling “status-casting.” In both Yahoo Mail and Messenger 10, you can update your status and all of your contacts who also use either of those two products can see your updates. You can also choose to see your friends’ updates from a variety of social media sites across the Web—such as Yelp, YouTube, and Twitter— right in your Mail homepage or IM stream.

Yahoo is making its communications products more social by combining private and public message streams in much the same way that AOL added lifestreaming to AIM last month. (That’s right, AOL beat Yahoo to this feature set by more than a month).

On the one hand, Yahoo wants to use the popularity of Yahoo Mail (which is the No. 1 Web mail service with 300 million people using it worldwide) to get into the micro-messaging game. Just like it did with Yahoo profiles at the beginning of the year, you can now add 140-character updates via Yahoo Mail to other people on Yahoo. It also lets you and keep track of what your contacts are doing across other social sites. These appear under a new updates section on the Yahoo Mail landing page.

Yahoo Messenger lets you do the same things—create updates across your Yahoo network and see updates from your IM buddies happening elsewhere. But it doesn’t appear to be a two-way connection.