eBay just became an even stronger player when it comes to online payments and classifieds. The company has announced two acquisitions today: the first one is U.S.-based online payments business Bill Me Later for approximately $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in outstanding options.

The second acquisition is Denmark’s leading online classifieds site dba.dk, as well as vehicles site bilbasen.dk for approximately $390 million in cash.

Bill Me Later, as explained by eBay’s president and CEO John Donahoe, is complementary to PayPal. “Together, PayPal and Bill Me Later will make online payments safer, easier and more convenient than ever,” he says. DBA, on the other hand, is another corner of the world conquered as far as classifieds go. “We are the global leader in classifieds with top positions in Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, and sites in more than 1,000 cities across 20 countries. The acquisition of dba.dk and bilbasen.dk gives us technology and expertise we can leverage across our classifieds portfolio to create better customer experiences,” said Donahoe.

Despite obviously not being short with money, eBay will cut its workforce by approx. 10 percent, which translates to about 1,000 employees and several hundred temporary workers. As they say, this reduction will “simplify and streamline eBay’s organization, improve the company’s cost structure and strengthen the overall competitiveness of the company’s existing businesses.” I bet it’s great consolation to the folks that are about to be laid off.

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Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve “Developers” Ballmer revealed that Windows is working on a cloud-based operating system while Amazon is now offering Windows as an available server environment through it’s EC2 service.

A lot of hay has been made recently over the term Cloud Computing. Frankly, it’s a sign a term is overused when Richard Stallman is unclear on the concept. That’s why Sean and I sat down today to attempt to lay out exactly what cloud computing means in the context of these two bits of news today.

The short answer is that we’re not talking about web apps primarily here. Steve Ballmer was particularly short on details when he dropped the term “Windows Cloud,” and it seems to be a slight misappropriation of the term as purists define it.  

The Amazon offering is very easy to define, and we do so, and proceed to talk a bit about what this means in terms of long term Microsoft enterprise strategy as well as what sorts of branding issues Microsoft might be running up against with these new offerings. 

Watch our talk on it or download the MP4.

At the time we recorded, the details of the Windows Cloud were a bit, well, cloudy (though we had a pretty firm grasp on what was going on with the Amazon EC2 Windows situation).  They’ve since been cleared up a bit, so for more analysis on that, see Stan’s post from earlier today.

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—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Ballmer Keeps Bloviating, But Actually Makes Sense!Ballmer Comments on FacebookSteve Ballmer Attacks Google’s Gmail AdsGreat, Now We’re Left with BallmerMicrosoft’s Windows Cloud Smells FunnyYouTube Launches New Set Of APIsMicrosoft Gives Yahoo 3 Weeks For ‘Definitive Agreement’ To Buyout

Source:Mashable!

In the midst of economic doom and gloom, exits can still exist. PaidContent and ProBlogger are both reporting on a story of a blog exit that’s nothing short of jaw-dropping. Financial services blog Bankaholic has been purchased by financial information portal BankRate for a stunning $14.9 million. Bankaholic is a one man shop, operated by John Wu, who is supposed to stay online with the blog after the transition.

BankRate has made a number of acquisitions recently, according to PaidContent:

BankRate, of course, is exposed to some of the nastier aspects of the economy, though it’s held up fairly well and continued to grow. It’s also made acquisitions in order to diversify its range of financial products—last December it acquired Savingforcollege.com and Nationwide Card Services for at least $29 million.

The real question, though, is how this could in any way be a business move that will ever pay off. As Darren Rowse noted, the blog has an Alexa ranking of 42,168 and averages less than 20 comments per post, but does have a solid and net positive growth trend on Google. 

After poking around in the comments at ProBlogger and elsewhere, I think I found the answer. Izea’s Ted Murphy pointed to an interview Robert Scoble did with MoneyAisle’s CEO Mukesh Chatter. From the interview: 

“Just in last three years alone, the prices for some of the bids have gone up 200% to 300%,” said Chatter. “As an example from Google, to be one of the top three advertisers for ‘high yield savings,’ you have to pay $13.20 for a click. With a 1% conversion, it costs you $1,300 to acquire a customer.”

Ted Murphy brings the quote around to the context of the Bankaholic acquisition: “Those are the numbers behind this sale — essentially, it’s lead generation.”

Several years ago, I served as chief technology officer for a financial services and credit restoration company, and assisted in setting up our systems to work with our AdSense buys at the time. At the time, bankruptcy laws were in extreme states of flux and people were looking to get in quick on matters relating to their credit ratings before the legal changes went into effect, and AdSense keyword buys were sometimes north of $48.00 a click.

It was around that time where it became far more efficient to look to social media as a means for promotion than CPC advertising for lead generation, and I suspect that’s what’s going on here.

This is completely at unconfirmed rumor stage, so take it with a big chunk of salt, but Inquirer claims it has “well placed sources” that claim that Google’s acquisition of Valve is imminent.

It doesn’t sound like a very logical acquisition for Google, but Valve’s content distribution platform Steam is a good enough reason for Google to delve into gaming territory. With Steam, Valve has managed to do what no one else has: they’ve made it so easy and simple to download games that users are actually willing to pay for it even when they have a choice of pirating the same content for free. In numbers, it looks like this: 440 available games and over 15 million active user accounts.

Google, of course, is more about offering online content than distributing it through a platform such as Steam, but given Steam’s unique position on the market they might just be in it simply to thwart the competition before it wakes up.

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I must admit that when I read and wrote about Google’s private data anonymization policies I took the word “anonymization” at face value. I know that it can mean some very different things, but now that CNET’s Chris Soghoian has actually asked Google the sordid details and debunked the process, I’m quite sure that my and Google’s definition of the word is not the same.

Here’s the reply that Chris got from Google when he asked them to describe what anonymization really means:

“After nine months, we will change some of the bits in the IP address in the logs; after 18 months we remove the last eight bits in the IP address and change the cookie information. We’re still developing the precise technical methods and approach to this, but we believe these changes will be a significant addition to protecting user privacy…. It is difficult to guarantee complete anonymization, but we believe these changes will make it very unlikely users could be identified…. We hope to be able to add the 9-month anonymization process to our existing 18-month process by early 2009, or even earlier.”

Here’s what happens when you do a Google search, in the simplest possible terms: you type in some keywords, Google stores a unique cookie, your IP address, and the words you typed in.

Now, what they mean by anonymization is that after 9 months they remove some of the bits from your IP address. After 18 months, they remove the last part of your IP address. Now, even without taking into consideration the fact that the unique cookie is there all this time, rendering all this anonymization stuff completely useless, this sounds fishy.

Let’s start with the anonymization after 18 months. They remove the last part of the IP address, right? Like, 111.111.111.xxx? That’s a grand total of 255 possible combinations, which means you’re anonymous in the crowd of 254 other people. Gee, thanks Google! That’s the level of anonymity and privacy I want! Even without the cookie, it’s a bit laughable to think that someone who wants to find you will not be able to do so merely by analyzing timestamps, keywords, and the activity from other IP addresses with the same first three octets.

Bear in mind that I am simplifying things quite a bit here and I’m not taking into account the fact that most users today are assigned dynamic IPs by their ISPs. Still, the point here is that Google’s anonymization process - based on the data I have - is laughable and in many cases useless.

After 9 months, however, they remove some of the bits from your IP address. I’d like to know: which ones? If it’s as Chris predicts, 111.111.111.1xx, then this entire anonymization thing is a complete farce. If they remove some of the bits from the first, second or third octet… well, that’s a bit better, but due to the cookie business mentioned above, it’s still all very far from anonymity.

The sad conclusion that can be drawn from all this is that (and again, based on the data I have) Google is not really doing much to protect our privacy; they’re just doing it to shut the critics up. And don’t even get me started on all that other data owned by your ISP, your mobile network operator, your email provider… well, nearly every company that provides you with any online service. Put all those bits and pieces together, and your privacy is thrown out the window. If you want to stay anonymous, you’re going to have to take a lot of extra steps, because the big boys obviously won’t do it for you just yet.

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Source:Mashable!

According to TNC’s founder Chang Kim, Google has acquired the company, described by Kim herself as “a company that develops a cool blogging platform that’s favorited by the nation’s A-list bloggers.”

Google hasn’t been too keen on acquiring companies in Asia so far, and this is their first acquisition of a Korean company; it is almost certainly a strategic move, because I somehow doubt that Google - who owns Blogger - is in need of a blogging platform from a purely technological point of view. Kim, however, claims that TNC’s platform, called Textcube, is technologically very advanced (thanks to VentureBeat for the quotes, as Kim’s blog is down at the time of this writing):

“While other blog services seem to be exploring the idea of integrating social networks with blogs only lately, our new blog service Textcube (link in Korean) had already implemented the feature much earlier. Secondly, we have great engineering talents. Many of our software engineers hail from the nation’s leading comp sci programs, such as KAIST.”

Or, perhaps it’s TNC’s 400,000 users (and the majority of Korea’s high profile bloggers) that Google is after. We’ll find out soon enough.

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Social.IM, a standalone Facebook chat application that bypasses certain restrictions of Facebook, has been acquired by iSkoot, a company that was so far into providing carrier-friendly mobile VoIP solutions. With this move, they plan to move into mobile Web applications arena, and Social.IM is definitely not a bad start, although it has lost some of its luster since Facebook launched its own in-browser chat.

iSkoot’s CEO Mark Jacobstein goes marketingese on the deal: ”Social.IM has served as an instant Web communications desktop platform and we see a clear consumer integration with iSkoot’s upcoming suite of Web to mobile push services. Acquiring Social.IM is a key step in our path to introduce later this year a groundbreaking new communications platform that will revolutionize the mobile landscape.”

The story is interesting because Social.IM seemed to be in a bad situation: it focused on one platform only, providing Facebook users a way to chat, and then Facebook launched its own chat (which has several flaws, one of which is the fact that it’s so damn unreliable), which usually means you can close shop and wave goodbye. However, iSkoot seems to have recognized Social.IM’s potential and will integrate it into its own set of services. Although the terms of the deal aren’t disclosed, it doesn’t sound like too bad of a deal for Social.IM.

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I may lose my “early adopter badge” for saying this, but I do not see how Ubiquity really helps anyone. Given that it is a 0.1 release, I know it is far from complete. However, it seems like there is a lot of development required to really make the browser a platform, and make it easier for people to use the Internet as a service. When I say a lot, I mean a minimum of two years until early adopters can praise it like they have praised services like Twitter or FriendFeed. For the rest of the mainstream, we are looking at closer to five years given the traditional adopter cycle.

Of course, the logical question is why do I feel this way? First, look at the examples from the user tutorial. Being able to type “email to Mike” so that GMail creates an email and sends it is not a huge advancement. The search examples are much of the same thing. You can type “wikipedia babel fish” and it will search Wikipedia for you. Obviously, this barely saves any time or mouse clicks. All of the examples are this simplistic, and this adds to my “shouldn’t there be more” feeling.

I am generally underwhelmed for a few different reasons. First, why make the browser the platform? Isn’t it easier to create a website that does all of the same things? Isn’t this what sites like iGoogle or any other personalized homepage with widgets are trying to do? Does this just mean we need better websites?The big question I have with this is “What are we trying to do?” My understanding of the “browser as a platform” concept is that we are trying to treat the Internet as a service or a data source. You can do interesting things when not constrained to a specific page. I think Ubiquity is meant to change the way we work, and that is what I want. The problem is that we are not there yet, and it takes a little imagination to get there.

“Summon Ubiquity” is used throughout the documentation. Why? The services should just be active and ready from a toolbar or even parsed in the address bar. The commands also need to be very generic. If I am searching for information, let me type “find babel fish.” The built-in services can search Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo and whatever other search services that support Ubiquity. The process should be meta-everything. If I need a definition, I can type “define ubiquitous” and the service would look for definitions on various reference sites like Dictionary.com and any other engines that support definitions. Another area that could benefit greatly from integration with Ubiquity is semantics and linked data. Both would provide plenty of context and data sources for some interesting applications.

There are a few features that I really like about the service as well. They have included a concept of context or “this.” If I have selected a large section of text on a Web page, I can enter “email this to Mike” and the selected text gets emailed to my contact named Mike. Context in any activity is extremely important, and creating a quick way to get the context is fantastic. The other extremely important feature is that new commands can be created with just some lines of JavaScript. This means that there is not a huge learning curve for the API, it is just a matter of linking together the right API calls. The fact that you do not need to restart Firefox while developing is a nice bonus as well.

Overall, it is fairly obvious that Ubiquity is an interesting technology, but it is still very immature. It is something we should keep an eye on in terms of the platform development as well as what commands and applications developers create on top of the platform.

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Source:Mashable!

Microsoft has announced that it will acquire Greenfield Online Inc, a company that owns Ciao GmbH, a leading European shopping and price comparison site. Microsoft will purchase all outstanding shares of Greenfield Online for $17.50 per share, which means that the total value of the transaction is approx. 486 million dollars. As others have noticed, Greenfield already had a deal in place with media PE firm Quadrangle Group LLC., who was supposed to buy Ciao for $426 million, but it seems that Microsoft had outbid them.

John Mangelaars, vice president, Consumer and Online, Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa has said the following about the transaction: “Ciao’s success has been led by a team of talented people who took a unique combination of intuitive technology and the insight that comes out of their passionate consumer community to become one of Europe’s leading shopping comparison sites. This makes the company a fantastic asset to the future of our search offer. Integrating Ciao’s capabilities into Live Search will provide a strong launchpad for our commercial search offer in Europe and enhance our e-commerce offering on MSN.”

According to comScore, Ciao has over 26.5 million unique monthly visitors, and it’s one of the leaders in the price comparison, consumer product reviews and shopping site arena in Europe. According to the PR, Ciao’s technology platform, online community and extensive merchant relationships will be integrated within the Live Search platform. Microsoft’s recent efforts to combine shopping and search are obviously part of a bigger strategy, in which Microsoft plans to corner the shopping market and commercial search, as it can’t hurt Google when it comes to general purpose search.

Microsoft has also secured a buyer for Greenfield Online’s Internet survey solutions, and both transactions are expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2008.

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MapQuest today launched its new homepage design that aims at reducing the amount of time you spend surfing through the site’s pages and keeps you doing more of what you want.

According to the company’s Vice President of product development, Mark Law, MapQuest has received countless messages from users asking execs to revamp the site and make it a more useful tool for getting work done quickly and efficiently.  And in order to do so, MapQuest’s latest design (which, right now, mostly impacts the homepage) tries to take the site from a “directions and map service” to a “location-centric” service that provides mapping and directions.

The improved MapQuest homepage now features a map that displays the location you input into the box above it.  MapQuest said that most of its users — about 48 million unique — simply didn’t want to move from page to page when searching on a map and it decided to make the front page the place to get practically everything.

Included in that map, the new MapQuest homepage will allow you to get gas prices and see where construction is going on in a cleaner interface than before.  On top of that, it will feature a Weather section and available live cams (in certain cities) to show you what’s happening on the ground.

MapQuest is also using its AOL ownership and will now display different AOL properties at the bottom of the page, like City Guide, which lets you search for point of interest and practically anything else in the city you’re viewing.

More importantly, MapQuest is using the bottom of the page to see if users want the information to be included in the maps.  Want to find the best burger in New York with City Guide on MapQuest maps?  If so, tell the company that you want to do it and if enough people agree, it’ll integrate that into the maps.

MapQuest claims getting directions will be easier too.  Instead of offering two search boxes like it does now, the new MapQuest homepage will leave the directions box “greyed out” until you decide to search for directions.  Once you do, it’ll work just as it does now.

I had the opportunity to see the new MapQuest homepage in action and it does look much cleaner and generally more useful than its predecessor.  That said, I don’t know if it’s really enough to make Google Maps users switch and MapQuest was quick to note that this is just the beginning of much more to come.

The company wouldn’t tell me any more than that, but as more of its pages are revamped and it improves its offerings, it’ll be interesting to see what will come of it.

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Source:Mashable!

DriverSide, the web-based service for helping you keep tabs on your car health and maintenance, has announced its acquisition of fairBenjamin in order to expand on its own technology and access to local mechanics in a given area. The amount of the acquisition has not been disclosed, but both services are fairly new, having been launched in 2007, with DriverSide raising an undisclosed amount of funding earlier this year.

You may recall that DriverSide offers a web-based tool to help you keep track of your current car’s needs, but it’s also a localized search engine that helps you find reliable and trusted mechanics in your area. One of DriverSide’s main objectives is to connect users with mechanics, offering points of comparison for everything car related, from the prices of various automobile parts to the maintenance schedules of your vehicle according to the manufacturer versus actual maintenance reports.

An important part of DriverSide’s growth on this end is its ability to offer an easy-to-use platform for sharing things like actual maintenance data so that consumers can have a factual set of information to work from, while also connecting them with the mechanics in their area. fairBenjamin has a patent-pending process for connecting these consumers with local mechanics, and its this access that DriverSide finds valuable in its long-term goals.

This acquisition will help DriverSide provide better estimates to consumers for repair costs, and offering overall value to end users. When it’s all said and done, the most useful car maintinance site will be the one that presents accurate information in a format that lessens the amount of time a given user will need to spend doing the research, and DriverSide has acquired fairBenjamin in an effort to move towards this direction.

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Several bloggers high and low took a great deal of heat for publishing a rumor yesterday that the Mormon church was looking into purchasing or acquiring social networking giant Facebook. WinExtra, The Industry Standard, Inquisitr and VentureBeat all covered the rumor that seemed to originate from Zach Klein and Brady Brim-DeForest.

Zach Klein said on his blog:

I heard from an employee close to the deal that the Mormon church’s genealogy business made an unsolicited bid to acquire Facebook.

While maintaining the country’s largest ancestral database, they certainly have a motive to control this generation’s biographical data, and they certainly have the cash to do it. In 1996, Time Magazine estimated the church’s annual revenues to be $5 billion, with total assets at $25 to $30 billion.

Zach is co-founder of video site Vimeo, and Brady has a laundry list of founding, executive, and directing positions at Web 2.0 companies in his bio. These folks aren’t unreliable sources of information, but as with all merger and acquisition rumors, they must be taken with a grain of salt.  Who would have thought that AOL was seriously buying an Old Media organization like Time-Warner before it was confirmed.  I remember the morning I woke up to Adam Ostrow telling me that Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo - I had a hard time believing that one, too.

That the Mormon Church would attempt to buy Facebook is a semi-credible rumor, and it’s given even more credence when you start to throw in background bits of information about the LDS organization and Facebook itself.

First of all, as almost everyone noted, Facebook has started allowing employees to sell off stock at a much lowered valuation than the $15 billion that Microsoft invested in.  Second of all, and again, widely discussed, the Mormon church has a very ingrained to the theology interest in creating very detailed geneaological  records of all church members.

This didn’t prevent a literal virtual mob to form around the rumor, which went into full-on attack mode against anyone who posted anything that entertained the idea.

Brady’s initial write-up was probably the most succinct and thorough treatment of the rumor, and it was re-hashed by the other bloggers who talked about it as well:

The Mormon Church maintains the largest genealogical database in the United States and apparently has the cash reserves necessary to make an offer of the magnitude necessary to acquire Facebook.

According to a 1997 Time Magazine Report, the Church of Latter Day Saints’ assets exceeded $30 Billion in 1996, and three years later was reported to be making over $5 Billion in revenue each year.

The Church is no stranger to the technology world, and in the 1980’s even created the first standard for exchange of genealogical information, Genealogy Data COMmunications, or GEDCOM for short.

The sheer depth and breadth of the Church’s genealogical information is staggering - the specter of pairing it with one of the most detailed, accurate, and widespread social maps in existence (Facebook) is truly terrifying.

How much did they offer? Well, according the the latest executive stock sale rumors, Facebook may actually be valued at around $5-8 Billion – so we can only assume that the Church made an offer somewhere north of the $5 Billion mark.

Brady established the feasibility and motive for it to be true, but the response was swift and certain from members of the church who were offended by the notion. Louis Gray and Jesse Stay both posted to their blogs questioning the rumor, and Louis Gray questioned the intelligence and common sense of the other bloggers who gave the story play on their own blogs. Jesse Stay, though, went further out of his way to show his displeasure with the blogosphere for considering it, even for a moment!:

Frankly, I never share [rumors] (well, rarely), but they are fun to read because, well, they’re funny. But rumors like an entire Faith buying a huge company like Facebook are ridiculous, unfounded, and frankly offensive to me that anyone would take such a rumor seriously when the Faith is my own. It’s a religion, people - tell me one reason a religious Faith would need a social network like Facebook to further its mission. Do you seriously believe any religion would be so stupid as to try this? People would leave Facebook in droves if that were to happen, and a network like Facebook has no good way of building up the members of the Faith itself.

Mormonism is a For-Profit Organization

The problem is that like many other modern religious movements, the Mormon church looks more and more like a business than a faith as time goes on.  I did some research last night to compile some very interesting facts about the Mormon church with relation to their finances.

The church has not publicly disclosed its financial statements in the United States since 1959, and only their UK revenues are audited (where it is required by law). Most of the revenues for the church supposedly come from tithes and offerings, but there are a wide variety of commercial efforts and enterprises that the church undertakes, some of them a part of the non-profit side, while others have been spun off into a for-profit corporate arm of the church named Deseret Management Corporation.

Assets of this company include: America’s largest nut producer AgReserves Inc, a company called Hawaii Reserves, Inc. that generated $280 million in revenue alone, a half-million acre farm named Farmland Reserve Inc, a TV and radio chain named Bonneville International Corporation (the 14th largest in the US), and an insurance company named Beneficial Financial Group which has $3 billion in assets.

This, of course, doesn’t include the second largest newspaper in Utah or Brigham Young University, both of which generate substantial revenue and fall under the ownership of the church in one form or another.

A lot of these subsidiaries are rationalized by the fact that they have benefit to members of the church. The insurance company can sell insurance to the church members at a discount, the radio and TV chain can provide all-Mormon all-the-time entertainment. The farm and nut producer can be used to feed the flock on missions as well as the starving folks of the world. I still haven’t figured out how a tourist attraction in Hawaii can be justified, but I’m sure if you ask the Mormon PR folks, they’ll give you a decent answer.

The truth is, though, that these corporations do more than just what their justifications dictate. A lot more. You accrue $3 billion in assets by taking a loss selling insurance to your flock. The radio and TV stations that are owned by Bonneville may be “family oriented,” but include a whole lot of secular content (mostly adult contemporary music and right-wing talk shows).

Does the rumor sound so offensive, outlandish, moronic and ridiculous now?

But Wait, There’s More!

I’ve intentionally stayed away from talking about the theology of the movement because it’s not germane to the business dealings in the context of this rumor, and frankly I know a lot of Mormons that are really cool people, and I don’t really want to go to war with them over religion. The truth is, though, that there is a lot more than what some of their apologists and fervent defenders are saying, and their attempts to quash the rumors ignore some very large truths.

That said, to understand why this is such a particularly plausible rumor requires understanding why heritage research is so very important to Mormons. A little bit of searching found a website for a (very long! and) even-handed documentary I watched recently on Mormon history by PBS. They explained it thusly:

One of the core tenets of Mormon faith is that the dead can be baptized into the faith after their passing. Baptism of the dead evolved from the beliefs that baptism is necessary for salvation and that the family unit can continue to exist together beyond mortal life if all members are baptized.

One of the core tenets of Mormon faith is that the dead can be baptized into the faith after their passing. Baptism of the dead evolved from the beliefs that baptism is necessary for salvation and that the family unit can continue to exist together beyond mortal life if all members are baptized.

Mormons trace their family trees to find the names of ancestors who died without learning about the restored Mormon Gospel so that these relatives from past generations can be baptized by proxy in the temple. For Latter-day Saints, genealogy is a way to save more souls and strengthen the eternal family unit.

There are enormous resources put into this endeavor, and it’s not something they take lightly. There’s an entire mountain compound devoted the discovery for and cataloging of these records. What was originally estimated to be a 120 year project is now estimated to be completed in 10 years.

Acquisition and Merger Rumors in General

So we’ve established that Mormon-owned organizations like to buy stuff, and they’re not particularly hung up on them being secular organizations in nature, they have enough cash to buy most, if not all, of Facebook at the lowered valuation, and they really love having records on people.

All this is moot, though, since the church debunked the rumor? The official line from the church since 3:00 PM yesterday has been, “This rumor has no foundation whatsoever.”

Let me throw another quote at you: “We’re not shopping the company.” That one comes from Kevin Rose, talking about Digg. If you believe that, I’ve got some land in the Everglades for you.

Still not convinced? Tell me if you remember this line: “Microsoft taking over Yahoo — that conversation has never come up.” That’s Terry Semel, former CEO of Yahoo. Caterina Fake also laughed off the prospect of Yah