Microsoft’s new search engine is reportedly dumping its codename, Kumo, in favor of the brand name Bing. To get the word out, Microsoft is planning a massive advertising campaign to launch its new search brand. Bing’s debut will feature a $80 to $100 million online, TV, print, and radio advertising campaign, according to AdvertisingAge. To put that number in perspective, Google’s entire advertising budget for all of 2008 was $25 million, AdAge says. Microsoft is hoping a major ad push will take a chunk out of Google — the number one online search brand — in favor of Bing, the same way Microsoft’s laptop hunter ads helped in its fight against Apple.
Twitter Inc.’s co-founders say the rapidly growing online communications company will eventually charge fees for its services, but it’s unclear which ones and what will drive revenue.
"There will be a moment when you can fill out a form or something and give us money," said Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive officer.
"We’re working on it right now," Williams said at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference.
Williams and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mentioned possible revenue-generators, including a service that would authenticate the source of information. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts could pay to make sure that impostors don’t send messages under its name.
Using a new tracking tool, search engine giant Google said on Wednesday it saw a spike in searches for information about flu among people in Mexico last week even before news of the outbreak became widely known.
Google said it has put together a flu trends tracking system for Mexico based on the U.S. Google Flu tool launched last fall that is used by U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to figure out where influenza is heating up.
It is based on Google’s observation that people who are sick with flu tend to search for the same types of information on the Internet, and these searches can be used to predict where an outbreak may be occurring.
The Department of Justice is now looking into Google’s proposed settlement over its Book Search service, sources tell both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal . The inquiry is said to be focused on antitrust concerns surrounding the online book deal.
The Book Search settlement, announced in October, followed a three-year battle over Google’s right to display copyrighted books on its Web site. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers claimed Google was violating copyrights by doing so. Google eventually agreed to pay $125 million to ensure authors and publishers could register to receive payments anytime their books were viewed within the service.
Yahoo Inc. confirmed Tuesday that it will cut 675 jobs, 5 percent of its workforce, as its online advertising business continued to erode in the first quarter amid economic gloom.
The Sunnyvale Web portal said it would carry out the layoffs, the third round in just over a year, in the next two weeks in hopes of saving money and freeing resources to hire elsewhere in the company. Executives said the cuts will be focused on Yahoo’s product managers and engineers.
The men behind Pirate Bay were found guilty on being accessories to violating the copyright law by a Swedish Court. They were sentenced to one year in jail and a fine of $3.6 million dollars.
Unlike the case of Napster, The Pirate bay doesn’t actually host the copyrighted files, it simply allows users to posts links to copyrighted files on third party servers. That’s why the they were charged of “assisting making available copyrighted material” instead of “assisting copyright infringement”
According to vnunet.com, Firefox Web browser is gaining popularity, while other web browsers continued to wane.
The figures, published by web developers’ portal W3Schools, shows Firefox with 46.4 per cent, up nearly one percent from January, while various versions of IE, when taken together, dropped by 1.2 per cent to 43.6 per cent. Google’s Chrome browser rose slightly to four per cent.
However, as W3Schools explains, it is primarily a site for people with an interest in web technologies. These users are therefore “more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user” and so not fully representative of the general market.
