Record highs for new-media ads

Advertising on the Internet continues to be an increasingly lucrative sector of the market, according to results announced Monday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The revenue figures, which were released at the MIXX 2.6 Conference and Expo in New York, show that Internet advertising revenues have increased 37 percent from the first six mon...

Google's Schmidt Extends Hand to Advertisers
Search engine giant Google is sending a message to advertisers: It wants to be more responsive to their needs. In a keynote address at the Search Engine Strategies Expo in San Jose, and at a rare media briefing that followed, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Google wants to “find ways we can give information to advertisers that is truthful” and more complete. Schmidt said Google wants to be more fort...

IBM hosting podcast on IM
When K.C. from Boston wanted to know whether his instant-message conversations, especially those at work, were confidential, he turned to an unexpected source for the answer: IBM. That's because Big Blue has recently started a podcast, called ShortCuts , intended specifically to give people a way to get answers to common questions about e-mail, instant messaging, blogs and other online tools. ...

Firefox 2 beta ready for debut
The Mozilla Foundation is ready to release a beta version of Firefox 2, the next major version of its Web browser.

This is the first beta version of Firefox 2 to be made publicly available, and Mozilla hopes that software developers will download it and test whether it is compatible with their existing Firefox extensions.

"We have over 1,000 extensions already, but ...

YouTube Will Promote NBC Materials
An agreement was signed by the two companies that will lead to each one benefiting from the media share of the other. In the constant marathon for audience, NBC's fall line-up will be advertised on YouTube and no less than 13 million users will have access to previews of such shows as: Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show. The joint-marketing deal with NBC means that YouTube will also expan...

Google invents its way into the future

When Google was a graduate-school project being run from a Silicon Valley garage, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built their own computers out of cheap parts meant for personal computers.

They wanted to save money, and they felt that they could design a network of computers that would search the Web more efficiently than those available from traditional manufact...

Internet calling pressures Bells to lower rates

Competition in the phone business, intensifying this year as Internet-based calling has taken root, has reached the point where many industry experts are anticipating an era of remarkably cheap and even free calls.

That era would be built on a vast migration of phone service from traditional networks to the Internet, where the calls become just another way to use Internet ...

Google Checkout – A Payment Ecosystem
The online transactions pet project Gbuy from the Mountain View Company has grown and transformed into Google Checkout and is available as of yesterday. The payment solution provides Google customers with the possibility of creating an account that will comprise all relevant information on the user and on a credit card.

Google Checkout is the solution with which the online giant cl...

New Mobile Services From Google
Google announced the availability of several mobile services that further demonstrate its commitment to making the mobile phone a more convenient and dependable device for accessing useful and relevant information while on the go. Already available in U.S. and U.K. English, mobile phone users will now have access to Google's mobile services in a range of languages including French, Italian, Germa...

Google Introduces Ad Scheduling for Google AdWords
As part of Google's continuing effort to provide more value to its advertisers, Google today introduced ad scheduling (also know as "dayparting") for Google AdWords. This feature enables advertisers to automatically adjust their bids or pause and resume their campaigns based on the time-of-day or day-of-week. This feature is appropriate for all types of AdWords advertisers, from small to large, l...