MySpace Beats Yahoo in Ad Views

Until recently Yahoo leads the US market for online advertising, with 53 billion views on average. But according to data gathered by comScore, MySpace beats Yahoo in June drawing 56.8 billion advertising views. Even though MySpace leads in terms of advertising viewership, Yahoo draw top-dollar ad rates relative to MySpace. ComScore data also shows that Yahoo’s share of the display market has been trending down since July of 2007.

Microsoft to buy Ciao.com for $486 Million.

Microsoft Corp. is buying Germany-based Web comparison shopping site Ciao and its parent company Greenfield for about $486 million in cash. Microsoft says the acquisition of Ciao, a collection of European price-comparison, shopping and consumer reviews sites in seven countries and languages, will boost its search presence in Europe. Google dominates the search industry with 62 percent of the global search market and 79 percent in Europe. Ciao.com gets more than 26 million unique visitors a month.

Google Plans to Launch Web Browser.

Google is set to launch a new Web browser called Chrome on Tuesday. The beta version of Google Chrome will be launched tomorrow in more than 100 countries. Google said they have used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox to build the new browser. Google promises simplicity, speed and security in its new browser. Here is the link for the cartoon created for Chrome by Google. The release of the new browser by Google is a long-anticipated move aimed at countering the dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Update : Chrome can be download here.

Intel and Yahoo To Bring the Internet to TV.

Intel Corporation and Yahoo! previewed plans for the Widget Channel, a television (TV) application framework optimized for TV and related consumer electronics (CE) devices that use the Intel Architecture. The Widget Channel will allow consumers to enjoy rich Internet applications designed for the TV while watching their favorite TV programs. It will also give developers access to write TV applications for the platform using JAVASCRIPT, XML, HTML and Adobe Flash technology. In addition to supporting the Yahoo! Widget Engine, Yahoo! will also provide consumers Yahoo!-branded TV Widgets that are customized based on its category-leading Internet services. Intel is the world’s largest CPU maker.

Yahoo Buzz Opens for All

Yahoo’s Buzz opened up for every one. Until now only a hundred or so invited publishers could post news to Buzz. The main advantage of Buzz over other social bookmarking services like Digg,Delicious is that Yahoo pushes a few Yahoo Buzz stories to their home page every day, resulting in huge traffic to the sites. Starting yesterday, the invitation requirement is gone, and anyone can submit their stories to Buzz.

Internet Fraud doesn’t Get the Attention

Phishing, Malware and Viruses costs consumers $7.1 billion in 2007. But its a concern of many that most internet fraud is not prosecuted by US government. Even though loss by internet fraud is increased by $2 billion from the previous year,U.S. federal and state law enforcement authorities are doing little to resolve what has become a multi-billion-dollar problem. Phishing is an attempt to steal your personal data in the form of fraudulent e-mail or website claiming to be legitimate seeking identifiable information.

Cuil.com New Search Engine

Cuil is a brand new search engine, its only one day old. Cuil (pronounced COOL) provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. Cuil claims that it goes beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page. The team behind Cuil has an extensive history in search. The company is led by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. Mr. Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM. Ms. Patterson was the architect of Google’s large search index. Cuil says it has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3 times more than any other search engine. Will Cuil be a threat to Google?

Reason For Teenage Obesity

Dr. Catherine Berkey and colleagues from Harvard Medical School,  Growing Up Today Study (GUTS), surveyed more than 5000 girls, 14 - 21 years from all 50 states, and  their weekly habits were recorded. The researchers found that more Internet time, more alcohol consumption, and less sleep resulted in extra weight gain. Girls who consumed 2 or more alcoholic beverages a week or slept less than 6 hours at night gained more weight.  Girls who use Internet in addition to alcohol and sleep gain 4 extra pounds a year. Researchers are encouraging adolescent girls to replace recreational Internet time with more sleep, and avoid alcoholic beverage consumption to lose their weight.

Identity Crisis Faced By The Facebook Generation

According to a warning given to the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, this generation who use internet for everything and who have never known a world unless they  surf on-line  are  growing up with a dangerous view of the world and their own identity. They are going through major identity crisis. People who born after 1990 have grown up in a world dominated by online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Many of these youngsters use Internet as the main medium to communicate. Their relationships are quickly disposed at the click of a mouse.  Because of the online social networking, people find the real world boring and unstimulating. Because of this online mess, youngsters are going through the stages of vulnerable to impulsive to suicide.

Chat room communication reduced sensory experience; person’s expression/body language/ voice/tone aren’t there; and this can shape one’s perceptions of the interaction differently. Online session  changes the perception to a dream-like state, and this unnatural blending of mind with the other person leads to entirely different meaning to friendships and relationships.
See Also:

• Stanford teaches Facebook psychology.
• Student faces Facebook consequences.

Facebook borrows money

Facebook’s explosive growth needs more cash. Facebook has borrowed $100 million recently from Calif.-based venture loan firm TriplePoint. The loan will help to buy approximately 50,000 more servers. In January this year Facebook elevated its projected revenue from $300 million to $350 million. In 2007 its revenue was $150 million. Facebook has approximately 70 million registered users.

China surpass US in internet usage.

China becomes the world’s largest Internet market by number of users surpassing the United States. An estimate by Beijing-based BDA based on data from China Internet Network Information Center indicates that the country’s Internet users totaled 210 million at end-2007.

Image based search engine : Otello

Vodafone Showcased its latest idea at CeBIT, an image based search engine. It’s the first image-based search engine that anyone who has a mobile phone with camera can use. Mobile phone users just snap a picture of anything and send it to service number as a MMS message, Otella check the database for information associated with the photo and deliver it to the mobile phone in seconds. The photos that are sent to the search engine don’t have to satisfy any high quality requirements.

Internet in the car

Called as “Connected Drive” BMW is going to offer fully, unrestricted, built-in access to the Internet in their vehicles. The new technology would use EDGE to connect to the Internet. A safety feature that BMW installed would only enable Internet connection when the car is parked. The BMW cars installed with this technology is only available in Europe at this time.

Google Users Older and Big Spenders

A recent Hitwise analysis revealed that Yahoo attracts more younger audience than Google. On the other hand Google draws older audience and they are most likely to have spent $500 or more online.