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Hitwise states that Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback rebate program is working in full flow and adding as a helping hand to live.com, keeping its search traffic’s momentum stable. The procedure of Live Search Cashback is such that it gives back users (a certain amount of) money every time they search for an item on live.com, and thereafter buy it from a registered or participating store.
The Live Search Cashback was just a tiny part of the traffic (3.75%) for live.com when it started in July, yet the latest news is that the number has almost doubled (6.29%) in a time-span of 3 months. The visitors consist more of females than men, and between the age of 25 and 45 years, with an income of under $100,000.
What appeared to be a dream lately has at last turned to reality with that latest update to the iPhone software. The update enables users to play with their apps in the full screen mode in both the iPod Touch and iPhone.
How is this going to help? Well think of your applications running free, without the Safari cage around them. Plus it also removes the nagging toolbar the user has to bear with every time an application is run. That doesn’t mean your apps get Safari independent, all the apps would still run in the Safari but without the obvious menus (a.k.a toolbar) draining the fun out of your app.
News about Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his colleague Justin Rosenstein calling its quits had been circling around as rumors. But Mark Zuckerberg confirmed it with his statement saying, Dustin had been a valuable asset for Facebook and he would always turn to him for advice.
There wasn’t much that could highlight the reason for the departure but a post by Rosenstein; who previously worked for Google put forward a few words in a note on Facebook. In it he has written a story about his life and the work he had been doing for long, but perhaps the most important thing were his plans with Dustin that eventually became the reason for their departure.
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Wizzard TV, the podcasting network has announced its partnership with Joost which is an ad supported video platform. According to the deal the prior will bring later a catalog of branded and independent video content. The deal will probably bring millions of worldwide users.
Google has been has growing concerns in relation to monetizing its major services that include YouTube and Image Search. While plans are up and running for YouTube, Google in order to go forth with its monetization plans has decided to come up with something for its Image Search as well.
Google’s Image Search had been missing out on around $200 million worth or yearly revenue for not including ads in the results obtained from search. Attempts had been made earlier with text results but it affected the traffic pretty much and the idea was eventually pulled down.
We had reported last month that eBay is serious about selling away StumbleUpon but it appears Deutsche Bank (the bank assigned to look for the correct deal) is having trouble finding a buyer. The reason being that eBay is bent upon selling StumbleUpon for not a penny less than $75 million; the same amount it had bought StumbleUpon last year.
There has been a decay in StumbleUpon’s traffic owing largely to the fact that most of the users make use of the toolbar and occasionally visit the site.
Facebook, which is one of the world’s most popular social networking sites, is about to set their international head quarters in Dublin, Ireland. The Irish capital already has the offices of internet companies such as Google, Amazon, eBay and Yahoo. The announcement was made yesterday by Mary Coughlan, the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment.
According to the social network, the Irish capital will be the hub of worldwide operations and will be providing technical, sales and operations support to users through out Europe, the Middle East and Africa. There is still no certainty about the number of jobs going to be created with this deal.
With the current financial crisis in the U.S., a number of businesses have been affected. Gawker Media has also smelled the danger and is taking some “necessary measures” before things go further wrong. Though the bail out plan has just been passed by the House, the market has reacted the other way and the shares have gone way down than anyone has expected. Gawker Media has announced that it will be laying off 19 of 133 editorial positions and also suspending the bonus payments at the start of next year. Further more 10 new people will be recruited on the commercially most successful sites.
According to the memo by Nick Denton 2009 will be exceptionally difficult. Will this decision make any difference? Well I think probably it is not going to make a huge difference but yes, cutting bonus payments will cause the employees to lose motivation and it will help them get demoralized. Following is the memo from Nick Denton:
Apple’s stock appeared to be crashing after rumors about Steve Job having a heart were published on CNN’s citizen journalism site namely iReport. The situation was taken in control as sources at Apple called upon Silicon Alley Insider and termed the reports to be false. However the time that lapsed was enough to dent Apple’s stock for the start given that Job’s health has been a major concern over quite a long time.
Perhaps it was an act to jeopardize Apple’s stock shares and such random rumors have been a part of web world and tech companies for more than a decade. Anonymous post makers across the web have been crowned the name of citizen journalists and such rumors springing up out of nowhere are quite common.
Things might have settles after a major slump in the stock market earlier last week but it appears that the Goliath of present economic crisis is out again sledging major tech company stocks further down. The companies that took the most severe hammering included Apple and of course Yahoo.
Developers who have got lines of applications working in the Facebook platform can now amalgamate the same into Friendster. This follows the growing trend of support for applications across different platforms and Friendster support for integrating both the Facebook and OpenSocial code.
David Jones, VP of global marketing for Friendster said in his release:
With Yahoo eyeing everything to redeem its lost glory in any way, be it acquiring AOL for boosting traffic, dealing with Google or even having it in some distant corners of their mind to look upon a deal with Microsoft; the saga has gone far enough to dent Yahoo’s stock and eventual chopping away of employees. Things as observed aren’t really going yahoo enough for Yahoo and recent reports strike a hammer at rumors.
The optimistic Jerry appears to have finally started thinking that the world we live in is far to real and that reality doesn’t have much room the optimism (especially the likes of Jerry) and the co-founder has decided to make employee cut outs a reality.
After launching the first Android based T-Mobile G1, Google has easy search to the phone that predicts what you might be looking for with search suggestions. The idea is to make Search an integrated, easy to use and platform-wide feature.
It definitely makes search easier, especially given the much difficult and small interface like a hand phone to perform one search task. And that to coming for a wide variety of applications with a possibility of performing search within different applications sounds pretty useful. Andy Stadler, an engineer in the Android Team writes in his blog post:
The much talked about idea of SlingMedia to launch a video portal had been in talks for ages but it appears that the team has finally decided to kill suspense and put out with its video portal. Though it’s still in private beta and available for those with invites. The news was put forward by TechCrunch and it appears that the service may hopefully be out in sometime (let’s hope the private doesn’t last for months before becoming public).
Readers were informed about the beta service out for tests via an email from Sling Media that told them of how users can get an invite and access the service. The testing is only available in the U.S, meaning that beta is still a far dream for those outside the US frontiers.
Looks like Google India has got something more for Googlers in India with its offering of a new product called, Google SMS Channels. The service lets you subscribe and receive updates about news, blogs, jokes sports etc via text messages.
The service is available in India and users can directly subscribe to the service via SMS. The service being free for both users and content publishers and given the growing trend of the population pacing towards the mobile culture, the service has a definite boost required for success. Users can create groups here and stay in touch with friends via text messages without paying a dime.
It appears that Google has finally decided to bring forth a change in its Blog Search site with a new homepage the style of which is somewhat resembles Google News. All its does is display the millions of blogs similar to the way news is displayed at Google News, with division of blogs into categories, including politics, technology, etc. All related posts are then grouped into each category respectively.
The functionality is quite similar to the Google News and the technology news aggregator Techmeme and unlike Google News, Blog Search pulls news and stories from various blogs namely, Epicentre, ZDNEt, etc. But it isn’t quite congested and there are news from various news sources like those from reports at the New York Times,. LAT etc
Gigya a tool to power sharing of content and socializing across the web at the same time giving publishers and marketers a chance to reach wider audience and engagement online. The company provides APIs provide simple access to over 50 web platforms and reaching over 150 million people each month.
Gigya has raised $11 million in series C round of funding that was led by DAG Ventures. Despite the current economic crisis, the current raise is set to keep up the rising demand and to push forward two new widgets: The Wildfire (a widget to assist widget makers with distribution) and Socialize; a tool that brings social features to any website.
Planet Cazmo, an online site that provides a virtual world for kids/teens through out the world has integrated AllPosters‘ ad content. The later provides posters and other art prints. With the current deal, players of Planet Cazmo will be able to access a number of AllPosters poster images in order to give their virtual rooms a better look.
Following is the press release of the deal:
There has a been a lot of cry and hue for quite sometime over actions been taken by the anti piracy group to have ISPs take an action against customers involved in downloading content that violates copyright laws. Many ISPs have put this down stating that they can’t control what the customers download and what not, while many more have simply warned their customers about the request they have at their hands.
Of all these Cox Communications has taken a jump and really heeded the warning well by pulling down their customer’s connections, who are part of copyrights violation.
Clearspring, a leading provider of widget creation, distribution, tracking and monetization services that extends its services to the leading media companies, advertisers and widget developers has acquired AddThis. AddThis is the leading bookmarking and sharing button on the web making it easier for users to bookmark share content across the web easily. With a monthly display of its button reaching 20 billion and partnerships with leading websites, including Oracle, Freewebs, etc, AddThis is the right thing to acquire for Clearspring.
The reason for this acquisition is obvious; generating more traffic and have its hands at more tools to offer publishers.
