Online/Interactive

CNET has a good wrap-up of Google's press day product launches. More to come.

To add to Wednesday's post of the same name, Om Malik has some interesting data about the battle that is heating up for bundled services between cable and telecom companies.

Om Malik also reports on the quickly consolidating telecom landscape and the corresponding branding game being played. It seems now that AT&T-owned Cingular could soon change its name to, well, AT&T. Many questioned the name change from SBC to AT&T,…

After months of testing, and a very limited rollout to an invite-only list of small businesses, Microsoft's today announced the details of its adCenter SEM platform. The press release is here. AdCenter's selling points include better targeting options than Google's…

A Wall Street Journal article today is receiving a log of attention for its speculation that Microsoft could be interested in a sizable equity stake in Yahoo!. The combined forces would be meant to battle Google. Here is additional commentary…

Just as Comcast's first-quarter revenue growth (announced last week) was attributed to bundled service packages, this CNet article today points out that Time Warner Cable has experienced something similar. Quadruple-play offerings (voice, data, video and wireless) will become standard in…

A new personalized news site called Spotback launched yesterday that will customize news based on the aggregate tracking of an individual user's behavior. This will involve tracking how users manually customize their news and rate stories they have read. Techcrunch…

On the Heels of McClatchy's purchase of Knight Ridder (and subsequent sale of four of its papers to MediaNews Group), the publisher announced a partnership with WebVisible late last week at the AdTech conference in San Francisco. WebVisible's Geneva platform…

Another player has launched in the online real estate vertical. MyNewPlace deals with rentals only and specializes in apartment complexes where it can form relationships with a single point of contact that represents many units. This strategy has allowed it…

Yahoo! and AT&T have extended their current relationship (Yahoo! exclusive content and an optimized My Yahoo! portal are offered to AT&T broadband customers) to now also offer integrated voice services. The voice-enabled Yahoo! messenger will be offered free to AT&T…

Some news from the past couple of days:—It's official: McClatchy has found buyers for some of the big market papers it acquired with its recent purchase of Knight Ridder. MediaNews Group (Publisher of The Denver Post) and Hearst are the…

Washington Post Tech columnist Leslie Walker has an interesting piece today about search engine optimization. Worth a read.

We've written about the concept of inserting advertisements in video games here. The Washington Post has a piece today about the current state of the art.From the article: While most online advertising revenue comes from banner ads or sponsored links…

We wrote about online video start-up DaveTV in last year's White Paper "From Reach to Targeting: The Transfomation of Television in the Internet Age" (and here). Om Malik has a quick analysis of the company's contextualized ad strategy for video…

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Lots of interesting things have happened so far this week, mostly in the online video, social networking, and online news and classifieds spaces. Here is a quick recap:—Many of the monetization challenges that face MySpace (analyzed in yesterday's post) also…

It's official: The Washington Post's Express has launched its Web site, Readexpress.com. The site was already announced, but it is live for the first time today. Express is a free daily metro aimed at commuters and younger readers that has…

The New York Times has a good piece on the monetization challenges and opportunities faced by MySpace. Though the site is second only to Yahoo! in the traffic it receives, its revenues are less than one-twentieth of Yahoo!'s.From the article:In…

Here is a roundup of this week's notable happenings from around the local media world:—Job search engine Simply Hired raised $13.5 million in a third round of funding from Foundation Capital and Fox Interactive Media. It will use the funds…

The Google calendar product was launched about a week ago. Philipp Lenssen has posted a list of "interesting google calendars" with screen shots. It's worth the time to look at his list.