Online/Interactive

I'm late writing about this but before SES I was in New York as a panelist in Yahoo!'s first Search Light Award event. It brought together four finalist ad agencies to show how they'd integrated search marketing into their broader…

Google has apparently agreed to pay the equivialent of $90 million (yikes!) to settle a click fraud class action. Here's the AP story. According to third-party data compiled by eMarketer, SEMPO found that "the percentage of advertisers who say that…

Yesterday, Cingular (soon to become AT&T wireless, again), the largest U.S. wireless carrier, announced it would launch a new video service for a couple of new phones. For a flat fee of $20 per month consumers can access clips from…

Some have speculated that AT&T in its new, hypothetical post-acquisition position as the nation's dominant broadband provider might be tempted to pursue fees from companies (e.g., Google, Vonage, etc.) that use lots of "bandwidth." This is the essence of the…

SiliconBeat writes about a new wiki platform for the masses, Wetpaint. They're still ahead of the mainstream consumer marketplace, but community and online collaboration tools continue to gain momentum. And because we couldn't resist this issue (again), we've just added…

AOL's MapQuest announced a new OpenAPI and a contest to create the best mashup using it: As part of the OpenAPI launch, MapQuest also announced a Developers Challenge, in which Web developers can compete to build the most creative mashup…

Bob Tedeschi's New York Times "e-commerce report" column (reg. req'd) yesterday highlighted the personalized shopping potential of RSS. We first wrote about the mainstream importance and potential of RSS and alerts as a shopping tool last year: Paid search has…

Classifieds aggregator Oodle has launched a partner network and API for syndication of its listings. The first two members are Lycos and Backpage.com, a group of community classified sites operated by local media, including weekly newspapers, radio and TV stations…

Microsoft is busy rolling out a flurry of search-related upgrades. A dizzying array of tools and features are coming via Live.com and Live Labs/Ideas. Also the company bought Onfolio and is going to integrate the functionality into a toolbar and…

I have seen the future of online shopping and it's ShopLocal. OK, so maybe that statement is somewhat overblown, but it's essentially true. Newspaper-owned ShopLocal just relaunched with a new and improved design and interface. The site offers both online…

Just the latest in what appears to be increasing M&A activity, NBC Universal announced that it is buying iVillage (soon to be Women.com) for $600 million. That marks three deals in four days: Fox Interactive Media on Friday, AT&T on…

A couple of sites are reporting on the beta launch of Ingenio's Ether. It's essentially a billing and payments infrastructure with scheduling and phone number provisioning. It allows anyone who sells advice/expertise to do so remotely over the phone using…

And away we go ... In the most recent installment of their ongoing small business research, Wells Fargo and Gallup found (no surprises here) that small businesses preferred free word-of-mouth referrals and rated them more effective than paid advertising. (This…

From Techcrunch ... FIM CEO Ross Levinsohn announces he's bought one of the companies on the list (scroll) and may buy more. More M&A to come ... The company was NewRoo (a personalized news aggregation site). SiliconBeat has more.

There continues to be business activity in the embryonic field of video game advertising. As we've reported in the past here and here, this could be an interesting area to watch because of the repeated exposure that ads could receive,…

Despite the perceived success of MySpace, there are skeptics of social networking business models. BusinessWeek brings up the possibility that we're in a social networking bubble that is reaching saturation while ad models remain somewhat shaky.From the article: For many…

An addendum to the previous post: If the social networking space is indeed saturated, it just got a little more so. Viacom has announced it could launch what seems like a "me too" social network this year that will target…

PaidContent has an interesting interview with Jim Voelker, CEO of InfoSpace. It covers among other things the company's merging of its search and directory and mobile divisions. Read it here and listen to it here.

Broadband numbers were up in 2005, according to Leichtman Research Group, and reported by Om Malik. We'll get into this further in an upcoming advisory on triple- and quad-play offerings of cable and telecom providers. We'll also hold a related…

Search Engine Journal reports on a new product from Local.com that is basically a branded search engine that publishers can plant on their sites. This eliminates the need for publishers to invest in the development of search functionality on their…