Online/Interactive

As Charlene Li points out about Google Pack in her recent post—and this similarly struck me when when I downloaded it—Google and Yahoo! are developing direct channels onto the desktop in a way that, really, only Microsoft has done before.…

Thanks to PaidContent for pointing us to a TheDeal.com story (reg. req'd) about bidders for Knight Ridder. Potential suitors include: Thomas H. Lee Partners, Bain Capital, Texas Pacific Group and Hellman & Friedman Blackstone Group, Providence Equity Partners and Kohlberg…

Google, again pushing beyond the browser, announced (per a story in MediaPost per Forbes) that it would be working with Volkswagen to develop an automotive nagivation system based on Google Earth: VOLKSWAGEN AG AND GOOGLE HAVE entered into a deal…

Today Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) announced a major deal to be the platform for MediaNews Group, which publishes 50 dailies and 121 other publications in 12 states (with combined daily and Sunday circulation of 2.1 million and 2.4 million,…

MIVA, formed from the combination of FindWhat and ESpotting, was the first network to adopt PPCall and is a marquee player abroad, but it has stuggled in the U.S. of late. The company has now apparently retained Deutsche Bank to…

This came out today. Here's what they had to say about it in Mountain View at "the plex." Today is the 10th day of January and I'm counting four product announcements (or their equivalents) so far—ahead of last year's pace.

SEW reports that IAC/InterActiveCorp has launched a comparison shopping service called Pronto. Check it out and let us know what you think. We'll do the same. More on this later.

According to The Wall Street Journal (sub. req'd), Yahoo! will be testing free Wi-Fi at two Starwood-owned hotels: Seeking new ways to distinguish their respective brands, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Yahoo Inc. said they will begin a…

PaidContent has an exclusive interview with Marco Boerries, SVP-Connected Life, Yahoo!. With the recent media storm over content and online video (stepped up even further by last week's CES conference and this week's Macworld expo), an important question is: When…

It seems like everyone and his second cousin has an online advertising forecast these days. We're working on ours, expanding it to include more categories this year. But here's a nice write-up by Chris Sherman of the recent SEMPO survey…

Here's a piece on a Wi-Fi "cell" phone, introduced at CES, that can split calls between cell and Wi-Fi networks. This comes on the heels of the new Skype-Netgear Wi-Fi phone . The article talking about UTStarcom's new GF200 (discussed…

Kudos to SiliconBeat for unearthing TurnHere.com, which is posting local videos from all over the U.S.—watch a couple of them and you'll immediately see the local biz advertising and travel implications. Here's what the site says: TurnHere.com, a new Internet…

It's already clear that this will be a BIG year for broadband video and offline "on-demand" cable and, maybe, telco IPTV. The fierce competition among Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL in the online ad/search world is spilling over into the…

YellowPages.com announced today it has entered a distribution agreement with Yahoo! that covers both Yahoo! Yellow Pages and Yahoo! Local. You can read the press release here. We will cover the deal in more detail in next week's Local Media…

Motorola has announced that it will integrate Google and Yahoo! into handsets ("button on the phone's keypad" ). A big deal—Motorola is the world's second-largest handset maker—this will raise user awareness of mobile search (and especially Mo-Lo) and is more…

The New York Times (free reg. req'd) has more detail about the expected announcements from Terry Semel and Larry Page today. Semel's keynote is going on right now, and Page's is later today. We'll follow up with recap and analysis…

This WSJ article (sub. req'd) details plans (and negotiations) to charge fees of content providers for priority high-speed delivery of broadband content: Large phone companies, setting the stage for a big battle ahead, hope to start charging Google Inc., Vonage…

Speculation that Google will move more aggressively into the jobs vertical.

SiliconBeat directs us to a post by Robert X. Cringely about the value and strategic potential of Google serving ads on TV (contextual targeting). At a high level, it's consistent with this report. On a related note, I took a…

... for November are here. Here are the highlights: Google Sites —39.8% Yahoo! Sites— 29.5% MSN-Microsoft Sites —14.2% Time Warner Network— 8.7% Ask Jeeves —6.5% According to comScore, Google and Ask.com were the only gainers. Also: Americans conducted 5.15 billion…