Industry News

Microsoft Makes Bid on Norwegian Search Software Company

by Joshua Hay January 9, 2008 Industry News

The New York Times reports that, earlier this week, Microsoft made a $1.2 Billion bid for Fast Search and Transfer, a search software company based in Oslo Norway. The company is not a competitor in the consumer search market at present, but rather they are specialist in the search technology used inside companies and government [...]

Wikipedia in For Competition From Google

by Joshua Hay December 18, 2007 Industry News

It’s rare these days to run a research-related search query on Google and not find the first one or two results to be related or exact Wikipedia pages on the topic. This is because Wikipedia is theoretically exactly what Google loves – the site is enormous (try over 26 million pages indexed as an estimate), [...]

Facebook Sues Dodgy Porno Company

by Joshua Hay December 18, 2007 Industry News

Amongst a swarm of articles regarding the privacy issues of social networking sites and new advertising models, 17 people, as well as a Canadian company that owns a portfolio of adult sites are being sued by Facebook for attempting to mine user-details off members profiles on the popular social networking site. The claim is that [...]

LinkedIn Updates and Opens to Developers

by Joshua Hay December 13, 2007 Industry News

InfoWorld reported on Monday that social networking site for professionals, LinkedIn, has announced that it will open its doors for developers to build applications for the site to help make it more interactive. Along with this update they have also released a beta version of a redesigned home page, as well as signing a deal [...]

YouTube Expands Its Partner Program

by Special Guest December 12, 2007 Industry News

As posted on The Hollywood Reporter Google’s YouTube has announced that it is expanding its Partners Program, a project first launched in May that lets users who upload videos to the site share in revenue created from their content. The service, that monetises videos through semi-transparent overlay ads and banner ads, was invite only for [...]

MySpace “Transmissions” will sell Exclusive Music Performances

by Joshua Hay December 5, 2007 Industry News

New York Times reports that MySpace, in a program dubbed “Transmissions”, is inviting musicians to choose a studio and select the songs they want to perform and will then show and sell videos of the performance to its user base of upwards of 200 million accounts as at September 7, 2007, (how many of which [...]

Six Apart Sells LiveJournal to Russian Media Firm

by Joshua Hay December 5, 2007 Industry News

As seen on Yahoo! News, Moscow-based media firm SUP announced Monday it has bought blog hosting firm LiveJournal, from its parent company Six Apart, as part of a plan to cultivate an international community of people that author such online diaries.

LG Launches “Cool” Aircon Micro Site in Time for Summer

by Joshua Hay December 3, 2007 Industry News

Smarthouse News reports that LG has launched a new interactive website on Saturday to coincide with the beginning of summer, complete with a virtual household tour, designed to make choosing an air conditioner for summer that much easier. The website at www.lge.com.au/airconditioning, which doesn’t yet offer any information about individual products and their specifications includes [...]

No Surprises from US Ad Spending Trends

by Gary Ng December 3, 2007 Industry News

Adweek reports today that, according to data from Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the top ten advertisers in the United States spent nearly US$700 million less on TV time alone and US$180 million more on digital media during the first three quarters of this year – holding back nearly US$670 million from the media marketplace, which is a [...]

New Themes for iGoogle

by Irene Lee December 3, 2007 Industry News

Those of you who use iGoogle now have five additional theme choices to personalise your home pages. These include: the solar system, showing a new scene for each day of the week; the Hong Kong skyline (it changes in light and texture based on time of day); a family of raccoons playing in a leaf [...]