Advertising and marketing

Google is revisiting efforts to create a venture capital arm, according to a report on The Wall Street Journal site Wednesday night.

David Drummond, a Google senior vice president, is expected to lead the effort, according to those who were briefed on the discussions. The group has also hired William Maris, a 33-year-old who has worked as an investor and entrepreneur, to help set up the venture, the newspaper reported.

The search engine has played with the idea of a venture capital arm in the past, and the plans could still fall through.

If successful, the new venture would put … Read more

Remember TiVo's reporting of Janet Jackson at the 2004 Super Bowl, when thousands of people replayed her "wardrobe malfunction" over and over on their digital video recorder?

Years later, major advertisers are even more rapt about people's TiVo behavior, particularly as it pertains to the commercials they watch.

Starcom USA, a Chicago advertising agency with such clients as Walt Disney, Coke and Kraft, has teamed with TiVo to be the first to use its so-called PowerWatch Ratings Service, a Nielsen Ratings-like service that reports--based on input from a panel--which television shows and ads people fast-forward, watch, … Read more

Google wouldn't be Google without its ownership of the estimated $10.4 billion annual search advertising market. But other ad-technology hopefuls are still angling for ways to take a few million or billion dollars off the top for themselves--just like Microsoft and Yahoo.

One such start-up, New York-based Clickable, is trying to build a lucrative business by selling advertisers a simple software tool to manage and improve their search-marketing campaigns with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Because it can be tricky and time-consuming for advertisers to keep track of multiple search campaigns, Clickable lures them with a self-described iTunes-like application … Read more

Hollywood is starting to take note of a Silicon Valley start-up that claims to possess the answer to its Web-advertising woes: the trick, according to the company, is to take an opposite approach to DRM.

Managers at FreeWheel say one of the reasons TV networks and film studios are reluctant to syndicate their content widely on the Web is piracy. The other main reason is that it's hard to track, control, and manage their own ads when they're dispersed across dozens of sites.

FreeWheel says it has the answer, and some in the entertainment sector agree. About 15 … Read more

A week after the debut of The Dark Knight, Hollywood's big summer hit, the movie studios are taking aim at two small-potatoes Web sites that point people to pirated versions of first-run films such as the Batman thriller.

The Motion Picture Association of America on Tuesday said it has filed lawsuits against MovieRumor.com and Free Online Movie DataBase, or FOMDB, for violating studios' copyrights by providing links to pirated versions of their movies.

The suits, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleged that the sites are virtual clearinghouses for locating infringing copies of … Read more

A California assemblyman has urged the state's attorney general to investigate privacy implications of Yahoo's search-advertising deal with Google.

"I am writing to urge you to direct your office to take quick and decisive action by launching a formal investigation into the proposed business transaction between Google and Yahoo's search-advertising business," Joel Anderson, a Republican assemblyman from San Diego, said in the letter to California Attorney General Jerry Brown.

Attorneys general from Florida, Arkansas, and Connecticut are reviewing the Yahoo-Google ad deal. The Justice Department also is scrutinizing the partnership.

Specifically, Anderson said he's … Read more

The jump to Juniper Networks as CEO seems almost a no-brainer for Microsoft executive Kevin Johnson.

Johnson will not only be top dog at the networking company when he arrives September 8, but he's landing a $5 million signing bonus that'll be doled out over three years and an annual base salary of $800,000, according to Juniper's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

Johnson, who's leaving his post as Microsoft's online and Windows chief, will also land two stock option grants that total 1.6 million shares vesting over four years, … Read more

Yahoo dipped below $20 a share Tuesday morning, following a report in the San Francisco Chronicle that T. Boone Pickens dumped his entire stake of 10 million shares.

Shares of the Internet pioneer fell as low as $19.71 in morning trading, coming within a breath of the $19.18 that the stock closed at on the day before Microsoft announced its unsolicited buyout bid of $31 a share. Microsoft later bumped it up to $33 a share, which was rejected.

Pickens jumped into the stock in May, following an announcement by investor activist Carl Icahn that he would wage … Read more

Yahoo has updated its search results to include recent headlines more quickly.

"Because we're better able to detect when a query is about a breaking-news topic, we're able to deliver fresher results when it matters most," Paul Yiu of Yahoo search product management and Jean-Francois Crespo of Yahoo search research and development said in a Friday blog posting.

In addition, Yahoo can better place the news in the results page, balancing news with less time-sensitive results, Yahoo said.

Google also has made a strong effort to mix breaking news into its search results.