ie8 fix

Advertising and marketing

Hollywood takes a FreeWheel-ing approach to ads

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

Click here for first-run movies, MPAA lawsuits

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

Calif. AG urged to probe Yahoo-Google ad deal

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

As Juniper CEO, Kevin Johnson to get $5 million signing bonus

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

T. Boone Pickens dumps Yahoo stake

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

Breaking news freshens Yahoo search results

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.

Google reveals scope of Web-crawling task

It's a pity the National Security Agency can't talk about its computational challenges, because it's leaving a lot of the boasting rights to Google.

In a blog posting on Friday the company shared some detail about the challenges of one aspect of its search operation, the Web indexing and processing that must take place before the results are delivered to users. The short version: Google has no choice but to think big.

First comes surfing. "We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow … Read more

Users can automatically encrypt Gmail connection

Update 12:35 p.m. PDT: I clarified this post to reflect the fact that this involves encryption only between a user's browser and Gmail's servers.

Gmail now can be set to encrypt communications between a browser and Google's servers by default, an option that makes the e-mail service harder to snoop on but also potentially slower.

Users already could encrypt communications with Gmail servers (by going to https://mail.google.com), but on Thursday, the company added an option to use that encrypted connection automatically.

"Your computer has to do extra work to decrypt all … Read more

AOL to sell Xdrive, close photo and mobile sites

AOL is scrapping some online destinations but will push others harder in an attempt to improve its finances, according to internal memos.

Among those products to be shuttered are Bluestring, a site to share videos, music, and photos; Xdrive, a general-purpose online storage service; and AOL Pictures, where people could store and share photos, according to a July 14 memo from Kevin Conroy, AOL's executive vice president of products and marketing. The memo was published Thursday by TechCrunch.

"These consumer storage products haven't gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the … Read more

Microsoft to power Facebook search ads

Updated at 12:30 p.m. PDT with more details on the search deal.

In the coming months, Facebook will begin powering its Web search and related sponsored text links with Microsoft's technology, in an expansion of a strategic relationship between the two companies.

Microsoft's search unit head Satya Nadella said Thursday that Microsoft will deliver an API (application programming interface) that Facebook can use to integrate both Microsoft's Web search and its paid search results into the social network's U.S. site. Facebook currently uses a homegrown search engine for its social network, and it … Read more