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An advertising industry association--backed by four of the world's largest ad agencies--sent a letter to the Department of Justice Monday endorsing the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, saying it "enhances competition."

American Association of Advertising Agencies President and CEO Nancy Hill posted the open letter Monday, which was also signed by Maurice Levy, chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe; Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP; Michael I. Roth, chairman and CEO of Interpublic Group of Companies; and John Wren, president and CEO of Omnicom Group. "We believe that Yahoo and Microsoft's proposal to combine their technologies and search … Read more

Vevo, the online music-video jukebox, now counts an Arab media conglomerate among its backers.

Abu Dhabi Media Company, backed by the people from the United Arab Emirates, has made an undisclosed investment into Vevo, the companies announced Monday.

Universal Music Group, the largest record label, founded Vevo earlier this year. Sony Music Entertainment, second in size behind Universal, has since joined the venture. YouTube is providing technology support for the video service, which is scheduled to launch later this year.

According to previous press reports, Abu Dhabi Media Company was created by the oil-rich government of Abu Dhabi in 2007 … Read more

Stardust is sprinkled all over music service Spotify.

In recent months, users, reviewers, and even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have heaped praise on the European service, which has yet to launch in the United States. But while Spotify may be a nifty service, it may also be a textbook example of how popularity doesn't mean profits.

CEO Daniel Ek appeared to acknowledge that his company has a long way to go before hitting profitability in a candid note he posted to the site on Thursday. Writing on the anniversary of the site's launch, Ek signaled that the service … Read more

Every year, the major record companies produce more miserable-sounding recordings. I'm not surprised by this. The labels know most folks listen to music with iTunes or streaming audio, and sound quality is a low priority for most music listeners. My weekend poll is ample proof of that.

Lyor Cohen, CEO of recorded music for the Warner Music Group, cares about sound, at least at home. He admitted, in so many words, to being an audiophile on the pages of the September 20 New York Times Sunday magazine. The media has been alerted! It's like learning that a fast-food bigwig is a wine snob.

Cohen was Run-DMC's road manager in the 1980s, and he now works with Jay-Z, Madonna, and the Beastie Boys. In the article, Cohen said his hi-fi is his "favorite possession." The Clearaudio turntable pictured in the article is a very high-end German model that "won a gold medal at a consumer technology convention a few years ago." … Read more

Red Hat is generally credited as the industry's leading open-source company, but it's a distinction that is as meaningless as it is incorrect. While Red Hat's revenue directly derives from the open-source software it develops and distributes, other companies like Sun, IBM, and Google actually write and contribute far more open-source code. It may be time to stop talking about open-source companies and get back to the importance of open-source code.

Open source is increasingly the foundation upon which software and Web companies depend. MySpace made waves on Tuesday by open sourcing Qizmt, a distributed computation framework (… Read more

Editors' note: A bold claim this week by General Motors, that its forthcoming Chevy Volt electric car would get 230 miles per gallon, prompted us to do some musing on a possible historical precedent.

For Release the 11th of August, AD 1909

Durant "Chevrolet" Expects 230 mpb in Town Jaunts

WARREN, Mich. - William Durant, chairman of the General Motors Company, announced to-day that his new "Chevrolet" gasoline automobile, named after famed racing-car driver Louis Chevrolet, will boast almost six times the fuel efficiency of a comparable horse-drawn carriage.

Durant attributed this remarkable figure to a … Read more

Hosting company GoGrid suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack Monday afternoon that affected approximately half of its thousands of customers, co-founder David Hecht said on Tuesday.

The DDoS attack hit Monday afternoon, slowing customers' Web sites, creating latency issues, and making clients' Web sites inaccessible, Hecht said.

Although GoGrid was able to stabilize the situation by late Monday afternoon, getting most of its customers' sites back online, the company faced a decision whether to stay on course with a scheduled maintenance later that night or reschedule for another date.

The maintenance, which required GoGrid to take its portal down and troubleshoot … Read more

Oracle on Monday announced plans to acquire Relsys, which develops drug safety and risk management applications.

The acquisition, which is expected to close by June, is designed to bolster Oracle's Health Sciences Global Business Unit, formed last summer. Health sciences is one of a number of industry sectors into which Oracle is delving via a buying spree.

Relsys develops applications designed to aid drug, biotech, and medical-device companies in streamlining their operations, adhering to regulatory compliance and improving the safety of their products.

With the acquisition, Oracle aims to provide its customers with the ability to identify safety risks … Read more

The vertical takeoff and landing tiltrotor is yet another aerial configuration the military would like to add to its unmanned-aircraft inventory.

One experimental model, the Mono Tiltrotor (MTR) by Baldwin Technology, is intended to integrate a coaxial rotor, a folding lifting wing system with a lightweight airframe and sophisticated kinematics to deliver a robotic flying box car. The U.S. Navy wants the MTR, or something similar, to deliver cargo to Marines on the ground.

The unit, referred to generically as Cargo UAS (for Cargo Unmanned Aircraft System), should be autonomous, to the extent that it can take off and … Read more