aol

This week: there's plenty to see as we talk about getting hands-on with the latest MacBook Air laptops and Mac Mini desktop. Following a quick tutorial on fixing some of the gestural quirks in OS X Lion, the gang gets quizzed on the most popular Web sites of 1996 and wins a few prizes for the chatroom audience (reminder: hop into the live chatroom every week for a chance to win rare video game promo items and other cool stuff).

Bonus: Download the show's jaunty theme song as a free MP3 here.

… Read more

Yet another management shuffle at AOL, which has been doing this consistently since CEO Tim Armstrong arrived from Google two years ago. The newest headline: sales chief Jeff Levick, one of Armstrong's key initial hires, is out, replaced by his former deputy Ned Brody.

Other departures include two recent hires: Lauren Hurvitz, brought on last fall to run PR; and HR head Kathy Andreasen, who joined at the same time.

Unlike the last round of body-moving at AOL, this one doesn't seem to be prompted by the company's acquisition of Huffington Post; unless I'm missing something … Read more

Hulu has hired investment banks to oversee a sale of the streaming-video service, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The news comes a day after someone leaked word that Hulu had received a buyout offer. Later, it was reported that Yahoo was the company that had expressed interest. And now comes another report from Variety that Hulu has renewed its content licensing deal with Fox Broadcasting. Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns a share of Hulu, along with Disney and NBC Universal.

All these stories hitting at one time (head scratch), what are the odds?

Well, the … Read more

Though Google remains firmly on top of the search engine market, it's shed market share to Microsoft over the past year, according to data released last week by research firm Compete.

Looking at the overall search engine market from May 2010 to May 2011, Compete found that Google has lost close to 16 percent of its share, dropping to 63.6 percent from 73.9 percent. At the same time, Microsoft grew its share by 75 percent, jumping to 17 percent from 9.7 percent.

The other three search engines tracked--Yahoo, Ask, and AOL--grew only slighty over the past … Read more

AOL saw its profits for the first quarter nosedive by 86 percent as the company struggled to swallow the costs of buying the Huffington Post.

For the quarter ended March 31, the online service watched its profits fall to $4.7 million from $34.7 million in the year-ago quarter. Revenue also fell, reaching $551.4 million, a 17 percent drop from $664.3 million a year ago.

AOL closed its $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post in March, integrating the media Web site with its AOL Media and AOL Local units. Buying the Huffington Post as well as … Read more

Microsoft and Google each grabbed a tiny sliver more of the U.S. search market last month, according to ComScore.

Both companies gained three-tenths of a point of market share in March, compared with February.

Overall, Google sites accounted for 65.7 percent of the 16.9 billion searches in the U.S. last month, ComScore said yesterday. Microsoft sites snagged 13.9 percent, while Yahoo sites held 15.7 percent. As always, ComScore's figures specifically track "explicit core" searches, which are search terms that people manually enter on a Web page.

Beyond the core search numbers, … Read more

More people viewed video ads at Hulu than at any other Web site last month, according to stats released yesterday by ComScore.

Out of the 4.3 billion video ads that U.S. Internet users watched in March, 1.2 billion of those were at Hulu, making it the top site for video ad impressions for the month. Video network Tremor Media was next on the list with 804.3 million ad views, followed by video marketplace Adap.tv with 553 million video ad impressions, and BrightRoll Video Network with 398 million.

Internet users spent a total of 1.9 … Read more

Two years ago Cisco bought a little video camera maker. Today it's letting it go, sniff sniff. Also lots of legal laffs today: The Winklevii refuse to give up; Microsoft calls out Google on Federal approval of Google Apps; and a blogger hits HuffPo with class-action suit. Plus, future Macbooks to be made from bicycles?

A political activist and longtime blogger for The Huffington Post filed suit Tuesday against the digital publication, its founders Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, and its new parent company AOL, citing its use of unpaid blogger talent. The plaintiff, Jonathan Tasini, is seeking class-action status; he filed on behalf of a "putative class" of the estimated 9,000 people who have been published on The Huffington Post without compensation.

"Arianna Huffington is pursuing the Wal-Martization of creative content and a Third World class of creative people," Tasini said in a press release. "Actually, that is … Read more