Webware

Google updated AdSense this week, adding desktop-style ad support for high-end smartphones like the iPhone 3GS. The change led to Google's insertion of advertisements, alongside search results, into the iPhone Maps application.

Local iPhone map searches now display sponsored listings in the view and list modes of the Maps app.

We discovered examples of these ads on Monday, while searching for a Verizon Wireless store. We should also note that this is the first time ads have appeared within one of the iPhone's default apps, rather than in something we've downloaded for free or purchased from the App Store. Our search for "Verizon" resulted in the following list view:

Maps app search--"Verizon"

Tapping the white arrow in the top blue circle brought us to the "Sponsored Link" screen, which contained some additional information about the business under its name emphasized in italics, such as phone number, Web address, and physical address. In addition, there are options to get directions to or from the business, add it to one's contacts, share it with others, or bookmark it.

Sponsored Link results page.

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The march of the ads from the PC to the smartphone took another step Monday with the launch of Google AdSense for high-end phones.

Web publishers can now design AdSense ads--groups of Google AdWords text ads displayed by third-party publishers on their Web sites--with the HTML browsers used by smartphones in mind, Google announced Monday in a blog post. Advertisers had been able to run smaller mobile ads that older mobile phone browsers could handle, but they'll now have an option of showing a more sophisticated ad on a more sophisticated browser like those used by the iPhone, the Palm Pre, and Android phones.

One of the more interesting stories for Google over the next several years will be whether it can replicate its dominant position in PC-based search and search advertising onto the mobile device. Any way you slice it, smart mobile devices are expected to grow at dizzying rates over the next several years and have already evolved to the point where they pack substantial computing power.

As people spend more and more time online with those smaller screens, there will be an opportunity for advertisers and Google to make some money. Google also offers its advertising partners the chance to display AdWords ads on mobile search or AdSense ads in mobile applications for the iPhone and Android devices.

Android and iPhone developers looking for an extra source of revenue will soon have an advertising option, sponsored by Google.

Google's AdSense program--in which it sells and distributes ads to third-party publishers--is coming to mobile devices as a beta program, the company announced Wednesday. A small group of developers have been testing this program but now anyone can apply, said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management, in a blog post.

Mobile apps are one of the hottest topics in software development these days, as Apple's App Store continues to grow and other developers roll out their own app stores in response. Plenty of money is being made simply on the sales of the applications themselves, but additional revenue streams are starting to emerge, such as Apple's addition of in-app purchases with the release of iPhone OS 3.0.

Google, naturally, would like to get in on the action. There are other companies offering this kind of service, such as AdMob's strong presence in iPhone apps, but Google is an advertising freight train.

Still, AdSense growth has slowed this year amid a plunge in advertising spending around the world, and moving into mobile provides additional room for the company to grow. Last year Google offered AdSense for games, another step outside its usual comfort zone.

There are a few catches if you want to participate in the beta. Your application must generate 100,000 page views a day, and it must be free. Google is taking applications here.

People are constantly registering new Internet domains, and Google is trying to ensure a good chance its online services show up on the pristine Web real estate.

The company on Wednesday announced a collection called Google Services for Websites that people can put on their brand-new Internet domains even if they don't have lots of technical expertise.

The services let Web site operators add Google ads and two Google search tools, Site Search and Custom Search, using a control panel that Web-hosting companies can offer. The ads come through AdSense, which scans text on the Web site and presents what Google's algorithms determine to be the most relevant advertising, with the site operator and Google sharing any resulting revenue when people click on the ads.

It's smart for Google to try to hook impressionable new customers on its services as they arrive on the Net. And the company is offering incentives to Web hosting companies to offer the services beyond just the idea of helping customers do something useful with their site.

"Web hosters who participate can enroll in the Google Affiliate program which allows them to get referral fees for every customer who creates Google Site Search," said Nitin Mangtani and Dave Kim of Google's enterprise search team in a blog entry.

Google announced Friday that AdSense users will now be able to change the font face of the text in its ad units. According to the company's AdSense engineers, users will be able to choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana in their ads, but they will only be applied to units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters.

To customize the ad units, AdSense users will need to visit the "Ad Display Preference" section in their Account settings and select the custom font they want to use for their ad. Once they pick that font, they can update their account and all of their ads will immediately change, as soon as the updated code is copied to their site.

Online app developer Zugara announced Thursday that it has released a new Twitter app called "Free Twitter Designer," which allows users to create "professional-looking" background images for their Twitter profile. The new app is available now for free on the company's site.

Popular rock band U2 launched its new album on MySpace Music Friday. The album, "No Lone On the Horizon," will be available exclusively on the band's MySpace profile page until March 3, at which time it will be released on iTunes and CD. The songs can only be streamed and they cannot be purchased through MySpace Music's download partner, Amazon. I can't help but wonder if this is a response to Thursday's report suggesting the album has cropped up on numerous P2P sites around the Web.

The OpenID Foundation, an organization that attempts to promote and enable OpenID technologies across the Web, has hired a new executive director. According to the organization, Don Thibeau, who was an independent consultant prior to his new role, has taken the reins.

ProPay, a provider of merchant payment solutions and PayPal competitor, announced Friday that it has launched ProtectPay, an encrypted payment card processing and transmission service that it hopes will provide an "end-to-end secure option for processing credit card payments in real time." The tool is available now on all ProPay accounts.

Anyone with an unused, parked site can now make some cash by using Google's new AdSense for Domains, the company said Friday.

"AdSense for domains allows publishers with undeveloped domains to help users by providing relevant information including ads, links and search results," Google said.

The company is opening AdSense for Domains up to "English-language AdSense publishers located in North America" first, but it will eventually expand the service to other regions. When that happens, the new program will also support other languages.

Credit card giant Visa said Friday it has launched its Visa Mobile Application, which has become the first financial app for Android-based mobile phones. According to the company, the app alerts users to account activity and provides them with special offers from merchants. Once received, those offers will work with the Android phone's GPS functionality to map where those offers can be redeemed. The app is available now in the Android App Store.

According to a survey conducted by research firm eROI, which asked 283 high school and college students about their online lives, 25 percent of respondents claim they signed up for their first e-mail address so they could shop online. A whopping 81 percent of respondents said they got their first e-mail address to communicate with family, and 52 percent said they did it to chat with friends. eROI also asked the students which e-mail service they preferred. Google won with 32 percent saying they use Gmail. Yahoo took the second spot with 19 percent adoption, followed closely by Microsoft's MSN with 18 percent.

ReadWriteWeb is reporting that Google has removed a slew of sections from its Chrome browser's end user license agreement. According to the report, the new agreement has removed Chrome's age restriction policy and its requirement for personal information. It also no longer bans automated access. Google has yet to comment on the changes.

If Google's entry into a field of advertising doesn't legitimize it, nothing can. And that's why the in-game advertising industry just got a huge shot in the arm.

On Tuesday night, Google announced the beta launch of its new AdSense for Games program, the search giant's first foray into the video games market, and the long-awaited answer to the question of what the company planned to do with AdScape Media, which it bought for $23 million in February 2007.

According to Christian Oestlien, the senior product manager for AdSense for Games, the program's beta launch will focus on the placement of a variety of forms of ads in Flash-based casual games and some larger titles.

In the beginning at least, Oestlien said, Google will work with partners like PlayFish, Mochi Media, Demand Media and Konami.

The latter, Oestlien said, would use AdSense for Games to place ads in well-known titles like Frogger and Dance Dance Revolution.

And among the initial advertisers participating in the program are eSurance, Sprint, and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Of course, the in-game advertising field already has several well-established players, including Microsoft's Massive, DoubleFusion, and IGA.

"By (Google) finally launching in the space," said DoubleFusion CEO Jonathan Epstein, "it confirms for all parties...that this space is of interest to one of the largest media companies in the world. Google does not enter into markets that don't have billion dollar-plus potential for them."

To Epstein, having Google plant its flag in the in-game ads space shows everyone that games cannot be taken lightly as an ad platform, no matter what other choices advertisers have for their dollars.

"The battleground here is not between ourselves and Massive and Google," Epstein said. "It's getting games their rightful share of the ad dollars, as opposed to TV, print, and (traditional) online ads."

For its part, Google is well aware that it will have several significant competitors, but still thinks it can set itself apart.

According to Oestlien, Google intends to do so by leveraging its network of thousands of advertiser partners, as well as its proven experience helping those partners with the placement of effective print, image- and Flash-based creative ads.

Google's long-term play
Given that Google announced its AdScape buy more than a year ago, Google's move is by no means a surprise. Some see that it's only natural that the company seeks to repeat the success it has had with AdSense in as many new environments as possible.

And some think that while Google may have its work cut out for it in the games space in the short-term, the AdSense for Games move is really part of a long-term play involving several different media.

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Google has taken its popular Google Trends and launched a spin-off product called Google Insights for Search. Geared toward advertisers, it's a tool to track a particular search term's popularity across the Web and geographic regions of the world.

For Google, this can help boost advertiser confidence and potentially win its program some new converts who would've otherwise been skeptical regarding how effectively they could target an online ad campaign.

With Google Insights for Search, you can search for a term to track how much it's been googled over time, where on a "heat map" it's most popular, and what the top "related" and "rising" searches for the term are.

Results can also be filtered by geographic region, time frame, or category. Let's say you search for "spears," and most of the results on Google Insights for Search deal with some trashy pop star. But you happen to be the owner of a small business that creates replica medieval weapons, so that's not the sort of spears you're looking for. You can narrow your search down to a single field--"industries," say, or "recreation," and hope you see fewer instances of Britney and Jamie Lynn.

Here's another one: search for "spaghetti," and you'll get a lot of results about people seeking recipes. But narrow it down to the "lifestyles" category, and you'll see that most of the search results that Google Insights provides involve the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Google has enlisted Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane to create an original animated series that it will distribute on the Web via its AdSense advertising system, according to The New York Times.

Google plans to use AdSense to syndicate the program--called Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy--to thousands of Web sites that are popular with MacFarlane's target audience, according to the newspaper. Advertising will be incorporated via "preroll" ads, banner ads, or "brought to you by" ads, according to the report.

MacFarlane is also reportedly working with advertisers to create original advertising to run with the Cavalcade content, although neither Google nor MacFarlane would reveal any of the advertisers, saying only that the deals were among AdSense's largest ever.

MacFarlane, who will receive a percentage of the ad revenue, told the newspaper that the two-minute episodes would be "animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier."

Google, which launched AdSense in 2003, expanded its AdSense program last year so that Web site publishers could display and make money off embedded video clips from YouTube content partners that have targeted banner or text ads. Google has experimented with distributing video and video ads on its AdSense publisher network before, but with mixed results. The company has tested distributing in-stream video ads and in-stream video clips with bundled ads.