Category: Archive

Earlier this week, reports surfaced indicating that Google had bought Gizmo5, a VoIP firm. The news came just on the heels of Google’s AdMob acquisition. Google has now officially announced that it has indeed acquired Gizmo5.

Google has released several new features for Google Ad Planner. Google says these are aimed at providing a more granular view of where your audience can be found. Features include subdomain data, ad placements, and reach and relevance at a glance.
When Google says reach and relevance at a glance, it is referring to a new interactive graph feature, which lets advertisers see which sites in their plan provide the best reach and relevance.

It looks like Yahoo is quite serious about using its homepage to display news that people actually want to see.  Rather than assign someone to tinker with algorithms, the company’s hired a 25-year veteran of the news industry to assemble a team of editors.

The majority (88%) of nonprofit organizations are experimenting with social media to engage audiences, but 79 percent are not sure of its value for their organizations, according to a new survey by Weber Shandwick’s Social Impact team and KRC Research.

"We know from our work with nonprofits that most realize the potential of social media and are experimenting with it, but many are not maximizing the full opportunity," said Paul Massey, Social Impact co-lead.

Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site so many people love, announced an important deal today as it named HP’s Snapfish its preferred photo printing and gift creation partner.  Thanks to the arrangement, printing pictures is about to become a lot easier for some folks, and for others, this will even be the first time a certain printing option has been available at all.

Google has added a "follow" feature to Google Wave. The feature is designed to let users stay up to date on public waves of interest. In other words, if there are waves out there that are available to everybody, and you want to follow it, simply click the follow button for that particular wave.

Except, perhaps, for multitasking techies and the last few people using dialup connections, load times aren’t a huge deal from a user perspective; the average page appears before most folks think to click on anything else.  Still, Google looks set to make a lot of friends with the introduction of a research project dubbed SPDY ("speedy").

HP announced today that it is acquiring 3Com, makers of network switching, routing, and security solutions, for $2.7 billion in cash (at 7.90 per share). Both boards have already approved the transaction.

HP says the combination of these two companies will transform the networking industry and "underscore HP’s next-generation data center strategy." The company believes this will help customers simplify networks and improve IT service delivery capabilities.

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Mobile in Spanish. This is a Spanish-language version of the Yahoo Mobile home page, which is customized specifically for U.S. Hispanic consumers, and is available on over 1,900 devices.

"By bringing together U.S. Hispanic consumers’ favorite content and services from across the Internet, Yahoo! Mobile en Español enables users to create both culturally and personally relevant mobile experiences," a spokesperson for Yahoo tells Murdok.

The majority (80%) of emails sent with coupons received higher open rates and transaction rates than non-coupon campaigns, according to a new report from Experian Marketing Services.

Seventy percent of coupons-using households get their coupons from newspapers. However, the Internet is a growing coupon resource. Over the last three years, the number of households that get their coupons online has increased by 46 percent.