Category: Archive

Ning, the social platform that allows users to create their own social networks introduced a virtual gifts feature today for its 1.6 million networks and 36 million registered users.
Ning Virtual Gifts offers a built-in revenue-generating feature for network creators, allowing them to create custom gifts and stores related to the topic of their network.

Amazon announced today that its Amazon Payments is now being accepted by a number of charities. Organizations include:

Dow Jones & Company said today it would launch "The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition," aimed at providing business readers with more in-depth information.

Update: Peter Kafka at All Things Digital says Google is partnering with iLike and Lala on the music service, which is being called "OneBox." He writes:

Google announced a number of new and upcoming features for Google Analytics today. The features, Google says, focus on three things: power, flexibility, and intelligence.

TurnHere has shared the results of an interesting survey on current and future trends in online video among brands and marketing agencies. The survey found that online video has and will continue to have a prominent place in the arsenal of marketers. It should be noted that TurnHere is an online video company.

Cybercriminals are increasingly using online scare tactics to persuade users to buy rogue security software, according to a new report from Symantec.
To convince users to install rogue software, cybercriminals place ads on websites that prey on users’ fears of security threats.  The ads generally include false claims such as "If this ad is flashing, your computer may be at risk or infected," instructing the user to follow a link to scan their computer or get software to remove the threat.

Google has introduced some new features for the Google Search Appliance (GSA). There are about ten of them, but the one the company is really touting is one that allows the GSA to learn the habits of searchers and use that information to fine-tune its information retrieval process to increase relevancy.

WordPress has launched a couple of new mobile themes for bloggers who use WordPress.com. The themes are designed to display automatically when the blogger’s blog is accessed with a compatible mobile device.

Making moves to get blogs to display properly on mobile devices is a good move considering recent research, which found that consumers are generally not pleased with the way mobile web sites display.

 More people plan to shop online during the holiday season this year (55%) compared to last year (49%), according to a new survey by MarketLive and the E-Tailing Group.
More than a quarter (26%) of shoppers plan to buy more gifts online, up from 21 percent last year. Eighty-five percent of consumers report the main reason for shopping online is still time savings, but 40 and 38 percent of shoppers respectively also rate wish lists and reviews as increasingly important.