WebProWorld

Pee Wee Herman, the alternate identity of actor Paul Reubens, made famous in the 80s from a couple of TV shows and movies (namely Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Tim Burton’s greatest acheivement in my opinion), is back. You probably know the story. He was busted for exposing himself in a theater and Pee Wee Herman pretty much fell off the face of the planet, although Reubens has popped up from time to time.

It’s no secret that today’s mobile phones put early supercomputers to shame, and really, smartphones can almost keep up with today’s laptops in terms of letting people email, search, listen to music, and shop.  So a session at the Shop.org 2009 Annual Summit explored how retailers should embrace the mobile market.

Mzinga and Babson Executive Education recently conducted a survey, which examined the adoption, use and current state of social technologies in business. The findings revealed that 86% of respondents use social technologies in one or more areas of business, including marketing, internal collaboration/learning, customer service and support, sales, and HR.

Google recently launched a new Internet statistics site, called simply "Google Internet Stats." The site provides industry data from third-party sources for use in research.

Google has released a new version of its photo editing software, Picasa, for both Mac and PC. The most noteworthy new feature is the addition of name tags, which lets users organize photos based on who’s in them. This uses the same technology that powers a similar feature on Picasa Web Albums.

British news sites are starting to see a lot more traffic from the US. UK Internet visits to News and Media websites grew by 8% last year according to Hitwise, and US Internet visits to UK News and Media sites have gone up by 54%.

Along with Yahoo’s big new "Y!ou" campaign, the company has begun rolling out the new Yahoo Search.

Back in February Google launched the beta version of Google Sync. This allowed Google users to sync their Gmail contacts and Google Calendar events to their iPhones or Windows Mobile devices (Android already synced data). The feature did not come with the ability to sync actual mail, however. That has now changed.

The addition of "push Gmail" support has been a heavily requested feature ever since Google Sync was launched.

The web was abuzz yesterday with talk of a new Yahoo marketing campaign, which is all about "Y!ou." This campaign was formally announced today, and a new site dedicated to it has even been set up by the company at YouAndYahoo.com. Yahoo says it is the single-largest integrated marketing campaign for the company ever.

More print publishers are focusing on the mobile market as a way to expand their brands, reach new audiences and generate additional revenue while offering advertisers the chance to reach locally targeted engaged audiences, according to a new survey from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC).
Forty-five percent of respondents who track mobile’s impact on their website traffic said the devices increased visits by up to 10 percent today. Half believe mobile traffic to their websites will increase by five to 25 percent in the next two years.