Content Indexing & Navigation – Page 6

South Korean company, Daum, Buys Lycos Inc.

South Korean internet portal Daum has bought Lycos Inc for US$95 million (€79 million) – considerably less than the US$12.5 billion (€10.4 billion) in shares its Spanish owner Terra paid for it just four years ago. In fact, it’s less than 1% of the original price.

Even April this year, the price sought was nearer $170 million (€140 million).

Daum’s new acquisition gives it a subscriber base of 170,000 paid users and a 6% slice of the US banner advertising market. Lycos also features Wired News, the stock market information service Quote and thousands of user created Tripod websites.

Daum president Lee Jae-Woong said that the acquisition of Lycos Inc meant that they were now ready to embark on a global initiative: “a springboard for our company to venture into the US Internet market and become a global player.”

Their new purchase might give Daum a foothold in the US internet market, but Lycos Inc has been loss-making for some time now, and it’s a very tough market out there – they’ll be facing stiff competition form a newly revitalised MSN and a cash-rich Google.

Daum.net

Lycos Inc

Microsoft’s Newsbot

Microsoft are testing their Newsbot service outside Europe, as a competitor to Google’s News offering.

Google News is still in beta, but has proved an invaluable service to many. It works by scraping submitted sites for news headlines and emailing out alerts. MSN Newsbot has a much busier user interface than the typically sparse Google offering.

Newsbot is powered by the new MSN Search engine and scrapes 4,800 sources for stories, but does not as yet have an email alert function. Microsoft that the site is for delivering targeted news to visitors, rather than emailing headlines. To customise content, MS use Passport and keep track of items clicked on.

The site claims: “By gathering together news from around the world and tracking the interests of users of the site, we determine which stories are most popular and suggest stories that you may want to follow based on the patterns of other users.”

Microsoft are working with Moreover on this trial and claim that the site can build up a profile of a user’s interests after only ten minutes of surfing.

MSN Newsbot

Microsoft Buys Lookout for Outlook

Microsoft are focussing on providing search facilities for their customers – after their changes to MSN Search, they’ve acquired Lookout, a company that makes searching technology for Outlook.

Outlook is an impressive diary, email and contacts program, and those who use it generate huge amounts for data – though searching through mails, appointments and addresses for details and information was never its strong point.

Microsoft have not released any details of the deal, and will not say how Lookout will be integrated in their products, but they have said that they intend to use the acquisition to improve services.

Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of MSN, said in a statement: “Our vision is to take search beyond today’s basic Internet search services to deliver direct answers to people’s questions, and help them find information from a broad range of sources.”

Having a fully featured internet search built into the operating system will be very convenient and this could be ominous news for Google who do not have the same potential for product integration that Microsoft have. Instead Google relies on visits to their portal, or on customers installing their tool bar.

Lookoutsoft

Google, Orkut and Affinity Engines’ Social Networking Suit

Google is facing legal action after Affinity Engines (AE) accused them of using their code in their Orkut social networking site. This is all splendid timing for a company that is planning a major IPO.

They claim that the code was taken to Google by Orkut Buyukkokten, who had also promised Affinity Engines that he wouldn’t develop a competing social network product.

It’s not looking good for Google – nine bugs present is Orkut are also present in Affinity Engines’ inCircle product. In addition to the bugs, AE claim that there are textual similarities between the two sets of source code.

Google refuted the claims in a statement to Wired News: “Affinity Engines has not provided any evidence to Google that their source code was used in the development of orkut.com. We have repeatedly offered to allow a neutral expert to compare the codes in the two programs and evaluate Affinity’s claims, but Affinity has rejected that offer.”

Orkut is a Turkish citizen and was working on inCircle when he ran into some visa problems. Taking a job at Google was a way to get round this, but he kept working on inCircle – though signed agreements not to develop any further social-networking technology and confirming that any code he developed belonged to AE.

The name of Google’s new social networking site couldn’t be a more obvious indicator of who has been working on it.

Orkut

About inCircle

MSN Search’s Revamp

Moogle? Goomsn? The news MSN Search service is out of the stables today, and despite what might be under the hood, Microsoft have obviously been inspired by Google’s clean, easy to use interface. Basically, they’ve taken most of the ads off.

After a year in development and US$100 million (€82 million), Microsoft’s MSN Search tool is still just a front end for Yahoo’s technology. For the time being.

To catch up with Google and Yahoo, Microsoft are gearing up to launch their very own, in-house developed, search tool this year. Webmasters will get a chance to vet its performance and accuracy before it goes live, baring in mind that MSN Search has had a odd and unfortunate habit in the past of dropping results from some sites competing with MS. Hope they manage to track that bug down and fix it.

In an interview on this week Yusuf Mehdi, head of MSN Search said, bafflingly “If this is a next-generation airplane, this is only the inside of the engine.” The first person to tell me what that means gets the usual prize – a bad CD from my collection. Come on people, I’ve still got a few left.

Microsoft’s MSN Search engine is currently third place in the US – Google deals with 35% of all internet searches, Yahoo takes a healthy 30% and MSN has 15%. They have a lot of catching up to do, but a strong band, new search engine and integration with MS’s operating systems (if they’re allowed to!) might just put them at the front of the field.

MSN Search

Man Charged For Google Adwords Extortion

Michael Bradley, a California resident who claims to have developed a program to generate fraudulent clicks on Google’s Adword service, was arrested at the company’s offices and charged with extortion.

Bradley had threatened to sell the software to spammers if Google did not give him US$150,000 (€123,400).

The fact that the software is designed to trick Adwords into registering more clicks, and therefore more revenue for the customer from Google, coupled with trying to extort money out of Google by then threatening to sell the software earned him a speedy arrest and freedom on a US$50,000 (€41,100) bond.

He’s pleading not guilty.

More about adwords

AOL Buys Advertising.com

America Online Inc, the world’s largest distributor of disposable CDs and apparently also an interactive services company, has announced that it has signed an agreement to hand over US$435 million (€359 million) in cash for Advertising.com, the internet’s third largest advertising network.

Advertising.com plans and optimises online campaigns for more than 800 advertisers, and also works with some 1500 online publishers to bring them 110 million unique visitors every month. About 70% of all US internet users encounter Advertising.com’s work in the course of a month’s surfing.

This is AOL’s biggest deal since it merged with Time Warner, and shows that there may be some life in online advertising after the bubble burst after all. AOL, having ditched its broadband product and now staring at declining dial-up business, is understandably keen to drive growth in other areas, and believes that content and services are what it’s best at.

Jonathan Miller, Chairman and CEO, America Online, Inc., said, “Online advertising is showing very strong growth across the industry, and the acquisition of Advertising.com underscores AOL’s determination to strengthen its competitive position. Advertising.com has built a profitable, scalable and highly attractive business. This acquisition is a strategic move that will bolster AOL’s advertising business, building on the strides made in the past year.”

Advertising.com

Hotmail Enters the Storage Wars

Hotmail is the latest contender to offer large amounts of storage to its subscribers – up to 2 gigabytes if you pay a US$19.95 (€16.46) subscription. Users of the free Hotmail service will get 250mb, as a response to GMail’s 1 gig, advertising-funded, service.

By GMail’s standards, 250mb seems almost mean, but then Hotmail aren’t going after the “never delete anything” crowd. The new 2 gig incarnation of Hotmail will be called Hotmail Plus, and will allow users to send attachments of up to 20mb – and will have no graphical adverts on the web frontend.

As a bonus, all 170 million subscribers will get email anti-virus checking and MSN Calendar. It’s about time that the anti-virus product was integrated as that’ll cut down on much of the infected spam that is flooding mailboxes worldwide. A frightening release from BT yesterday stated “46% of all email traffic in Europe will be spam in 2004 and by 2008 this will rise to 71%.”

Interestingly, a Neilsen report in May had the number of Hotmail subscribers down at around 34 million.

Hotmail Plus

US “Family Movie Act” Will Approve Parental Content Filtering

The Motion Picture Association of America is unhappy about HR4586, the “Family Movie Act”. The act will allow companies like Clearplay to manufacture software for filtering content from DVDs, without film studios suing over their product being tampered with.

As always, censorship is an emotive issue: parents should have the right to protect their children from inappropriate material… but then perhaps they should be more selective about what finds its way into the DVD player when their kids are parked in front of it?

“The technology my legislation allows does not alter any movie’s violence, sex and profanity,” said Lamar Smith, the Republican sponsoring the bill through Senate. “But it does allow parents to skip over the movie’s violence, sex and profanity. If they choose to designate a technology company to help them accomplish this, more power to them.”

Not being a parent, I’m somewhat baffled here: why would you want to sit your child through a film based around the themes of sex, violence and profanity, even if it is filtered?

Nevertheless, the studios are unhappy about someone else, the consumer with some software, having the final cut on their films. So this is all about artistic integrity is it? No, this is Hollywood.

Jack Valenti, MPAA CEO testified that legislation wasn’t necessary because studios are already working with movie filtering companies and directors to create new, edited versions of popular films that are more family friendly. Of course, having two versions of a film in the shops means more sales for the movie industry, whereas just one version means that it’s the filtering company that makes the money and not the studios.

Valenti’s statement

Lamar Smith on the Family Movie Act

Yahoo Launch Yisou Search Engine for China

Yahoo have launched Yisou! (which apparently means Number 1 Search! in Chinese, wonderfully compact language) to China’s 95.8 million internet users.

Yahoo, whose services are available in 36 languages, claim that their search technology is behind nearly half of all internet searches. Note that the Yisou portal offers a cheeky little MP3 search tab right on the home page, whereas the European and American versions don’t.

The Chinese market obviously has massive potential for internet companies – with a population of 1.2 billion, of which 88% have yet to get on the internet, growth is all but guaranteed. Google have already got in on it by buying a stake in baidu.com, another search engine. By the end of the year, there are expected to be some 111 million internet users in China.

Yisou

Baidu