Digg.com and Microsoft today announced an agreement in which the two companies will collaborate to bring relevant advertising to the more than 17 million unique monthly visitors to Digg, an innovative Web site that harnesses the collective wisdom of the world’s online audience to prioritize the overwhelming amount of content available on the Web. Microsoft’s advanced advertising technology and sales force combined with Digg’s unique and growing user community make possible the three-year collaboration, grounded in the companies’ commitment to technological innovation and user experience.
As part of the relationship, Microsoft will be the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on Digg. The two companies also agreed to work together on future technology and advertising initiatives.Â
“Our collaboration with Digg is about bringing our advertising technology and sales force to one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web and a true innovator in user-generated content,†said Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft. “We believe advertisers will welcome Microsoft and Digg’s combined strengths to forge more meaningful connections online.â€
Microsoft and Federated Media Publishing, Digg’s current advertising partner, plan to collaborate to bring integrated programs to Digg’s users and advertisers. “Federated Media has unique advertising sales assets that dovetail with our efforts, and we look forward to working with them,†Berkowitz said.Â
“We’re now positioned to provide a world-class advertising solution that builds upon Digg’s philosophy of providing a great experience for users and advertisers,†said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. “As the Digg audience continues to grow and diversify, we believe that this initiative with Microsoft, and the resources that it provides, will enable us to focus less on developing an advertising infrastructure and more on developing new and innovative features for the site.â€
The companies expect to begin execution of the agreement in the coming weeks.
July 25th, 2007
The THESEUS consortium is delighted with the EU Commission’s decision to approve public funding of the THESEUS research programme by the Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie, or BMWi for short). The programme is set to run for 5 years and will receive some € 90 million of public money from the BMWi. The portion set aside for research and development will be divided equally between the fields of science and industry. A further € 90 million will come from participants from the industrial and research sectors, so that a total of around € 180 million will be invested in a considerable number of forward-looking research projects.
In the course of the next few weeks and months, 30 different companies, research establishments and universities will be embarking on a wide variety of exciting research products aimed at developing user-oriented basic technology applications and technical standards for a new internet-based knowledge-sharing infrastructure. Consortium members from the industrial sector will develop prototypes of the new technologies and test them in 7 application scenarios. The purpose of the tests is to find short-term ways of converting the technological advances into innovative tools, commercially-viable services and potentially profitable business models for the World Wide Web.
The THESEUS consortium is coordinated by empolis GmbH, a subsidiary of arvato AG. Siemens, SAP, empolis, Lycos Europe, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Deutsche Thomson oHG, intelligent views, m2any, Moresophy, Ontoprise, Festo, the German Mechanical Engineering Federation VDMA (Verband Deutscher Maschinen und Anlagenbau) and the Institute for Broadcasting Technology IRT are just some of the members of the Consortium, whose work is distinguished by its promotion of close collaboration between industry’s research and development departments and research bodies from the public sector; among these are, for example, internationally recognised experts from the DFKI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence), the FZI (Research Center for Information Technologies), Munich’s LMU (Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität) and TU (Technische Universität), the TU Darmstadt, the Technical University (TH) of Karlsruhe, the TU Dresden and the University of Erlangen. Nine member institutes of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft are also involved.
The research programme focuses closely on forms of semantic technology that are capable of recognising and classifying the content and meaning of information (words, pictures or sounds). With the aid of this technology, smart computer programmes are able to understand and replicate the context in which data is used and processed. By applying rules and classification principles, computers can also draw logical conclusions from content, and subsequently recognise and construct links between various items of information from diverse sources. In future, internet users will be able to apply the standards and basic technologies (“semantic toolboxesâ€) developed by THESEUS when they want to create or process content, rules and classification systems themselves, or to process, collect and link content from different media along “smart†lines. In combination with semantic methods of this kind, the Web 2.0 we know today - with its principles of transparent, open, interactive social networking - will become the internet of tomorrow.
Some of the basic technologies being developed by the research partners are functions for the automatic creation of metadata for audio, video, 3D and picture files, and mechanisms for the semantic processing of multimedia documents and their associated services. Research is also being carried out on the development of tools for the management of ontologies, and of new machine learning algorithms and dialogue processing systems that can assess an individual situation and then take this assessment into consideration. At the same time, work on innovative user interfaces is in progress, as well as on new DRM procedures intended to provide better protection for the holders of intellectual property and marketing rights to multimedia content.
July 25th, 2007
Expanding on its ongoing work to help protect customer privacy, Microsoft announced an enhanced set of privacy principles for Live Search and online advertising data collection, use and protection. The principles outline new, enhanced steps to help protect the privacy of Microsoft Windows Live users, including making search query data anonymous after 18 months by permanently removing cookie IDs, the entire IP address and other identifiers from search terms.
Microsoft will also work to give customers more control over what information it uses to personalize their online search experience. In connection with its efforts to support a common industry approach to privacy issues, Microsoft also announced that it will join the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) later this year when it begins to offer third-party ad serving broadly.
“We have been thinking deeply about privacy related to search and online advertising and believe it is critical to evolve our privacy principles,†said Peter Cullen, chief privacy strategist at Microsoft. “We believe our enhanced principles should be part of the industry dialogue on this issue and that keeping these issues as simple as possible for consumers is the best approach. For instance, on search data, anonymous should mean anonymous.â€
July 25th, 2007
