The Wall Street Journal Digital Network today announced an agreement in which Microsoft Corp. becomes the exclusive third-party provider of contextual and paid search advertising for its network of sites, including The Wall Street Journal Online, Barrons.com, MarketWatch.com, AllThingsD.com and others.
“Relevant and targeted digital advertising is important to our business and to the quality of the experience that we deliver to our users,” said Gordon McLeod, president of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. “Microsoft’s state-of-the-art advertising platform will enable us to dramatically improve our revenues from this key sector, and we look forward to working together.”
“This deal is a significant win for Microsoft for two key reasons. First, it makes the extended Microsoft advertising network the premier destination for advertisers interested in reaching financially minded users, as it complements our offering in this vertical through MSN Money and other syndication partners,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions at Microsoft. “Second, this deal is a strong indicator that we’re gaining significant traction with our advertising platform. The Wall Street Journal Digital Network is one of the largest financial services publishers in a very dynamic vertical segment, and we’re delighted to add it to our portfolio.”
The addition of these sites brings an additional 20 million unique visitors per month to the extended Microsoft network, enabling advertisers to reach out to an increasingly deep and attractive audience in the financial services vertical. The Wall Street Journal Digital Network is expected to begin providing Microsoft contextual advertising in February.
January 30th, 2008
Yahoo! today announced its support for the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework for all 248 million active registered Yahoo! users worldwide. OpenID, an open framework based on proven Internet technologies, enables users to consolidate their Internet identity, eliminating the need to create separate IDs and logins at all of the various websites, blogs, and profile pages they may visit in the course of their online session. In addition to the many leading Yahoo! services users already enjoy, anyone with a Yahoo! ID will be able to use the same ID for easy access to any sites that support OpenID 2.0.
Yahoo!’s initial OpenID service, which will be available in public beta on January 30, enables a seamless and transparent web experience by allowing users to use their custom OpenID identifier on me.yahoo.com or to simply type in “www.yahoo.com” or “www.flickr.com” on any site that supports OpenID 2.0. Alternatively, web sites that accept OpenID 2.0 will be able to add a simple “Sign-in with Your Yahoo! ID” button to their login pages that will make it even easier for their users. Yahoo! is working with several partners, including Plaxo and JanRain, to make it possible for users to access these sites with their Yahoo! ID from the first day of the public beta.
“A Yahoo! ID is one of the most recognizable and useful accounts to have on the Internet and with our support of OpenID, it will become even more powerful,” said Ash Patel, executive vice president of platforms and infrastructure at Yahoo!. “Supporting OpenID gives our users the freedom to leverage their Yahoo! ID both on and off the Yahoo! network, reducing the number of usernames and passwords they need to remember and offering a single, trusted partner for managing their online identity.”
“Yahoo!’s commitment to an open web is a significant validation of the OpenID movement and Yahoo!’s adoption of the standard today immediately triples the total number of people able to use OpenID,” said Scott Kveton, chairman of the Board of Directors for the OpenID Foundation. “With Yahoo! actively engaged with the OpenID Foundation and its community to promote OpenID, Yahoo!’s users will be able to more easily access the many sites across the web that support the standard, and the potential for access to Yahoo!’s vast international user base will create an even more powerful incentive for additional websites to begin accepting OpenID users.”
Yahoo!’s implementation is based on the OpenID 2.0 specification, which Yahoo! worked closely with the OpenID foundation and community to finalize in December 2007, and includes new features that improve security and usability of OpenID, making it the most user-friendly single sign-on and online user-authentication standard. Yahoo! users who log in with their Yahoo! ID on OpenID sites will have the added protection of Yahoo!’s sign-in seal wherever they go on the web. In addition, no email or IM addresses are revealed or disclosed as part of the login process, which further helps protect users from phishing or other attacks.
“Plaxo believes that users should be able to carry their identity and personal information with them wherever they go across the social web,” said Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect of Plaxo. “Yahoo! is making that vision a reality by becoming an OpenID provider. Yahoo! users will be able to easily access Plaxo and other services without having to create and remember yet another password. This also paves the way for a secure approach to data portability between the various services people use across the web.”
“At JanRain, we believe the evolution of the Internet and the next generation of web applications hinges on universal adoption of a secure, portable digital identity,” said Larry Drebes, founder and vice president of engineering for JanRain. “JanRain is a leader in OpenID libraries, tools and applications, and has worked closely with Yahoo! to integrate its new OpenID offering into our services. The addition of 248 million Yahoo! users to the OpenID ecosystem will be a tremendous milestone in expanding the user base for OpenID.”
Yahoo! will continue to devote resources to helping to improve the OpenID user experience and to educating its users. In addition, Yahoo! intends to expand its support of OpenID by adopting other elements of the program as the service evolves. More information and updates can be found at http://openid.yahoo.com.
January 21st, 2008
T-Mobile and Yahoo! today announce a strategic partnership which will see the first graphical advertising appear on T-Mobile’s pioneering Internet service. Web’n'walk, which was the UK’s first service to offer people unlimited access to the whole internet on a mobile phone, is set to carry a variety of innovative graphical ads exclusively sold and served by internet giant Yahoo!.
Mobile advertising is revolutionising the market by allowing advertisers to deliver more targeted messaging to consumers on their mobiles when on the move. As pioneers of the Internet on your mobile, T-Mobile and Yahoo! will combine their expertise in the industry and knowledge of consumer habits, to enable advertisers to offer consumers targeted graphical ads when using the web’n'walk service. Mobile advertising is unique in allowing consumers the ability to interact and respond directly to the messages that advertisers try to deliver to them when they are out of the office or home. T-Mobile and Yahoo! intend to roll out the first mobile advertisements on web’n'walk in the first half of 2008.
Phil Chapman, Director of Marketing at T-Mobile, said: “Mobile advertising is a key area of development for T-Mobile in 2008 and this partnership with Yahoo! shows our commitment to making this strategy succeed. With conventional mobile marketing tools limiting the levels of interaction, banner advertising through the Internet on your mobile creates many opportunities for potential advertisers to adopt innovative marketing campaigns. We regard Yahoo! as a leader in display advertising, and with its deep understanding of the mobile space and the potential that mobile advertising can offer clients, we’re glad they are on board as our partners.”
“This partnership with T-Mobile demonstrates Yahoo!’s continued focus on mobile and extending our leadership in graphical advertising across multiple platforms,” said Geraldine Wilson, VP of Connected Life, Yahoo! Europe. “Advertisers are fast recognising the value of mobile advertising as a core part of their digital campaigns, and we are excited to work with T-Mobile to create superior experiences that deliver great value to advertisers and mobile users alike.”
Thomas Husson, Senior Analyst at JupiterResearch, said in a recent report*: “The mobile channel enables advertisers to interact with consumers at different and unique peak times when they are relatively more difficult to reach through other media. More than any other medium, mobile can be leveraged to make the most of unique contextual, individual, and behavioural targeting.*”
T-Mobile has been at the forefront of the mobile Internet since the launch of the web’n'walk Internet service in 2005. Web’n'walk allows users access to the real internet, to surf the Internet when they want and how they want, T-Mobile have a number of price plans for Contract and Pay as you Go customers ranging from 50p per day with the 5 day pass for £2.50 to £7.50 per month for unlimited web browsing.
Yahoo! is focused on creating the monetization engine for the mobile Internet: enabling publishers to monetize their services, and advertisers to reach their target audiences at large scale and with impact.
January 20th, 2008
Today, Google announced the release of the iGoogle Themes API, which allows for user-generated iGoogle Themes. Now, anyone who can build a webpage can design an iGoogle Theme. Opening themes gives users more options for personalizing iGoogle pages, whether that be through creating new themes, or through choosing a user-created theme.
Developers are an important part of our innovation ecosystem and we’re always striving to release tools to help them innovate in new directions that will ultimately make the web richer for all users. With the iGoogle Themes API, developers can design and share a theme with the tens of millions of iGoogle users around the world, providing even more options for users to customize their iGoogle experience.
To jumpstart the development of iGoogle Themes, we’ve released custom themes from innovative designers Yves Behar, Mark Frauenfelder, Troy Lee and John Maeda. These themes are great examples of creative, high-quality themes and we hope will inspire theme designers.
Along with the release of the iGoogle Themes API we’ve also created a themes directory. Similar to the Google Gadgets directory, this directory allows users to find and select a theme for their iGoogle page.
To learn more about iGoogle Themes API, go to: http://code.google.com/apis/themes/
January 17th, 2008
Today, the first day of Macworld, Google announced new improvements to the integrated Google experience on iPhone. The previous version, launched just over a month ago, brought together our suite of web applications — including Search, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, and more — into one easy-to-use interface. Since then, we’ve streamlined the interface even further, making the applications faster and improving their usability. Some of the improvements announced today include:
- Improved UI: The applications look and feel slicker, and they are easier to activate, navigate and use via a touch-screen.
- Customization of default tabs: Now Google users can have easy access to their favorite applications by customizing the applications that appear on the Google.com menu bar. Users simply choose their favorite Google applications to bring them to the front menu, ensuring that they’ll be close at hand whenever they’re needed. Switching between applications is effortless, as users only need to sign in once to access their Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Docs, and Picasa accounts.
- Speedier Gmail: New emails will automatically show up so there’s no need to manually refresh inboxes. And the new auto-complete feature for contacts makes composing emails faster than ever.
- Speedier Calendar: With our new month view, users can glance at an entire month of appointments.
- iGoogle: Now Google users can access their iGoogle gadgets on the iPhone. Everything they’ve customized on their iGoogle homepage including weather, stocks, and news feeds now appear on their iPhones. To go to iGoogle, simply click on the iGoogle link on the Home tab. You can customize your iGoogle page on your computer at www.igoogle.com.
These new features provide iPhone users with a desktop-like Google web application experience in terms of ease-of-use, speed, and feature richness but optimized for the iPhone. This experience is made possible by the iPhone’s general usability and the capabilities of its web browser, combined with Google’s innovative mobile web applications. We plan to expand this experience to international versions of the iPhone and to other platforms that offer similar usability and browser capabilities. One of our goals is to support platforms that are fulfilling the promise of the mobile web – like the iPhone – and to ultimately deliver unique and compelling mobile experiences that improve people’s daily lives.
To get the new Google experience on the iPhone, users simply navigate to www.google.com on the iPhone Safari browser. To see the full range of mobile products and services available from Google, visit mobile.google.com. If you’d like to learn more about today’s announcement, Google’s mobile initiatives or if you need screenshots, just let us know. And if you’re at Macworld please stop by our booth (number 1268 in the South hall) for a live demo! We’ll be there at 11:30 am on Tuesday and 10:30 am on the other days.
January 14th, 2008
Google announced today the expansion of the Conversion Optimizer bid management feature. The Conversion Optimizer is a new feature that allows advertisers to meet their ROI objectives by automatically managing their cost-per-click (CPC) bids according to a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal. The AdWords system makes adjustments with the aim of keeping the cost of each conversion below the specified maximum CPA bid, showing ads when conversions are most likely to occur. Advertisers can save time while achieving more conversions and a lower CPA. Since the Conversion Optimizer first became available as a beta feature in September 2007, many advertisers who have used it have been pleased with the ability to more effectively promote their products and services online.
“The Conversion Optimizer is a great new bidding option for Steve Madden, as it’s both time and cost-efficient in helping us manage our online advertising budget to meet specific ROI goals,” said Frank Siano, internet marketing manager at Steve Madden. “Now that our bids are adjusted automatically, advertising with AdWords is even simpler than before. And because our ads only appear when they’re likely to convert into sales, we’ve seen very high results, such as increasing our daily conversions by 60 percent.”
Starting today, advertisers whose campaigns have enabled AdWords Conversion Tracking and accrued at least 200 conversions in the past 30 days will be eligible to use the Conversion Optimizer. The Conversion Optimizer is ideal for advertisers and agencies who want to manage their advertising costs around clear, defined conversion goals.
By using this free feature, advertisers gain more precision and greater control over their advertising budgets. It allows them to simultaneously increase ROI, receive more conversions and save time by automating the bidding process. Ads using the Conversion Optimizer participate in the standard ad auction and are able to show on both Google’s search and content networks.
To learn more about the Conversion Optimizer, which is now available to qualified advertisers worldwide, visit http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer.
January 11th, 2008
This morning at the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas, Google Engineering Director Andrew Moore announced a new version of Sky in Google Earth. Sky now includes several new features that provide scientists, students and amateur stargazers with new tools to explore the millions of stars and galaxies visible in Sky, get up to date on current sky events, learn basic concepts of astronomy, see historical sky maps and much more:
Earth & Sky Podcasts: podcasts about stars, galaxies, planets and events coming up in the sky from the NPR program Earth and Sky
Current Sky Events: provides timely updates on recent cosmological events from VOEventNet
Featured Observatories: images from NASA observatory satellites including x-ray images from NASA’s Chandra satellite; infrared images by the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS); ultraviolet images by the GALEX Satellite; and a microwave map of the sky by the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP)
Historical Sky Maps: a favorite in Google Earth, David Rumsey’s historical maps of the sky date back to 1792 and illustrate how conceptions of the sky have changed over time. Also available is a beautiful Constellations Art layer based on engravings by astronomer Johannes Hevelius from 1690 Grand tour of the sky: the best of Sky imagery in a tour that takes the user through 100 of our favorite spots in the Sky
Sky community: The best content published by the Sky community on the Sky discussion forums
To access Sky, users need only click “Switch to Sky” from the “view” drop-down menu in Google Earth, or click the Sky button on the Google Earth toolbar. The interface and navigation are similar to that of standard Google Earth steering, including dragging, zooming, search, “My Places,” and layer selection.
Also introduced today, the Sky API will enable developers to develop their own sky mashups using the extensive sky imagery. Already several partners have implemented the API: Night View from the folks at www.heywhatsthat.com and a version for the iPhone from Alasdair Allan
January 10th, 2008
Microsoft today announced that it will make an offer to acquire Fast Search & Transfer ASA, a leading provider of enterprise search solutions, through a cash tender offer for 19.00 Norwegian kroner (NOK) per share. This offer represents a 42 percent premium to the closing share price on Jan. 4, 2008 (the last trading day prior to this announcement), and values the fully diluted equity of FAST at 6.6 billion NOK (or approximately $1.2 billion U.S.). FAST’s board of directors has unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept the offer. In addition, shareholders representing in aggregate 37 percent of the outstanding shares, including FAST’s two largest institutional shareholders, Orkla ASA and Hermes Focus Asset Management Europe, have irrevocably undertaken to accept the offer. The transaction is expected to be completed in the second quarter of calendar year 2008.
“Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes, helping people find, use and share critical business information quickly,” said Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division. “Until now organizations have been forced to choose between powerful, high-end search technologies or more mainstream, infrastructure solutions. The combination of Microsoft and FAST gives customers a new choice: a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of customer needs.”
The companies possess a number of complementary strengths that advance a shared vision for helping businesses deliver information worker productivity and improved business results. FAST has a deep talent pool and is respected throughout the technology industry for its expertise in best-in-class, high-end search solutions. Microsoft offers worldwide customer reach and an extensive partner network, and is the recognized leader in business productivity with the popular Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, which combines search with best-in-class collaboration, business intelligence, portal and content management capabilities.
“This acquisition gives FAST an exciting way to spread our cutting-edge search technologies and innovations to more and more organizations across the world,” said John Lervik, CEO of FAST. “By joining Microsoft, we can benefit from the momentum behind the SharePoint business productivity platform to really empower a broader set of users through Microsoft’s strong sales and marketing network. It validates FAST’s momentum and leadership in enterprise search.”
In addition to bolstering Microsoft’s enterprise search efforts, this acquisition increases Microsoft’s research and development presence in Europe, complementing existing research teams in Cambridge, England, and Copenhagen, Denmark, with new and significant capabilities in Norway.
The offer will be subject to customary terms and conditions, including receipt of acceptances representing more than 90 percent of FAST shares and voting power on a fully diluted basis, and receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals on terms acceptable to Microsoft. The complete details of the offer, including all terms and conditions, will be contained in the offer document, which is expected to be sent to FAST shareholders during the week of Jan. 14, 2008. The offer will not be made in any jurisdiction in which the making of the offer would not be in compliance with the laws of such jurisdiction.
January 9th, 2008
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