Yahoo!-Microsoft deal gets green light from Australia and Canada

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Ahleen
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0

Google better be ready, as the partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft gets the stamp of approval from Australian and Canadian competition authorities today.

The 10-year Internet search and advertising partnership between the two companies was first unveiled in July, and will tackle head-on against Google. This no-cash deal will allow Yahoo! to use Microsoft’s Bing search engine on its sites. In return, Yahoo! will be providing exclusive global sales force for premium search adveritisers.

“Microsoft and Yahoo! have been notified that Australian and Canadian authorities have separately concluded their reviews and have no objections to our proposed search agreement,” the two said a joint statement. “We continue to believe that this deal will create a true, competitive alternative in the marketplace that will benefit consumers, advertisers and publishers.”

Yahoo! and Microsoft also said that they remain hopeful that the agreements will be finalized by early next year.

The partnership of the two companies however, is still yet to be reviewed by US anti-trust regulators.

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20091124/tc_afp/usaustraliacanadaitinternetyahoomicrosoftgoogle

eBay experienced “technical issue”, caused outage

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Ahleen
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0

eBay

On Sunday, popular online auction site eBay confirmed that search outages, including a messed up search result, over the weekend resulted from a “technical issue”. The site was quickly restored but the company still wants to take caution.

“We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday and we are seeing normal activity levels today,” a post on the company’s eBay Ink blog read.

“As part of our effort to restore critical search functionality as quickly as possible for sellers and for buyers, we have kept some secondary search features temporarily offline. This includes refining search by certain item specifics, such as color or clothing size, and having Store Inventory Format results included in the main search results.”

According to the company, the technical issue was caused by “a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago.”

eBay members expressed their discontent over the outage. They are requesting refunds for seller fees if their auctions were disrupted as a result.

“I had a one day auction ending today, (and) no one was obviously able to bid on it because they couldn’t search for it,” an eBay seller said on the eBay Ink blog. “Will I get a credit for this?”

According to an analyst release from JP Morgan Chase, it did not anticipate the outage would have an effect on eBay’s fourth-quarter earnings. I know eBay wants that too. 🙂

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10403808-36.html

Roku adds Facebook, Flickr, Pandora and 7 others

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Ahleen
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0

Roku Channel Store

Following their announcement late last month, set-top box maker Roku announces 10 new content channels available in their newly-launched Channel Store.

For those who are not familiar with Roku, this is the company that makes a wireless device that allows content to be streamed directly to any TV screen from the web.

In addition to the existing three channels: Netflix, Amazon and MLB.TV, users now have access to channels including Facebook Photos, Flickr, TWiT, Blip.tv, FrameChannel, Motionbox, Mobile Tribe, Pandora, Media Fly and Revision 3 – all for free.

Sorted by “new”, “most popular” and “top-rated”, users can choose which apps they would want to appear in the homescreen in the Channel Store. All current users of Roku can automatically access the app store once it becomes available over the next two weeks. New users of Roku will have to sign up for a free account to be able to avail of the service.

And don’t think they’ll stop there too. Representatives from Roku assured users that this is just the start. There will be more content channels constantly added starting now until the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10402856-1.html

AT&T goes prepaid

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Ahleen
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0

AT&TFor their wireless broadband, that is.

Announced today, the giant cellphone carrier has expanded its service by offering prepaid wireless broadband service allow users to connect their laptops to the Internet. Up until now, AT&T customers had to sign a contract for their wireless broadband service. To attract more customers, and to keep up with the competition (Verizon announced their prepaid service earlier this month), AT&T has now ventured in that direction too.

The AT&T DataConnect Pass plans has three packages, priced similarly to what Verizon Wireless is offering.

Customers can choose to pay $15 usable for 24 hours or 75MBs maximum usage, whichever comes first. The weekly plan costs $30 covers 7 days, and up to 250MB of data usage. The monthly plan costs $50 and allows usage for 30 days and up to 500MB of data.

To give you an idea of how much you can use this packages, Marguerite Reardon of CNET estimates that 75MB of data is about 25,600 e-mails sent or received, download 500 Web pages, and send and receive 150 low-resolution digital phones. A 250MB-worth of data usage would allows users to send or receive about 85,300 e-mails, look up 1,700 Web pages, or send or receive about 500 low resolution digital photos. Lastly, the 500MB data package would allow users to send and receive about 170,000 e-mails, look up 3,400 Web pages, and send or receive 1,000 low-resolution digital photos. 🙂

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10403933-266.html

Google acquires Teracent

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Ahleen
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0

teracentThere seems to be no stopping Google in their bid to acquire more and more companies.

Just this month, the search giant announced its acquisition of Gizmo5 and AdMob. Today, Google announced that it has also acquired Teracent, an online advertising startup that serves computer-configured display ads from a library of elements.

With this acquisition, Google aims to make it easier for their advertisers to run more effective display ad campaigns.

“Teracent’s technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors,” Neal Mohan, Google VP of product management, and Google engineering Director Joerg Heilig both said in a blog post.

“These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the Web site, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.”

Seems like Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, wasn’t joking when he said the company was looking to accelerate its acquisition rate. Let’s see what else they’ll think of buying next. 🙂

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/web_services/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221900802

Woman fights back after losing insurance because of Facebook

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Ahleen
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0

If you’re on depression leave, make sure you don’t post happy pictures on Facebook.

That’s the lesson a woman learned after her insurance provider withdrew her disability benefits after seeing “evidence” that she was no longer depressed.

Nathalie Blanchard was diagnosed with major depression and took a long-term sick leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec. She was receiving monthly benefits from her insurance company, Manulife.

According to 29-year old Canadian, when she called up the company to ask why the payments dried up, her insurance agent told her she was no longer depressed and cited pictures she posted on Facebook, including ones showing her enjoying a male strip-tease show at a Chippendales bar while celebrating her birthday.

Today, she said she would fight her insurance company’s decision. “This is a major battle and it’s not going to be easy,” she said in a telephone interview from her home.

Blanchard’s lawyer, Tom Lavin, said his client had the right to enjoy a vacation therefore was wrongfully dismissed from her benefits.

“The issue for me is that they stopped her disability benefits without the proper medical recommendations. Her doctor recommended she go on vacation,” he said.

When contacted, Manulife declined to comment on the incident. They did, however, release a statement saying “we would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook.”

Nathalie Blanchard’s hearing will take place on December 8 before the Quebec Superior Court.

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20091123/ap_on_hi_te/cn_canada_facebook_insurance

On the rumor mill: Firefox soon on Sony PS3

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Ahleen
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0

PS3Wouldn’t it be better if Sony’s PS3 to have much more decent web browser?

Well, that possibility might not be that far behind. A post from the PlayStation Insider says the creators of the PS3 might be doing a deal with Mozilla to incorporate Firefox on the device.

We recently received a tip from a source very close to Sony who says that they have been in talks with Mozilla lately about possibly porting firefox over to the PS3. That said, our source made sure to point out that they were unsure if any deal had actually been reached at this point, but it is great news none the less considering the complaints Sony has been getting about the lack of reliability with their current built in PS3 web browser. Throwing firefox into the mix would give PS3 the ultimate advantage when it came to internet functionality.
True? We sure hope so. 🙂

Source: http://psinsider.e-mpire.com/index.php?categoryid=17&m_articles_articleid=1447

eBay sells Skype for $1.9 billion

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Ahleen
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0

skypeIt’s a done deal.

Shortly after announcing the plan in September , eBay has finally let go of Skype which they acquired in 2005.

The famous online auction site completed the sale of the Internet telephony service for $1.9 billion and an “I Owe You” note for a further $125 million. The investors, owning 70 percent of the share of Skype include Marc Andreessen’s new Andreessen Horowitz group, Silver Lake, and the Skype co-founders’ Joltid Ltd. eBay controls the remaining 30 percent.

The deal was pushed through after eBay finally settled a legal battle with Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. The duo filed a copyright lawsuit claiming that the auction site violated copyright law by altering and sharing the peer-to-peer source code behind the Skype.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10402053-93.html

Facebook: Third most popular video site

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Ahleen
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0
Credit: Nielsen
Credit: Nielsen

Yup, you got that right. Facebook doesn’t only reign in the social networking arena, it’s also staking a claim in being among the top video sites in the world.

The result was according to Nielsen’s Video Census released today which looked at the number of video views for the month of October. YouTube topped the chart with 6.6 billion streams and Hulu came in second with 632 million. Facebook came in the 3rd place with 217 million streams, beating out Bing, Yahoo, Fox, ESPN and other sites.

“During the past year, online video viewing has become central to the Web experience,” Jon Gibs, Nielsen’s Vice President of Media Analytics, said in a statement. “In conjunction with this increase, we are seeing remarkable growth in video viewing on social networking sites and it is only natural that these two trends would converge in consumers’ minds, making sites like Facebook and Myspace.com, increasingly important distribution points for both consumer and professionally generated video.”

In September of this year, Facebook only ranked tenth among the most number of video streams.

“Social networking sites are evolving from a venue for catching up with friends to a platform for personal expression, allowing consumers to share their experiences in the full variety of content formats available online,” Gibs said.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10401834-2.html

Automatic captioning makes YouTube videos more accessible

By
Ahleen
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0

YouTubeVideos are fun to watch, but without the sound, one can never really enjoy it.

That’s what people who have hearing impairment have to endure, silent videos. Having captions on the other hand, will definitely make it more accessible and a better experience for them.

The thing is, placing captions on ALL the videos you are uploading is a pretty daunting task so Google is solving that problem by adding the feature Automatic Captions or auto-caps.

“We’ve combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect, but even when they’re off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time,” Google Software Engineer Ken Harrenstien said in the official Google blog.

Google also introduced new feature in YouTube called automatic caption timing or auto-timing which will make it easier to add automatic captions manually. All you have to do is upload a text file containing all the world in the video and Google’s ASR technology to identify which part of the video the words were spoken.

At present, auto-caps is only visible in a number of partner channels including U.C. Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google and YouTube channels. Auto-timing on the other hand, is now available to all English language videos.

Source: http://www.crn.com/software/221900372;jsessionid=PAGP41GLU3Q5ZQE1GHOSKHWATMY32JVN

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