America Online is still not for sale, but now we know why: Time Warner thinks it can turn AOL into the money-making machine it was supposed to be when the companies merged in 2001. Speaking at a media conference yesterday, Time Warner Chief Executive Dick Parsons said that the idea began when its competitors "woke up and realized AOL wasn't dead," and started discussing possible deals. Time Warner is now looking to grow its AOL business through a strategic partnership that will allow it to deploy more sophisticated technology and add traffic more quickly. Parsons said AOL needs better advertising …

Meanwhile, Time Warner investor Carl Icahn is attempting a shareholder mutiny. He would rather see the media conglomerate restructured and, perhaps, its AOL unit spun-off. Icahn has made his billions by pushing companies to buy back shares or spin off assets in order to bring more value to shareholders. He owns about 3 percent of Time Warner, and is hoping to enlist the support of other shareholders through the recent hiring of the investment bank Lazard. Time Warner Chief Executive Dick Parsons responded to Icahn's public displays of dissent, calling the Lazard hiring evidence that he doesn't have any "great …

The irony is too thick, really. Google, the "don't be evil" company, is trying to eat just about everybody's lunch these days and getting great press for doing so, while building a data bank that's starting to smell oddly like the Big Brother we've all been trained to fear. This year, the company has expanded into book publishing, video, Wi-Fi, and telecom, adding ever more to the extraordinary database of information it gathers and keeps from all of us. One privacy advocate suggests that Google could soon become the poster child for a movement regulating data collection. Now the search …

It might come as little surprise that Google executives believe Adwords is a better investment for retail marketers than say, a print magazine, but their logic, as ever, is hard to argue with. John Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management, gives an example. If you're selling $1,000 Prada handbags, you'll probably spend about 28 cents for each user that clicks on the ad. That actually costs almost three times as much per user as a full-page ad in a magazine like Vanity Fair, which, at $110,000 with a circulation of 1.1 million, costs roughly 10 cents per reader. Rosenberg …

Michael Zimbalist, the president of the Online Publishers Association, has been hired by the New York Times Company as the new vice president of research and development operations. As of Jan. 23, he will report to Martin Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for the New York Times' digital operations. Aside from overseeing the research and development duties of the Times Company, Zimbalist will also head its mobile technology initiatives. This marks the end of Zimbalist's five years with the Online Publishers Association, which he joined as acting executive director in 2001 before becoming president in 2004.

It was inevitable: like iPods, new satellite radio receivers now have the ability to store hundreds of digital music files. But the bad news, the Wall Street Journal says, isn't for Steve Jobs and Apple. Rather, the new devices put the music industry in another awkward position because consumers don't have to pay for the songs they decide to store and manage, unlike iTunes. The $13 they pay per month covers that now, regardless of how long a user decides to keep a song. Record labels receive much, much less from satellite radio than they do for CDs or online …

In yet another sign that phone and cable companies are now vying for the same customers, BellSouth Corp. said today it will test a new Web-based TV service with its Atlanta-based customers this summer. Though it has yet to be fully realized, Web TV has been generally considered to be the next step for cable companies, though the digital broadband revolution makes these opportunities available to anybody. Cable providers have already moved into phone company turf by offering Internet-based phone services for less than the cost of traditional phones. BellSouth rivals Verizon Communications and AT&T have also rolled out Web …

Following in the footsteps of other multinational technology firms, Microsoft Corp. said it plans to invest $1.7 billion in India over the next four years, most of which will go into research and development, global software delivery and new retail outlets in 33 cities. Microsoft expects to almost double its staff there to 7,000 employees, up from roughly 4,000. In the last few months, tech firms Intel and Cisco Systems also said they each would invest about $1 billion in India. Workers there earn about a fifth of the pay of American workers in similar positions.

Recent media trends indicate that the "tipping point" for offline ad dollars moving online could occur in the second half of 2006, says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy in a new report. He says that several trends, including online ad spending increases, the speed of technology growth, and the way online benefits offline campaigns, are converging, accelerating online's spending growth from a 5 percent share this year to a 10 percent share much faster than originally thought. In the second half of next year the industry will feel the full impact of dramatic budget shifts online from some major marketers, …

Google's video content will not be free, Google Video head Jennifer Feiken said recently. At the Digital Living Room conference in Foster City, Calif., Feiken said the next step for Google's broadband video project is to charge users for downloading content, while letting content owners set prices. The company, which makes 99 percent of its revenue from search and contextual advertising, is currently working on its advertising strategy for Google Video. Feiken said this will be simple and unobtrusive to the user, like Google's other ad products. She said Google Video will be very different from Apple's iTunes, which has …