In California these days, the ability to bridge the gap between Hollywood and Silicon Valley has become a very useful skill to have now that the Web's major players are vying for control of the broadband video market. The Los Angeles Times profiles Jennifer Feikin, the woman spearheading the broadband effort from Google. Feikin speaks the disparate languages of Hollywood and computer engineers on behalf of the search giant, which makes her "hugely valuable" as the Internet changes the way people consume media. In fact, it was Feikin, an employee at Google since 2002, who lobbied hard for Google to …

New data from Forrester Research says that e-commerce, including travel, accounted for an all-time high 7.7 percent of retail sales in 2005, or $172 billion. But Forrester executives said the upward trend by no means indicates that online sales will one day overtake catalog and storefront sales. In fact, operating margins tend to be lower for online merchants, according to the data. Catalog merchants reported an average margin of 32 percent last year, store-based 27 percent and Web-based only 21 percent. Ninety-two percent of catalogers reported a positive operating margin, versus 70 percent for store-based, and just 64 percent for …

Contextual advertising is potentially "as large as the Web itself" says search marketing guru Danny Sullivan. Even though search is said to convert better, people spend more time surfing the Web than they do searching, which means that any publisher who can amass a sustained traffic flow could become a content partner with a contextual network like Google or Kanoodle. In fact, the next generation of youngsters, who have Web sites and e-mail addresses set up for them even before they're born, will likely have Web logs by the time they can write, which, of course, they can sell ads …

In advertising, the job market is often the last place to recover from a recession, and technology follows this rule as well, it seems. The Wall Street Journal reports that after four years, Silicon Valley, the cradle of the Internet technology boom, finally had a net increase in jobs in 2005. A new study from measurement firm Joint Venture says that the period of restructuring is over, and Silicon Valley's tech jobs now comprise 14 percent of total regional employment, significantly higher than its 2 percent share of total U.S. employment. Salaries are also way above the national average of …

Google has entered into a partnership with Canada.com where it will provide the Canadian Web portal with search and content advertising services. Canada.com has three million unique visitors per month across its properties, which now use Google's search technology and advertising solutions. The companies didn't release financial details of the transaction. Google said the move is important for those advertisers who have been looking for broader penetration of the Canadian market.

The New York Times today posts an interesting article about the evolution of AdSense, Google's contextual advertising network. AdSense publishers are now finding creative ways to leverage the money they receive from Google to get people to use their site. Digital Point Solutions, a software company from San Diego, receives about $10,000 per month from Google in exchange for placing text ads on its technology forum. For anyone who starts a new discussion, he/she receives half the money Digital Point gets from Google for that section, and then splits the share with other participants in the discussion. The payoffs for …

Mobile marketing is evolving fast, leaving marketers to dream (impatiently) about the days when global positioning systems allow retailers to send ads to cell users when they're a few blocks away from one of their stores. Advocates call this kind of targeting a potential "silver bullet," but privacy groups, of course, are worried marketers are going after a place that's as private to some as their pocket book. However, it's illegal for wireless carriers to sell consumers' cell numbers to advertisers; in fact, carriers cannot divulge any information at all without users' permission. This means that carriers and advertisers are …

Following up on last week's story about China's censorship of the Internet and the cooperation of major companies like Microsoft and Yahoo!, Business Week sits down with Nicholas Bequelin of the Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. Bequelin says that last year, when Yahoo! assisted the Chinese government in imprisoning a journalist (and subsequently received a ton of bad press in the U.S.), it probably could not have acted differently despite the "objectionable moral and ethical grounds" of the situation. He says this merely illustrates "the cost of doing business with China," and that to vilify these companies for cooperating …

Due to fierce competition from Internet majors like Microsoft, Amazon and Google, satellite mapping technology is improving so swiftly it seems nobody has taken time to think about the tech industry's old innovation bugaboo: privacy. Analysts agree that privacy issues abound when high definition satellite images of just about anywhere are available; but the tradeoffs, they say, are worth it. The potential for online advertising, for example, is massive. Local advertisers that don't want to buy national ads will have the opportunity of reaching consumers who are only scouring certain neighborhoods for certain products and services. Last week, Microsoft scored …

Despite what is expected to have been a dismal fourth quarter performance, U.S retail sales of video game hardware, software and accessories hit a new record anyway in 2005, according to research firm NPD Group. Internet-enabled portable devices like the Sony PlayStation Portable and Nintendo's Game Boy Advance led the industry to a new sales high of $10.5 billion last year--$2 million more than the previous record of $10.3 billion set in 2002. Portables were definitely the story for 2005, accounting for more than 10 percent of industry sales. Nintendo's GBA led the way, recording 52 percent of the $1.4 …