• Angry Web Firms Protest New Bill Neglecting Net Neutrality
    Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are protesting a new bill that?conspicuously-- would not regulate how broadband operators organize their networks. In a letter to the bill's author, Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton, the companies said the proposed bill "would fail to protect the Internet." Barton, in crafting the document, has clearly sided with the telecommunications companies, which include major phone and cable firms, and collectively form one of Washington's most powerful lobbying forces. According to Cnet, the Web industry is currently being outspent in Washington by a 3-1 margin. The Web firms support the idea of network neutrality, which says that …
  • Google Goes To Washington
    Google has officially joined the ranks of Washington's lobbying herd, that powerful "underground" force of influencers who curry favor with politicians on behalf of the large corporations who send them there. Google's new army of advisers is charged with helping to fight fires on the thorny issues of copyright law, access to the Web, and privacy, including the recent battle with the Justice Department over proprietary search data. More recently, the push to preserve "unfettered" Internet access by banning network providers from creating a multi-tiered network system that would reward those publishers willing to pay for more bandwidth, has taken …
  • Facebook Seeking $2 Billion In Possible Sale
    Facebook, arguably the Web's second most popular social networking site after MySpace.com, is putting itself up for sale, according to Business Week. The owners of the student-aimed site hope to sell for as much as $2 billion, having recently turned down a $750 million offer. That's about three times as much as News Corp. bought MySpace for in July of last year. Facebook is the seventh most heavily trafficked site on the Web, according to comScore Media Metrix, garnering 5.5 billion page views in February, more than Amazon, Ask.com or The Walt Disney Company, but far fewer than MySpace, …
  • New Mobile Company Creates Cell Phone Avatars
    Sean Ryan, the founder of the online subscription service Rhapsody, is launching a new venture that aims to capitalize on teens' fascination with cell phones upgrades. It's a fact that the vast majority of game, ringtone and wallpaper downloads are teens, so why wouldn't they be willing to shell out some cash to create cartoonish caricatures of themselves? That's the idea behind Ryan's latest venture, called Meez, which lets users create their own images, and then upload them wherever they want. This could absolutely be a big hit for the former Rhapsody chief, as teens willing to personalize their phones …
  • Survey: Not Many Subscribe, But Interest Is There For Mobile TV
    Just 2 percent of cell phone users subscribe to a mobile TV service, but that number is expected to spike in the next four years, according to a mobile video survey by JupiterResearch. More than four in 10 mobile subscribers say they are interested in mobile TV, but research firm says carriers must now find the right combination of price and content. Last year, consumers spent $62 million on mobile video subscriptions, which Jupiter predicts will grow to $501 million by 2010. While just 2 percent subscribe, the survey finds that more than 17 percent are interested in watching TV …
  • Verizon SuperPages To Sell AdWords To Its Advertisers
    Verizon SuperPages.com has signed an agreement with Google whereby its vast sales force will resell advertising in print and online to Verizon's large pool of small to mid-sized businesses. The deal essentially marries Google's massive advertising network with Verizon's ability to sell advertising directly to its nationwide clients, something Google and other big Internet companies don't have the resources to do. It also leverages Verizon's close, long-standing relationship with its small-business clients. Kelsey Group managing editor Greg Sterling said these kinds of moves are "critical to moving the local search market forward" because local businesses, who tend to know nothing …
  • Online User-Generated Political Content Spared In Campaign Finance Law Reform
    Federal regulators have brought political advertising on the Internet under the nation's campaign finance law, by unanimously adopting a rule that requires anyone placing a political ad on a site to abide by federal campaign spending and contribution limits. However, the ruling was also clear that other political Internet activity, such as blogging, e-mail, and starting one's own online publication, would not be covered by the campaign law. Ads for or against federal candidates will be paid by money regulated by the law, which limits individual spending to $2,000 and bans union and corporate donations. Some Internet users had feared …
  • Column: Internet Not Only To Take Lead, But Take Over Marketing
    In an age of rapid and rampant digital expansion, traditional media has taken solace from the fact that--to date--no medium has ever been outright replaced by the emergence of others. Well, as any stat watcher knows, such precedents exist to be broken. Remember the 2004 World Series? No team in the 100 year-plus history of baseball had ever come back from 0-3 to win an American League Championship until the Boston Red Sox. Perhaps that's a bad analogy, but the point is, anything can happen. Ad Age columnist Jonah Bloom agrees. He calls it "wishful thinking" on the part …
  • How To Teach World Peace Through Video Games
    Eric Zimmerman, the CEO of a game development company called gameLab, issued a challenge to his developers a few months ago: design a game inspired by the Nobel Peace Prize. Among the candidates: "Peace Bomb," which sounds suspiciously like the situation with the U.S. in Iraq, is a Web-based interactive game designed for Nintendo's portable DS where a group of players promote "peaceful insurgency projects" in a war-torn country, with the end-goal of embarrassing a "militaristic corporate government." In another, called "Empathy," players live in a nation on the brink of war, and their goal is to keep their family …
  • Open Source Internet Debate Paves Way for Change
    Apple's battle in France over the country's proposed mandate to open up its iTunes music store to distribute other forms of content could result in radical long-term changes in the economics of content distribution, writes Diane Mermigas of The Hollywood Reporter. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the so-called "Net Neutrality" bill would effectively force network operators to keep their pipes open to any and all content providers on the Web, regardless of how much bandwidth they require. In an interesting twist, regulation is aiming to open up or keep open the Internet markets. Ironically, the steady increase in direct downloads, …
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