Yahoo has released a free software download that lets you manage photos, play music, play back TV shows, and search videos online and on your PC (no Macs). It's a DVR of sorts, that super-charges your TV, provided you have a TV tuner card installed and some cables to connect to your computer. It's a direct shot at Microsoft, no doubt, reminiscent of Microsoft's Media Center Edition or Apple's Front Row. I haven't tested the new service, called Yahoo Go, but it certainly looks worth trying and underlines the company's stated push to move beyond the PC. In January, the …

Massive Incorporated, an in-game ad serving company, is being acquired by Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal reported this morning. This means Microsoft plans to handle ad-serving for the XBOX 360, its next-generation video game console, on its own. It also underscores the belief of industry analysts and executives in the potential for incremental advertising revenue in video games. The Massive acquisition means Microsoft has its next-generation advertising strategy in place long before rivals Sony and Nintendo have even brought their new consoles to market. The acquisition likely means the other console makers will develop their own in-house ad-serving …

As much fun as poking around the blogosphere can be when you're bored or wasting time, wading through all the crap can become tedious, quickly. A new blog search engine called Sphere aims to lighten that load with a new approach. Sphere analyzes individual blog posts, the nature of the blog they appear on, as well as link structures--who links to whom and the quality of the links, factoring in who started a discussion versus who's just participating. Sphere also looks at meta data like posting frequency and lengths of postings. Most crucial to the algorithm, company executives say, …

Microsoft has made a habit recently of arriving late to the game in several tech industries: content creation, search, music, etc. Like everyone else, it's now foraying into social networking; forgive us for being skeptical. The new company, called Wallop, Inc. is a spinoff of an intellectual property program begun last May. It will be jointly funded by Microsoft and VC firm Bay Partners. There are very few details about the service, except that research started in 1999 and several hundred thousand users are testing the service within Microsoft. So it's not a small project. Microsoft has hired Karl Jacob, …

The British Broadcasting Corporation is taking a page from News Corp.'s MySpace playbook, investing heavily in a suite of online features the publicly funded broadcaster hopes will bring it closer to younger audiences around the globe. BBC is revamping its entire Web site to include features like blogging, music downloads and home videos. "We should aim to deliver public service content to our audiences in whatever media and on whatever device makes sense for them, whether they are at home or on the move," the company's director general said. Following the lead of American companies like Disney, BBC is also …

Skype, eBay's Voice over Internet Protocol service, announced yesterday that it will make audio clips available for download as ringtones. The deal includes the following music publishers: EMI Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Warner/Chappell Music and the MCPS-PRS Alliance, Britain's association for author and publisher rights. Why they think users will want to download audio clips to their computer for 50 cents more per download than iTunes--which gives you the full song for less--is anybody's guess. Not only that, but Skype users can also make their own ringtones by importing audio clips from their computer's hard drive. Analysts say ringtones may …

The French government has announced a $2.5 billion plan backing a series of projects, including a Franco-German search engine called Quaero, intended to rival Google. "Quaero" means "I search for" in Latin, and France and the rest of Europe are searching for a way to compete in the booming new media market. History says that government-backed organizations don't typically compete well in an open-market; nevertheless, France has declared that competing with Google and others is essential for the country's economic future. Quaero, one of six government-backed projects given the green-light with this recent round of funding, aims to develop multimedia …

The idea of "Net Neutrality" ( as some would have it) may be about to die in Congress, paving the way for Internet network operators to charge content owners for access to greater bandwidth, but activists won't let the issue go without a fight. According to CNET, dozens of organizations ranging from the American Library Association to the conservative Gun Owners of America group to uber-liberal Movon.org have launched a new Web site under the moniker "Save the Internet." During a conference call (which CNET called a "pep rally") the campaign's director declared: "On one side you have the public...on …

Click Forensics, a monitoring firm measuring click fraud, is following (somewhat) in the footsteps of Fathom Online in creating its very own search advertising-related temperature gauge, the Click Fraud Index. Of course, instead of measuring the average price of keywords, Click Forensics aims to tell marketers what percentage of the clicks they pay for are fraudulent. In March, when the company started the service, the average was 14 percent, lower than the pessimists who worried that click fraud could be as high as 30-40 percent, but far higher than Google and Yahoo would have us believe. That said, the fraud …

YouTube is like one big marketing experiment: the site attracts massive numbers and is run by a couple of starry-eyed kids looking for all kinds of ways to rake in the marketing dollars--so long as they don't piss off their young user base. In its latest marketing venture, Weinstein Co. is paying the short-form viral video site to put the first eight minutes of its new thriller "Lucky Number Slevin" on the site. The collaboration marks the first time a studio has put sequential film content on YouTube, and it may not be the last, should the experiment prove to …