The newspapers of the future--we've been down this road before--will they simply be news Web sites, or will they be downloadable pdf files sent to our inboxes? Some newspaper publishers are planning to introduce a form of electronic newspaper that allows users to download entire editions from the Web onto little handheld devices with reflective digital screens that--in theory--will be easier on users' eyes than laptop and cell displays. Hearst Corp., France-based "Les Echos," and Belgium's "De Tijd" are planning a large-scale rollout of these readers this year. Book publishers once tried to sell similar digital readers, but these failed …

Why is it that Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft is such big news? And what, exactly, was his job in the first place? Scoble was most famous for the way he candidly blogged about his company--both bad and good--but he was, technically, a technology evangelist--recruited by Microsoft to develop relationships with software developers and bring to light powerful new ideas. Blogging, therefore, became a big part of his job, and his blog, Scobleizer.com, became a mandatory daily stop for the techie Slashdot set. As John Furrier, his new employer at PodTech, says: Robert's "his own brand." PodTech is producer and aggregator …

Less than 10 percent of in-game advertising is trackable today, a panel of video game, ad agency and technology executives recently estimated at a digital marketing conference. Measurement is still limited by a lack of standardized ad units and impression counts; Nielsen Interactive Entertainment is still working on something that should help advertisers buy and sell this stuff, but until they do, measurement will remain ambiguous and specific to each publisher (or tech vendor). Take Two, which produces the "Grand Theft Auto" series, says it has already seen incremental revenue from in-game advertising, although apparently not enough to keep its …

Piper Jaffray's Safa Rashtchy, an Internet media and technology analyst, said the social network revolution is only just underway. That and so-called "Googlism," he says, will continue to drive the transformation of the Internet. Rashtchy believes that social networks are poised to shape the future by replacing Web portals. MySpace, for example, has already surpassed MSN and AOL in terms of monthly page views, but not in terms of revenue. The News Corp. site also added 50 million visitors in March, growing at a clip of nearly 250,000 users per day. Not even Google grew this fast, but both portals …

We don't generally cover what happens in Europe, but if you read a lot of business news, you've probably heard that Vodafone, the world's largest mobile operator by revenue, recorded the largest net loss in European corporate history: $41 billion. That is such an astronomical amount of money for one company that it's hard to wrap your head around how anyone could post such a massive loss and still be around to talk about it next quarter. However, Business Week tells us that the wireless giant is in no danger of going bust. As it turns out, a one-time write-down …

If you're in in-game advertising, when Microsoft's Kevin Browne--the general manager of Xbox new media and Franchise Development--speaks, you listen. During his keynote at the Game Advertising Summit, Browne discussed the current state of things: spending is mostly on static ads; each title requires unique integration; effectiveness can only be measured after a sale; integration is difficult for development teams; and ad agencies are playing a very limited role in the process. The reality, then, is not so good. Marketers want broad reach, accountability, easy integration and execution, and multiple formats to choose from--and they want to know their agencies …

Perhaps "co-registration"--the process of asking users to sign up for offers from third parties during or after registration--is no longer the dirty word it used to be five years ago, writes Dan Felter, the CEO of Opt-Intelligence, an online lead generation company, which is another word for co-registration. At its worst, co-registration is an excuse to dump aggregated partner data on someone else. Felter uses the example of a Web site that gets about thousand sign-ups a day suddenly delivering 70,000 leads in one weekend. As a consumer, did you ever wonder where all that spam comes from? Well, a …

We know MySpace is talked about all the time, but the massive increases the site is recording recently are worth mentioning. It seems that every time we write about this company, its user base has grown by 5-10 million. TechCrunch takes old MySpace stats from a Business Week article in October of last year, and cross-references them with April 2006 data from comScore and the company itself. In those six months, its user base has surged from 40 to 75 million--growing at an average clip of 240,000 users per day last month (a 60 percent increase since October). It now …

eBay is entering the keyword advertising business with a twist: the company will promote its auctions on other Web sites, borrowing a strategy from Google and Yahoo, but making it its own. The auctioneer's chief strategy officer told a conference of software developers in Las Vegas on Saturday that it will run the auction-equivalent of contextual ads on other Web sites in exchange for a cut of the resulting sales. Basically, eBay will display its auctions on content partners' Web sites; merchants will provide snippets of code that allow content providers to showcase items for sale in real-time at eBay's …

RBC Capital Markets highlighted the pending launch of GBuy, Google's new online payment system, as a major reason why it has maintained an "outperform" rating on the company. What's the big deal? Well, the merchants that use the new payment system will provide Google with even more data about its users that it will be able to use to drive more precise targeting in future searches. GBuy is all about data mining: "If harnessed, the precision of this targeting could be revolutionary," wrote RBC analyst Jordan Rohan in a report Friday. Users will be taken off the merchant's site to …