It was bound to happen sooner or later. First it was Google that announced a market-busting 1 gigabyte email storage capacity in 2004, then Microsoft and Yahoo followed suit. Google and Microsoft then upped their storage to beyond 2 gigs, and now Yahoo has become the first to take it to the extreme: unlimited email storage. Once upon a time, 1 gig was all the storage anyone thought they would need. But nowadays, the proliferation of photos, video, music and other hefty file sizes mean consumers need ever more storage if they don't delete messages. Now, Yahoo co-founder …

Google envisions a world of statistical machine translation, whereby computers instantly translate everything from documents to the things people say to each other in chat rooms across the Web. As ever, the search king believes automated programs are the way to go, not (in this instance) human linguists. The company doesn´t even plan to use linguists to program its grammatical rules and dictionaries. Instead, it will feed documents already translated into two languages into its program, which will learn rules and patterns for future translations, based on the data it´s been fed. Franz Och, a German …

Thanks to a huge surge in 2006, online ad spending in Britain has overtaken that of the print newspaper business, Britain´s Interactive Advertising Bureau was proud to report. Web spending, which grew an astonishing 41 percent, was nearly $3.97 billion, while the press industry last year recorded a "barely discernible" 0.2 percent rise, hitting 3.72 billion. In other media, TV revenues fell 4.7 percent, while radio os forecasted to be down 3 percent. Britain is widely considered to be the world´s leader in online advertising, as underscored by its tremendous year-over-year rise. Web spending now accounts for a …

Much has been made about a lack of federal regulations possibly leading to an ISP-controlled Internet, where tariffs would be imposed on Web companies for greater broadband consumption--especially as increased demand puts a greater strain on their networks. ISP providers have vehemently lobbied against neutrality regulations, saying that the establishment of rules would only benefit Web giants like Google. They add that tariffs would actually help smaller companies that take up less bandwidth catch up with the Googles of the world. On March 22, the FCC launched an investigation into whether ISPs are stifling competition, though …

In a special report, MSNBC´s Bob Sullivan concludes that it´s highly possible your computer is under the control of a hacker, who like the proverbial pied piper, can organize legions of computers to perform tasks for him. Experts tell him the Web has become an "operating system for criminals"; viruses that create bot networks have become so lucrative that hackers now are locked in a cyber arms race with security companies. Hackers lease out their bot networks to criminals who may want to send spam, launch a denial of service attack on a bank for randsom, or even …

Light years behind rival Google's massive Web ad network, Yahoo has smartly decided to bring the same idea to the emerging cellular phone market. Early Tuesday, the Sunnyvale, Calif. giant announced plans to create a mobile ad network. It would allow marketers to place ads not only on its mobile services, but also those of its publisher partners. So far, Yahoo has just three publishers in its network: MobiTV, a mobile video service, Opera, a maker of Web browsers, and Go2, a Yellow Pages site. To encourage more publishers to join, Yahoo is offering customization tools, including oneSearch, …

"It's difficult enough for an incumbent to take on a scrappy pioneer," Fortune writer Adam Lashinsky says of the new News Corp.-NBC Universal online video venture, which highlighted AOL, MSN, Yahoo and News Corp.'s own MySpace as partners in its press release. "But six? I don't think so." If you ask top execs from NBC, MySpace, et al they'll tell you that the unnamed company, a video site for licensed media content that supplies a video player to its Web partners, isn't trying to compete with YouTube. Sure it isn't. Boldface lies notwithstanding, Lashinsky wonders why the companies even …

Twitter, the mini-blogging service for mobile phones, is fast becoming the Web's new media darling. Over the past few weeks, Silicon Valley has started buzzing about the possibility of the company hitting the kind of critical mass seen by YouTube and MySpace. Users of Twitter post short messages that can be viewed either on a Web site or on mobile phones. They get to use up to 140 characters. It was launched publicly last summer, though started to take off mid-March after being adopted by technology bloggers attending last year's South by Southwest conference in Texas. …

Nearly one-third of U.S. households do not have Internet access, nor do they plan to get it, according to a new report from Parks Associates. At this point, these people, representing 29 percent of U.S. households or 31 million homes, see little or no use for it in their lives. They will only be converted once the Web becomes more essential for entertainment services, like TV. Some 44 percent of respondents said they do not subscribe to the Internet because of the perceived low value to their daily lives rather than concerns over cost; 22 percent said they …

Traditional media is under assault from its consumers. They don't want to pay for content, they're going to different sources (including blogs) to find information, they're leaving television for online video, and their behavior is throwing the future economics of media into question. Here are some examples: Time Warner's 2006 ad revenue fell 23.8% from 2000 according to the Publishers Information Bureau. The New York Times Company's stock trades at $25--half its 2002 share price. And the music industry's business model is completely caving in: CD sales fell 20% in the first three quarters of the year, while …