It just may be the shortest beta testing period of any Google product: After a mere 3.5 months, the search king has taken its Chrome Web browser out of beta. Gmail, for example, has been in beta since April 2004. So, what's new? "The engineering team has been fixing a lot of bugs and working on stability, working on making the product really rock solid," Brian Rakowski, product manager for Google Chrome, tells Information Week. He added that Google isn't putting a lot into the "1.0" tag: "We're trying, throughout the whole Chrome development process, to release features very quickly, …

An anonymous Yahoo manager who survived yesterday's layoffs sent Silicon Alley Insider her plan to change the company for the better."Yahoo is in need of a reboot," the manager said simply, just like a laptop that starts freezing or stops performing well. Useless software programs need to be deleted and the machine needs to be rebooted so it can start to run better. However, where the analogy falls short is in the area of personnel, the people who power the machine. Lots of people have left or have now been forced to leave Yahoo, the manager notes. "As a company, …

The video game industry continues to shrug off the recession, NPD Group says, posting a sales increase of 10% in the past month to $2.91 billion, up from $2.64 billion in November 2007. The research group described the industry's continued growth as "blistering." NPD Games analyst Anita Frazier noted that the increase was particularly impressive considering that there was one less week for post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping this year than last year. "With $16 billion realized for the year so far through November, the industry is still on pace to achieve total year revenue of $22 billion in the U.S.," Frazier …

Ad networks have become a "blessing and a curse" for advertisers and publishers, says ClickZ writer Kate Kaye. While they offer advertisers better targeting and broader reach, ad nets are also supposed to help publishers monetize the pages they can't sell directly. Trouble is, "there are more Web pages than ad sellers and buyers know what to do with." The result is a glut of inventory, which drives prices down. Kaye says the culprits are social media inventory, which command extremely low CPMs, and in some cases, ad network efficiencies. "No one would have predicted that better tools would produce …

Mobile CPMs are falling fast, Advertising Age reports. According to industry executives, the cost of reaching 1,000 consumers on their mobile phones now averages $15 compared with an average earlier this year of $20 to $25. Last year, $40 to $50 CPMs were normal. "It seems to be part of a steady decline rather than a single event that sent CPMs tanking," says Eric Bader, managing partner of Brand in Hand, which buys mobile media for such clients as Procter & Gamble, General Mills and Esurance. So what's with the drop? Advertising Age's Rita Chang says the economy is a …

One of Yahoo's defense mechanisms back when Microsoft was trying to acquire the company for $31 per share was a so-called "poison pill," a hefty employee severance plan promising cash and stock benefits that would have made it even more expensive for Microsoft to acquire the ailing Web giant. In response to that plan, angry Yahoo shareholders sued the company in February. On Wednesday, the same day that it began sweeping job cuts, Yahoo announced the settlement of that suit, significantly weakening the takeover severance plan. According to The Associated Press, the former severance plan, guaranteed to each of Yahoo's …

Microsoft's mobile strategy is on the rocks, says BusinessWeek's Olga Kharif. In the third quarter, rival Apple shipped more iPhones than the 56 smartphone makers that create Windows Mobile-powered phones combined, according to research firm Canalys. In the past year, Windows Mobile has slid from being the world's second most popular mobile operating system to the No. 4 spot, behind Nokia's Symbian, Apple's OS X and Research in Motion's BlackBerry. To make matters worse, Google's Android operating system has been met with popular demand, causing a host of new carriers and handset makers to sign-up for making mobile devices that …

Many VCs are struggling to retain investors, but Accel Partners has bucked that trend, announcing Thursday the closing of two new funds worth more than $1 billion. The first, called Accel London III, contains $525 million and will be used to fund European-based startups. The second, called Accel Growth, will be managed in Palo Alto and contains $480 million for "growth equity." Accel's Jim Breyer tells Kara Swisher that raising the money was easier than he thought. "It wasn't difficult, simply because we are fortunate to have exceptional investors, who stepped up aggressively over the last month," said …