The back-and-forth between Microsoft and Yahoo executives over a possible search deal continues, with Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell admitting at an industry conference on Thursday that Yahoo's search business wouldn't be the "silver bullet" that fixes its Web business. "Yahoo doesn't have the magic solution," Liddell said. "No one should think it will transform the industry." Liddell also noted that Microsoft's Web division had been disappointing, and that a number of fixes would be considered. "No one inside Microsoft says we've done as well (at online) as we should have," he said (via Silicon Alley Insider) . "We …

In a very long email that can be read in its entirety here, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who will be keynoting the 2009 OMMA Global Hollywood Conference & Expo in Los Angeles next month, advises startups to hold on for as long as they can during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In the memo, Calacanis, who co-founded and then sold the blog network Weblogs to AOL in 2005, expresses the gloomiest of outlooks for the global economy. "The severity of what has happened can't be underestimated," he said. "Bottom line: there is zero chance of …

According to a new study, the U.S. could raise nearly $52 billion in revenue over the next 10 years by taxing Internet gambling activity. Of course, this would require lifting the three-year-old Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which makes it illegal for credit card and other companies to knowingly process payments made through offshore gambling operations. European online gambling companies lost billions in market value after Congress passed the 2006 law. Gambling supporters hope the new analysis, prepared by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, will help repeal the legislation. "There is a dramatic need to have a regulated system that protects …

MySpace no longer receives as much press as Facebook and Twitter, but the News Corp. site is still one of the most popular sites on the Web. And, says Read Write Web, it continues to try to innovate with new products for users and advertisers. However, for some, new features like "status and moods" might be seen as "too little too late." After all, status updates have become the province of Twitter and Facebook. Other new features are more useful. For example, MySpace is now offering music users a "Music Playlisting" feature that allows users to share playlists publicly the …

When Google launched Google News in 2002, many in the media world said the search giant had created a product it didn't dare monetize, notes ClickZ's Zachary Rodgers. The thinking was that Google News relied entirely on major media companies for its content, and that these firms would instantly sue if Google tried to make money off their content. Well, that was 2002, towards the beginning of the newspaper industry's death spiral. Now, with newspaper and other print companies reeling, Google has begun serving ads on Google News results in the U.S. In a blog post announcing the move, Google …

New data from comScore suggests that PC Web users and mobile Web users are very different. According to the new report, those who spend the least amount of time in front of their PCs are 30% more likely to surf the Web on their mobile phones. This negates the assumption that the heaviest PC Web users are the same people using their phones to go online, says Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm. It makes sense, if you think about it-you certainly don't need to access the Web via your mobile phone if you're sitting in the office at a desk all …