IAC/InterActiveCorp, Barry Diller's Web media conglomerate, is "wildly overcapitalized," with a cash hoard of $2 billion and virtually no debt, according to Forbes, but Wall Street has been tough on the Internet giant of late. Diller split the company into five separate businesses last year, and now he is taking another big gamble, seeking a "transformational" acquisition to boost the company's flagging stock price. "I wouldn't be surprised if Diller's next deal is transformational, maybe even something on the scale of a YouTube," says Alan Gould, media analyst at Natixis Bleichroeder. "The world has changed a lot since the birth …

Microsoft has been "badly shown up" in the mobile business by the likes of Apple, Palm and Research in Motion, but the software giant is planning a massive offensive when it unveils its new mobile strategy at next week's Mobile World Congress, according to BusinessWeek. There, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will unveil "My Phone," a new service that allows anyone with a phone running Windows Mobile 6 to automatically access their photos, contacts, calendar items and other data hosted on a Microsoft Web site. The service automatically uploads photos taken with the phone to the user's My Phone site each …

Online advertising growth may be slowing overall, but in-text ads are picking up steam, Fortune reports. In-text ads are those double underlined keywords found inside texts that are often mistaken for normal hyperlinks. When you mouse over them, a box with an ad appears. When you click on them, the ads direct you to the marketer's Web site. You can find these ads on sites like Fox News, MSNBC, and iVillage. Vibrant Media, one of the area's leading providers, declined to reveal 2008 revenues, but said they're now selling twice as many in-text as they did this time last year. …

Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed, social media companies offering some services that overlap, can all coexist peacefully, writes VentureBeat's MG Siegler. He points out that the blogosphere is atwitter about Facebook killing Twitter because it opened its application programming interfaces last week to allow status updates from Facebook to be passed through to other sites. In other words, the Facebook status update is now mobile. Could this signal the end for Twitter? Highly unlikely, writes Siegler. For starters, Twitter and Facebook status updates are used for completely different reasons. As Matt Hendrickson at TechCrunch points out, Twitter users and Facebook users …

Who needs a pricey Amazon Kindle when you can instantly access up to 1.5 million books on your iPhone? Thanks to a new application from Google, Book Search is now accessible from your mobile phone. That means you can now search public-domain (non-copyrighted) books on your iPhone or Android-powered device for free. Amazon's Kindle, a mobile device that allows users to download full- length books, retails at $360 and costs up to $10 per download (note: for copyrighted books). As VentureBeat's Anthony Ha notes, there are some drawbacks to the mobile site. One problem is the frequent errors that …