PaidContent's Joseph Tartakoff says Yahoo could lose as many as three more percentage points of search share to Google over the next year to 18 months, as its distribution deals with HP and Acer PCs run out. Yahoo told Dow Jones, which broke the story, that it may lose some share, but not as much as 3%, "because consumers will continue to use Yahoo search even if they buy a new computer pre-loaded with a rival's toolbar." Tartakoff notes that in the case of HP, Microsoft has replaced Yahoo as the default search engine, a move which could significantly boost …

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's plans to increase the regulatory oversight of private investment has the VC industry up in arms, TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid says, citing an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal that claims venture capital firms pose almost no systemic risk to financial markets and the global economy. The Journal piece points out that the $30 billion invested in venture capital each year is barely a blip on the radar, representing less than 0.1% of all financial transactions in the U.S. VC firms also use almost no debt, eliminating the negative effects of over-leveraged …

It turns out that Wednesday's New Media Age story about Twitter backing its first advertising partner in the UK was false; yesterday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote a blog post stating that it has no official business arrangement with Twitter Partners. "The name, branding, and suggestion that Twitter has some kind of equity partnership or an agreement of any kind in place is misleading and wrong," he wrote. Apparently, the two sides are now working to clear up the confusion; VentureBeat's MG Siegler suggests this could include a name change for Twitter Partners, among other things.

Kara Swisher delves deeper into the ongoing talks between Google and Twitter, and finds out that the search giant will be competing with Microsoft to strike a commercial search or product partnership deal with the microblogging sensation. Swisher says the Twitter talks for both parties are centered around a deal to exclusively deliver search or other similar services to Twitter properties. Twitter, with its real-time database of 140-character-or-less "tweets," is shaping up to be the next great battlefield in search. Google obviously dominates the field, with Microsoft a distant third, but some think the market for real-time …

After angering the digerati with its plans for metered broadband use, Time Warner Cable released more information about its pricing plans for the service on Thursday. In a statement, the company justified its actions, saying, "Internet demand is rising at a rate that could outpace capacity within a few years. According to industry analysts, the infrastructure may not be able to accommodate the explosion of online content by 2012." GigaOm's Stacy Higginbotham notes that we've definitely heard this before-for instance, AT&T last year predictedt that the Internet would be full by next year. "Instead of upgrading its …

As Americans spend more and more of their time on the Web, online ad spending should rise concurrently, right? Well, it hasn't turned out that way: online advertising hovers at around 10% of media spending, while users are spend as much as 20-30% of their media time surfing the Web. However, the Web is still growing its share of the overall media pie. According to a new report from eMarketer, the Web's share of media spending will grow to 15% by 2013. Ironically, the rate of growth is actually being boosted by the global recession, eMarketer says, as brands reevaluate …