Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget declares "Bing", Microsoft's new search engine, dead on arrival, and says the software giant should really consider leaving the Internet business behind. Blodget starts by taking issue with a recent analogy from CEO Steve Ballmer, in which he says it took several years and several tries before Windows became a household name. Ballmer said he hopes that Bing can come from behind in a similar manner. But Ballmer fails to acknowledge that Microsoft had a monopoly in operating systems, Blodget says. "When you have a monopoly, everyone buys your upgrades ... mostly because …

Bing may be live now, but it wasn't when Microsoft introduced the new search engine last week, potentially wasting a big opportunity to bring in new users, says Ad Age's Abbey Klaassen. According to the report, Bing was the subject of 1,500 news stories, spent almost a full 24 hours on Twitter's trending-topics list, and per Nielsen Online, it accounted for 0.23% of all blog conversations on the day that it was formally unveiled. However, visits to Bing.com only produced a landing page that said, "Coming soon" along with a three-minute video trailer outlining some of the …

CBS News on Monday announced a landmark deal with Web startup Ustream to stream all of its Evening News broadcasts and breaking news reports live over the Web, Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson reports. This is the first such deal signed by any major media company's broadcast news division. It is a non-exclusive ad-revenue sharing agreement. According to Ustream CEO and co-founder Brad Hunstable, the deal is considered a "validation" for both Ustream and the live-streaming industry as a whole. The idea here is to make CBS News's Ustream feed the place people go for premium news …

Time Warner's AOL, which will soon be spun off to become a standalone public company, may take on debt because it has "very healthy" cash flow, Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes says. "Theoretically it could support some debt," Bewkes said last week during an investor conference in New York. The company's capital structure won't be decided until terms of the separation are complete, he said. In a research note, Michael Morris, an analyst with UBS AG, said AOL could assume at most $1.5 billion in debt because its leverage shouldn't exceed Time Warner's, especially when cash flow …

Advertisers have tried and many have failed to gain recognition for their brands through social media advertising, USA Today reports. Analysts claim the next step may be creating their own social networking destinations. "Marketers are creating social networks that have lots of legs," says eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson. "They have one in Facebook, one in Twitter that links back to a corporate site. They don't expect to do all their social networking in one site." Volkswagen, Tropicana and Sharpie are examples of brands that have launched new social-networking sites that give people tools, blog capabilities and …