If Bing's first month represented Microsoft's best shot at taking search share from Google, then it's been a huge disappointment, says Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson. According to the latest figures from comScore, Microsoft's search market share was up just 0.4% in June, to 8.4% from 8.0% in May. Considering the many tens of millions of dollars Microsoft has spent promoting its new search engine, 0.4% growth simply isn't going to cut it, especially when Google maintained its 65% share. Yesterday, SAI cited a report from JP Morgan's Imran Khan which claimed that 98% of searchers won't …

Google this week announced that it was bringing its Google Voice mobile app to BlackBerry and Android phones. The mobile versions of the Google Voice service will allow users to access and playback voice mails, send and receive text messages and read transcripts in addition to making local and long distance calls from mobile phones. The apps are fully integrated with each phone's contacts, so you can make calls through Google voice straight from your address book. To use the service, users need to have a data connection, but it isn't necessary to have a Wi-Fi connection to place and …

How much does size really matter when it comes to audience measurement? Well, to hear Nielsen or comScore, the Web's largest audience measurement firms, tell it, the answer is a lot. In its most recent press release, Nielsen claims: "Nielsen Launches Largest, Most Representative Online Audience Measurement Panel in U.S." The panel's total: 230,000 Internet users.Following the release, comScore quickly came out and told The Wall Street Journal that its panel is still larger. Josh Chasin, comScore's chief research officer, said his company's panel now totals 300,000. "They caught up to where we were about six months ago," …

There are now more than 65,000 free and paid applications in Apple's App Store, which makes standing out a tough task for app makers. As such, developers are increasingly coming up with various ways to make a splash, The Wall Street Journal says, employing everything from temporary discounts to guerilla marketing tactics. For example, PopCap Games saw its popular title Peggle shoot up from No. 60 in paid apps to No. 2 in 24 hours by cutting the price of the game to $0.99 from $4.99 for four days. The company declined to provide revenue figures but …

Borrell Associates did an assessment of advertising on social networking sites and found that nearly 20% of all ad spending is by local businesses. The research firm is now estimating that local advertisers will account for roughly $641 million of the nearly $3.3 billion spent on social networking sites this year. Of course, as Gordon Borrell, who wrote the company blog post citing the research, says, that figure is still just "a drop in the bucket" compared to local online ad spending overall, representing just 3% of the total. "If we estimated it for individual local markets (we …

Facebook common shares are being valued at $6.5 billion after an investment worth $14.77 per share from Digital Sky Technologies. The investment boosts the Russian firm's stake in the social networking giant to as much as 3.5%. While this is far below the $10 billion valuation set by DST's May investment, Reuters notes that that was for preferred shares; the $6.5 billion valuation of Facebook common stock is actually higher than what investors had been valuing the social network at in secondary markets in recent months. DST's latest investment suggests that Facebook now has a higher market …

The hot rumor of the day is that Amazon is interested in buying Netflix, "a seemingly dreamy match," says Kara Swisher, except that the rumors ignore two huge potential roadblocks: one being price, the other being a "nearly impossible tax problem" for Amazon. Indeed, the online retailing giant would need to pay well above Netflix's current $2.43 market cap, which would end up being a sizable chink of Amazon's $35 billion valuation. And given that Netflix has so many distribution locations for its subscription rental business, Amazon would have to start paying state taxes-something the company avoids carefully.

Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley, raised eyebrows earlier this week with a report on how teenagers are consuming media, and why Twitter isn't particularly popular among the UK Gen Y crowd. Well, TechCrunch contributor Daniel Brusilovsky -- himself a 16-year-old high school student -- notes that Twitter isn't particularly popular among the U.S. Gen Y crowd, either. He uses comScore numbers to back up his claim: in June, 2009, just 11.3% of visitors to Twitter.com in the U.S. were between the ages of 12 and 17. Worldwide, the number of visitors under 18 drops to 4.4%.

Bing, Microsoft's revamped and renamed search engine, is now a month old, and the software giant is touting its early success (link: http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/search/archive/2009/07/13/bing-at-month-one.aspx). Indeed, not only is Bing receiving favorable early reviews, but more importantly, recent comScore data shows a healthy pop in traffic to the Microsoft search site. Some critics are even suggesting that Bing could usher in a whole new era in the search wars between Google and Microsoft. Well, "keep dreaming," says Silicon Alley Insider writer Henry Blodget. He argues that Bing traffic has only increased because Microsoft spent $80 to $100 million on a …