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IT was inevitable that the toy-maker Hasbro would end up in court over the very Scrabble-like Facebook application Scrabulous.
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IT is now official. Bill has left the building.
There might be small pockets of DR-DOS, OS/2, Netware, Apple and Linux devotees singing “Ding Dong the witch is dead” around the world. But at the Redmond headquarters of Microsoft, where Bill Gates bid farewell to the company he founded with Paul Allen in 1975, it was all tears and reminiscing. |
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News Corporation has moved to bolster the international growth prospects of its MySpace social networking phenomena, launching in India and using its Pay TV properties to joint-market the property. |
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SOFTWARE as a Service (SaaS) pioneer Salesforce.com has expanded its strategic alliance with search giant Google to deliver an expanded portfolio of business applications as a service via the Web. |
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NEW data on the viewing habits of internet users has revealed just how grave the threat on online video is to TV networks – the number of video’s viewed online jumped a staggering 66 per cent last year, but hardly any of that traffic belonged to traditional media companies. |
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ONLINE giant Yahoo has unveiled a suite a new features aimed at making search easier on mobile devices, including the better integration of voice and predictive text. |
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SOCIAL networking leader MySpace has joined three of the largest music labels in the world to launch a joint-venture music download service, leveraging the sites 30 million monthly visitors. |
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IN the month since Google was given the go-ahead from regulators to acquire online ad firm DoubleClick, the search giant has quietly started implementing plans to reduce staff and sell off parts of the company. |
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Mozilla, the not-for-profit open source foundation behind the massively popular Firefox browser, has quietly set up a new subsidiary focused entirely on the messaging and mail markets. |
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BUSINESS management software specialist Sage has unveiled a complete forward vision for its integrated customer relationship management portfolio that adopts Web 2.0 and Software as a Service (SaaS) principles. |
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MEDIA giant Time Warner Inc’s pioneering online unit AOL is to acquire the youth social networking service Bebo for US$850 million (A$906 million).
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GOOGLE chairman and chief executive Eric Schmidt wasn’t wasting any time during his flying visit to Australia this week, announcing a new service, a new strategic alliance, and a new headquarters investment.
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CHINA has outgrown the United States to become the largest internet market in the world as measured by number of users, according to the Beijing research group BDA China.
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SOCIAL networking phenomenon FaceBook is seeking to clean up its patchy record on privacy issues, giving its users more control over who sees their profiles and personal information. |
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IT is the clearest sign yet that much of the market does not believe that online giant Yahoo will be able to resist the acquisition overtures from Microsoft for long – and it comes from a Chinese company.
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MICROSOFT has taken a big step closer to offering its flagship productivity software suite Office as a hosted service, announcing a worldwide beta trial of an English-language version of Microsoft Office Live Workspace. |
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THE Australian Federal Police has deployed specialist software from Microsoft that helps analysts track and search large volumes of data in child exploitation cases. |
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MICROSOFT has unveiled an early beta of its next generation Internet Explorer browser, and also revealed a new-found commitment to adhering to the same Net standards as the rest of the browser business. |
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SOCIAL networking phenomena Facebook has lured one of Google’s most senior corporate executives away to be become its chief operating officer. |
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DESPITE the initial rebuff, Microsoft still thinks an acquisition of Yahoo is a good idea for both companies, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has told reporters at the giant CeBIT trade fair in Hannover. |
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ONLINE giant Yahoo’s board of directors is preparing to reject Microsoft’s hostile US$45 billion (A$50 billion) acquisition proposal, according to reports from the United States. |
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THE move towards making portable web identities has taken a giant step forward as five of the industry’s most power companies – Google, IBM, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo – joined the OpenID Foundation board. |
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YAHOO chief executive Jerry Yang says the company is still evaluating how Microsoft’s US$47 billion acquisition offer changes the industry’s strategic landscape, and urged employees not to get distracted by the bid.
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SEARCH giant Google has unveiled a new suite of security tools for protecting email from spam and related problems, technology it acquired when it acquired internet firm Postini last year. |
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MARKET wunderkind Google has narrowly missed analyst’ profit expectations for its fourth quarter, disappointing a market already concerned that the US economy will hamper growth. |
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NETSCAPE Navigator, the once ubiquitous web browser that fired the starter’s gun on the dotcom boom in the 1990’s, has passed away quietly, apparently unlamented. |
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MOZILLA’S open source browser Firefox has taken another big chunk of marketshare from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, according to the latest report from French research group XiTiMonitor. |
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MEG Whitman, one of the original commercial warriors of the online world and a genuine industry legend, is to step down as president and chief executive of auction house eBay at the end of March. |
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GOOGLE has gone on the front foot in a bid to have its proposed US$3.1 billion takeover of internet advertising firm DoubleClick approved by the European Union, attacking the EU over its handling of the acquisition. |
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OPEN source software specialist Mozilla has launched the first beta release of its next-generation Firefox 3 browser, highlighting better security, ease of use, and personalisation features. |
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THE internet pioneer who founded and built the Hotmail service before selling it to Microsoft has launched a suite of online personal productivity products that will compete with the powerful MS Office franchise. |
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IBM and Yahoo! has unveiled an updated version of its enterprise search software, which lets companies customise and personalise searches of information within their organisations and across the web. |
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SOCIAL networking phenomena Facebook is under fire from privacy groups over an advertising scheme that publishes the online purchasing habits of its users without their permission. |
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CONSUMER and corporate internet usage demands could outstrip global network capacity by 2010 if billions are not invested now, a new report reveals. |
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GOOGLE has looked to the ranks of mainstream traditional media to fill its Australia-New Zealand general manager position, appointing a former Fairfax magazine specialist.
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MICROSOFT’S online games network Xbox LIVE celebrated its fifth birthday this week, with the company announcing the service had signed its 8 millionth customer to market the event. |
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ASIA Pacific services provider Pacific Internet has launched a business grade “clean feed” content filtering system that restricts employee access to web sites that pose a security or productivity risk.
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MEDIA magnate Rupert Murdoch says News Corporation will drop the subscription model used by the online site of its latest masthead The Wall Street Journal in favour of free access.
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WEB pioneer Yahoo has settled a lawsuit in the US that had accused the company of helping authorities in China to jail and torture two political dissidents. |
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IT security and control firm Sophos has revealed the results of a new survey examining the potential productivity implications for businesses that allow their employees to access Facebook during office hours. |
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GOOGLE has taken a next step in furthering its ambitions for TV advertising distribution, entering a strategic relationship with The Nielsen Company, a ratings specialist in the US. |
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GOOGLE has joined forces with News Corporation unit MySpace to launch OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for building applications for social networking sites. |
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MICROSOFT has scored a rare win over rival Google, snaring a small equity slice of the Facebook service in a US$240 million deal (A$263 million) that values the social networking phenomena at US$15 billion. |
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HOME-grown Chinese search engine Baidu.com has doubled third quarter profits on strong traffic growth that continued to outstrip search leader Google’s efforts in China. |
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THE Australian competition watchdog says Google’s planned US$3.1 billion (A$3.4 billion) acquisition of online advertising specialist DoubleClick will not have an adverse impact on the market. |
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SEARCH giant Google is showing no sign of slowing already impressive revenue growth and has announced a 45 per cent increase in third quarter profits. |
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SOCIAL networking giant MySpace is to allow third party developers access to its service as it attempts to stem the rapid growth of rival Facebook. |
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YAHOO! has revamped its search engine technology, announcing an advanced search assistance technology and integrating audio, video and photos directly into search results. |
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MICROSOFT has moved to counter the threat from Google to its Office franchise, moving the first elements of the productivity software using the software as a service (SaaS) model. |
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DOCUMENT specialist Adobe Systems has signed a definitive agreement to acquire tiny SaaS start-up Virtual Ubiquity, developers of the online word processor Buzzword. |
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