Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

Yahoo has landed a big advertising deal with Viacom to provide contextual ads for 33 Viacom websites like MTV.com, VH1.com, Comedycentral.com, etc. This is a multi-year deal that could potentially expand to 140 additional Viacom websites all over the World.

Clearly Google wouldn’t have been Viacom’s first choice for an ad service, not after they’re seeking $1 billion in damages for copyright infringement.

According to Beta News, Viacom’s combined traffic numbers for all of their entertainment sites ranked #1 in their category and 11th overall.   And during February, they had over 90 million unique visitors which potentially means big $$ for Yahoo (this data came from comScore Media Metrix).

Yahoo’s Panama system will be used to provide the contextual ads because it’s Yahoo’s latest way of providing ads. Panama displays ads based upon both the fee advertisers pay, along with the ad relevancy in the search query.  It has done Yahoo well since it was introduced and has increased their click-through rate substantially.

According to Yahoo spokeswoman Gaude Lydia Paez, they’ll be using their typical revenue-sharing deal that’s used with most of their other partners. This is definitely a big deal for Yahoo and their Panama ad program, and should prove to be a good money-maker.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on January 20, 2009 by CyberNet.

Google is experimenting with yet another new search feature called Google Preferred Sites. If you’re one of the lucky few to have this option show up in your search preferences you can start taking advantage of this feature right now, but most of you will probably have to wait for Google to roll it out.

How it works is when you’re logged in with your Google account you can specify your favorite domains, which will then take precedence when performing searches on Google. It’s basically a way for you to have the sites you trust the most towards the top of your search results.

I actually can’t wait to get this feature. It says that the service will also be able to recommend links to be added by scanning through your Google Search History (if enabled). The only thing it sounds like it’s missing is the ability to block domains all together. Their SearchWiki will let you block specific results, but not entire domains.

What do you think? Is this something that you’d actually find useful?

Google Preferred Sites Help Page [via GoogleOS]

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on May 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

News is buzzing around about Microsoft’s $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive! Yep, you read that right. Microsoft didn’t want to be left behind after Google bought the DoubleClick advertising firm for a whopping $3.1 billion, and Yahoo! quickly followed that up by purchasing Right Media for a mere $680 million. Now Microsoft is back in the advertising game thanks to their all-cash transaction of $6 billion for aQuantive!

It’s kinda funny though, because Microsoft was up-in-arms when Google announced that they were going to buy DoubleClick, now Microsoft went and purchased a company that is even larger (aQuantive has 2,600 employees while DoubleClick had just 1,200). Of course, it was expected that Microsoft was bidding on DoubleClick along with Google so when they lost the war they knew they had to do something. Instead of pushing harder against the Google/DoubleClick deal, it looks like Microsoft just decided to go bigger.

According to CNN Money, Microsoft said that they are happy with the price they paid for aQuantive, and that future acquisitions aren’t out of the question. At the end of last quarter Microsoft had $28.2 billion in cash, and in regards to other acquisitions Microsoft said “We certainly have the economic fire power if we decide to do more.”

I could definitely see Microsoft eyeing other companies to acquire, and the first that comes to mind is Zoho. They offer a wide variety of Office-like applications similar to the ones being developed by Google. Microsoft seems to be falling behind in that respect, so I would expect them to try and quickly catchup by making a few acquisitions. After all, the cool thing to do these days is to throw billions of dollars around!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on April 12, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

These days, many of us have multiple places where we store contact information. For myself, I have a list of contacts in my personal email account, my work email account, contacts within some of the social networks I belong to, and then a master list on my computer. With all of the different places where we have lists of contacts, it can get a bit confusing and hard to manage. To help manage all of your contacts online is a service called Keepm. It simplifies the process of managing your contacts and places them all in one place. Today we’ll be taking a look at some of what Keepm offers.

Getting Started

The first thing you’ll want to do to get started is sign-up for an account. If you don’t have an account, you can’t use the service. All you’ll need is your name and a valid email address and you’ll be ready to go.

Adding/Importing Contacts

There are a couple of options for adding contacts.  The first is to simply click on the “Add New Contact” tab and manually enter a contact.  If you decide to go this route, you’ll enter in a first and last name and submit it. It’ll add that person as a contact and then you can go in and add all of the vital information like email address and website.  Below is an image of what a contact sheet looks like:

You can also import your contacts which is one of the most import aspects of the whole service. You do this by clicking the “Import Contacts” tab and then you’ll be guided through the process. Import methods are as follows:

• Import Address book
• Import VCards (.vcf)
• Import from Outlook

If you decide to import an address book, you can choose from the following services:

• Gmail
• Yahoo
• Hotmail
• AOL
• Linked In
• rediff.com
• Orkut

My Experience

After I signed-up for an account, I decided that I would import my contacts from my Gmail account. All I had to do was enter in my user login and password (rest assured, that they do not store your login information). Then Keepm very quickly pulled up a list of all of the contacts I had within my Gmail account. I was able to select or deselect the contacts that I wanted to be imported. Once I chose all of the contacts I wanted, I clicked “import” and it imported all of the information I had for each contact. The process was started and finished within minutes.

Export contacts…

Just as you can import your contacts, you can also export them as well.  You’ll just click the “Export” tab and then choose which contacts you want to export. You’ll also be able to choose your export method.  If you want it as a V-card, you can do that.  If you want it as a .CSV file, you can do that as well. Once you’ve selected your contacts and the method you want to use, you’ll be all set to export them.

Features

Keepm does have some nice features.  One of the best features is that you can add up to 3 tags for each contact. I ended up using the tags “family” and “friends” quite frequently. If I quickly wanted to view my family members, I could just search using the family tag and it would pull everybody up that I had tagged.

Additional features include:

1. It’s free!
2. Share your contacts with anyone via email address
3. It’s quick – there’s nothing worse than a sluggish site but Keepm is far from sluggish
4. It’s simple – this is a very simple contact manager and may be too simple for some of you
5. Search for your contacts by name/company, email address, phone number, instant messenger, city, zip code, or tags

What we’d like to see…

The one thing that I noticed that was missing was additional tracking tools like being able to see birthdays or anniversaries that are coming up.   They also don’t provide any type of demo before signing up which would be nice to have as well. All in all though, if you’re looking for a simple contact management solution, Keepm is great. Any other ideas for managing your contacts?

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on October 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

The list of companies offering an online word processor just keeps getting longer and longer. And because there are so many options, it makes it difficult to determine which service to use, if any at all. As though there weren’t enough options, Adobe has announced that they are acquiring Virtual Ubiquity which is the company that makes Buzzword.

Buzzword is a fairly new online word processor built upon Adobe’s Flash platform using Adobe Flex. Eventually Adobe will be integrating it into a new service called Adobe Share which sounds like their version of an online office suite. While I’m still not sold on the idea of managing all of my documents online, Buzzword does have some nice features considering it is web-based.  Some of those features include:

• Spell Check
• End Notes
• Insert tables and images
• Print options for page size, page orientation, etc.
• View the history of all the revisions made on a document
• Share documents
• Organize files

The Adobe Flash platform is certainly powerful, and Buzzword realizes this.  Virtual Ubiquity’s CEO Rick Treitman says, “Flex and Flash were the means to where we want to go.  No one else realized how powerful it was as a virtual machine.” Another big feature with Buzzword is that they’re the first online word processor with pagination.  News.com explains Pagination as something that “allows people to get an accurate view of how a document will print out as the document is edited.”

Buzzword certainly could be competition for Microsoft, but more likely, they’ll end up as competition for other online word processors like Google Docs and Zoho Writer which could result in these companies putting extra effort into their products to make it the best. While I don’t foresee a major paradigm shift any time soon in the word processing market with people switching entirely from desktop based word processors to web-based options, it could certainly happen in the future. And should this happen, there will sure be all kinds of options to choose from!

Thanks for the tip S!

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