To begin with, Microsoft adCenter will start providing paid search results to Yahoo! sites in France, Ireland and the U.K.

Ranked second and third most popular search providers in the UK, Yahoo! and Microsoft hope to be able to achieve this in the first trimester of 2012. Advertisers and marketers will accordingly be informed about actions they can take with regards to their adCenter accounts and budgets.

Testing of the paid search results is expected to begin by mid January itself, but will be limited to a small percentage of Yahoo! traffic. Marketers have been advised to closely monitor their campaigns and prepare to increase their budgets, especially if the budget is currently depleted more than 80% daily.

Location targeting capabilities of adCenter are also being improved in order to help advertisers reach a more relevant audience, with new language and location targeting options. This will help European advertisers to reach users in various locations where the same language is spoken. They will also be able to decide which location they wish to target via choices ranging from a bundle of countries to individual cities. They will also be able to apply bid-boosting to focus their spending more effectively.

Testing and adjustments will continue until the second quarter of the year, by which time, Microsoft and Yahoo! are likely to be ready for a full-scale roll out of these services.

The site, called so.cl (To be pronounced as “social”), is meant to help students to share interesting discoveries related to their curriculum with each other.

so.cl

At present, the site is restricted to a handful of universities such as the University of Washington, Syracuse University, New York University and a few other schools. Others who may be interested in this project can express an interest in the project by signing on using their Facebook id or emailing microsoft.

The site looks like a combination of features from Facebook and Google+. It will have a combination of search, web browsing and social networking features.

Bing powers the search function of so.cl. Users can create ‘rich posts’ by finding interesting images and links on the web, and using So.cl’s montage function to assemble them automatically into a cool visual. They can also share videos with friends or any users via ‘video parties’. Although the name sounds like a video party is a variation of a Google+ Hangout, it is actually just a simple way to search, and quickly assemble a list of movies to view together with friends.

Example of a video party in So.cl

So.cl was developed by Microsoft FUSE Labs. The project has been described as “an experimental research project focused on exploring the possibilities of social search for the purpose of learning.”

The logic behind the launch of this site for students is the belief that many students would be interested in the same kind of information. Such a social network would make it easier for students even from distant places to share their information with each other.

Microsoft has clarified that this site is not meant to replace any existing social network such as Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. In fact users have to sign in through their Facebook account in order to access this new social network.

The study takes into consideration various devices such as tablets, e-readers, and other portable connected devices. The study concentrated on user demographics, features of the devices being used and shipment details. Retailing strategies being used by the manufacturers and marketers as well as pricing tactics were also studied.

Mobiles, smartphones and tablets are expected to be the fastest growing devices in the near future. This assessment has been further strengthened by the recent announcement from Microsoft stating that their Windows 8 OS will be orientated towards mobiles and tablets. Microsoft have also said that their Office suite will add to the attraction of tablets within the enterprise space.

Analysts at Juniper estimate that the number of tablet devices being shipped out will touch 253 million by 2016. This is a huge jump compared to the number of such devices expected to ship this year, which is just around 55.2 million.

Juniper’s numbers match other forecasts by Gartner and DisplaySearch quite closely. Numbers for this year were forecast to be around 50 million, but have now been revised up a bit, which further reinforces these steep growth expectations.

It is also believed that by 2016, more than half the number of tablet devices will have Wi-Fi as well as cellular connections. At present, most of these devices only include Wi-Fi connectivity.

Currently, customers are required to have separate connections for their mobile phones and for the tablet. This situation is expected to change in due course and could also influence the growth in usage of tablets.

The study was conducted across a sample of over 4,200 people in 6 countries across the Asia-Pacific region. The countries were Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Singapore and Taiwan.

Pre-family men are an important user base because they have good amount of purchasing power as well as influence and they are also quite knowledgeable about technological developments. This demographic in the market is also on the rise as the average age at which a man marries is on the rise.

Targeting this audience when marketing and advertising online requires an understanding of how these men think and what their preferences are with regards to the use of different gadgets such as laptops, PCs, smartphones etc. It is also necessary to know what content they are most likely to access and how and when that may be.

It was found that these men are most likely to use laptops (40%) and PCs (35%) for social networking, as also for important emails and business transactions. On the other hand, the mobile phone is used only 20% of the time for such activity.

In contrast, when this demographic play games, they are about twice as likely to make use of smartphones and desktop browsers (56%). Home consoles and portable game consoles are used only 35% and 33% respectively for gaming. Price and social connectivity are the likely reasons for this.

Uunmarried men in the region browse through information regarding news, entertainment and people most frequently.

According to him, marketing in a place like Asia is very different from marketing in the U.S. While the U.S. market is reasonably homogenous, there are a lot of differences across the Asian market.

Hence advertising in the U.S. is relatively easy, as the culture and values of the people there are similar.

On the other hand, the culture varies widely in the Asian region. Over 2,000 languages are spoken in this part of the world, and hence one has to keep all these factors in mind while preparing an ad campaign for this region.

He further explains that the arrival of mobile technology has brought about a common thread across these different cultures. Hence it is essential to make optimum use of this technology while marketing any product or service, as it can truly connect the consumers across different regions and cultures.

He says, “Start with consumers, start with categories, I see a lot of great work where people just don’t have the opportunity to use a kind of “vanilla” view and so they get into category-specific details, sharing some great use of creativity out there.”

If marketers keep these tips in mind, they are sure to be able to improve their campaign performance and will reap rich benefits in due course.

Windows 8 and a number of devices running the operating system are expected to launch tomorrow during the Microsoft Build Conference in California.

Microsoft will use its latest operating system to compete with the Apple iPad. The iPad, which was launched about one and a half years ago, is believed to have sold over 25 million units thanks to a lot of marketing and the usual hype surrounding an recent Apple product launch.

So far, competitors to the iPad, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Touch Pad by HP and the RIM Playbook have failed to dent the popularity of the iPad.

Microsoft hopes that the Windows 8 OS will be able to function equally well on both desktops as well as tablets. For this to happen, Microsoft will have to convince app builders to add one more operating system to their development schedules.

Initially, Windows will only roll out a test version of this new OS. It may be almost a year before the tested version is put up for sale worldwide as they will have to ensure that this system works equally well for desktops and tablets.

Microsoft Advertising recently recently posted the results of research analysing how Indians spend their time online. The study, titled “Living with the Internet” was carried out by Microsoft Advertising, MEC and Mindshare, and it provides interesting results.

Indians were found to spend:

• 49% of their time communicating
• 35% of the time seeking information
• 22% of their time on entertainment activities
• 14% of the time creating content on digital spaces (status updates etc)
• 12% of their time making online transactions.

In addition, it was also found that 81% of time spent reading the news or looking for information, is planned. Similarly, 81% of activities such as communicating, online chatting and networking are also planned. Even downloading or streaming videos, playing games or listening to music are planned 60% of the time.

In contrast, activities such as updating blogs, uploading photos and online transactions are unplanned nearly 50% of the time.

Another issue being studied is the popularity of laptops versus smart phones. While it was found that both gadgets are equally popular for searches on the go, laptops are more popular for other activities.

Laptops were used for communication 51% of the time compared to smart phones 46% of the time. Laptops were used for entertainment 23% of the time versus 17% for smart phones and laptops were used for transactions 13% of the time compared to 8% for smart phones.

This information is especially important to marketers and brands planning to target the Indian subcontinent as the data shows a definite maturing of the online market, thereby enabling advertisers to connect better with their target audience online rather than having no option other than to advertise on television, billboards and newspapers.

Microsoft, Apple and Oracle have come together to buy old patents of Nortel. Having done that, they are now asking manufacturers to pay a fee of $15 for every Android system they wish to use on their mobile devices. This fee makes it more expensive for phone manufacturers to use the Android apps in their phones, compared to the Windows Phone 7.

Google’s official blog claims that the imposition of this “tax” for these dubious patents is a means of fighting Google through litigation rather than competing by developing their own patent-worthy technology.

The U.S. Department of Justice should ask Microsoft and its partners to license the said patents at a reasonable price as it does not approve of the acquisition of patents as an anti-competitive tool.

In the meantime, Microsoft has responded to this allegation, saying that Google had also been invited to bid jointly for these patents, but had refused.

Google, in turn, replied saying that joining the group would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners, thus making sure that they were unable to assert themselves against these patents. It would also mean that Google would end up paying for something that would actually hamper the growth of their platform.

Microsoft has further said that Google refused to join the other companies because it wanted to buy these mobile patents for itself, to assert against others. Clearly, the last word on this issue is yet to come, but in the meantime, it will be the end users who suffer as they will end up paying heavily for the use of the patents.

A blog post on the RKGBlog contained a screenshot of ads being displayed within the organic search results.

The ads have been placed along with the organic (unpaid) listing results. The word “Ad” is placed on the right hand side of the sponsored result. However, it is not very prominent and can easily be missed.

Image courtesy RKG: Bing displaying ads within organic search engine results

In the past, Yahoo! and a handful of second-tier search engines had tried a service called “paid inclusion”, whereby ads were included in the search results, but there were no ranking factors. Yahoo! withdrew the service in 2009, due to its controversial nature.

Popular blogger Danny Sullivan had also voiced disapproval of Google using paid inclusion in their search results.

Currently, Google does include ads within their organic search results, but they are highlighted in a different colour above the organic results, differentiating them from the organic results and making the fact that they’re ads more obvious than the marking that Bing is using.

This format is currently in the testing stage and is shown only to a few users. A Microsoft spokesperson has said, “We’re constantly testing and experimenting on Bing, and with that, we carefully measure user engagement and reaction to these changes. We have nothing further to share at this time.”

If Microsoft does choose to go forward and roll this format out worldwide, it could have serious ramifications. For one, click-through rates on Bing ads are likely to rise. If Google feels the pressure and chooses to do something similar, AdWords advertisers could benefit greatly while the value of SEO could fall.

While Google had a market share of 90.53% in May 2011, in the U.K. it now has a market share of 92.02% for the month of June 2011. Similarly, a year-on-year comparison shows that Google had a market share of 91.82% in June last year.

In contrast, competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft jointly account for only 5.84% of the market share in search. This is a decrease of 1.49% compared to the share in May 2011 and a decrease of 0.21% compared to June 2010.

However, in spite of this growth, the overall share of search has reduced. In the past, search accounted for 40% of all traffic on the net. It now accounts for 34.29% of all traffic.

This result does not however mean that online search is on the decline. It only indicates that in spite of the fact that the overall number of searches are increasing, the percentage of traffic coming from search has declined because traffic from other sites, notably the social networks, is on the upswing.

A study of the traffic on social networks indicates that after a slight decline during the last three months, Facebook has now recovered and has the largest market share of all social networks at 53.72%. This is a growth of 0.11%.

YouTube, on the other hand, is the fastest growing social network in spite of being at the number two slot. It now accounts for 20.76% of all visits to social networks in the U.K.

In general, social networks are now the second largest source of traffic on the internet accounting for 12.54% of all traffic.

For over a year, a number of stories were either leaked out or speculated upon, about Google launching a social network. Invariably, the leaks were followed by denials about it. But now, things are out in the open.

Google has finally bitten the bait, and their new social network Google Plus (or Google+) has just been launched.

Google+

While there is bound to be excitement to find out what exactly Google Plus is all about, it seems to be a combination of features that are already offered by a number of other networks.

“Real-life sharing, rethought for the web” is the tagline for the new network. Users will be required to create a profile containing a name and a photograph. They will then find five basic features. These are:

• Circles
• Sparks
• Hangouts
• Instant Uploads
• Huddle

Circles allows a user to divide contacts into different groups such as family, friends and work. This will allow them to decide what information they wish to share with a particular group of contacts, instead of having to share all information with all contacts. A similar feature is already available on Facebook in the form of Friend Lists.

Sparks is similar to Google reader, which allows users to get updated news feeds by subscribing to sources of news and information. It facilitates the spread of viral content similar to how Twitter and the Facebook News Feed do.

Hangouts allows users to hold video conversations with various contacts at the same time. This feature is also available on Tinychat. The overall premise of the feature, though, seems to be inclined more towards mimicking functionality found on Foursquare.

As the name suggests, Instant Uploads will upload the photos taken on a mobile phone automatically. This is also possible through iCloud, Microsoft Kin and other platforms. This feature, though, competes directly with Facebook and Flickr for photo-sharing.

Huddle will enable the user to have a group chat. This is also possible through Beluga, which Facebook acquired recently and is very similar to Google Wave, which got discontinued at the end of last year.

Only time will tell how popular Google+ will become and whether or not it will provide any real competition to Facebook, which is already extremely popular and quite unlikely to feel any real threat in the near future. The odds are against Google once again, but they have very successfully beaten the odds in the past and just might do so again.

Recent reports from Inside Facebook had projected that the Facebook graph is on a downward slide, following a substantial loss in the number of users in the United States, U.K. and several other countries, between the months of May and June 2011.

In partial contrast to this, the study by UKOM/Nielsen has found that irrespective of actual user numbers, visits to  Facebook have increased and the popular social network has overtaken Microsoft in the U.K. for the first time ever, in the month of May. Facebook is now the second most popular site in the U.K.

According to this report, Facebook had 26.8 million visitors from the U.K. in May 2011, compared to 26.2 million visitors to the various sites on the Microsoft network in the same month.

While visits to Facebook increased slightly from 26.5 million, visits to Microsoft fell from 30 million in April 2011. In some ways, one could argue that Facebook doesn’t seem to have grown more popular, but instead Microsoft has lost popularity.

The same report also shows that the number of visits to Twitter in the U.K. has also gone up significantly during the same time period. The number of users for Twitter went up significantly following the episode about the super injunction pertaining to footballer Ryan Giggs.

Analysts at Nielsen indicate that the growth of users on both Facebook and Twitter is largely due to the growth of the number of users over 50 years of age taking an interest in these social networks.

While the interest by the over-50 population could be a good thing for advertisers, if the youngsters who have so far been the main users of these social networks decide to stay away from them because of the invasion by the elders, it could eventually have disastrous consequences for both sites.

In effect, users will now be able to use Skype software to make video calls using a set-top box and a special remote control.  The remote control will also have a keyboard, allowing users to chat. It will not matter whether the other party is using a phone, a computer or a TV to make the call.

Skype-enabled TV sets have already been available in the market since about a year.  However, this is the first time a cable network operator will offer such a facility.

The trial of this new scheme is expected to start in a few months’ time. Details regarding the cost of the software involved are not yet available. However, it is reasonable to assume, that it would cost less than a Skype-enabled TV.

Once the service is functional, when users receives a call, they will be able to view the caller ID and decide whether they want to talk with the caller, have a video conference or just chat. The service will allow users to make low cost Internet video calls while watching programmes on television.

This deal has come following the recent purchase of Skype by Microsoft for a record $8.5 billion. It will also renew user interest in cable TV connections, possibly reversing the trend among users to switch away from traditional cable to other options such as Netflix, Hulu and other Web-based services.

The fact is that Yahoo! is not only big, but several of its properties are number one in their respective fields, while many others are at the number two position. Alex Linde, Yahoo! Director of Mobile Advertising, said during the OMMA Tablet Revolution Showcase at Internet Week New York 2011that “Yahoo! is the premier digital media company”.

Linde explained that Yahoo! reaches about 680 million users every month, which is about 50% of the online global population. They also reach about 187 million users in the U.S., which is almost 90% of PC users in the U.S.A.

Similarly, Yahoo! has a large clientele on sites like Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and several other sites such as Flickr. Linde says, “We are the most trusted brand on the Web.”

According to the April 2011 comScore Media Metrix report, Yahoo! is the number one overall Web property and twelve of their properties are number one in their respective vertical sectors.

Yahoo! News Network, with 88 million users is far ahead of popular sites like CNN and MSNBC. Similarly, Yahoo! Finance is far ahead of Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and others. Yahoo! Sports is also far ahead of ESPN. Moreover, these Yahoo! properties have retained the number one position for the last several months.

In spite of this, Yahoo! seems to have lost the favoured position which it held, in the 1990’s.

Yahoo!’s Executive Vice President of the America’s region, Ross Levinsohn claims that this is just an evolution phase that the company is passing through. He describes it as “a generational thing. Not a Yahoo! thing.”

However, the company’s historical mis-steps have cost it in the long run, and even though it might continue to get visitors, it is unlikely to return to glory unless the management team at Yahoo! take some serious steps to bring the brand back into the limelight.

A study conducted by the Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento in Italy looked at the daily patterns of life in Twitter messages (tweets), and was presented on Tweetolife.com via graphs highlighting the differences in the contents of tweets according to the gender of the users and time of the day.

The said study was conducted between November 2009 and February 2010. Over 1 million tweets were taken into consideration while carrying out the study. The tweets were then classified into two sections male and female, based on the first name of the user.

When the tweets were analysed to find out which words or phrases were used more frequently by males and which were used more frequently by females, the analysts found some interesting trends.

Both men and women talked equally about marriage, but women spoke a bit more about divorce. Dinner and movies were other topics that were discussed more by women than by men. Of these two subjects, men spoke about movies more than they did about dinner.

Surprisingly, it was the women who also spoke much more about love and sex than the men. The number of women who spoke about love was higher than the number of women who spoke about sex.

Not surprisingly, the topics that men spoke about more than women were found to be football and money, and if percentages are anything to go by, it seems men are more interested in football than in money!

Where it comes to technology, men were almost always found to be much more enthusiastic about it. Topics such as ipad, iphone, android and tablet pcs were all tweeted by far more men than women. Women, however, did seem more keen on the iPod than men.

Search engines are also talked about a lot more by men than by women. However, women do seem to tweet more about Yahoo! than they do about Google or Microsoft.

Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have seen almost equal adoption by both sexes, which is reflected in the almost equal numbers of tweets about each of these networks by both men and women. Not surprisingly, Digg is much more tweeted about by men, as it does seem to cater much more to men than women.

On the humourous side, tweets about Justin Bieber seem to peak round the time teenagers come out of school up till the time they go to bed.

When are most tweets about Justing Bieber posted?

While these figures might seem mildly interesting or amusing, they actually could help marketers decide how and where to target audiences based on interest and demographics.

This is Microsoft’s largest takeover deal yet, and it is hoped that this deal will place them in a better position to deal with the onslaught of laptops, mobile phones, tablets and other devices.

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, made this announcement during a recent conference in San Francisco. The VoIP service will be paid for fully in cash, to become a part of Microsoft.

Services on Skype will be integrated with Microsoft’s existing platforms such as Xbox Live, Kinect, Outlook and Hotmail. Microsoft hopes to be able to put this technology to use for purposes such as video chats on Xbox, mobile conferencing through the Windows phone, audio chats between business associates and many more person 2 person services. This should enable Skype to reach a much larger audience worldwide.

Steve Ballmer has said, “By bringing together the best of Microsoft and the best of Skype, we will empower people around the world with new technologies that should bring them closer together.”

Earlier, Skype had been bought over by eBay, but the arrangement did not work out very well and Skype sold their major share shortly thereafter. It is a known fact that Skype had been on the lookout for someone to take over the company. It is believed that Google and Facebook were among the companies that showed an interest in the acquisition.

While Skype’s main offering of free voice and video calls over the Internet has been the main driver of its growth, the service has been making substantial losses over the last 5 years. After the amalgamation with Microsoft, the Skype user base will jump from 107 million to 660 million, which should help improve the balance sheets.

Microsoft has also said that they will continue to support Skype’s non-Microsoft based platforms such as Mac OS X, Linux, Android, Blackberry, iOS and others.

For the past four years, the top place in the Brandz 100 list was held by Google, but this time they have been toppled over. Apple’s iPhone has been doing very well and is indeed very popular but this change in valuation is largely being attributed to the iPad.

Apple has increased its valuation by $137 billion or 859% since 2006, when the Brandz Top 100 list was first introduced. Since last year, Apple has increased its valuation by $153 billion or 84%.

Google has fallen to spot number 2 and has also lost 2% in terms of valuation, in spite of the fact that their Android OS is doing quite well.

Popular social network Facebook has also entered the top 100 list for the first time this year and is placed at number 35 with a valuation of $19.1 billion.

Amazon has shown the greatest rise in position from number 46 last year to 14 this year, with a valuation of $37.6 billion.

Technology based companies held 6 out of the top 10 spots in the list. These were Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, AT&T and China Mobile.

Among the losers in this year’s ranking were Nokia, which has fallen 38 places and is now ranked 81, and Nintendo, which has fallen 47 places and now ranks 79 in the list.

The Brandz index uses various parameters to judge the top 100 brands in the market. These include brand equity surveys and financial data from analyst reports. The future growth potential of the brand as well as the bond it has with users is taken into consideration.

However, in order to make optimal use of this opportunity, the marketers must stay up-to-date with the changes taking place, not only on the web, but also in user behaviour.

Microsoft Advertising has conducted a study on this subject in conjunction with Mindshare and MEC. The study is called Living with the Internet: A Global Study of What’s Driving Web Behaviour

The study was conducted in two stages. The first part of the study was conducted in 2007 and the second part was conducted three years later, to see the changes in behaviour of web users over a period of time.

It was found that the basic motivations of web users viz. information, communication, creation, transaction, entertainment and surfing remain the same, but the difference between communication and creation is gradually diminishing.

As the internet grows, users try to get the maximum benefit out of it, without spending more time on it and hence each session on the internet is becoming more organised than it used to be.

In the past, planned internet use accounted for 61% of the sessions, but now it is 79%.

Even today email continues to be the most popular internet activity accounting for 23% followed by general browsing at 10% and social media activity at 6%.

Considering these facts, it is essential that marketers and advertisers should present their ads in such a way, that the ad is well assimilated with the content, so that it is appreciated by the user rather than being a distraction from the primary activity of the user.

As expected, Google continues to be the number one site, with a very wide margin. However, they have undergone a slight setback, as the number of unique viewers has gone down from 144.1 million in January to 141.1 million in February. The number of minutes spent online per session has also gone down.

On the other hand, Microsoft has had a very good month as they have risen from ranking seventh in January to ranking second in February. They have also had 48.8 million unique viewers in February which represents an absolute increase of 10.7 million visitors more than they had January.

Yahoo! has retained the third place as before and Facebook is now fourth in the list, in place of Viacom. VEVO, which was second in January, now occupies the fifth place, and Viacom is sixth, in place of Facebook. AOL has now taken Microsoft’s previous position at number seven. Turner Digital has retained the eighth spot in both months. Hulu, which was tenth in January, is now at number nine, and NBC has entered the list at number ten.

The study also shows that 170 million users watched online videos in February in the U.S. at an average of 13.6 hours per viewer and more than 5 billion viewing sessions.

It remains to be seen if the list will remain more or less steady in March or will change drastically again.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Bing Maps and Mobile said in an interview with Forbes, “The model of apps for everything is broken in a very fundamental way, a lot like the way the web was before there was a good search engine.” In the old days, people used to type the web address in the URL bar. Even now, this helps in deciding which app to use.

According to Arcas, some of the apps will become “baked-in” default options, depending on the circumstances and the search engine may also suggest some apps. Microsoft has previously talked about doing this by making use of the phone’s sensors such as its camera and location detection mechanism in order to anticipate some of the user’s queries and requirements in advance.

The success of the iPhone and Android have led to the availability of over 3,00,000 apps for mobile devices. To get ahead in this race, Microsoft will have to streamline the process of finding and using apps and make many of them a part of the Windows mobile operating system.

Windows Phone 7 already has 30,000 drivers, which is a good thing as far as providing options is concerned, but it slows down the speed with which the apps are available. Microsoft will, therefore, have to decide how best they can combine reliability with speed in order to improve usability.

As with search, Microsoft might be entering the market too late, with little new technology to make a significant impact. Microsoft’s mobile operating system has a fairly low market share of just 2%, compared to 8% for Google’s Android. The software giant would need to develop some really ground-breaking technology to break the current trend and make significant gains in the mobile market.

Nokia, the handset manufacturing giant, has been going through a deepening crisis since the launch of the Apple iPhone in 2007. The company has decided to sideline their Symbian OS in favour of the Windows Phone OS for their smartphones.

Microsoft Windows Phone on a Nokia handset

Nokia will also use other Microsoft services such as the Bing search engine for their mobile phones. This could turn into a serious blow for Google Mobile and help Bing to gain a larger share in the mobile search market.

The move is expected to help Nokia fight the growing popularity of the Apple iPhone as well as the Google Android platform. Nokia’s new Chief Executive, Stephen Elop, worked with Microsoft until last September, when he took charge of Nokia. The relationship comes as no surprise, not only due to Elop’s historical associations with Microsoft, but also because of the fact that Google is seen as a competitor.

According to Elop, “Nokia is at a critical juncture, where significant change is necessary and inevitable in our journey forward. Today, we are accelerating that change through a new path, aimed at regaining our smartphone leadership.” He also indicated that there would be a management reshuffle, and some people may also lose their jobs.

Though Nokia is still the largest handset manufacturer in the world, its market share has fallen from 36.4% to 28.9% in the last year.

Reactions to the announcement have been quite negative, and the price of Nokia shares has fallen 9.8% since the announcement. Even though this could be Microsoft’s biggest stroke of luck, with respect to mobile search, their shares didn’t rise much either.

Could this be both Microsoft and Nokia’s chance to strike the smartphone and mobile Web markets and make a serious change in both their fortunes?

The largest spending was seen in November ($14.5 billion) and December ($18.1 billion). Cyber Monday – the first Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday – broke all records with $1.028 billion being spent in a single day.

Among electronic items, flat panel TVs and mobile devices were the fastest selling, followed by computer hardware.

Online Consumers

Group buying through sites such as Groupon and Living Social gained tremendous popularity during the year. Social networks also continued to grow. Facebook became the number 1 site in August 2010, for time spent online, beating sites like Google and Yahoo! It now accounts for 12.3% of the total time spent online in The U.S.

The amount of time spent on leisure activities online also grew in 2010. Portals represented 20.2% of the share of time spent online, while social networks accounted for 14.4% and entertainment sites for 12.6%.

Social Networks

The growth of social media caused web-based email usage to reduce from 12.5% to 11.0%, especially among the younger generation. Social networking accounts for 14.4% of all time spent online, but its share much higher for youngsters. Women also tend to spend more time on social networks than men.

Facebook also now accounts for 10% of the U.S. page views and has gained millions of new users. MySpace, on the other hand, has seen a sharp decline, losing 27% of its users. LinkedIn, Twitter and several new social sites continue to grow gradually. While it has lost some users in the 35-54 years demographic, the number of users below 18 years and above 55 years have grown significantly. On the other hand, Twitter saw maximum gain in the 18-34 years demographic.

Search Marketing

The search market has also seen innovation with the introduction of instant search by Google. Google continues to be the market leader in the States, with over 60% of the market share, while Yahoo! had 16% and Microsoft had 12% in December 2010. ‘Facebook’ was the most searched term, with 1.9 billion queries in 2010, followed by ‘YouTube’ with 790.7 million searches.

Online advertising has grown by 23% between December 2009 and 2010. Leading brands have now started reallocating a larger share of their ad spend to online advertising. Over 1 trillion display ads were shown on Facebook and 529.4 billion ads on Yahoo! The strategies being used for display as have also improved resulting in better user response especially through retargeting. The online video and TV market are also growing, which is a fact that advertisers should take note of.

According to Google, Microsoft has been keeping track of what people are searching for on Google, and then simply copying the top search results of these queries on Google to improve their own search results.

Google claims that they first noticed that something was amiss, last summer, when a search for a misspelt query (torsorophy) returned the same results on Bing as it did on Google. Only, in the case of Google, the spelling was corrected (tarsorrhaphy), but not on Bing.

To cross check this, Google later set up a “sting operation” where they ran some synthetic queries on unusual search terms that wouldn’t normally be queried by any human, and the top position for these queries, was given as a web page which actually had no connection to the search query whatsoever.

A few days later it was found that Bing also showed the same web page as the top result for that query.

Bing copies Google results for the query ‘hiybbprqag’

This seems to indicate, that Bing is not only keeping tabs on what people are searching for on Google, but are also using Google search results to improve their own.

Google engineers speculate that that this is done either through the Bing Toolbar or the Suggested Sites feature of IE 8. Both of these features collect data from users and return it to Microsoft to improve the user’s search experience.

The Google Toolbar and Chrome browser also collect similar information from Google’s users, but Google claims that this information is not used to improve their search results, which is most probably a lie – search suggestions and clicks from the Google toolbar are almost certainly counted and used to improve organic results.

Microsoft on their part have categorically stated that they “do not copy Google results”. They further explain that Microsoft uses over a 1,000 different signals to create their search algorithm. While features such as the Bing Toolbar and Suggested Sites, do help them to decide their search rankings, it is possible that in the case of rare and unusual queries, as those used in Google’s “sting operation” there may be an overlap of results.

Where Microsoft’s explanation fails, though is in the fact that no human user would have been likely to search for those special search queries before Google set them up. How then did Bing derive the Google results without any historical clicks that were tracked to “improve” their user experience?

The complaints were lodged by price comparison site Foundem legal search engine eujustice.fr. Another search engine, Ciao, based in the U.K. and owned by Microsoft has also complained.

According to the BBC, these sites have alleged that Google manipulates its search results as a result of which these sites get a lower ranking than they deserve.

A statement from EU says “The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google has abused a dominant position in online search.”

The EU has decided to take this action based on the complaints which allege that Google gives unfavourable treatment to these sites while Google sites receive preferential treatment.

A Google statement says, “Since we started, Google we have worked hard to do the right thing by our users and our industry, But there’s always going to be room for improvement, and so we’ll be working with the Commission to address any concerns.”

The EU has clarified that the launch of the probe does not signify that Google is guilty, but they will treat the complaints seriously.

Sir Martin Sorell Chief Executive of WPP the world’s largest advertising agency says, “Search is the portal to the internet and Google has a colossal share, I do not think that the investigation is surprising, given the strategic importance of the internet.”

In their complaint Foundem has said that sites such as Foundem duplicate most of their results which causes them to receive a lower ranking.

Ciao on their part have complained that Google imposes some exclusivity obligations which prevent them from using the same ads on other sites. But Google refutes that claim too. They say they had a good relationship with Ciao until it was taken over by Microsoft.

Microsoft adCenter provides paid search results for Yahoo! Search and Bing, and their premium partners in the U.S. and Canada. Bing supplies the organic search results for Yahoo! Search.

The combined offering allows advertisers to reach a far greater audience with a single ad buy than they could before the alliance took place.

Since this arrangement has been successful – as successful as it could get in the presence of Google – in the U.S. and Canada, Microsoft and Yahoo! are now contemplating a similar formula in other regions. They intend to start this facility early next year in certain markets within Europe, such as the U.K., France and Ireland. They hope to be able to extend this service to all of Europe by the end of 2012.

Advertisers have been advised to continue to manage their Microsoft adCenter accounts with their existing support contacts as the holiday season approaches.

Once Microsoft and Yahoo! are ready to roll out their new facility in Europe next year, they will inform advertisers about the changes 3 months before the transition actually takes place.

While the combined market share of Yahoo! and Bing in the USA is more than 25%, the two search engines account for almost nothing in most of Europe. Most advertisers do not even consider advertising on either platform, and even when they do, impressions and click volumes are found to be dismal. The search alliance might get some interest, mostly out of curiosity and the hope for a serious Google replacement, but it is unlikely to make any significant impact.

Nevertheless, advertisers who do use the service have been advised to keep their contact preferences in ‘My Settings’ up to date, in order to receive regular updates and avoid inconvenience of any kind.

Jeff Kelisky, General Manager of Mapping and Local for Microsoft began by stating the main focus of the future for Bing maps. He stated that in place already was a framework on which developers can produce apps that use location information to produce and develop exciting and innovative applications that are grounded in maps. Before showing some examples of these applications he outlined a number of substantial changes to Bing Maps.

Changes

• A more fluid experience –  The whole user experience of Bing Maps is now a  smoother operation. For example, when zooming in on an area Bing Maps now turns into the bird’s eye view of the area upon reaching a set zoom in response to users comments and demands.
• Drag and drop directions – It is now possible to drop one pin in one area, and a second pin on another area of the map and ask for either walking or driving directions from pin 1 to pin2.
• New StreetSide experience (even Jeff Kelisky referred to it as “Street View” a few times!) – Currently only working in some parts of the US, but data is being collected in major cities.
• Map Apps – applications that run alongside Bing Maps. This is where the rest of the presentation focused.

Map Apps

Various applications can now be created with Bing Maps as a grounding. For example, the Twitter app displays locational tweets on the map itself. It is possible within the app to search tweets containing certain words. Bing Maps then displays these tweets with a flag icon.

Another application enables users to calculate the cost of a taxi journey from one place to another such as from Heathrow Airport to Victoria Station. It gave a pretty accurate estimate.

Windows Phone 7

A demo of Windows Phone 7 followed, with emphasis on how it uses Bing Maps. Window Phone 7 triangulates user location with GPS as well as using SIM information, giving a more accurate location of the user.

A hard “search” button is built into all Windows Phone 7 devices. While in Bing Maps, users can press this and instantly start searching their query.

For example, if you were out and searched for Pizza in Bing Maps, a map pops up with local pizza houses labelled. With these labels, Bing Maps also pulls the phone number, email address, reviews and what else is close to said location from Bing’s local database.

Three software developers then talked about how they used Bing Maps.

Earthware

Brian Norman – Technical Director, Earthware, spoke about how they use Bing Maps to create theworldcupmap.com

He stated that the aim of the project was to provide a “ground breaking mapping experience”, one in which all areas of news and video was pulled in and displayed on a map. He used the term “mapumentary”, the idea of information gathered from other sources and displayed on a map. For examples users could click on a stadium, while on the maps and see information about the games played as well as numerous information videos associated with that area.

Shoothill

Rod Plummer, Managing Director at Shoothill, started out by stating that there is a wealth of data out on the Internet, but that it is all over the place and hard to locate. A use of Bing Maps is to display some of this information on a map. He gave the example of displaying a heat map of MP’s expenses. He they gave a more detailed account of his work with MSN to produce maps about the Battle of Britain

http://news.uk.msn.com/in-depth/world-war-two/battle-of-britain/default.aspx

The Battle of Britian Map contains a current-day aerial view. On top of that, is a box in which users can select different maps or flight plans by dragging the box over the map and selecting which map or flight plan they want to see. The user can accurately see historical maps in relation to their present day grounding.

Fortune Cookie

Ben Morris, Head of technology at Fortune Cookie spoke about their use of Bing Maps to create a Journey Planner for their client, Europcar. The Journey Planner needed to be mobile as well as social so that users could upload their own photos, comments or recommendations.

The software allows a user to plan a drive while on holiday, showing accurate road maps, comments and recommendations as well as views along the way. He stated that users enjoyed a deep level of engagement and the average user time with the product was between 5 and 10 minutes.

Questions and Answers

A member of the audience asked whether  Bing itself would archive maps and produce a historical map archive. Jeff Kelisky said that this would be up to developers themselves to produce, but that the data would be available if a developer wanted to do this.

Another question was regarding user generated content. It was said that in the future it could be possible for members of the public to alert companies or councils to issues in their area via Bing Maps. For example, alerting a council of some dumped rubbish.

When Bing made their announcement, Satya Nadella, the Senior VP of Online Services, informed users that their search results would be enhanced by the ‘Like’ feature on Facebook.

In other words, when users conduct a search on Bing, they will be able to see which of their Facebook friends has ‘Liked’ the product or service being searched. Results that were ‘Liked’ by these friends will also be placed at the top of the search results page as they are likely to have more value for that user.

“Liked” results on Bing let friends help users decide which movie to watch

Thus, certain search results on Bing will now be personalised for individual users. This Facebook ‘Likes’ feature will be active only when the user has signed in to a Facebook account.

Another feature which Bing has also introduced, in conjunction with Facebook, is the ability to search more easily for people. Bing will now make it possible for users to search people by name and will bring up results from Facebook that are more likely to be the searcher’s friends. Users will then be able to add that person as a friend, or send the person a message directly from the Bing search results page.

Bing social profile search

Google’s newly integrated social search feature shows users conducting a search on Google for certain trending topics an indication of the pages popularity by including the number of times the page has been shared next to the page’s title in the search results. This social shares link, however, appears only on the main search results page and not in Google News.

Google social search results indicating number of times the article was shared

When users clicks on the ‘shared by’ link they are taken to the Google real time search results page for that link, which will show the real-time sharing activity for that particular page.

Unlike the Bing feature, this is a general sharing feature and it does not specify who has shared the article. It also does not give the user any specific information from friends whose opinion the user is more likely to rely on.

Bing is gradually rolling out the social search feature, and will currently limit the roll out to users in the USA only. Google’s feature is already live in the USA and UK.

Why Google’s latest social search feature doesn’t tie-in better with their social graph and show shares from contacts within a user’s social circle is not clear. Even with social graph integration, Google’s offering would rate second-class, at best, as Microsoft has a very big advantage here owing to their relationship with Facebook.

While Microsoft has now gained the number 2 position in desktop search according to reports from Nielsen, their performance in mobile search has not improved significantly.

In the beginning of 2009, Microsoft had signed a five year deal with Verizon, to make Bing the default search engine on Verizon mobile phones, with a view to improving their mobile search rankings.

In spite of this deal however, Verizon continued to have the right to use Google as the default search engine on their phones which were powered by Google’s Android software. As a result of this, Verizon is using the Google search engine on 7 of their 8 Android phones, thus leaving Microsoft ‘out in the cold’ in a manner of speaking.

Reports from comScore show that Microsoft’s share in the mobile search market has grown from 1.2% to 1.7% between July 2009 and July 2010. However Google has grown from 9.3% to 14.4% in the same time period.

Microsoft however has said that the deal with Verizon has been made keeping a long term view in mind.

They say that 7 new Android phones are due to be released by Verizon this fall, and they will use Bing as the default search engine.

It is certainly crucial for Microsoft to improve their mobile search market share if they hope to be able to corner a part of the ever growing mobile advertising market.

51% of 1,654 people surveyed by online coupon site MyVoucherCodes say they see the Google search engine logo more than 50 times a day. Considering a typical working day to be 8 hours or 480 minutes long, this means that users see the Google logo approximately every 9 minutes.

According to the same study, Microsoft is the next most popular logo and 15% users say that they see its logo most often, while 11% say that Facebook is the most seen logo.

“Which logo do you see the most during an average day?”

About 47% of users say that Google is their homepage or they navigate to the Google page first. 53% users use the site to check spellings and 52% say that they access Google Search between 10 and 20 times daily.

Data from Hitwise indicates that Facebook accounted for 17% of page views in the U.K. in June 2010. It was found that 1 in 6 page views in the U.K. were served by Facebook, which means that Facebook is undeniably one of the most important websites for online advertisers to focus on.

According to Hitwise data, while Facebook accounted for 7.14% of all internet visits in U.K. in June 2010, Google accounted for 9.59% in the same month.

Among social networks alone, Facebook held 54.5% of the market share in that month.

Yahoo! started transitioning some of the back-end functions of Yahoo! Search to Microsoft last week and the transition is now complete. As a result of this, all English Web, image and video searches conducted on Yahoo! in the U.S.A. and Canada will now be powered by Microsoft Bing.

The search transition will take place in other countries in due course.

In the U.S. and Canada, searches conducted on Yahoo! now have a “Powered by Bing” indicator at the bottom of the search results page.

“Powered by Bing” written at the bottom of Yahoo! search results

However, Yahoo! features such as Search Assist and site filters will continue to be available. Yahoo! will also continue to support SearchMonkey, Site Explorer – the counter part of which has long been disabled by Microsoft since the days of Live Search – and the Yahoo! Developer Network.

Yahoo! is still working towards finalising the revenue model for Yahoo! Search BOSS and they will continue to offer new tools in future.

The transition between Yahoo! And Microsoft has gone very smoothly and it is hoped that the joint service could compete significantly with Google.

One of the reasons for the irritation is the fact that more often than not, the ad is of absolutely no relevance or interest to the user, and the user then feels that being forced to watch it is a waste of time.

A few companies have now decided to try and rectify the situation by offering users a choice. Users on certain websites will now be able to select the ad they would prefer to watch from a choice of 3 or more ads, thus letting them see the ad that they have decided would be most interesting to them at that point in time.

While helping users, this option also has the added advantage of being beneficial to advertisers. Agencies and brands will improve their consumer targeting, thus increasing the possibility of making a sale, which is the ultimate bottom-line for a marketer.

The new tool that facilitates such ad delivery is called ASq. It will be functional by next month.

Microsoft, Yahoo!, Hulu, CBS and AOL have already decided to use ASq, while others such as YouTube are still weighing the pros and cons.

ASq’s new concept in video advertising is appreciated by most. However, there are those who disagree with the concept. Richard Wheaton of Ogilvy & Mather believes that unless users get to know about certain products and services, they would never be able to make use of them. ASq will restrict the exposure of such products from users, thus defeating the very purpose of advertising.

On the other hand, Uyenco Shatto, global research director at Microsoft Advertising says, “We’re getting smarter about what makes more impactful advertising. The big ‘aha’ here is understanding what makes a viewer choose a particular ad.”

ASq is expected to further improve the market value of the global video ad market, which is already $3.1 billion. The global video ad spend which was $2.2 billion in 2009 is expected to go up to $11.3 billion by 2014.

Google is reported to have said that during the second quarter of the year, marketers were more likely to agree to pay a higher charge for their ads to appear online. This was probably a result of the fact that users were more likely to click on the ads.

The largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. Gannett Co. has also reported a positive trend in the print media after a gap of 31/2 years. The decline of print ads has dropped to 6% during this period.

General Electric Co. has also reported a recovery in the local ad market and the percentage of growth is quite substantial.

The first two months of the quarter were good for Yahoo!, but in the month of June they noticed a sudden drop in the ad spend of several of their advertisers. Though the total search advertising revenue fell by 8%, the display advertising sector has shown a growth of 19% compared to the same period last year.

The Omnicom Group Inc. has shown a 4.2% growth of quarterly net income. There overall revenue grew by 5.9% and in the U.S. alone, it grew by 7.4%.

The New York Times has reported a quarterly growth in revenue after a gap of 3 years. Digital ad sales grew by 21% but the print media saw a drop of 6% in advertising generated revenue.

Online ad revenue on Bing has increased Microsoft’s revenue by 19%. Fox Cable Network reported a growth in their advertising revenue. Time Warner Inc. also saw a surge in growth due in part to increased ad revenue.

The deal was cleared, with regard to the Anti-trust laws, by the concerned authorities in February 2010. The two firms have now started testing both organic as well paid search results from Microsoft and Yahoo! Search.

The basic change which will now occur is that the search results from Microsoft’s search engine Bing will be displayed on the Yahoo! Search results page. The page will however continue to retain the features of Yahoo! Search along with its rich content and the various tools available on Yahoo! Search.

The tests are being conducted only in the U.S. and Canada and will reach up to 25% of users of Yahoo! Search.

Users will also find some difference in the search results display as Yahoo! is simultaneously testing some new configurations.

Users will be able to differentiate between the results received from Yahoo! And Microsoft as the results originating from Microsoft will be placed in boxes, while the other results will be from the Yahoo! Search Engine.

Yahoo1 will also be extending this combined search experience to users of Yahoo! Search Mobile in the near future.

It is hoped that the testing of organic search results in the U.S. and Canada will be completed by August or latest by September and for paid search results by October 2010.

Apparently, the deciding factor in this deal was the fact that Google’s services in the Japanese language were better than those of Microsoft.

The partnership is likely to come into effect next year.

While Yahoo! has a strategic partnership for search with Microsoft in the U.S. and other places, they are under no obligation to do so in Japan. This is because Yahoo! Controls only a 30% stake in Yahoo! Japan, while Softbank controls 40%. Since Softbank is the dominant partner, they are at liberty to select the partner.

At present Yahoo! Japan controls about 57% of the search market in Japan, while Google controls about 385. When these two ‘super powers’ join hands, they would effectively control about 95% of the market, potentially killing all competition.

Microsoft had to fight a similar situation between Google and Yahoo!, in the U.S. in 2008.

They had won that round thanks to the Anti-trust laws. They intend to do the same thing in Japan.

A Microsoft spokesperson has said, “We plan to present evidence to the Japanese FTC explaining why we believe that this deal is substantially more harmful to competition than Google’s deal with Yahoo! in 2008 that the U.S. Dept. of Justice found to be illegal,”

However, it is believed that it may not be very easy for Microsoft to win this battle in Japan, and the deal is eventually likely to go through.

The ACSI has been conducting yearly studies about the performance of various online media brands of portals, search engines, news and information sites etc. This year for the first time they have included social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia in their study.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the popular social media sites have not been ranked too highly on the customer satisfaction index.

On a scale of 0-100 Facebook has scored just 64, MySpace 63 and YouTube 73 points. The less popular but steady, Wikipedia has scored 77 points.

Larry Freed Chief Executive of Foresee Results says, “Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website]. The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”

Facebook which has faced several changes over the years, and which includes a lot of ads and gaming services has not satisfied its customers very well. Users also have some reservations about some of Facebook’s policies regarding privacy issues.

Wikipedia on the other hand, which is not a commercial site has maintained a steady format, thus allowing customers to achieve a certain level of comfort while accessing it.

One glaring omission in the study is Twitter. The reason for this is the fact that most users access it through third party apps rather than through Twitter.com, thus making it difficult to to collect accurate results. However it is likely to be included in the study from next year.

Facebook with a score of 64 ranks even lower than the IRS, and is in the bottom 5% of private companies studied along with airlines and cable companies. According to Larry Freed, one reason why users keep going back to Facebook in spite of low satisfaction, is that they do not have a better alternative at present.

Among other online categories studied, Google is at the top of the search engines with 80 points, but it has fallen 7 points since the previous study. While Bing which has been satudied for the first time, has 77 points followed by Yahoo! with 76 points, AOL with 74 points and Ask.com with 73 points.

Among the news categry Fox News was at the top with 82 points while MSNBC.com had 74 points and CNN.com had 73 points.

In an interview with Forbes magazine, Yahoo!’s senior Vice President, David Ko said that according to him, the best way to increase the mobile business is through mobile ads, apps and partnerships.

Ko says that Yahoo! is now focusing on building their mobile business by developing new Apps for users. They already have Apps such as Yahoo! Finance and Fantasy Sports on the iPhone and BlackBerry. They are now also working on Apps for Android and they want to add some really different and special features rather than just copying the features of other websites as they want to deliver high quality content and services.

Yahoo! is better off collaborating with mobile phone manufacturing companies like Nokia and Samsung rather than to compete with them. He feels that through such collaboration they can directly get access to the huge customer base which these mobile phone giants already have, rather than make your own handset and start building your customer base from scratch, after having invested large sums of money to design and manufacture the phone.

The decision to stay away from manufacturing of mobile phones seems to be a good one considering the fact that both their competitors Google and Microsoft have only recently announced that they would discontinue the manufacture and sale of their own handsets, Nexus and Kin respectively. Analysts say this decision is based on the fact that the sales have not been as good as expected.

According, to the Business Insider, inside sources reveal that AOL is actually looking for a buyer in Microsoft. Even if these rumours prove to be false, anyone who gets the search deal would have an edge for an eventual takeover of the company.

The rumours could be based on the fact that Microsoft has for long been on the lookout for a company that can help boost their share in the search market.

Microsoft can certainly afford to buy over AOL. They would be able to merge several of their features, such as mail, search and maps. They would also acquire a lot of man power, which would help in future projects and ideas. Most importantly, though, they would manage to cut off a major source of revenue for Google and secure another small chunk of the search market.

Google currently has a search deal with AOL. The search giant is not likely to be interested in a buy out of the company. Their interest would only be in renewing the search deal. However, if push came to shove, they might buy AOL just to prevent Microsoft from getting it.

According to experts, Microsoft may wait for AOL’s quarterly results before finalising such a deal.

Register local listings on Bing For Business

Bing might not be anywhere near the top choice for UK searchers, but it is believed to have the potential to reach 30 million users in the U.K. through the search boxes available on various Microsoft properties such as Internet Explorer, MSN and Windows Live.

Businesses that register with Bing for Business in order to establish a local presence on Bing Maps could be more visible to consumers.

While Microsoft promotes Bing’s local service as a simple 3-step process for businesses wishing to increase their visibility on the search engine, the reality is not quite as simple.

First, business owners or representative must add their business details to Bing’s local listings. Rather than handling the process in-house, Bing U.K. has outsourced it to a company called 118information. The process breaks down here itself for many businesses.

Once the user has verified that the business is not alreay listed on 118information, a new listing can be submited via a form that requires the business details as well as details about a “Senior Decision Maker”.

What’s worse, the form does not even mention a privacy policy, link to one or give users the option to opt out of being spammed by Microsoft’s selected partner and their partners!

Anyone with experience dealing with telemarketers will know that when someone asks for a “senior decision maker”, they are asking for permission to spam, online, offline and over the telephone!

Once a business has been verified, its information will be displayed on various Microsoft services including Instant Answers, Local Search and Maps.

The second and third steps that Microsoft recommend are registering the business website with Bing investing in pay per click advertising to highlight their products and service.

If Microsoft hopes to catch up with Google Maps or even local search services such as Yelp and FourSquare, they will definitely need to improve they way they go about collecting data to being with, in order to have a comprehensive set of listings, which users can then trust to deliver the results they need.

Users can share shopping search results in order to ask for a friend’s opinion while shopping online. The sharing options are visible only on the product reviews page, which can be reached by clicking on the “User Reviews” link on the Shopping search results.

Social sharing links on Bing Shopping

Sharing is enabled through Facebook and Twitter. Users can share the shopping search results by clicking on the Facebook, Twitter or email link and then typing any questions about the product.

Some question the utility of such a feature. Twitter users might not want all their followers to see their shopping-related queries. They might also not appreciate receiving advice and opinions from several of those followers or other advertisers with automated tweets set to respond to such shopping tweets.

Proponents of social search have always used the argument that the ability to get a friend or trusted person’s opinion before buying something would be invaluable. This new feature by Bing makes that argument a reality.

Neither Google nor Yahoo! currently offer users the option to share shopping search results. Microsoft might have yet another winner on their hands… if only more people would actually use Bing’s shopping search!

The service, which has been created in under 4 months, will allow users to create and share Microsoft Office documents with some or all of their friends on Facebook. The service is currently in the beta testing phase.

Users can either create the documents directly in the app or can even upload the documents from their PC. The new documents will show up in the recipient’s news feeds just like a status update.

In keeping with the basic rules of user privacy, the site allows users to decide whether they want to share a given document with only a few of their friends, with all of their friends or to make the document available to the general public.

Docs.com has been created by Microsoft’s FUSE labs, which was set up specifically to improve social network technology and facilities within Microsoft products.

This may be Microsoft’s answer to Google’s Google Docs. One could even argue that by using Facebook, Microsoft may have beat Google to the punch, as Facebook has been far more successful than any of Google’s social networking attempts.

Video Tutorial: Getting started with Docs for Facebook

Unfortunately, most of the technology giants such as Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook rely on companies that generate their power from coal. The use of coal to generate power adds to the carbon foot print.

It has been estimated that by 2020 data centres will consume 1,963 kilowatts of electricity, which is more than the power that France, Germany, Canada and Brazil jointly consume at present.

Tom Dowdall of Greenpeace said to the BBC that the availability of smartphones and netbooks is increasing the demand for cloud computing, which requires companies to invest even more in huge data centres.

However, instead of trying to use greener sources of energy, most of the companies are only concerned with efficiency.

Facebook, which is developing its first custom-built data centre in Oregon, will use an evaporative cooling system to cool their servers. Pacific Power, the company that supplies Facebook power, uses more coal than the U.S. average.

Over 380,000 people have joined English and Spanish language groups on Facebook set up by Greenpeace to pressurise Facebook to use 100% renewable energy. Facebook, however, claims to be helpless as they have to rely on the local power grid.

Microsoft uses a similar air cooling system but claims to use 100% hydropower in their data centre in Dublin. Yahoo! also uses hydropower for their data centre in Buffalo, New York.

Dowdall says, “We would like to see more examples of companies using purchasing power to drive an increase in renewable capacity.”

Google is the only tech giant that has truly pulled its weight and has invested in a number of environment protection and green energy related initiatives.

The study carried out in the first half of January 2010 found that keywords related to homosexuality had been filtered out in both the Arabic and English versions. When Arabic keywords like ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘porn’ or ‘homosexuality’ were queried, a pop-up message appeared saying, “Your country or region requires a strict Bing Safe Search setting, which filters out results that might return adult content.”

In the English version, use of these keywords is censored for Image searches, but Web searches for gay and lesbian sites are allowed.

Bing searches for ‘gay’ censored in Middle East

Unfortunately, this censorship also blocks out searches related to sex education and gay equality rights.

Bing does not offer users the option to turn off the Safe Search setting in the Middle East.

It was, however, found that if users who are physically present in an Arabic country change their country setting to a version of Bing that is offered in another region, such as North America or Europe, then the censorship does not occur, and users can thus gain access to all the searches that are banned on the Arabic version.

Another way users could initially bypass the censorship was by using another non-filtered keyword along with the filtered keyword. For example, the keyword ‘lesbian’ is filtered but ‘lesbian rights’ was not filtered. This, however, seems to be fixed, and both queries are now being censored.

Surprisingly, OpenNet did not find any censorship relating to other sensitive topics such as politics, terrorism, religious rights or minority issues and gender equality.

As of now, it is unclear whether Microsoft has imposed this censorship upon itself, or is working under instructions from the local authorities.

Brand advertisers want to know whether they are getting their money’s worth, in terms of quality and quantity, where digital media is concerned.

It is a well established fact that the more time a user spends seeing an ad, the more he or she is likely to be influenced by it and if this user is actively engaged with that ad the perception of the brand concerned is usually found to be higher.

The time spent on an ad, multiplied by the rate at which it is actively engaged with is known as the dwell score. The dwell score thus provides a tangible source to measure the effectiveness of a brand and its online ad campaign.

Dwell Score = Time spent on ad x Rate of engagement

Research from other sources such as comScore corroborate the fact that a high dwell score indicates a higher number of branded search queries, more visits to the brand website and more engaged visitors.

Data also shows that click-through-rates are not very effective in measuring brand performance as consumers are likely to spend more meaningful time on an ad then to actually click on it. To better understand this subject, new systems are required to measure the time spent and engagement with an ad.

According to the findings of the MIA Project, 96% of marketers surveyed felt that these digital ad measurements and calculations should be clear and transparent, but only 29% felt that they were so at present. 96% of them also felt that there should be consistency in the terms of measurement, but again, only 23% of them were satisfied with the present state of affairs.

Read the full white paper: Being Greater With Data (PDF 627 KB)

www.searchalliance.com

According to the official press release from Yahoo! and Microsoft, this alliance will enable their business users to connect with a larger audience of potential customers, thus saving them valuable time and money.

Users will now be able to search ad inventory from both the sites simultaneously, by using the Microsoft search engine, Bing, which presently has a combined audience of about 577 million users worldwide.

Advertisers will be able to use Microsoft adCenter to advertise to the combined client base of Yahoo! and Microsoft.

The alliance will obviously help both the companies concerned to improve monetisation for their partners, eventually helping the companies to generate more revenue for themselves.

Though both companies will continue to have different consumer search experiences, Microsoft will manage the technology for both of them through Bing. Yahoo! will support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies and resellers and their clients. Microsoft on the other hand will support self service advertisers. All ads will go through the Microsoft ad-Center.

This alliance will be implemented across the U.S. Canada, U.K. and France. Elsewhere in Europe, Latin America and Asia, Microsoft is already a partner of Yahoo!

At present, ads will continue to show up on Bing search results, just as before, and advertisers will be informed about the alliance once it actually begins. They aim to be able to implement the new setup before the 2010 holiday season, but may delay it to early 2011 if needed.

It now turns out that the speculations were true. Peter Burrows at BusinessWeek reported that Microsoft had made Yelp an offer of over $700 million, while the original offer they had received from Google had been in the region of $550 million.

To everyone’s surprise, Yelp, which hosts reviews of local businesses, has gone ahead and rejected the offer from Microsoft as well!

Instead, the company has accepted an investment of $100 million from Elevation Partners, which values the company at just $475 million.

On being questioned about this decision, Yelp CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman told Peter Burrows, “Yelp has the chance to become one of the great internet brands… That for me is the chance of a lifetime.”

Critics and supporters are shocked at the decision. Most believe that this was a colossal mistake, and while Yelp might be doing well right now, they are more than likely at the pinnacle of their success.

Google and Microsoft could very easily build such technology and both are sitting on enough cash to be able to even pay real users to post reviews on their services instead of Yelp.

Only time will tell, though, whether Stoppelman’s hopes will come true and the risk he has taken will be worth it or not.

The software available in this online store will be from Google’s business partners, and it should help Google to increase the sale of Google Apps, which are not doing as well as their competitors are currently.

Google already has a website, called the ‘solutions marketplace‘, where Google Apps users can access several different add-on tools and support services such as Identity Management, Securities and Compliance, Migration and Sync. Services such as Medium/Large Deployment, Small Business Setup and Support, Custom Development, Training and Google Analytics are also available to download from this site.

The source reveals that the new store is being setup with the intention of providing better integration between Google Apps and the software provided by Google’s partners. Buying add-ons and services will thus become easier for end-users.

The solutions marketplace is just a site where users of Google Apps can connect with third-party developers. However, the business store will be likely to charge a nominal fee for whatever services or products are sold through it.

At present, about 20 million people are believed to use Google Apps, but only a small portion of them pay for these services.

In contrast, Google’s rival, Microsoft, has a far larger market share in the software sector, and almost 500 million people have paid for Microsoft Office.

Google refused to confirm or deny the setting up of a store. A statement issued by them says, “We’re constantly working with our partners to deliver more solutions to businesses, but we have nothing to announce at this time.”

The Wall Street Journal, though, believes that Google may make a formal announcement about the Apps Store by March.

Analyst Katherine Egbert, of the investment bank Jefferies, wrote in a note to clients, “Our recent industry checks indicate Microsoft will be debuting its own phone, in the next two months. We expect the new phone to debut soon, either at the Feb 15-18 Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona Spain, or possibly at CTIA in Las Vegas one month later.”

Egbert believes that the phone, which is expected to be Zune-like, will be made through an OEM partnership, much like Google has with HTC for their Nexus One.

It is rumoured that the project for this new phone has underway for a while, under the codename ‘Pink’. A mobile handset release would complete Microsoft’s trilogy after Windows and the Xbox. The phone is expected to have a five mega-pixel camera and support 720p HD video and some form of music subscription or buying service.

Microsoft might have decided to make their own phone, irrespective of Google’s mobile strategy, to augment the revenue generated by Windows Mobile, which is currently not very large. They might also feel that they can deliver a better mobile software experience if the hardware is also their own.

There is no information as yet about the cost or service partnerships in place for this new phone.

If the phone is actually released any time in the near future, people are bound to think that Microsoft has lost all originality and is now merely following in Google’s footsteps.

187 million users are the equivalent of 91% of the total U.S. Internet audience. AOL’s reach reportedly grew by 8% compared to the same month in 2008.

Yahoo! Network, which reaches 180.9 million U.S. users, was ranked second place and grew by 9% in the same period. The Google Ad Network occupied the third place with a reach of 178.1 million U.S. Internet users, and grew by 13% in that period.

Microsoft Media Network has turned out to be the fastest growing ad network, with a growth of 31% compared to the same month one year ago. Collective Network, which grew by 22%, was the second fastest grower and Audience Science, which grew by 16%, was placed third in that category.

According to comScore senior Vice President, Jeff Hackett, “Ad networks continue to be a powerful mechanism for delivering a large audience online with eight different networks reaching 75% of the entire U.S. online population.” Hackett believes that in 2010 ad-networks will continue to innovate and perform well.

Top 10 US ad networks ranked by total unique visitors in December 2009

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, has made it clear during an interview with CNBC & Bloomberg that Microsoft plans to continue working in China, and they will toe the line as is expected of them.

Following a meeting with President Obama at the White House, he told Bloomberg, “There are cyber attacks on all companies, of any size, from all parts of the world, not just China, at all times, so it’s hard for me to understand how that got tied into the whole notion of doing business in China.” He further said, “China’s the second largest market in the world … [Pulling out of China] is not something we’re thinking about. That’s not part of the way for us to grow.”

Google’s announcement stated that the company had been the direct victim of highly sophisticated and targeted cyber attacks that had originated in China. The attack not only resulted in the loss of corporate infrastructure and intellectual property, but also targeted various human rights activists.

Microsoft, on the other hand, said that they had not been affected by any such attacks and their email system has not been breached. The ethics of bowing to the Chinese government’s cesnorship requirements don’t seem to bother Microsoft.

Microsoft’s market share in China, which is currently estimated at just 0.25%, may grow if Google quits the Chinese search market.

U.S. Government officials have clearly stated that they support Google’s decision to pull out of China. White House spokesperson, Robert Gibbs said, “Our concern is with actions that threaten the universal rights of a free Internet.” While the White House has not yet taken any action against China, Philip Crowley of the State Department said that they will issue a formal message to Beijing and ask for an explanation.

If Google is to be believed, freedom of expression on the Internet is at stake here, as is the future of several companies who wish to do business in China, which is the world’s largest Internet market. Though, that is little more than grand-standing on Google’s part.

Human rights organisations in China have asked other companies to follow Google’s lead and withdraw from China if censorship continues.

So far, however, there is no indication that other companies will withdraw, and China seems adamant on maintaining their policies, since they know that the Western world will not be able to withdraw from their country very easily.

Google base their claim to openness on the fact that they have opened up the source code for the Android mobile operating system, Chrome Web browser and Chrome operating system and a few other products so that the larger developer community can improve on them.

Rosenberg says, “at Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant profitable and competitive ecosystem for businesses.”

While all this discussion about openness is fine, one cannot help but notice the fact that Google’s largest source of income is their search engine, which ranks web pages to create relevant search results for user queries. And nobody really knows how the algorithm for this ranking system works, apart from the few people at Google who are in charge of the algorithm.

Google’s argument against making this algorithm public is, of course, that spammers would misuse this information if it were easily available to all.

This argument seems weak, however, as it has been proved by other open source projects such as the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, that while an open algorithm may seem to help spammers, there would be an army of developers ready to combat the spammers.

If anything, all of Google’s talk about the importance of being open seems to be a cheap dig at Microsoft, and an attempt to make Microsoft seem like the bad guys just before Google launches a full-blown attack on Microsoft Windows by launching their own operating system.