Last.fm has taken online advertising one step further. The music social network is harmonizing the advertising experience with a site visitor’s musical preferences. Interactive elements such as concert tickets, festival maps and transport information can all be served within ads to provide a more immersive, seamless mix between advertising and content.

Ad elements can even be made to move to the beat of whatever sounds the site user is listening to when the ad is served.”A lot of these formats were not possible before,” said Martin Stiksel, Last.fm co-founder (via Clickz). “Some of the new data now available for us to utilize for advertising was not available before. The world had changed around us and we’ve caught up and hopefully we made a step forward.”

Converse and Motorola are the first to use the innovative smart ads on Last.fm, a London-based radio station with around 1.5 million listeners across Europe. Last.fm was purchased by U.S. television network CBS for $280 million last year.

Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) was quick to shoot down unsubstantiated rumors that CEO Jerry Yang was stepping down on Wednesday. It wasn’t the first time such reports have cropped up, and it probably won’t be the last. While we’ll take Yahoo!’s word, for now, that Yang has no intention of resigning, it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that the company’s co-founder could choose to abandon his post. Within the next couple of weeks, Yahoo! should have a pretty good idea how it’s doing in its proxy fight with activist investor Carl Icahn.

Source: Tech Confidential

How you create a blog on Posterous (www.posterous.com) ? Is it difficult? Where is the innovation? - To see it for yourself just email something to post@posterous.com. The subject line of the email is the post title, the text area is the content. You can also email photos, videos and sounds files, which will be displayed in a custom Flash player on the site. You can choose to have comments emailed to you, and you can reply to the comment by simply responding back to the email (I wish Wordpress had that feature). Posterous is the new ideal mobile blogging platform. New features will be launched over the summer, says co-founder including customized CSS and the ability to cross post to other blogging platforms.

 

Kosmix, until now a vertical search engine for information about health, automobiles and travel, transformed itself into a universal search engine for all subjects earlier today during a general redesign.

The move has been anticipated since at least last September, and was described by co-founder Anand Rajaraman in a Beet.tv interview posted less than a week ago.

Now when users conduct keyword searches on Kosmix (much as they would on a traditional search engine like Google or Ask), they are presented with mashups of results from a variety of sources. Unlike Mahalo, Kosmix itself doesn’t publish any of the content it displays. Rather, it pulls it all from services like Flickr, Google, Wikipedia, TheFind, Yahoo Answers, Amazon, Truveo, and YouTube.

Results from each of these sources are shown in their own modules, which are packed rather tightly in a three column layout. We hear that there are hundreds of possible modules, although only a small subset of these show up for each query.

Coupons are making a comeback. In the face of rising food prices and a slowing economy, consumers are clipping coupons once again. Only, they don’t need scissors and a local newspaper so much as a computer, printer, and maybe a mobile phone.

The number of page views on Web sites that feature money-off coupons for all manner of consumer products surged 38%, to 281 million, in March from a year earlier, compared with 5% for the Internet as a whole, according to comScore (SCOR). Those visitors spent a total of 145 million minutes on the sites, a 37% increase. While the number of new users to coupon sites isn’t growing faster than the larger Internet audience, existing coupon site users are certainly becoming more active. “User engagement by deal-seekers appears to be ramping up,” says comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman. “As a general rule, something like online coupon site activity would increase as a result of macroeconomic trends.”

Individual sites say they’re detecting increased use. Coupons.com and RetailMeNot.com say they have seen large traffic spikes in the past three months. Visitors to Coupons.com, a decade-old site that lets users print coupons that can be redeemed in stores, grew 35% in the first three months of 2008, compared with the prior quarter, says the site’s CEO, Steven Boal. Typically, quarterly growth averages 22% to 23%, he says. Similarly, RetailMeNot says its growth for February, which typically slows after the holiday shopping season, is already back at December levels. “There is definitely an increased use of coupons across the board,” says RetailMeNot co-founder Guy King.

Consumer pain is turning out to be coupon sites’ gain. Coupons.com provides retailers with coupon-marketing and -serving technology. The more consumers printing and using their coupons, the more retailers are likely to work with the site. RetailMeNot sells ads on its site through Google (GOOG) and collects commission from the coupon-driven traffic to retailers’ Web sites such as Amazon.com (AMZN). “The net effect is that people are trying to get the most of their shopping through coupons,” says King.

Google expects to launch new products for its YouTube web video service in the next few months and sees reason for closer cooperation with Yahoo, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said on Thursday.

Schmidt has said getting the video sharing site to make money is the web search company’s top priority for the year. He did not give details of the products, however, and they are not even in initial, or beta, testing.

At the company’s annual shareholder meeting, Google co- founder Sergey Brin said YouTube and DoubleClick, an online advertising company bought by Google earlier this year for $3.1bn (?1.55bn), are still small businesses compared with its core search and advertising business.

"They both have potential, but for it to be a sizable part of our revenue, you’re going to have to wait at least a couple of years," said Brin in response to a question about when those acquisitions would make a significant contribution to the company’s bottom line.

Google bought YouTube for $1.6bn in 2006.

The web search leader played a large role in the takeover battle between Microsoft and Yahoo. During a two-week test, it sold search advertisements on rival Yahoo last month as part of Yahoo’s attempt to find an alternative option to Microsoft’s offer.

Schmidt said the trial run provided good reason for the companies to discuss cooperation, but there was no deal yet.

"We view the test as successful," he told reporters before the web company’s annual meeting. "That’s a good basis to talk to Yahoo some more."

The Google CEO, speaking later at the shareholder meeting, said the company will continue to growth faster outside of its home market. Google generated 51% of its revenue outside the United States in the March quarter, but Schmidt said he expects that figure to grow over time.

Without giving a specific time frame, Schmidt said he expects 65% of Google’s revenue to come from abroad. Eventually, non-US revenue could be even higher.

Google co-founders Brin and Larry Page also fielded a request from one shareholder who asked the pair not to split the company’s stock, which closed at $583 on the Nasdaq.

"I think that’s the first time we’ve had that request," Page said with a chuckle.

Brin played the straight man: "We have had no problem honoring that thus far and I don’t expect that anything will change in that respect."

Will Google and Yahoo come together on a search advertising partnership? The two companies have been discussing an agreementunder which Google would deliver some ads alongside Yahoo’s search results. Since Google on average earns much more than Yahoo for every search, the deal, at least in theory, would boost Yahoo’s revenue. The two companies conducted a two-week experiment to make sure that was indeed true and both companies have called the test a success.

No deal has been announced yet, and the reasons the companies have not come to terms are unknown. But a person with knowledge of the discussions said Google has been thinking about a conundrum: deal or no deal, the company could end up with something of public relations black eye.

If the companies reach a deal, Google is certain to face antitrust scrutiny. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said Thursday that he was confident that the companies could structure an agreement in a way to avoid it being blocked by regulators. That may be true. But it doesn’t take a public relations expert to realize that coming under scrutiny as a powerful monopoly, whether or not it ultimately leads to a deal being blocked, is not good for a company’s image.

If Google, on the other hand, pulls away from the deal, it could face some criticism too. Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin said Thursday that Google’s offer of a search ad deal to Yahoo was not an effort to scuttle Microsoft’s takeover attempt, but rather rather an attempt to give Yahoo options in the face of a hostile takeover attempt. The possibility of a search deal emboldened Yahoo’s board to hold out for a higher price. Rather than fight, Microsoft decided to walk away.

if Google walks away, essentially cutting off the lifeline it had offered Yahoo, it won’t be seen as playing nice.

Spokespeople for Google and Yahoo declined to comment. Source: N.Y. Times