Spamalot! Volume of spam is back on the rise

McAfee announced today that the volume of spam emails has increased 141 percent since March to more than 117 billion emails a day.

That means 92 percent of the email we get, assuming it all goes unfiltered, is spam. Spam volumes have increased 33 percent every month for the last three months.

The security software vendor also estimates that 14 million computers have been enslaved by cybercriminal botnets. Those are the unprotected computers that have … Continue Reading

Microsoft and Yahoo turn on the buzzword firehose

Microsoft and Yahoo are shaking up the web search landscape today with their just-announced partnership. But before returning you to our regularly scheduled business analysis, I’d like to take a moment to celebrate the way Microsoft and Yahoo shared the news. Normally, talking about PR stuff is a little too inside baseball for me, but honestly, the companies’ efforts set some kind of gold standard for the relentless, undiscriminating use of near-meaningless buzzwords.

Here’s Microsoft … Continue Reading

Questions not answered on Microsoft / Yahoo deal

Despite the large amount of text coming from Yahoo about its ten-year search deal with Microsoft, there are a few questions still nagging the VentureBeat staff. We don’t expect to get answers, but we need to get the questions out there anyway.

1. What happens to Yahoo BOSS? Yahoo’s press release states that “The agreement does not cover each company’s Web properties and products, email, instant messaging, display advertising, or any other aspect of the … Continue Reading

With uncertain future, Bebo gets a new president

AOL might spin out its expensively-purchased social network, Bebo, as it prepares to be separated from media parent company, Time Warner. Or so say long-running rumors. In the meantime, Bebo has a new president: Stephane Panier, its former chief operating officer, who has previously been a senior finance director at Google.

Bebo had some 24 million unique visitors around the world in May, according to comScore, down from 38.1 million a year earlier (which was … Continue Reading

Twitterers mixed on Bing getting big through Microsoft / Yahoo deal

One reason Twitter is so fascinating is that conversations don’t stick to topics the mass media considers important. This morning, there’s not much tweeting about the business details of Microsoft’s deal with Yahoo to take over its search engine and search advertising sales. Far more Twitterers are tweeting because Microsoft’s Bing will now become the #2 search engine on the Internet, because of its placement on both Microsoft and Yahoo sites. Bing is near the … Continue Reading

Yahoo / Microsoft 110% rumor nixed

[Update: Last night, AllThingsD -- usually a reliable source on Yahoo stories -- reported that Microsoft would give Yahoo 110% of the ad revenue it collected by selling ads against its Bing search engine on Yahoo sites. Instead, the official press release on the deal says Microsoft will give Yahoo 88% for the first five years of the deal. Our original and wrong post is below.]

Yahoo’s ten-year search deal with Microsoft is pretty much … Continue Reading

Traders reward Microsoft, punish Yahoo for deal

“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry,” Carol Bartz said in her prepared statement about Yahoo’s agreement to turn over the bulk of its search and advertising business to Microsoft. Day traders don’t seem to agree. YHOO shares have dropped more than 10 percent from yesterday’s closing price.

Yahoo’s drop is part of a larger trend: The entire Nasdaq composite index is down this morning, albeit by less … Continue Reading

Microsoft and Yahoo unite on search, in revolt against Google dominance

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced an agreement that lets Microsoft’s Bing search engine take over Yahoo’s search site, and in turn gives Yahoo control over premium search advertising for both companies.

The deal significantly changes the landscape of the search advertising market, a fundamental driver of much of the new Web economy. Small and large businesses alike have placed advertising alongside search results, in an effort to boost their business. But Google has emerged as … Continue Reading

Product management on a shoestring

There are shortcuts and then there are shortcuts that cost money. When you’re running a small company, you’ll likely find both types are essential if you want to give your team time to focus.

After six years at extremely large media and technology firms (Comcast and Viacom), I went back to startups, where I started my digital career in 1996. Problem was, a lot of the infrastructure that was at my fingertips at these larger … Continue Reading

Social game companies light the way for old-guard casual game makers

[This is part two of a two-part story on how new platforms and social game companies are changing the casual gaming market. See the first part here.]

Attendees at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle last week were envious of how the social game companies have stolen a march on the old guard casual game companies.

It’s clear that social game companies operate differently than traditional casual game companies, and no company illustrates this better … Continue Reading

Party crashers! iPhone/social games make old-guard casual game companies envious

[This is part one of a two-part story on how the casual game market is evolving. See the second part here.]

A year ago, the iPhone and social games on Facebook were barely on the radar at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle. But at last week’s conference, most of the attention focused on the two fastest-growing and most exciting parts of the video game business: the iPhone platform and social games.

In little more … Continue Reading

SugarSync extends backup/sync/share service to Android, eyes netbook market

We’ve written before about Sharpcast and its creation, the SugarSync system that let users backup, sync, and share files from their computers and smartphones. VentureBeat writer Anthony Ha called it “the simplest and most usable sync service I’d seen.”

But Sharpcast hasn’t been able to take off as a business the way it should with a product this solid. In January, CEO Laura Yecies, who had taken the helm a month earlier, acknowledged that the … Continue Reading

Q&A: Verizon says it will be the first to offer 'true' mobile video

[Disclosure: This post is one of a series of articles sponsored by Verizon. The company has given us editorial freedom to write what we'd like. In return for us covering the company's developer conference, Verizon will be running ads on our site in ensuing weeks.]

Verizon just launched an app store called Vcast Apps, opening the door for developers to reach 1 billion consumers by working with the company’s software development kits and … Continue Reading

Knowledge Genie helps know-it-alls package their wisdom

Got some knowledge you want to share with the world? And maybe make some money at the same time? The traditional thing to do would be to write a book, but a startup called Knowledge Genie says it has a better solution, offering an easy way to turn that knowledge into an interactive web tutorial.

Co-founding husband-and-wife team Milo and Thuy Sindell took me through the creation of a tutorial — or, as they call … Continue Reading

Live Gamer acquires N-Cash to deliver "one-stop shop for virtual goods"

Live Gamer has acquired Korean micro-transaction provider N-Cash for an undisclosed sum as part of a bid to expand into the red hot market of primary virtual goods.

New York-based Live Gamer is already a player in the secondary market for video game virtual goods — game publishers use Live Gamer’s platform to let online game subscribers trade virtual goods they earn in games such as Sony’s EverQuest. In the past, gamers trading such goods … Continue Reading

LibreDigital scores $15M second round for eBook distribution

LibreDigital, which you’ve likely never heard of, supplies technology that delivers eBooks from publishers to readers’ gadgets. HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Wiley, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today are among LibreDigital’s clients, which include six of America’s top 10 book publishers. LibreDigital offers its technology as a service rather than requiring publishers to configure servers and install and maintain software themselves.

The round was led by Triangle Peak Partners, a … Continue Reading

New Twitter homepage puts search at its heart

Twitter just debuted its new homepage, putting search at its core. This plays to the company’s growing strength in giving a sense of what’s happening right now on any given topic. (It could also play to a potential business strength in selling ads against real-time search results, if Twitter’s co-founders decide to ignore their “advertising is less interesting” comments.) The trending topics get an added push to the front with three categories for seeing what’s … Continue Reading

Microsoft, Yahoo may finally embrace with search, advertising deal

Update: Such a deal has just been announced.

Yahoo and Microsoft are close to a search and advertising deal that would finally bring them together in a fight against Google’s dominance, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yahoo would use Microsoft’s Bing search engine for its properties and handle sales for some text ads in search results. The deal would deliver the pair 30 percent of the search market against Google’s 65 percent.

For Microsoft, … Continue Reading

Roundup: Sprint / Virgin, Microsoft / Yahoo, VentureBeat on Techmeme

What does the Sprint-Virgin hookup actually mean for cellular customers? — “The answer is … probably nothing,” claims my fellow New York Times Gadgetwise blogger Roy Furchgott. As a guy who reports doggedly on the wireless industry, Roy’s immediate response to the deal is that it won’t close until the end of this year at the earliest. Until then, Sprint and Virgin Mobile will operate as two separate companies. After the deal closes, he reports, … Continue Reading