Janis Mara

Microsoft Corp. launched a beta version of its MSN Toolbar offering easier access to its services including e-mail and search, as well as a customizable pop-up ad blocker, on Monday. The release marks MSN’s entry into the toolbar space, already pioneered by its rivals both in the portal space and the search space. Users of […]

America Online and CBS have teamed up to show classic Super Bowl commercials on their respective sites and enable viewers to vote for their favorites. Featured spots include Apple’s “1984” ad for the Macintosh, (which aired that eponymous year), as well as Xerox’s 1977 ad featuring a monk photocopying his scroll on a Xerox machine. […]

America Online has signed four major brands as sponsors for AOL Latino, signaling that big-time advertisers are taking note of the approximately 12.5 million Hispanics online. General Motors, Coca-Cola, InterContinental Hotels Group and Artisan/Lionsgate are charter launch sponsors for AOL Latino, the Spanish language version of the giant ISP’s online service that launched in October […]

Yahoo! has launched a beta test of a module incorporating RSS technology, giving members the ability to pull headlines and text from other sites and display it on their MyYahoo! Pages. Earlier this year Yahoo! accidentally let the RSS beta slip onto the My Yahoo! service, so the release of the feature has been widely […]

SAN FRANCISCO — The federal Can Spam act will be “a total failure,” legal Internet authority Lawrence Lessig told an audience of Internet service providers, e-mail service providers and spam-blocking companies at the National Spam and the Law conference in San Francisco Thursday. Lessig, a Stanford law professor, said the act won’t stem the tide […]

Pursuing young buyers at a zero-to-sixty pace, Toyota is using live chat on the Scion site, as well as banner ads and rich media, to woo the elusive demographic to buy its lower-priced brand. The campaign comes as Scion prepares to roll out its vehicles across the United States over the next few months. So […]

Friendster meets Yahoo! in a newly launched search engine, Eurekster, which returns paid and non-paid search results ranked according to their popularity among networks of friends and associates. The service, which launched Wednesday, offers personalized search, which means different types of people will get different results. Overture will supply paid placement listings under “Sponsored Listings” […]

What’s in a name? A great deal, apparently, because a number of companies in the interactive advertising space have changed their names in the last few months. Gator became Claria, Dealtime and Epinions changed to Shopping.com, and Ah-ha.com switched to Enhance Interactive. At least it’s not like the days of the dot-com boom, when companies […]

Overture Services and Wanadoo, Europe’s second biggest Internet access provider, are renewing and expanding their paid search agreement. The renewed, multi-year commitment applies to sites in the United Kingdom served by Wanadoo subsidiary Freeserve, as well as those Wanadoo operates in France, Spain and the Netherlands. Listings for the latter are provided by Overture’s Dutch […]

Yahoo! has created a research organization focusing on paid search and other technologies. It will be headed by the founder of Overture Research. Yahoo! Research Labs will help the company compete in the escalating fight for search superiority inspired by the explosive growth of the paid search sector, estimated to hit $6.3 billion in 2004, […]

Online travel site Priceline.com is launching a multimillion-dollar national TV campaign with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy touting its new ticketing service, which gives customers a choice of flights, times and airlines. The company, known for its “name your own price” tag line, is bringing back Shatner, who helped put Priceline.com and online travel sites […]

Is eBay an e-commerce site or a media property. In the latest example that it can be both, the online auction company and Washington Mutual have teamed up to offer six-month certificates of deposit in an online auction format, starting this week. Rather than bidding up the price of the CD, users bid down the […]