Nicholas Carlson

While speculative reports fly around the Internet about who might buy Yahoo — Microsoft, Google or News Corp. — new CEO Jerry Yang and President Susan Decker have a business to run. Their plan is to turn Yahoo from the media company former CEO Terry Semel used to run into a technology company with a […]

Electronic payments firm CyberSource, which traditionally focuses on managing payments for mid-sized and enterprise customers, today announced an agreement to acquire Authorize.Net and its 175,000 mostly small-business customers. According to a statement, CyberSource will acquire Authorize.Net in a stock and cash transaction valued at approximately $565 million. Authorize.Net shareholders will receive 1.1611 shares of CyberSource […]

First came the acquisitions feeding frenzy in online advertising. Google got DoubleClick, Yahoo ate up Right Media, and Microsoft gobbled aQuantive. Now it’s up to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to make sure nobody got sharked. Following the requirements of the Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust act, the FTC is conducting a review of Microsoft’s $6 billion bid […]

If you’re in the U.S., Google search advertising isn’t going to help you “find it on eBay” today. That’s because eBay is “experimenting” with other methods to optimize traffic to its site, company spokesperson Hani Durzy told internetnews.com. The move follows Google’s recently canceled plans to host an event in Boston, the site of this […]

Later this month, YouTube will begin testing technology to identify user-uploaded video content copyrighted by TimeWarner and Walt Disney. After the video is identified as copyrighted, TimeWarner and Disney will be able to remove the content or keep it up and split advertising revenue with YouTube parent-company Google, a company spokesperson told internetnews.com. The plan […]

From now on, or at least until another government complains, Google will anonymize its search server logs after 18 months. The company made the announcement this week in response to another round of European Union objections. Previously, Google held onto user search data for as long as 24 months, a length of time the company […]

Reporter’s Notebook: “I probably shouldn’t admit this,” the bespectacled woman across the table said. “But I don’t have a television because I can’t stand the ads.” It’s a confession you might expect from a corduroy-sporting high school history teacher, but not from one of the world’s most powerful advertising executives. The woman across the table […]

Google’s oft-articulated plan is to provide third-party developers with the tools they need to make the Web useful. That’s because the more useful the Web is, the more money Google can make in advertising. One of the best ways to make the Web more useful is to make it faster. So today, Google bought start-up […]

Killing off the butler didn’t help, so today Ask.com introduced a new version of its search engine in hopes of boosting its lagging market share. The IAC company is calling the redesigned search engine Ask3D. With new search technology and a three-panel design, it’s supposed to give searchers what they need, faster, according to Ask […]

Reporter’s Notebook: I just spent a week in Silicon Valley, where the nights are surprisingly cool, even in May, and the highways are wide. And where nobody cares about user-generated content anymore. Remember how venture capitalists, circa 2006, suddenly discovered you didn’t need editors and writers to run a news site, but just a platform […]

Web video startup Joost already has a new chief to run the show. Former Cisco Systems  executive Mike Volpi today succeeded Joost founding CEO Fredrik de Wahl, who will become Joost’s chief strategy officer, according to a company statement. Volpi takes over full operational responsibility for the company, which launched May 1, effective immediately. Mike […]

SAN JOSE, Calif. — With the passing of each fiscal quarter, it’s increasingly clear Google’s got a good thing going connecting the world to the fruits of Web developer labor. And it’s not about to let up. Today at its Google Developer Day event here, Google vice president Jeff Huber emphasized the search giant’s plans […]