Susan Kuchinskas

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — For now, Microsoft is ceding the race for dominance in Internet search to the space’s 800-pound gorilla, Google, so it can focus on improving the experience for its existing users. At its Searchification event, held Wednesday at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus, executives briefed analysts, reporters and advertisers on changes to its […]

SAN FRANCISCO — First there was Web 2.0: a multi-million-dollar industry riding on the social media aspects of YouTube, Flickr and Blogger. Now, there’s Office 2.0, tools to help businesspeople connect and collaborate. The Office 2.0 Conference, held on Thursday and Friday in San Francisco, brought together 70 vendors offering online applications they say will […]

SAN FRANCISCO — The so-called Web 2.0 apps — blogs, wikis, photo-sharing, collaboration, community and other kinds of content generation– still struggle to penetrate the business community. While it’s still tough to get people to change the way they work, there’s a culture clash brewing. Today, Office 2.0, the two-year-old conference dedicated to the use […]

EarthLink , one of the earliest national Internet service providers, is in a world of hurt. Today, the company announced it would restructure, cutting 900 jobs and shuttering several regional offices. The company’s announcement said the move, to be completed by the end of the year, would reduce losses, while implying it might go in […]

Microsoft denies that it’s buying aQuantive for its technology. Instead, executives say, the purchase is designed to turn part of Microsoft into possibly the world’s largest media company. You might think that aQuantive’s technology could jump-start adCenter. Since it introduced its new advertising platform in May 2006, Microsoft has been touting its eventual ability to […]

A good phisherman goes where the phish are — and that’s massively popular Web sites such as YouTube. And that’s exactly where two have been found. Two security companies have sighted malicious files masquerading as videos on Google’s video-sharing site. Secure Computing Corp. this week reported a new “zlob” disguised as a video file on […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft’s Live Search has a new look. Microsoft’s search and ad teams trekked south to San Francisco last night to celebrate the launch of Virtual Earth 3D, a new online mapping interface for its Live Search offering. It provides city imagery in the round. When Live Search users click on the “maps” […]

Social media — photos, blogs, networks and tags — is all about sharing. But social media startups don’t want to share their intellectual property. Instead, they’re heading to the patent office. On Aug. 22, Google was awarded a patent for a method of using “editorial opinion” to rank search results. It’s just in time: Searchers […]

Digital entertainment startup iBloks has a message for “techthusiasts” who are dying to play with fancy graphics in Windows Vista: Come on down. The startup opened its doors this week, offering consumers the ability to play with Vista’s WinFX presentation layer technology on their XP machines. Think of it as a scrapbook on steroids. The […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Remember the dot-com era? Well, forget it. Online advertising is hotter than ever if AdTech San Francisco is any indication. The tradeshow and conference, held this week, was the largest in its 10-year history, with over 300 exhibitors and more than 9,000 attendees, according to conference chair Susan Bratton, . “We are […]

When search Goliath Google settled a click-fraud suit with Lane’s Gifts last month, the search industry’s collective eyebrows went up. Maybe there was a problem. Except no one knows how bad the problem is. The industry whisper number ranges from 10 percent to 30 percent of all clicks. And search providers insist they have mechanisms […]