Advertising giant WPP has acquired a stake in Yield Software, a service that helps marketers shift their ad spend from traditional media to online advertising, reports MediaPost. The services allows marketers to “optimize” their budgets across various online ad platforms, provides landing page optimization, organic search optimization (SEO) and paid search (SEM).
In February, WPP rival Publicis partnered with Rapt to form Rapt Information Services with the intent of making online ad buying more transparent across various ad platforms. A month later, Rapt was purchased by More»

Labels: Online Advertising, software, Web Apps

Bill Gates has reneged on his promise to donate £1 million to Charles’s charity, the Prince’s Trust. Instead Mr. Gates donated £250,000 worth of software which Microsoft sources claim to be worth £5 million.
Tea Will Not Be Served: Either way Charles’ mummy Queen Elizabeth was not very happy with Mr. Gates. Mr. Gates had agreed in principle to give the money to the organization’s Business Program, which helps young people start their own companies. But negotiations between Microsoft and the Prince’s Trust broke down and the More»

Labels: Bill Gates, Microsoft, software, startups

Microsoft has released Windows XP SP3 to the web in several languages including English.
ARS Technica reports
Concerns over the general overall quality of the Microsoft Vista Operating System have put Microsoft in a bind with respect to longer term support for the XP environment.
Many companies as well as individual users have no intention of upgrading to Vista in the near future. In fact some installations have actually reverted to XP from Vista, preferring what appears to be the superior stability and familiarity of the XP Operating System.
My personal experience has been that OS upgrades are generally more trouble More»

Labels: Microsoft, operating system, software, vista, xp

Software as a service - SaaS for short, is clearly a major development in how enterprise computing will evolve in the coming years.
OpSource, a solutions provider, has an excellent set of white papers and a resource center featuring issues relating to SAAS deployments and advantages. For the disadvantages with SaaS you’ll want to turn elsewhere since Opsource is presumably a strong advocate for SaaS solutions given their business model.
Over the coming weeks we’ll be exploring several issues relating to SaaS and the enterprise including the advantages of flexibility, scalability, and rapid deployment using More»

Labels: enterprise 2.0, saas, software

Microsoft has released in beta a new software suite targeted at the consumer market and named “Albany”. Product manager Bryson Gordon explains the product:
“Albany” is the codename for a new all-in-one subscription serviceof essential software and services consumers told us were most important tothem. We’ve pulled together the productivity tools people need to organizetheir lives, security to help keep their personal information safe andonline services that make it easy for them to keep in touch with friends andfamily, and folded them all into a single service that also ensures theuser’s PC More»

Labels: albany, Microsoft, Microsoft Albany, software

Apple´s feeling the fury and heat for a somewhat tricky feature that led many users to inadvertently install the Safari browser during a recent Apple update. Although it possibly was an innocent mistake, it is more likely that Apple marketing pushed this approach knowing that making the install a defaulted feature would lead to an increase in installs, and assumed the benefits of this would outweigh the criticism.
CNET’s Tom Krazit inexplicable suggests that this is the users fault, saying in his post Look, people, it’s 2008: You’re responsible for what you install on your More»

Labels: Apple, CNET, software