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Mobile News: Google Gets LG, Yahoo Gets Virgin Mobile

posted on March 28, 2007

Maybe 2007 will be the year that mobile finally reaches the tipping point. If the recent flurry of mobile news is any representation, it could just be the year that mobile reaches the masses.

Today we have two partnership deals to share with you.

First, LG Electronics will start shipping select LG handsets with Google apps already installed. The phones will offer one-click access to Google search via an icon on the application menu and will come with Google Maps, Gmail and Blogger.

Next up to bat, is Yahoo and their deal with Virgin Mobile USA.

Starting next month, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger can be downloaded onto several Virgin Mobile handsets, and the applications will be preloaded on select phones in the future.

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Why PayPerPost When You Can BegForPost?

posted on March 28, 2007

Not since SEMPO Tahoe mocked SEMPO, has anyone pulled off a great spoof of a questionable search marketing organization. Michael Arrington serves up a treat with news that BegForPost has launched.

What’s it all about?

You’ve worked for months building a startup on a boostrap budget and the launch is near. How will you get an initial influx of traffic to propel your product/service into viral bliss? Don’t pay off bloggers to promote your startup, beg! Getting started is quick and easy. Fill out the form below, sit back, and wait for Internet stardom. You’re almost there!

Here’s what the service promises…

  • Completely free
  • No chicken hats
  • No conflicts of interest
  • No annoying reality show
  • No direct deployments to production
  • No premature acquisition announcements

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DoubleClick For Sale, Again?

posted on March 28, 2007

It’s been just under two years since internet advertising powerhouse, DoubleClick, was bought for $1.1 billion. Now, according to the WSJ (sub), it’s once again looking for a new suitor.

The New York-based company is using investment bank Morgan Stanley to help sound out its options, these people said, including a possible stock-market listing. The company is majority-owned by San Francisco private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which since purchasing DoubleClick in 2005 for approximately $1.1 billion, has sold off a number of divisions and reshaped the business. Hellman is seeking at least $2 billion for DoubleClick, said one person…

Microsoft is among those the company is in “active talks” with.

Hat-tip E-consultancy.

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Twitter Got the Message

posted on March 27, 2007

It’s been like a day since we’ve talked about Twitter, so I guess it’s time again. (Okay, it’s really been two weeks, but I just keep hearing so much about it that it’s hard to remember that I didn’t write those things!)

So, in our first brush with the IM/SMS-based “miniblogging” platform, Liana Evans had already covered how Twitter could become useful to business.

A few businesses caught the idea early on, such as woot.com. Woot.com’s implementation, to me, seems like the ideal way to use Twitter (or RSS feeds, for that matter) as a marketing tactic. Of course, part of this is due to the nature of woot.com’s concept: sell only one item a day, at a discount, until midnight or it sells out, whichever comes first. Thus, one update a day keeps you informed of the best deals.

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The Ultimate Authority on the Status of Blogging

posted on March 27, 2007

Yes, folks, the ultimate authority on the status of blogging weighed in today. Unfortunately, they did not side with the bloggers.

The Lithuanian Parliament decided that bloggers do not meet its definition of journalists. The reasoning, as reported by Agence France-Presse (via Breitbart):

The Media Law describes a journalist as a person who collects, disseminates and provides information to the media, based on a contract with the media, or who is a member of a journalists’ union[.]

Perhaps in Lithuania, “serious journalists” don’t turn to blogs and bloggers as sources.

What do you think it takes to join a Lithuanian journalists’ union? Just a guess, but I think it would be easier for the blogger whom they ruled against to do that than get a contract with “the media.”

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Unlimited Yahoo Mail and Mobile YouTube Coming

posted on March 27, 2007

A couple of quick announcements for you.

  1. As of May, every Yahoo Mail user will have unlimited email storage. Will they still delete your account if you don’t sign in for 3 months?
  2. Meanwhile, YouTube will launch a mobile version of its web site in June.
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All Your Translations Are Belong to Google

posted on March 27, 2007

Google’s statistical machine translation initiative aims to make huge advances in document translation. Instead of relying on humans to translate documentrs, Google is taking a different approach. According to Reuters…

Instead, they feed documents humans have already translated into two languages and then rely on computers to discern patterns for future translations.

While linguistic experts are impressed…

“Some people that are in machine translations for a long time and then see our Arabic-English output, then they say, that’s amazing, that’s a breakthrough,”

The average web user is less so…

“And then other people who have never seen what machine translation was … they read through the sentence and they say, the first mistake here in line five — it doesn’t seem to work because there is a mistake there.”