Tech News : AOL Acquires ADTECH

AOL have announced the purchase of a controlling interest in ADTECH AG, a German based online ad-serving company.

The acquisition gives AOL an ad-serving platform that features a variety of ad management and delivery applications that allow publishers to manage their online campaigns.

ADTECH will operate as an independent subsidiary of AOL’s Advertising.com.

AOL CEO Randy Falco said in a statement that the deal would give AOL the ability to provide publishers with a more complete set of advertising solutions.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Tech News: Lots of Product Announcements At Google

Lots of announcements today at Google during their Searchology event. My live blogging notes are here and I’ve posted on their pre-announcement of a cross-language search engine coming soon. See SearchEngineLand as well.

Cross-Language Search Engine

Google’s Udi Manber mentioned in passing that they would soon be launching a cross-language search engine. More details here.

Universal Search

Google’s Marissa Mayer announced what amounts to a first step towards a “universal search model.” This is effectively an integration of results from all of Google’s vertical search properties (video, images, news, maps, books, blogs, websites) which are presented for searches at Google.com and are ranked according to Google’s relevance engine. There are a number of example searches in my notes from the event earlier today. Videos from Google Video and YouTube are embedded directly in results for viewing.

Video Search Now Includes Non-Google Sites

In January Google launched a video search engine that included only Google Video and YouTube videos. Today they’ve expanded it to include video from Metacafe and “5-6 other large video sites.”

Google Experimental

Google Experimental launched today. This includes a number of enhancements to Google Search. Adding any of them will change your Google search results. These include a timeline or maps view, keyboard shortcuts, left hand search navigation and right hand contextual search navigation. Note that Google Experimental is not the same thing as Google Labs, which contains stand alone applications.

Google Navigation Bar

Google’s home page and many applications now include a navigation bar that gives on-click access to popular products like Gmail, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets and Picasa.

Tech News : New Stuff At My Yahoo

The big guys are really starting to focus on personalized home pages, where Yahoo dominates and Google is coming on strong (by adding a link from the Google.com home page). Google says their personalized home page has been their fastest growing product over the last few fiscal quarters. Pageflakes and Netvibes are two notable startups in this space.

Tonight Yahoo is announcing a few enhancements to the recently relaunched My Yahoo: a new calendar module, a My Netflix module that uses the Netflix API and an update to the Yahoo Bookmarks module.

The calendar module has read/write functionality (as it should). My Netflix lets users see what movies have recently been released on DVD, the movies in your queue and movies you have at home. The main addition to the bookmarks module is the ability to add new bookmarks directly from the module.

The new features will be rolled out on Thursday. Screen shots are below. The first one shows the calendar and netflix modules.

Tech News : Sony to lose $413M in video games unit

Sony will lose about 50 billion yen ($413 million) in its video games business this fiscal year, and recovery won't come until the arrival of more games to play on the PlayStation 3 machine, a company executive said Thursday.

"The main point is that the PS3 will still be producing operating losses," Senior Vice President Takao Yuhara told a small group of reporters at Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news).'s Tokyo headquarters.

On Wednesday, Sony reported that losses for the January-March quarter widened to 67.6 billion yen ($563 million) from a 66.5 billion yen loss a year earlier, largely on launch costs for the PlayStation 3, which went on sale in November in Japan and the U.S., and in March in Europe.

But Sony, which makes Vaio personal computers and Walkman portable music players, forecast a record profit for the fiscal year through March 2008 at 320 billion yen ($2.7 billion).

Booming sales of flat-panel TVs and digital cameras that have been lifting sales are expected to continue and boost Sony's earnings in coming months, Yuhara said.

Although PS3 losses are expected to shrink with cost cuts this fiscal year, the key lies in having Sony and outside game-makers produce attractive games to play, which fully exploit the machine's expensive technology, he said.

"What's most important is software," Yuhara said. "In every region, our software lineup will be strengthened."

Sony's revival efforts, led by Welsh-born American Howard Stringer, Sony's first foreign chief executive, may finally be starting to pay off. After taking the helm in 2005, Stringer got Sony to drop unprofitable businesses, sell off assets, reduce jobs and shutter plants. But losses from PS3 remain Sony's biggest headache.

Tech News : Next gen of Wi-Fi is planned for summer

Said on Thursday it aims to double its combined annual Wii and DS software sales to 300 million units, without giving a specific time frame. REUTERS/Issei Kato" border="0" height="134" width="180">The next generation of wireless Internet products certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance is expected to hit shelves this summer, even though a final standard for the technology isn't due for another year, the industry group says.

The Wi-Fi Alliance was announcing Wednesday that it will begin certifying wireless routers, networking cards, microchips and other so-called "Draft N" products in June. The products, which take their name from the upcoming 802.11n technical standard, are expected to reach retail stores shortly thereafter.

Wi-Fi comes in several flavors — "b," "a," "g," and soon "n" — referring to the subsection of the technical guidelines issued by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a technical professional organization.

The "n" version is expected to be about five times faster than the widely used "g" variety, though in practice, speeds rarely reach what's listed on the box. Draft N products are said to offer better reach through walls and into dead spots and will use multiple radios to send and receive data, making them better at handling big video files.

Gear rated to handle n-level wireless already is being sold. But the Wi-Fi Alliance said certified Draft N items from different vendors are guaranteed to work together and to work with older certified Wi-Fi products.

Karen Hanley, senior director of marketing for the Austin, Texas-based industry group, said the wireless industry shipped 200 million Wi-Fi products last year worldwide. Over the next few years, the category will expand from mostly laptops and access points to Wi-Fi enabled cell phones, televisions and video games.

Hanley said the final 802.11n standard isn't expected until 2009.

Tech News :Tiny sex images on Google get okay from court

A U.S. appeals court lifted a preliminary injunction on Wednesday against Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) from showing thumbnail-size photos from sexually explicit Internet sites, but said the company might be liable for allowing links to sites displaying pirated photos.

The case is the latest in which courts are seeking to strike a balance between fostering the free flow of information on the Internet and protecting copyrighted content.

A lower court had found that Google's thumbnail images violated the copyright of adult magazine and Web publisher Perfect 10 Inc., but said the Internet search company was probably not responsible for displays of the underlying images from Perfect 10's Web site.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco reversed those findings on Wednesday.

"We conclude that Perfect 10 is unlikely to be able to overcome Google's fair use defense and, accordingly, we vacate the preliminary injunction regarding Google's use of thumbnail images," Sandra Ikuta wrote for a three-judge panel.

Perfect 10, which boasts of "The World's Most Beautiful Natural Women," first objected to Google about the thumbnail images in 2001, saying Google linked to Web sites that republished images of their nude models without authorization. Perfect 10 charges $25.50 per month for access to its site.

They sued in 2004, alleging copyright infringement and in 2005 filed a similar claim against Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN - news) and its A9.com subsidiary, saying they provided links to Google search results. A court granted a partial preliminary injunction in 2006.

The lower court's ruling had threatened to bar Google from featuring thumbnail pictures -- small versions of photos that are linked to a bigger version of the same picture. But the injunction was stayed pending further legal review, which meant Google continued to display the thumbnail images.

A number of photographer associations and the Motion Picture Association of America made legal filings in support of Perfect 10.

TRANSFORMATIVE NUDES

Judge Ikuta found that the thumbnails were not an infringement as they fell under the category of "highly transformative" work.

"We conclude that the significantly transformative nature of Google's search engine, particularly in light of its public benefit, outweighs Google's superseding and commercial uses of the thumbnails in this case," she wrote.

On a second issue of Google's liability for copyright infringement by linking to full-size images, the appeals court left the door open for Perfect 10's argument.

"There is no dispute that Google substantially assists web sites to distribute their infringing copies to a worldwide market and assists a worldwide audience of users to access infringing materials," the ruling found.

"Google could be held contributorily liable if it had knowledge that infringing Perfect 10 images were available using its search engine, could take simple measures to prevent further damage to Perfect 10's copyrighted works, and failed to take such steps."

The ruling said a lower court should re-examine the issues against both Google and Amazon.

Tech News : Google's search engine goes universal

In its latest technological leap, online search leader Google Inc. will begin showing videos on its main results page Wednesday along with photos, books and other content previously separated into different categories.

Under a new "universal search" approach that Google began rolling out Wednesday afternoon, some requests will produce more than just a series of links and snippets pointing to other Web sites.

As an example, the results to the search request "I have a dream" will include an actual video showing Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous 1963 speech along with the usual assortment of Web links.

The videos will be shown on Google's results page if it's contained in the company's own database or the vast library of its YouTube subsidiary. A thumbnail will direct traffic to videos hosted on other sites like Metacafe.com.

Other Google results will more frequently show photos or information from the more than 1 million books that the company has copied during the past two years. More news stories and local information pertaining to search requests will be displayed on Google's first results page — perhaps the most prized showcase on the Web.

Google's database has included photos, books, videos and local information for several years, but fetching the content usually required searching through one of the customized channels featured in a row of links above the main query box.

A new link to Google's increasingly popular e-mail service, Gmail, will be added above the query box in the next day or two to make it easier to access for existing users and presumably more alluring to Web surfers who haven't already opened an account.

By intermingling different types of Web content on its main result page, Google is betting it can become even more useful to its millions of users and maintain the competitive advantage that has established the Mountain View-based company as a cultural and financial phenomenon.

The increased emphasis on video also could alienate some longtime users who revere Google for its traditionally staid results page.