Digital music battle heats up
eMusic has announced plans to launch in all 25 EU countries in a bid to become Europe’s number two music downloading site behind iTunes.
Survey highlights sites' sway over music tastes
Recent moves by social networking sites into the digital music business have been backed by a new report.
The 2006 Digital Music Survey, carried out by Entertainment Media Research, shows the likes of Bebo and Myspace have a strong influence over the way listeners’ discover and purchase music online.
Apple elects Google CEO Schmidt to board
Apple has pulled off a coup by luring Google CEO Eric Schmidt to its board of directors, in a move that was announced late last night.
Google challenges Microsoft with 'Apps for your Domain'
Google today launched Google Apps for your Domain - a set of hosted services aimed at small and medium businesses.
Just as we were getting used to Google as a new advertising powerhouse with MSN pushed to the fringes, the search behemoth reminds us that it wants an even larger slice of the action, this time carved from more familiar Microsoft territory.
Microsoft inks ad deal with Facebook
After losing out to Google in the race to sign up Myspace as an advertising client, Microsoft has landed a deal with the US' second largest social networking site Facebook.
AOL keyword suggestion tool published
SEO Scoop has pointed out a keyword suggestion tool that has now been set up, based around the search data infamously published by AOL a couple of weeks ago.
The tool estimates the volume of searches for different keywords on the three biggest engines, based on their market share and the number of queries contained in AOL’s data.
Microsoft recruits users for Xbox games
Another sign of big players' growing interest in user-generated content has come with Microsoft’s announcement of game development tools for the Xbox 360.
The software, called XNA Studio Express, will enable amateur developers to create their own games and share them via the Xbox Live online service.
Search industry goes deep into social media and online PR
Search goes super holistic at San Jose. Blogs, reputation management, content and communities are big on the agenda as well as the return of creative advertising, this time by way of Google and Yahoo!
Windows Live Spaces launch hits problems
The launch of Microsoft's revamped blogging and social networking service has got off to a bad start after a flood of user complaints.
The Windows Live Spaces service, an updated version of blogging site MSN Spaces, was hit by problems with the statistics page and emoticons, as well as issues with email publishing, Friends Explorer and Firefox.
Brand associations on both sides of the Atlantic
Online measurement company Hitwise has run a comparison of search terms associated with Yahoo!, MSN and Google in the US and UK, highlighting some differences in consumers' attitudes to the three portals on different sides of the Atlantic.
The study found that US consumers, for example, largely associate MSN with its portal content while in the UK, the brand is better known for communications tools Messenger and Hotmail.
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Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
