Microsoft has agreed to acquire a Connecticut-based research company called Greenfield Online, which runs both a website called Ciao for European comparison shoppers and an online survey system that helps businesses conduct market research.

The cash tender offer to buy out all of Greenfield’s outstanding shares amounts to roughly $486 million, about $60 million more than public equity firm Quadrangle recently offered to pay for Greenfield. Microsoft has already found an unnamed party to buy Greenfield’s surveys division from it, leaving the Redmond, WA-based company with the remaining Ciao subsidiary.

I may lose my “early adopter badge” for saying this, but I do not see how Ubiquity really helps anyone. Given that it is a 0.1 release, I know it is far from complete. However, it seems like there is a lot of development required to really make the browser a platform, and make it easier for people to use the Internet as a service. When I say a lot, I mean a minimum of two years until early adopters can praise it like they have praised services like Twitter or FriendFeed. For the rest of the mainstream, we are looking at closer to five years given the traditional adopter cycle.

Of course, the logical question is why do I feel this way? First, look at the examples from the user tutorial. Being able to type “email to Mike” so that GMail creates an email and sends it is not a huge advancement. The search examples are much of the same thing. You can type “wikipedia babel fish” and it will search Wikipedia for you. Obviously, this barely saves any time or mouse clicks. All of the examples are this simplistic, and this adds to my “shouldn’t there be more” feeling.

I am generally underwhelmed for a few different reasons. First, why make the browser the platform? Isn’t it easier to create a website that does all of the same things? Isn’t this what sites like iGoogle or any other personalized homepage with widgets are trying to do? Does this just mean we need better websites?The big question I have with this is “What are we trying to do?” My understanding of the “browser as a platform” concept is that we are trying to treat the Internet as a service or a data source. You can do interesting things when not constrained to a specific page. I think Ubiquity is meant to change the way we work, and that is what I want. The problem is that we are not there yet, and it takes a little imagination to get there.

“Summon Ubiquity” is used throughout the documentation. Why? The services should just be active and ready from a toolbar or even parsed in the address bar. The commands also need to be very generic. If I am searching for information, let me type “find babel fish.” The built-in services can search Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo and whatever other search services that support Ubiquity. The process should be meta-everything. If I need a definition, I can type “define ubiquitous” and the service would look for definitions on various reference sites like Dictionary.com and any other engines that support definitions. Another area that could benefit greatly from integration with Ubiquity is semantics and linked data. Both would provide plenty of context and data sources for some interesting applications.

There are a few features that I really like about the service as well. They have included a concept of context or “this.” If I have selected a large section of text on a Web page, I can enter “email this to Mike” and the selected text gets emailed to my contact named Mike. Context in any activity is extremely important, and creating a quick way to get the context is fantastic. The other extremely important feature is that new commands can be created with just some lines of JavaScript. This means that there is not a huge learning curve for the API, it is just a matter of linking together the right API calls. The fact that you do not need to restart Firefox while developing is a nice bonus as well.

Overall, it is fairly obvious that Ubiquity is an interesting technology, but it is still very immature. It is something we should keep an eye on in terms of the platform development as well as what commands and applications developers create on top of the platform.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Mozilla Announces Ubiquity for Universal AccessAdobe to Acquire Makers of Web-Based Word Processor BuzzwordMore Bad News for VonageThe Web 2.0 Office? Not yet…Happy 4th Birthday Del.icio.usSlacker Signs Deals with 3 Major Record LabelsBuzzword Launches Social Features with Zoho Writer Rival

Source:Mashable!

Microsoft has announced that it will acquire Greenfield Online Inc, a company that owns Ciao GmbH, a leading European shopping and price comparison site. Microsoft will purchase all outstanding shares of Greenfield Online for $17.50 per share, which means that the total value of the transaction is approx. 486 million dollars. As others have noticed, Greenfield already had a deal in place with media PE firm Quadrangle Group LLC., who was supposed to buy Ciao for $426 million, but it seems that Microsoft had outbid them.

John Mangelaars, vice president, Consumer and Online, Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa has said the following about the transaction: “Ciao’s success has been led by a team of talented people who took a unique combination of intuitive technology and the insight that comes out of their passionate consumer community to become one of Europe’s leading shopping comparison sites. This makes the company a fantastic asset to the future of our search offer. Integrating Ciao’s capabilities into Live Search will provide a strong launchpad for our commercial search offer in Europe and enhance our e-commerce offering on MSN.”

According to comScore, Ciao has over 26.5 million unique monthly visitors, and it’s one of the leaders in the price comparison, consumer product reviews and shopping site arena in Europe. According to the PR, Ciao’s technology platform, online community and extensive merchant relationships will be integrated within the Live Search platform. Microsoft’s recent efforts to combine shopping and search are obviously part of a bigger strategy, in which Microsoft plans to corner the shopping market and commercial search, as it can’t hurt Google when it comes to general purpose search.

Microsoft has also secured a buyer for Greenfield Online’s Internet survey solutions, and both transactions are expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2008.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:How I Spent My Billions: A Brief History of Ad Network AcquisitionsRumor: Microsoft Wants To Buy Ustream.TVDone Deal: Microsoft Buys Musiwave for $50 MillionGoogle, Microsoft, Yahoo Settle Internet Gambling Court CaseMicrosoft Scores $500 Million Online Ad Deal with ViacomYahoo Acquires Maven Networks for $160 MillionConfirmed: Microsoft Wins Facebook Stake with $240 Million Investment

When Microsoft launched their Live Search Cashback option back in May, all of the bloggers and reporters talked about how it was going to really boost Microsoft’s search market share. I took a different view, looking at it from the dealhunters point-of-view. In late June we talked to the deal hunters (me included) and they said that the Live Search Cashback was great, paying up to 35% rewards for shopping on eBay.

Today Techcrunch editor Erick Schonfeld has an article about how Microsoft hasn’t gained any market share with the new Live Search Cashback option and in fact the overall share dropped by a small percentage in July. Erick points to research by comScore and concludes with, "While two months worth of data is far from conclusive, it does suggest that in search you can’t buy market share. You have to earn it."

The issue that so many writers are missing is that this new cashback option will never get users who are looking for information to switch. Why would I switch from Google to Microsoft Live Search Cashback when I am looking for cat photos? Microsoft is sitting on a huge homerun if they could get their ducks in a row about how to market this tool properly.

For example, why would ANYONE not start a purchase on the Microsoft site? If you are buying items online and not getting cashback from Microsoft, Fatwallet or the other cashback services, you are simply throwing money away. Look at these cashback amounts:

• Zappos - 22.5%
• Footlocker - 45%
• Newegg - 3%

In the deal hunter segment, the Microsoft Live Search Cashback is doing well from my perspective. Fatwallet continues to be a discussion place for the cashback search and as of yesterday there are now merchants paying up to 62.5% back.

Will Live Search Cashback take away market share from Google or Yahoo in the informational searches? No. Could it dominate the product search/price comparison category? Yes. Microsoft needs to learn how to market the search as a product and purchase search - and then we will see those charts change direction.

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The deal will ensure that the non-profit Mozilla foundation will be able to continue with the development of Firefox, its mail client Thunderbird, and a number of other applications. From Mozilla CEO John Lilly:
“We’re very, very happy about our relationship with Google and this makes sure that Mozilla will be sustainable and thrive for quite a long time to come”.Source:TechCrunch

According to an AT&T source, net effect problems in the iPhone firmware are causing poor reception and calls dropped for iPhone 3G carriers. It’s all your fault.Source:TechCrunch

When it comes to search, Microsoft is trying everything it can to become a serious player. It tried to acquire Yahoo, its latest version of Internet Explorer attempts to steer Web surfers away from Google, and then there is straight-out payola to search advertisers. I am talking, of course, of Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback promotion, which lets advertisers offer rebates to consumers who make a purchase after doing a Microsoft search.

After Live Cashback launched in May, Microsoft saw an initial one-month boost in its share of the U.S. search market (from 8.5 percent in May to 9.2 percent in June). But in July, its share slipped again down to 8.9 percent, according to comScore. Although we only have two months of full data (June and July) since launch to evaluate, it doesn’t look like Cashback is having any effect.

YourScreen is a new service that is announcing its upcoming beta today, and it’s set out to enable you to turn a television into a start page of sorts. Designed for use within schools, companies, and at events, YourScreen is a custom option for displaying your content on televisions. So what type of content can you post on these televisions?

Built on Adobe AIR, YourScreen comes with some ready-made content, like weather and a stock ticker, with more plug-ins on the way. You can use these plug-ins in conjunction with your own content or simply stream the content you’d like to display. This could be a live video of a speaker or an interview, an image slide show of companies presenting at a particular event, or other pertinent information regarding your company that you’d like to convey to your employees. So far, YourScreen doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of differentiating features that you couldn’t already take advantage of with a closed-circuit television system.

But as YourScreen grows, its aim is to provide a Web-based platform for easily managing content that is displayed across this television system. So you will be able to use the YourScreen Web interface to determine what content is shown in which screen. There are also tools for helping you create content, so you won’t have to rely entirely on third-party services to create a slide show. For instance, YourScreen can turn your collection of still shots and videos into a stream that can be broadcast across multiple television screens.

In targeting schools, businesses and events, I think YourScreen would also do well to partner with, or add integrated support for a wide array of content imports and compatibility. Services like Mogulus and Kyte offer platforms for creating content that is likely to be ideal for broadcast on custom systems like YourScreen, and also offer a good amount of tools for making multimedia content on the fly. Catering to users that may start with next to nothing when streaming with YourScreen as well as those that have already begun creating content with other Web apps would be a broader strategy for appealing to multiple types of users when promoting the YourScreen service. If you’re interested in the upcoming beta, see here for more details.

Source:Mashable!

Looking forward to spicing up your Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 installation with social goodness? Me.dium, a self-described social software company, will be standing aside the likes of Facebook, Yahoo, and eBay for Microsoft’s newest browser launch today. Me.dium’s role is essentially to, among other things, deliver a “crowd-powered” discover-share mechanism first touted at Microsoft’s MIX08 conference earlier this year.

Indeed, Me.dium is no freshman to IE8 or the broader Web browser market. Mashable’s Kristen Nicole made mention of the company’s participation in the IE8 Beta 1 push, as well as the debut of a Firefox 3 download. At that time, a number of the features in Me.dium’s plugin were already being promoted. The What’s Hot Webslice, for instance, is a recommendation component that offers users a quick glimpse of things deemed interesting by the collective mob. And the so-called Discovery Accelerator, which finds content deemed interesting via keywords gleaned from virtually any webpage, takes the recommendation concept further still.

The more personally social aspects of Search software are the toolbar’s “follow” feature and integration with Facebook. Also, a portion dubbed visual search, made possible by IE8, builds on a move made by Me.dium early last month, done in light of Yahoo’s launch of its BOSS platform (short for Build Your Own Search Engine) that, along with the standard display of news, reviews, pictures and videos, shows a certain hierarchy in various links’ popularity, albeit one that is eminently susceptible to change in behavior of the search crowd.

Me.dium CEO Kimball Musk makes a fairly convincing argument to Me.dium’s utility in the browser environment, and IE8 Betas 1 and 2 by natural association. Altogether, its social search feature set allows for users to keep better apprised of the often fast-shifting Web environment, particularly with concern for breaking news and viral oddities. And bridging the crowd’s tendencies with friend-enhanced extensions really just helps better fill the proverbial picture. Granted, there is a leap or two (or more) that the user must take to fully involve him/herself in these processes, but as is the life of most any people-powered invention of good repute.

The way in which such inventions have lasting impact is really a matter of how the give-take arrangement between a service and those its serves is balanced. Me.dium appears a generously worthwhile effort in that respect.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Me.dium Holding 5-Day Online Music FestivalMe.dium Adds Support For Songbird Media Player, Firefox 3Me.dium to Host Live Chat During Edwards MTV/MySpace AppearanceMe.dium’s Role Reversal: NeighborhoodsMe.dium Offers a Social Browsing Widget, and MoreMe.dium to Host Online Mosh PitMe.dium Chosen to Showcase IE8 Social Discovery

comScore is out with their June Ad Metrix analysis of the top online display advertising publishers and advertisers in the U.S. On the publisher side, Fox Interactive Media leads the pack with 52.3 billion ad views. MySpace accounted for 51 billion of the 52.3 billion hence my story title. Facebook came in sixth with 3 billion ads and Glam made the report in tenth with just over 2 billion ads.

On the advertiser side, Microsoft leads the pack with 5.5 billion ads purchased. In second place is the University of Phoenix with 4.7 billion ads - guess they have some open seats. Vonage and Netflix came in eighth and ninth respectively with just over 3 billion ads purchased. Experian Interactive is the company who pushes the dancing women/bear/monkey ads for Lower My Bills and the FreeCreditReport ads.

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