Matthew Hicks

Yahoo completed a name change Monday for its Overture Services search-based advertising division. As promised last month, Yahoo Inc. brought its advertising division under its corporate branding umbrella. The Overture name has changed to Yahoo Search Marketing for the U.S. market, Yahoo announced. Yahoo extended the branding change across a range of its search marketing […]

Reuters resumed its instant-messaging service on Friday after having suspended it for a day to stop the spread of a variant of the Kelvir worm. As of 7 a.m. London time, Reuters PLC made its Reuters Messaging service available again to customers of the enterprise IM service. Reuters PLC had suspended the messaging service early […]

Reuters shut down its enterprise instant-messaging service Thursday after a variant of the Kelvir worm began circulating through the network. The London-based company suspended the Reuters Messaging service at about 8:30 a.m. London time and was expecting to restore access by the start of business on Friday, a Reuters spokeswoman confirmed. The suspension resulted from […]

AOL Instant Messenger moved instant messaging interoperability a step forward Thursday by announcing that it will work in conjunction with four mid-tier business IM systems. America Online Inc. launched a partner program with Antepo Inc., Jabber Inc., Omnipod Inc. and Parlano Inc., all of which sell enterprise software or services for presence and IM. Through […]

Whether they come from home-movie buffs or Hollywood producers, Google wants to collect digital video files in order to push its video-search service beyond broadcast television. Diverging from the video-search approaches of its competitors, Google Inc. on Wednesday began accepting video uploads directly from content owners. While none of the submissions will be immediately available […]

In an attempt to bolster local search, Yahoo will start letting small businesses build Web sites for free. Yahoo Inc. plans to announce the free Web hosting feature on Wednesday and to provide it as a companion to a business listing submission program it launched on Yahoo Local about four months ago. The free sites […]

Google is making its local-search service available from mobile devices, complete with maps and driving directions. The company is expanding its mobile search options on Tuesday by providing access to Google Local from mobile devices equipped with XHTML (Extensible HTML)-enabled browsers. Along with the mobile-browser option, Google Inc. is adding support for retrieving driving directions […]

Since first becoming a Web standard nearly four years ago, SVG has lagged in adoption as developers waited for broader support for next-generation Web graphics. But upcoming plans from two Web browser makers to natively support the XML-based graphics language could give Scalable Vector Graphics the boost it needs to begin remaking the look and […]

Travel and employment Web sites are a step closer to getting their own Internet domains. ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has designated two new domains, .jobs and .travel. Both are sponsored domain names, meaning that they are designated for specific purposes rather than general use, and have the backing of industry […]

The problem of click fraud in search-based advertising is undergoing intense scrutiny as it moves out of the shadows of the online industry and into the public setting of courthouses nationwide. Earlier this week, news broke of what could become the first class-action lawsuit against the major providers of pay-per-click ads, including Google Inc. and […]