cornwall's blog

The service will be similar to competing programs from Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft will announce a pilot program March 16, said the people, who asked not to be identified. These paid searches auction off placement next to Web search results to companies with related products.

Microsoft spokeswoman Karen Redetzki declined to comment. Microsoft is holding briefings with reporters tomorrow, she said. MSN is holding a conference for its advertisers this week and plans to make the announcement there, the people said.

Microsoft has almost 10 times as much in cash and short-term investments as Yahoo and more than 16 times as much as Google, and winning customers with price cuts may be considered a "pretty good use of cash," Pyykkonen said.

Still, the same content filters that are supposed to be protecting corporate communications and increasing productivity may be blocking a good chunk of legitimate communications.

Do you get to say what you want to say? Do you get to read what you want to read?

In crafting newsletters, we carefully abide by spam filters' daunting demands and avoid terms we know filters will flag and cause messages to be rejected. Increasingly, these restrictions can seem ludicrous. Many of the terms we no longer use in our email are not even vaguely offensive.

The first thing was to keep enough cash on hand to give us flexibility to manage things like a severe short-term economic dislocation or investment opportunities. We haven't publicly said how much cash that will be, but it's probably fair to assume that, after the upcoming distribution, we will still have around $25 billion to $40 billion on hand.

We also want to have enough for acquisitions. We have made a series of acquisitions, some of them for cash. And while most of them have been fairly small, we also want to be able to make some game-changing investments if we so choose. Any large acquisition would likely be a combination of cash and equity.

the latest cyberswindle, pharming, threatens to reel in entire schools of victims.

"Phishing is to pharming what a guy with a rod and a reel is to a Russian trawler. Phishers have to approach their targets one by one. Pharmers can scoop up many victims in a single pass," said Chris Risley, president and chief

this past weekend would-be pharmers attempted to exploit a known vulnerability in Symantec's firewall, redirecting some users from eBay, Google and weather.com to three sites that attempted to install spyware on visitors' computers.

"Your reputation, and any damage to your reputation, is most closely felt where you reside." she [the plaintiff's lawyer]said. Paul Schabas, who is representing The Post, said that the case should be heard either in Washington or in New York, the home of the United Nations. Last year, however, a judge in Ontario Superior Court in Toronto sided with Mr. Bangoura. Last week, both sides were in appeals court arguing about that decision.

Joining The Post is an informal consortium of 51 news organizations, including The New York Times Company, Google, CNN, Canada's leading newspaper publishers and the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Kurt Wimmer, a Washington lawyer representing the coalition, said that allowing libel actions outside of a publication's home country could lead to an impossible situation.

We put a blog up and it said, "Pitch Tim Draper on your billion-dollar idea."

We had some great fun with it. We picked 11 ideas, and we invited them all to pitch me from video teleconferencing. It worked unbelievably well. We actually ended up funding one called InterCell.

Meanwhile, one of Google's best shots at building a new revenue stream receives scant attention. Last May, the company began experimenting with display ads -- which run atop or along the side of a Web page. It's enticing for big advertisers who are often as concerned with building their brand as they are with driving traffic.

Still, 10 months after uncorking this service, Google is being strangely closemouthed. It won't divulge specifics about the number of participating publishers or advertisers. And the topic came up just once during Google's four-hour meeting with analysts on February 9.

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book of unknown contents, written some 500 years ago by an anonymous author in an unidentified alphabet and unintelligible language.

Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers — including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame — who all failed to decipher a single word. This string of egregious failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into the Holy Grail of historical cryptology; but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is nothing but an elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of random symbols.

The book is named after the Russian-American book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. It is presently item MS 408 in the Beinecke Rare Book Library of Yale University.

the creative minds behind the formation of the largest travel sites (Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia) pooled their collective wisdom to devise a new model.... The site would not actually sell anything - rather it would help consumers find products and services from other websites.

The way we get paid is a lot like the way Google gets paid, so when we hand someone off to another Web site that has its products on our site, we get paid a small referral fee.

Ultimately, what we were trying to do at Orbitz was to sell you something. At Kayak we're not trying to sell you something. We don't actually provide the booking services, so we're one step further removed. We don't have a point of view on what you buy—American versus United—or, frankly, where you buy it, AA.com or even Orbitz.

The best is yet to come as Kayak.com is committed to helping consumers make informed travel decisions.

.. while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tail” – queries asked a little over once a day.

You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day.

Overture figured it out, Google perfected it and we all know what happened from there. .... It was a special kind of marketplace where small advertisers could reach small markets efficiently.

Google, eBay, Amazon, Rhapsody, Netflix, iTunes. What do they all have in common? They all work the long tail and they’re all radically changing the dynamics of their more traditional businesses.

JotSpot is a company that is building a platform to make it easy and affordable to build long-tail software applications.

The Home Technology Integration skills course, previously only available in the US, is designed to train people to set up and fix digital home networks.

"The demand for the networked home is growing by leaps and bounds, and with it, the need for certified professionals - digital plumbers - to service this market,"

It is hoped that the qualification will open up a new stream of jobs for engineers who currently work in technical support.

Netscape is out with a test release of version 8.0, and the new browser is nothing like its recent predecessors, which were mostly about fixing bugs and playing catch-up.

I just wish Netscape didn't constantly try to dispatch me to content from its developer, America Online Inc., or its partners.

some sites won't work with Firefox because they need the IE features. The new Netscape, which is only available for Windows PCs, addresses the quandary through a regularly updated list of "good" and "bad" sites.

....Netscape is safer than Firefox or IE alone. I ran on all three browsers a site that tries to steal AOL billing information, and only Netscape successfully blocked the program from running.

My one major fault with Netscape is, however, a show stopper.

Most of its tools are geared toward generating traffic for AOL properties. The maps tool gets you MapQuest, the movies tool reaches Moviefone. Weather gets you AOL partner WeatherBug.

So until I get more choice, I plan on sticking with Firefox, even if it means occasionally having to run IE for those sites that need it.

Farechase searches other Web sites for fares and rates. The upgrades are designed to let people refine their search results according to such criteria as preferred airlines, flight times, nearby airports and number of stops. People will also be able to sort results by price and departure times.

Yahoo began building up its travel service after taking over FareChase last year, and it began testing the site in September. Yahoo has been angling to build more-robust consumer travel services without tapping third parties

Sullivan says keyword tricks hurt the editorial integrity of sites. Another problem, he says, is the proliferation of computer-generated directories with links to hotels, restaurants and entertainment and no real editorial content, fueled by the availability of "Ads by Google" checks.

Tales of AdSense riches range from a few hundred dollars a month to $50,000 or more a year, though high-dollar paydays are rare. They require a Web site with tons of traffic and the ability to put in 18-hour days working the system.

Pirillo, who has a following from his former role as a host on the now-defunct TechTV cable channel, says he's clearing more than $10,000 a month.

When he published the now-defunct Silicon Alley Reporter magazine, Jason Calacanis says, he used to suffer from insomnia, worrying about his monthly $200,000 to $400,000 printing bill.

He now runs a company called Weblogs, which publishes 75 Web sites on such topics as cars, gadgets, digital music and video games. He sleeps much better, he says, because "with AdSense, you know you're always making money. Your life gets a lot easier."

Google and Yahoo say they are working on the problem, but Battelle doesn't think that's enough... says Google and Yahoo should show the same kind of joint leadership. "Because if they don't, it will end up biting them in the butt."[/qu

The Nasdaq's peak did indeed mark the end of an era, where online entrepreneurs behaved like snooty rock stars in their meetings with venture capitalists.

About 60% of investors' value was wiped out when the iconic stock exchange's Nasdaq's heyday ended. Similar falls were seen at equivalent exchanges in Europe.

Google Toolbar Inserts Links in Others' Sites, And That's a Bad Idea

Though these sites are seemingly coming into an already crowded search market, dominated by the likes of Google.com and Yahoo.com, there's still room, I think -- especially for sites that, like Nextaris.com, are trying to take search to the next level.

Google, beware!