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Last week, Google announced that it had signed a deal with several telecoms to fund an undersea high-bandwidth fiber optic cable between the United States and Japan. The global consortium calls itself "Unity," and includes: Bharti Airtel, Global ... Transit, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel in addition to Google. (Source: google.com) The continent-connecting cable will span 10,000 km, will cost $300 million USD, and is expected to increase web traffic between the United States and Asia by 20 percent. NEC corporation and Tyco Telecommunications were chosen to build and install the cable, which ... (view more)

In October of last year, Microsoft launched HealthVault, a free online, encrypted storage area where individuals could manage their own medical record. Now, Google has tabled their own health storage offering called (surprisingly) Google Health. The ... battle for your medical record has begun. Both Google Health and Microsoft's HealthVault provide a secure place to store and maintain health data. The data that can be stored varies but will generally include records of vital statistics (e.g. heart rate, blood pressure, height, weight, etc.), patient family history, and disease or problem-related ... (view more)

Google has added one more method of advertising, as it continues to seek new sources of ad revenue. The question is whether the new technique -- AdSense for Video -- will fare any better than the previous concepts. The newly-minted AdSense for Video ... will provider advertisers a means to overlay video or text ads on a video viewer. The ads will be dynamic, rotating every 20 seconds and will be matched with the content of the video or web page being viewed. (Source: nytimes.com ) The assumption is that the rapidly growing interest in online video and Google's ownership of YouTube justifies the ... (view more)

Google Experimental Search Google is always experimenting with new features aimed at improving the search experience. Take one for a spin. http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html Belvedere Keep your desktop or any other folder on your hard ... drive organized and under control with Belvedere, an automated Windows file management tool. Use Belvedere's friendly interface to create advanced rules to move, copy, delete, rename, or open files based on their name, extension, size, creation date, and more. Sets up rules for taking actions on files based on the name of a file, its extension, size, ... (view more)

Microsoft is investing heavily in Mobile phone technology. On Monday, the software giant announced that it had acquired Danger Inc., the company behind popular mobile technology like T-Mobile's Sidekick. "The addition of Danger serves as a perfect ... complement to our existing software and services, and also strengthens our dedication to improving mobile experiences centered around individuals and what they like," said Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, Robbie Bach. (Source: microsoft.com ) In a statement, Microsoft said it sees in Danger a company that has "connected with a ... (view more)

Since the launch of the highly successful AdSense campaign, Google has been synonymous with online advertising. Thanks to a new initiative that will merge online and print ads, Google is making the leap from the screen to the printed page and ... hosting ads in a newspaper near you. Google's new Print Ad program will allow organizations with an existing AdSense account to convert their campaigns to print format with just a few mouse clicks. Advertisers will be able to search for ad space within over six hundred international newspapers. Linking online ads with print media could cause a ... (view more)

Yahoo is expected to reject Microsoft's $44.6 billion takeover bid today, believing the offer seriously undervalues the company. But analysts believe Microsoft will not give up easily, and may increase the $31-per-share offer that it proposed ... earlier. Other strategies include a direct offer to shareholders, or an attempt to overthrow Yahoo's board of directors. In the increasing war for online advertising, Microsoft is looking to purchase Yahoo to gain a competitive advantage against dominant ad provider, Google. (Source: nytimes.com ) For its part Yahoo seems willing to stave off Microsoft's ... (view more)

Last week, Time Warner's new CEO Jeff Bewkes confirmed the corporation would separate AOL's Internet dial-up division from the company's advertising and content business. This leads analysts to believe that Time Warner may sell one or both of its ... AOL divisions.(Source: cnn.com ) "We're working on separating AOL's access and audience businesses so we can run them independently. This should significantly increase AOL's strategic options," Bewkes said during a conference call with investors. AOL's subscription business has been faltering since the Web 2.0 explosion, and rival firms ... (view more)

Microsoft is hoping that its acquisition of Yahoo will help it gain ground on the advertising and search front, and adding Yahoo's 500 million users to its base. But assuming that Jerry Yang and Co. yield to the Redmond giant, will it be enough? The ... New York Times recently ran a picture depicting the Microsoft and Google as two large sharks consuming everything in their path: aQuantive, DoubleClick, and MultiMap. Then there are the smaller exclusivity agreements with prominent tech companies such as The Wall Street Journal and Facebook for Microsoft, and Google's deals with MySpace, Fox, and ... (view more)

It's now guaranteed that a major part of America's wireless airwaves will be accessible to any device or computer program. That could mean more choice for cell phone owners who want to access the Internet on their phones. The guarantee comes because ... bidding on the relevant part of the airwaves (the C block of the 700 megahertz spectrum to be precise) has passed the $4.64 billion mark. The government has agreed to proposals, championed by Google, ruling that any bidder paying more than this amount would have to follow open-access rules. The airwaves are being freed up by television ... (view more)