NEWS IN BRIEF
Daily Digest 29 July
29-07-2009
by Emmet Ryan
Yahoo and Microsoft get together | Apple fine tunes app search
Bing goes the dynamite. After months of speculation, Microsoft and Yahoo have come to 10-year agreement for an internet search partnership. Yahoo will make Microsoft's Bing search engine the search provider on its family of websites, licensing its own search technology to Microsoft to integrate if it chooses. Yahoo will handle sales of search ads for both companies, using Microsoft's technology. The deal will work as a revenue sharing agreement, with Microsoft paying Yahoo 88 percent of the search revenue generated from its sites during the first five years of the agreement. The deal, which follows Microsoft’s failed bid to buy Yahoo outright last year, gives the Redmond-based giant what it truly wanted in the form of access to Yahoo’s search traffic. While unlikely to scare Google, the agreement will certainly raise the attention of the undisputed search king. Microsoft and Yahoo together accounted for 28.4 percent of all US search traffic last month, compared to Google's 65 percent share.
In related news, analysis by Irish clothing website Puddleducks.ie has found that Google is still the preferred search engine for Irish shoppers. Analysis of traffic across five sites from search engines for the last month showed that Bing has only gained a 3 percent share of the Irish search engine market, while Google still has around a 92 percent share of the search engine traffic in the survey. "Google is still the overwhelming favourite for search among Irish online shoppers. The results also mean that getting good search results in Google is still the most important aspect of search engine optimisation for Irish internet businesses," said Aedan Ryan, owner of PuddleDucks.ie
In other Microsoft news, the firm is planning to open its first two retail stores in Arizona and California later this year. The software giant has signed leases at shopping centres in Mission Viejo, California and Scottsdale, Arizona. The California location is already home to an Apple store. The stores will sell laptops, software, Zune music devices, and Xbox 360 games and consoles. The precise opening date for both stores is still unclear but Microsoft has indicated it plans to open both in the autumn.
Apple meanwhile is working with developers to help improve discovery of App Store applications. Developers are now being asked to enter up to 255 characters worth of keywords, which will be used for search in the App Store on the iPhone and iPod touch. The move has been made following Apple's recent acknowledgement that improvements needed to be made so users could find applications with greater ease. There are over 65,000 applications currently available in the App Store and Apple is looking to make it easier for users to sift through these.
Complete Telecom has delivered a 100Mbps internet network to Carton House in Maynooth, which recently housed the visiting Real Madrid football team. The infrastructure in place at the hotel has the ability to offer up to 1GB. The deal with Carton House, which accommodates more than 450,000 guests per year, is valued at EUR200,000 over four years. The new IP infrastructure is part of a multi-million investment by Carton House to position itself in the world’s top tier of business resorts
New audience figures released Wednesday by internet audience measurement firm ABC Electronic, shows that Daft.ie has seen a surge in visitor numbers. According to ABC Electronic, Daft.ie received a record number of visitors to its website in May 2009, helped in part by a move into the Northern Ireland market. The May audit shows the website delivered over 103 million page impressions to 1,275,630 unique browsers, a 24 percent increase on a previous audit conducted in September 2008.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 