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Google said Friday it will pay $140 million for a Russian contextual advertising company as it seeks to expand its services to advertisers and Web-site publishers outside the U.S. The 6-year-old company, Zao Begun but known as Begun, has a search and contextual advertising business, with about 40,000 advertisers and a network of 143,000 Russian-language Web sites.
Last month Begun launched a contextual video advertising service, Begun. Videocontext, the first such service in Russia, according to Rambler Media, a Russian company that runs a search engine, instant messaging service, an online newspaper and a price-comparison site, among other Internet properties. The service is wrapped into Rambler Vision, a video-sharing Web site. Advertisers can place ads that match users’ search queries. Videos are tagged with metadata, and Begun’s system takes into account the viewer’s location along with demographic information. Advertisements appear below the main content, and users have the option of closing that window completely.
View: Full Story at InfoWorld

Want a new gadget this summer? Google Checkout will be working in part with more than 50 online retailers to offer you a discount this summer. This promotion will give you $10 off a purchase of $60 or more. Some well known participating retailers include TigerDirect and Buy.com.
There’s nothing wrong with snagging a great deal with an additional $10 off! This is a good move for Google, considering competition with a major competitor, PayPal. Google hopes to raise awareness of Google Checkout, and expand it further into the online community. [news.com]

The bad news just doesn’t seem to end for Yahoo. As the Internet portal prepares to fend off a proxy fight by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, new research from comScore concludes that for the first time, Google has overtaken Yahoo as the most-visited Web site in the U.S. Google reached the pinnacle of the Top 50 U.S. Properties in April, with an audience of 141 million visitors, according to data from comScore’s monthly analysis. Yahoo and its affiliated sites ranked second, with 140.6 million visitors, followed by Microsoft sites with 121.2 million visitors.
View: Full Story at Infoworld

Yahoo Inc said on Tuesday that it supports a program by archrival Google Inc to develop applications for social networks and will help create a joint foundation to keep it alive.
Google launched its OpenSocial network in November to lure developers already creating popular Web applications on social networks like Facebook.
Yahoo, Google and News Corp-owned MySpace said on Tuesday they will create the OpenSocial Foundation to maintain a neutral, community-governed forum for developing applications. It will be set up as a non-profit entity, with assets to be assigned to the new organization by July 1. [Reuters]

Google continued to increase its share of the U.S. search market in February, widening the gap that Microsoft hopes to fill by buying Yahoo.
In February, Google’s share of core searches by U.S. Internet users rose to 59.2 percent, up from 58.5 percent in January, according to figures from market research company comScore.
During the same period, Yahoo’s share slipped to 21.6 percent, from 22.2 percent a month earlier, while Microsoft’s share slipped to 9.6 percent from 9.8 percent.
AOL is clinging to a 4.9 percent share, while Ask saw its share rise slightly to 4.6 percent from 4.5 percent in January. Worldwide, the number three search engine is China’s Baidu.com, behind Google and Yahoo but ahead of Microsoft’s MSN-Windows Live. [WashingtonPost]

Google Inc, the world’s leading search engine, said on Monday it was concerned about the free flow of information on the Internet if Microsoft Corp were to succeed in acquiring Yahoo Inc.
Last month, Microsoft proposed buying Yahoo in a deal originally worth $44.6 billion, but Yahoo’s board has rejected the offer, saying it was too low.
“We would be concerned by any kind of acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft,” Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told reporters.
“We would hope that anything they did would be consistent with the openness of the Internet, but I doubt it would be.”
Schmidt pointed to Microsoft’s past history and “the things that it has done that have been so difficult for everyone”, but he did not elaborate.
Last year, a European court upheld a landmark 2004 decision that Microsoft abused the near-monopoly power of its Windows operating system to damage competitors, along with a 497 million euro ($695 million) fine. [Reuters]

YouTube.com accounted for one-third of the 9.8 billion videos viewed online in the US during the month, according to new research. The total number of videos viewed in January was down slightly from the more than 10.1 billion viewed during a record-breaking December 2007, according to new data comScore.
The market watcher noted that Google Sites once again ranked as the top US video property in January with nearly 3.4 billion videos viewed (34.3 per cent share of videos), gaining 1.7 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com was found to have accounted for more than 96 per cent of all videos viewed at the property.
View: The full story @ vnunet

A serious Gmail account hacking backdoor, has been found in the popular Gmail archiving software G-Archiver. This application, in all its innocence, allows you to download and backup all emails from your GMail account. But apparently the developer included the code to send an email to his email ID with all usernames and passwords!
G-Archiver has posted this explanation of what happened: “It is urgent that you remove the current version of G-Archiver from your computer, and change your Gmail account password right away. What happened was that a member of our development team had inserted coding used for testing G-Archiver in the debug version and forgot to delete it in the final release version.”
Hopefully, G-Archiver will release a new version very soon.
View: Details at WinVistaClub.

It’s no surprise that Sony has had some sort of new PS3 SKU in the works, but the company has now finally gotten official with it, and thrown in another surprise to boot. On that former front, Sony’s announced the Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots PS3 Bundle, which includes said game, an 80GB PS3 and a DualShock 3 wireless controller (also available separately), all for the usual $500 price tag. Look for it to coincide with the launch of MGS4 in the second quarter of this year. As if that wasn’t enough, Sony’s also taken the wraps off its new God of War PSP Entertainment Pack, which includes a spiffy red Kratos-approved PSP, the God of War: Chains of Olympus game, Superbad on UMD, and a voucher to download Syphon Filter: Combat Ops for free. $200 and it’s yours this June. [Engadget]

AOL and Yahoo! are said to have held talks as the search engine considers potential deals to help it evade the clutches of Microsoft.
Advisers from Time Warner-owned AOL met with representatives of search engine Yahoo! to see if a deal is workable, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
The talks with internet firm AOL come after Yahoo!’s rejection last week of Microsoft’s offer to buy the company for 42 billion US dollars (£21.4bn).
Among the other suitors for Yahoo!, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is thought to have offered to buy a 20% stake in Yahoo! in a deal that would see Yahoo! swap shares for a clutch of online assets, including social networking site MySpace. Mr Murdoch has ruled out making a full bid.
Details of the discussions involving AOL and Yahoo! remain unclear, although a potential sticking point could be Google’s small stake in AOL. Anti-trust laws would make any deal involving Google and either AOL or NewsCorp difficult, the newspaper report said.
Microsoft’s approach came a year after the two companies held talks over a possible tie-up to challenge Google, although Yahoo! rejected the proposals at the time because it hoped to reap benefits from an overhaul of the business.
But Microsoft warned on unveiling its offer that the competitive situation had not improved and that it believed a merger was the “only alternative” to challenging Google’s dominance.
The software giant wants to offer a credible alternative to Google through the tie-up, offering greater choice to advertisers, increasing research and development spending and stripping out overhead costs.
It has also hinted at a hostile bid by reserving the right “to pursue all necessary steps” to win over the firm’s shareholders if the deal is opposed [MSN News]