Starting today, June 4, 2008. you can now check your email accounts at Gmail, AOL, Hotmail and Hotmail. You can also shop on Amazon in case you have an in-flight compulsion.
Full fledged internet access is not yet available..
Found on Techcrunch
Walmart has added a classified listings service to their site. Silicon Valley startup Oodle, which was founded in 2004, is powering the service.
The listings are free, which means Walmart is likely doing the deal to generate page views and advertising impressions. They also now compete with both Craigslist and eBay-owned Kijiji.
The fallout to the recently enacted New York State “Amazon Tax” has begun. Overstock.com, one of the largest internet retailers, has notified more than 3,400 New York based affiliated that their relationship will be terminated June 1st when the law goes into effect.
“We hope this termination period will only be temporary”, said Jonathan Johnson, SVP of corporate affairs at Overstock.com. “We think that the New York law is unconstitutional and we think that lawmakers have made a mistake that s hurting small businesses in New York.”
The Law requires out of state online retailers to begin collecting sales taxes on purchases shipped to New York addresses, meaning that Amazon.com and Overstock, each of which have no employees or operations in New York, will be required to collect state taxes because it has affiliates based in the state.
Amazon is challenging the law in New York state court. Overstock may join Amazon or begin its own court battle, Johnson said. If the law is dismissed, Overstock will re-establish relationships with all of its New York based affiliates.
“When it came donw to choosing between our customers and our affiliates, it was an easy choice,” said Johnson.
Myspace, the largest online social network started to implement Google Gears, which enables offline access to services that normally only are available online. I recently installed Gears in my browser and I got a popup notification while I was checking my myspace messages.
Instead of having to scroll through pages and pages of messages, I can now sort by date, from, status (read/unread) or subject. And, more importantly, I can also search the full text of messages. The results are shown instantly without actually refreshing the page.
Any user with at least 5,000 mail messages in their inbox will be prompted with the option of installing Gears and using the new system. Also, any MySpace user that has already installed Gears will have the option of using the new system.
Don’t get your hopes too high, they haven’t activated any of the offline access as yet so for now all we have is the sorting.
Google Gears is beta software offered by Google to enable offline access to services that normally only are available online. It installs a database engine, on the users computer. Google Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Thus Google Gears enables web applications to work even though access to the network service is not present.
A Los Angeles-based law firm with a history of targeting online media companies for click fraud filed suit Tuesday against Citysearch, the directory site and local online search service, providing information on businesses in the categories of dining, entertainment, retail, travel, and professional services in cities throughout the United States. Visitors to Citysearch’s local city guides will find contact information, maps, driving directions, editorial, and user reviews for the businesses listed.
The firm, Kabatech Brown Kellner states, “Citysearch.com is defrauding its advertising customers of millions of dollars by not only turning a blind eye to click fraud, but in fact encouraging it as well,” The plaintiff is Tom Lambotte but the class action suit seeks to encompasses anyone in the U.S. who paid for pay-per-click advertising space on Citysearch.
According to the complaint, filed in a California court, Lambotte first purchased Citysearch ads in late 2007, didn’t see a gain in traffic to his site, and attempted to cancel his ad account. The cancellation process dragged out, he said, and in the meantime his ad clicks started to escalate suspiciously. He speculated that click fraud–in which clicks to ads are meant only to drive up the rate the advertiser pays and not to purchase the product–was at play.
Claims in click fraud lawsuits are hard to prove, but the law firm representing Lambotte has extensive experience in the field. The firm has won against both Yahoo and Google, and attorney Brian Kabateck recently went after Google’s AdWords advertising program, claiming that it deceived customers.
The claim is as follows:
“Lambotte’s Citysearch ad received a total of 7 clicks (plus two more that he generated) between December 11 and 25, 2007. On December 26 he received a response from Citysearch to his December 22 request to cancel his ad. Suddenly, his ad began receiving 12 to 16 clicks a day, for a total of 69 clicks between December 26 and December 31, when his ad was finally canceled. He received in these five days 10 times as many clicks as he had received in the previous two weeks. Despite this, Citysearch refused his repeated requests to reverse these charges.”
Excerpts taken from Cnet
