AOL is expected to surpass its quarterly earnings forecast, thanks to gains made in display advertising sales, according to analysts at financial firm UBS.

The much-maligned media company is to report revenues of $532m (£340m) this quarter, rather than the predicted $525m (£335m). The boost comes from year-over-year growth of its domestic display sales, up 21% for the quarter. Read More »

While most of the world’s top marketing executives acknowledge a critical shift in the way they engage with their customers, many question their organisations’ ability to manage the change, a study by IBM has found.

The IBM Global CMO Study is the technology giant’s first study of CMOs, and the 15th in the ongoing series of C-suite studies developed by the IBM Institute for Business Value. The study conducted face-to-face interviews with over 1,700 CMOs between February and June 2011. Read More »

News that a large proportion of UK businesses are clamping down on the use of social media channels like Facebook and Twitter in response to perceived security threats is sadly typical of the knee-jerk reaction most companies have when it comes to their internet security.

While a recent survey points out that 53% of managers identified social network use as an issue of concern, there were similar concerns about the use of the internet itself when it first came on the scene, with companies concerned that staff would be spending all their time on it. Of course we now know the internet is a must-have communication tool – imagine how damaging a blanket ban on its use would have been to businesses. Read More »

Well known Google progammer and blogger Steve Yegge has posted a long rant about Google’s failures concerning its social network Google+, which he has described as a “pathetic afterthought”. Yegge posted the piece on Google+ and had intended it to be an “internal post, visible to only Google staff, but mistakenly posted it so that it was visible for everyone to see. Then he left it up.

Yegge who previously worked at Amazon before joining Google spends a lot of time comparing the two companies before devling into the real problem as he sees it with Google+.  In a long damning post he hints that it might already be already be too late for Google+, which he says is “a knee-jerk reaction”. Read More »

Things seem to be going from bad to worse for Blackberry after its humongous PR failure following its outage news reaches us that the outage is continuing to spread.

CNN reports that the “outage now impacting users on almost every planet”. This could be terrible for Blackberry as those Klingons can be very tricky customers. I bet the Emperor has a Blackberry he’ll be going spare on Coruscant. Read More »