Social media has had a large part to play in driving donations towards relief efforts to help those affected by the tsunami in Japan. Some have been received well, like the initiative by LivingSocial that matched users’ $5 donations to give more than $2m to relief efforts. Others have sparked accusations of profiteering from human tragedy, such as the ill-judged attempt by Bing to link donations to retweets using the #SupportJapan hashtag. Read More »

Straight from the Kenneth Cole School of Capitalising On Human Suffering To Promote Your Brand comes Bing‘s #SupportJapan campaign, which this weekend offered to donate $1 to Japanese earthquake victims each time their original post was retweeted.

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The web is awash this morning with talk that Twitter could be sold. It is said to be in talks with both Facebook and Google. Not just those two, but others as well. Who else? Maybe Microsoft.

The talks have given loss making Twitter an estimated valuation of $8bn to $10bn. That is a huge price tag for a loss making business, but the prize could be huge too. The challenge is huge but the pitfalls are there too. Read More »

You can imagine a few red faces at Mountain View right now. It is one of those stories that refuses to go away – Google accuses Microsoft of copying search results yet they are the ones who end up looking silly.

Originally broken by Search Engine Land the story detailed how people within Google had harboured suspicions for a year that their search results were being copied by Bing after they found both engines were returning similar results for unusual misspellings. Unlike Google, Bing seemingly makes no attempt to correct the misspellings yet still somehow returns the same list of sites, even though these contain no references to the misspelled words. You can understand why Google’s suspicions were raised.

Image: Jeffrey Beall

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Its true people. Not only was Microsoft able to turn Stephen Fry to its promotional cause, but it is actually selling Windows Phone 7 to people. No really. We know this as Microsoft took these photos. As evidence, I’m guessing, in case of any cynical doubting Thomas the media asked for proof. Read More »

It is being reported that private equity firms have approached News Corporation about possibly buying Yahoo. This emerged as shareholders continue to push for a sale of the company to private equity firms with possible involvement from AOL.

The speculation about an imminent sale of Yahoo pushed its shares up by as much as 9.9% last hight before they settled up 4.5 to $15.93. This values the company at $21.5bn — although that value is highly notionally with analysts recently saying that Yahoo! was worth next to nothing.

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Aha, we knew they were up to something.

Facebook and Microsoft’s Bing have announced a partnership which will see them integrating Like data with Search.

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Microsoft is hosting a Bing event at its Mountain View campus today. The folks from Facebook have been invited along.

Sounds like they’re planning something. What are they about to announce?

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Stephen Fry, the go to celebrity for all your technology quotes, will it seems put out for anyone. The Apple fanboy put in an appearance for the launch of Microsoft Windows Phone 7 having previously slated Windows mobile back in the day.

No longer. He likes Windows Phone 7 and he was happy to get up on stage and say so. Although he was weighed down by his freebies. Read More »

Amid reports about the impending death of web browsing, Microsoft is today trumpeting that the beta version of Internet Explorer, IE9, is being adopted at a rate they’re pretty pleased with, having been downloaded six million times during the first fortnight since its launched.

Source: Net Applications, September 2010

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