This time, it was Microsoft that was snubbed at the last minute
In 1996, America Online agreed to offer Netscape's Internet browser to its five million customers. A day later, the nonbinding agreement was shunted aside when AOL announced that it had instead chosen Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser in a $100 million deal.

America Online sealed a deal lately with Google Inc. to deepen their relationship, while leaving Microsoft Corp. as the spurned suitor.

With federal funds for basic computer science research at universities in decline, three of the industry's leading companies are joining to help fill the void.

Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are setting aside their bitter animosity to back a new Internet research laboratory aimed at helping entrepreneurs introduce more groundbreaking ideas to a mass audience.

The facility, housed at the University of California, Berkeley, will develop open source Web services. All three companies will contribute equal measures financially.

Financial Services Group GUS Buys US Online Shopping Comparison Site PriceGrabber.com for $485M

Retail conglomerate GUS has snapped up PriceGrabber.com, an online price comparison service for American shoppers, for $485 million (£273 million), as it moves to capitalize on the success of its financial services arm Experian.

MTV Networks Inc. has partnered with Microsoft Corp. to develop an online music service to be launched early next year to rival the dominance of Apple's iTunes.

The service dubbed as URGE, it will be integrated into the next version of the software maker's Windows Media Player and offer more than 2 million tracks for sale individually or as part of a subscription package, MTV said. It will also include downloads of MTV shows, original programming, and online radio programs.

Skype have announced a partnership with Thomson Directories to boost its toolbar with new local search features. Skype’s web toolbar will now let users search for any business using the optimized Thomson Local search engine.

Thomson Directories are widely acknowledged as the market leader in local search, so it made perfect sense for Skype to work with them, said Skype’s VP of Business Development, James Bilefield.

Amazon.com in a move with potentially far-reaching implications for the search market has rolled out the Alexa Web Search Platform, opening up its huge web crawler to any programmer who wants paid access to its rich trove of internet data.

Nearly all the raw materials required to run a fairly complex Internet search service is now available, for lease, from online retailer Amazon Inc.

Amazon, which opens up 5 billion documents and 300 terabytes of data to anyone, along with offering computer and storage time for processing tasks. The idea is to enable the creation of new services that utilize Alexa's vast Web archive and search technology.

Answers Corp. announced that it had acquired Brainboost Technology LLC in a cash and stock deal worth up to $10 million as the Web search provider seeks to move beyond answering just "who?" or "what?" questions into answers that resemble natural human responses.

The New York-based company, which was formerly known as GuruNet, said it had agreed to pay $4 million in cash and 439,000 restricted shares in a deal worth between $9 million and $10 million at current stock levels.

Phishers slip through web loopholes.
The growing sophistication of phishers has left the majority of Americans unable to tell the difference between legitimate and scam e-mail, a survey released indicated.

Despite continued efforts of researchers, security providers and online businesses to discourage phishing schemes and shut down related Web sites, some criminals are still able to flout the system and find ways to keep their illicit operations up and running.

Skype, the international Web calling phenomenon acquired by eBay, said that it is adding high-resolution picture phone features to its free telephone replacement service.

Version 2.0 of the Skype software at http://www.skype.com aims to make it easier for customers to sign up and use its phone-over-Internet services, which are free on computers and offer low per-minute charges when calling conventional phones.

"Video calling has come of age," Skype vice president of marketing Saul Klein said of the new feature.

Chairman on a weeklong tour of firm's operations all over Asia
Intel Corp. will invest more than $1 billion in India, signaling the importance of this emerging technology power as a source of revenue and engineering talent, Chairman Craig Barrett said during his weeklong tour of the country.

This investment demonstrates Intel's long-term commitment and builds on the foundation we have created during our 10 years operating in India, said Barrett. We will grow our local operations, boost venture capital investments and work closely with the government, industry and educators to increase the impact of the country's information and communications technology (ICT) industry.

Blinkx and the Times Online, the Web site of British newspapers The Times and The Sunday Times, have launched a co-branded toolbar called Times Online Smart Search.

Blinkx and The Times both feel that the new desktop search and news offering will revolutionize the way Times readers get their daily news. The partnership should work well for both companies. Blinkx will benefit from the strong brand and loyal reader base that have followed The Times and having a popular distribution channel in The Times Online. The Times will benefit via expanding their frequency to existing readers who download the search tool and fortifying that relationship by serving contextually targeted news stories to those readers.

Google’s search for revenue beyond its popular pay-per-click advertising system has everyone from publishers to phone companies unnerved by the seemingly endless scope of the web leader's ambitions.

Seeking to diversify its revenue base, Google has begun offering advertisers a set of free marketing analysis tools to help customers boost how much they spend on text ads carried by Google.com or affiliated sites. Google is selling ads in print publications and expected to move into branded, graphical ads.

Chinese Internet firm Alibaba.com has vowed to defeat US giant Google in the battle to become the dominant search engine for the potentially lucrative Chinese market.

Alibaba’s chief executive Jack Ma wants to be Number One in China. E-Bay has already bitten the dust as the dominant e-commerce site in China, now his horizons are Asia and Europe.

Alibaba.com chief executive Jack Ma said his company was the undisputed king of the web in China after seeing off eBay and taking over Yahoo!'s Chinese operations in an August deal that secured a billion dollars of investment.

Royal Philips Electronics and Toppoly Optoelectronics Corporation of Taiwan have announced they have signed a binding letter of intent to join forces in mobile displays by merging Philips' Mobile Display Systems (MDS) business unit with Toppoly to create a leader in mobile display technology.

Toppoly will swap shares for Philips' mobile display unit, which will enable it to more than double its output of small and medium-sized displays

The merger will give a boost to Toppoly in vying for the top place in the world's small and medium-sized display panels in the long run, after the two companies' customers, technologies and products are integrated, Toppoly chairman Ray Chen said at a joint press conference in Taipei.

Banking on the success of push-to-talk mobile phone services, Sprint Nextel recently announced a walkie-talkie service for sharing photographs.

The company touted its Nextel Direct Send Picture service as giving PTT users the ability to display pictures taken with the camera phone on the screens of the recipient's and sender's screens simultaneously. The voice conversation can continue while the picture is displayed, Sprint said in a statement.

A test version of a new Firefox browser is now available. New features include improved pop-up advertisement blocking and faster back and forward Web navigation features, and added support for Mac OS X.

Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1, which came out earlier this week, is a preview of the upcoming version of the browser. The final release is expected later this year, following several delays.

The new release comes at a time when the Firefox browser is gaining more share of the browser market, and thereby proving its mettle against Microsoft Corp. and other deep-pocketed competitors and their proprietary Internet browsers.

Google and Yahoo! are taking the battle for search engine supremacy to mobile phones with two separate US initiatives aimed at transferring their existing web services to mobile users.

Driving the mobile charge is the swift rate at which the devices are penetrating many regions of the world combined with the increasing technological sophistication of networks and handsets.

According to a new proposal being considered by a suburb of New York City, any business or home office with an open wireless connection but no separate server to fend off Internet attacks would be violating the law.

Politicians in Westchester County are urging adoption of the law--which appears to be the first such legislation in the U.S.--because without it, "somebody parked in the street or sitting in a neighboring building could hack into the network and steal your most confidential data," County Executive Andy Spano said in a statement.

Enterprise search company Autonomy announced it will acquire Verity for approximately US$500 million. The deal brings together the two biggest enterprise search technology companies in a market seething with activity due to the success of consumer search engines.

David Mitchell, practice leader for analysts Software@Ovum, called the deal a "necessary move" as it gives the two mid-size companies "the scale to invest in R&D and innovation."

Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch called the deal a "transformational acquisition" and said it will create better products for their combined 16,000 customers. Autonomy's customers include Astra Zeneca, BBC, British Aerospace, Nokia, Shell and Vodafone.

Amazon.com has announced a book-scanning project --- and it's figured out a way to please authors and publishers, spread around the money for everyone, and do the right thing for readers. Google should sit up and take notice.

The Amazon plan includes: scanning copyrighted books and let readers search through them. It will offer paid online access to parts or the entire book, and the payment will depend on the book, and on how much of the book someone wants available.