Ask & AOL

San Francisco -- Ask.com, a unit of Internet business company InterActiveCorp., on Tuesday said that its Chief Executive Office, Jim Safka, has suddenly decided to step down from his position with the company due to personal reasons, after serving the company for 18 months, according to reports from Wall Street Journal.

The current President of Ask.com Scott Garell would take over Safka's duties, with Garell's title changing to president of Ask Networks.

Safka has joined the company last January, replacing Jim Lanzone right in the midst of parent company IAC's massive restructuring.

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San Francisco -- Exploring to widen the parameters of its online identities manager Socialthing social networking news feed service, AOL on Tuesday announced plans to integrate it in across corporate sibling Warner Bros. Television Group (WBTVG).

The service, acquired by AOL last summer, is aimed at assisting users to trace the Internet activity of friends. A feed of members' activity across Warner Bros. entertainment sites -- TheWB.com, KidsWB.com, DCHeroZone.com, MomLogic, Essence.com and TheCW.com -- will be displayed on their Socialthing profiles. (more…)

London -- Rosy days are back again! If you can remember Jeeves, the quintessentially cartoon butler of the late 1990s and early 2000s, who serves up answers to search queries, saying its British users missed him after the company dropped him three years ago, is being brought back as the face of the Ask.com Internet search engine in the UK, as the company tries to boost its user numbers and revenues.

Ask.com “retired” Jeeves in 2006, after the company was acquired by Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp, and started a process of global re-branding.

Ask is re-emerging with its original name, “Ask Jeeves,” in Britain, and is introducing a multi-million-pound advertising campaign on Monday featuring an updated, three-dimensional and less servile Jeeves than his previous incarnation.

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Los Angeles -- With the economic decline looming large all over the globe, consumers are either cropping down on their spending or actively looking to minimize expenses. And taking advantage this opportunity, AOL today will formally relaunch its completely revamped comparison shopping hub, AOL Shopping, to promote recession-friendly deals, coupons and sales to consumers across its site and a group of new advertisers including Barnes & Noble and Sears.

With retail sales steeply dropping during March, almost decreasing by 1.1% compared to February, it seems that retailers are in for the long haul when its comes to the virtual drought in consumer spending.

AOL Shopping's homepage demonstrates a “monthly specials” slideshow, featured dominated by an above-the-fold of the site from retailers across a handful of categories, including cookware, appliances and electronics.

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New York -- The IAC/InterActiveCorp search engine Ask.com is attempting to impress its advertisers with improvised protection of content and scoring its paid serch clicks, has made alliance with metrics firm Anchor Intelligence's ClearMark software for reaping the solution.

Keeping in course with its commitment to make searching the Web a more safe and secure experience for Internet users, Ask.com is making it more appealing and improving the quality of its advertising solutions through its partnership with Anchor Intelligence's ClearMark software, the leading provider of traffic quality solutions.

The major goal of Ask's alliance with Anchor Intelligence is to protect its advertisers and partners from paying for fraudulent clicks.

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San Francisco -- AOL's popular teen and young adult social-networking site Bebo, on Monday announced the expansion of its reach to include five new European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, offering premium video content via media partners, its first major expansion outside the English-speaking world, the company said Monday.

Owned by America Online, previously, Bebo has local presence (translated sites) for countries like Ireland, the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Poland, which claims to have captured more than 22 million users worldwide, and almost half of it from Britain alone, but now it plans to use IP-based geo-targetting to cater services in users' mother tongues.

Recently it launched a latino site for U.S.-based users. Bebo will offer sites in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch as it attempts to broaden its user base.

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San Francisco -- In the latest geographic expansion of its ad business, AOL today announced the launch of Platform-A Canada, in an effort to allow easy access for advertising clients in the country to manage ad buys across the Web portal's largest online advertising networks equipped with the most comprehensive suite of marketing solutions and the best ad technologies, following recent country specific European launches in the U.K., France and Germany.

The move will essentially combine AOL's ad network with its existing AOL Canada media network into Advertising.com. The combination gives Platform-A an audience of collectively 22.5 million unique visitors per month according to comScore data to its ad network, which includes AOL's media properties AOL.com, AIM and MapQuest, as well as Advertising.com's third-party niche sites like online automotive magazine Canadian Driver, Engadget and TMZ.com from AOL's MediaGlow publishing unit, which alone reaches more than 10 million Canadians monthly, according to comScore.

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San Francisco -- The Time Warner-owned Web portal AOL on Monday rolled out a bundle of new features to beautify its social networking site Bebo, which it acquired in 2008, adding a “lifestreaming” feature from the social data aggregator SocialThing it also acquired that year, allowing a user to post stream-of-consciousness photos and other comments, including a status update that will sync information from friends' profiles on other sites like Facebook and YouTube.

Last December, Bebo announced Social Inbox, which aggregates a user's friends' activities from their online social life, irrespectively of the network the latter have chosen to work with.

Bebo's “Social Inbox” feature enables you to view updates from people you are connected to via any service, by aggregating them into your inbox on the site. All you need to do is provide the service with your user ID on all the other websites you are a member of and Bebo will make sure you know what your friends are doing.

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New York -- Search portal Ask.com , a division of the New York based Inter Active Corp., Tuesday announced a multi-year, strategic alliance with anti-virus software solution provider Symantec to deliver malware-vetted search results with color-coded ratings in an attempt to gain more traffic from security conscious surfers.

Ask and Symantec formulated Safe Search that brings searching the Web safer by providing users with ratings before they visit a site that could damage or infect their computer.

Ask.com stated that Symantec's latest version of Norton 360 software, due to be released today, will be able to actively rate the security threat of every site which appears in a user's search results, through a new toolbar.

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