Ask & AOL

New York -- The onset of the New Year has heralded bundles of dismay for many workers, with continuous news of job cuts coming amid tough times. Despite remarkable traffic growth as high as 27% yearly on its associated Web sites including new personal finance news service WalletPop, Time Warner Inc.’s underperforming AOL Internet unit is not spared of the depression and will cut about 700 jobs, as it faces an advertising slump, to survive the present economic situation.

This afternoon, a memo first obtained by The Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher cites AOL CEO Randy Falco as informing his employees that even those who will be remaining with the company should not expect much special this year.

“Reducing our workforce is never easy, particularly in the current climate,” Falco wrote, “but our goal in doing this is to provide our core businesses the resources they need to thrive. Please know that, as always, we will be doing everything we can to help and support those affected, including offering severance packages and other services.”

San Francisco -- AOL’s recently created Products and Technologies Group today rolled out their enhanced version of AOL Web Mail product, a plug-in architecture that allows users one-click access to GMail and Yahoo Mail in-boxes and a variety of third-party sites and destinations directly from the AOL Web Mail page.

Since past year, AOL has contributed more than 30 new features and an assortment of new functionality to Web Mail in an effort to make it more open and attractive to third-party content and to offer more monetization opportunities to advertisers. The new version is being released globally, making it available in more than 38 countries and locales around the world.

New York -- AOL has announced a series of developments that it expects will expand, reposition and monetize its digital publishing business in 2009. AOL's 2005 acquisition of Weblogs, a company that was host to dozens of blogs, provided a template for the low-cost publishing strategy. It has developed a novel business unit, MediaGlow, which will centralize its entire publishing efforts, with the goal of greatly expanding the unit's global reach in the coming year.

AOL is planning to form two new divisions with some of the sites it purchased then, like Engadget, are now multimillion-dollar businesses. The new divisions include: People Networks and MediaGlow.

San Francisco -- AOL unit Bebo social network on Wednesday rolled out a new feature called “Social Inbox,” to collect e-mail, social networking, and media recommendations in...

New York -- AOL on Monday introduced the latest online local events site that enables users to search and browse for an extensive range of events in their local area, together with kids and family activities, community events, live performances, sporting events and many others, called When.com, powered by Zvents online events guide.

Both the sites are basically identical except for one element: “Where when.com differentiates is the addition of Kids and Family activities, which we feel is important to our audience,” said AOL spokeswoman Jaymelina Esmele. Zvents handles the categorization, but AOL draws more attention to the family-friendly events.

New York -- AOL.com, the web portal of America Online, on Thursday rolled out a revamped homepage available that it hopes will become a hub of sorts for Internet travelers by letting consumers access multiple social networking services directly from AOL.com, becoming the first major portal to offer direct access to information from major social networking sites, email accounts and more without switching from site to site.

Officials said that this follows the move a month after AOL.com, the number four gateway to the web after Google, MSN and Yahoo, offered access to multiple e-mail services from the AOL.com site, being part of AOL’s continuing approach to open its homepage, to outside services and content -- offering consumers more customization options.

New York -- Ever striving, but still overshadowed by its bigger rivals, IAC Corp.’s Ask.com, the fourth-largest search engine, has a record of coming up with interesting innovations that are often imitated by others in the Internet search business.

Ask.com plans to unveil a new version of its search engine on Monday with several enhancements that seeks’ to make the search experience a lot more similar to asking a question and getting an answer, which it considers significant and believes that it could give its popularity a boost in a market dominated by Google.

Ask.com has sharpened the relevance of its search results, made the engine faster and simplified the site’s layout, said Ask.com President Scott Garrell.

New York -- AOL has launched Digital City, a novel, magazine-style website that aims at entertainment enthusiasts and readers who are interested in “stories from around the world,” the company said. According to a company press release the website derives its name from a very vintage AOL brand, as “a new approach to geo-blogging by displaying original content with a local slant, but global appeal.”

“A new look from lifestyle to entertainment, DigitalCity.com encompasses local trends with a global appeal.”

Ever since AOL altered its subscription service two years back with an ad-based model, the web veteran is now further letting its doors open in an effort to win back some of the customers by introducing a new feature on its revamped homepage that allows users to access multiple email services from third parties.

Dwindling far behind competitors such as Google, Yahoo and, to a smaller degree, Microsoft’s MSN, AOL -- a division of media giant Time Warner has launched a host of new services and content initiatives in a bid to close the gap in the online advertising game.

New York -- It appears that AOL is becoming serious about mobile advertising by sharpening its ad-positioning tools for the iPhone in a nod to the popularity of the Apple smartphones.

The Internet media company on Wednesday announced that it has updated its advertising system, known as Platform-A, the mobile industry’s most strong and comprehensive solution for targeting advertising to iPhone users, so that advertisers can send promotions to people while they are surfing the Web on the iPhone.

The move symbolizes the latest initiative by AOL to expand its mobile ad offerings. Last year Time Warner’s Internet business moved its headquarters to New York to be closer to Madison Avenue, and Platform-A, the division formed in June to bring together AOL’s various advertising businesses under one roof, whose subsidiaries include Baltimore’s Advertising.com, is launching new technology that allows advertisers to specifically target Apple iPhone users worldwide.