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Logitech sells billionth mouse

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Logitech has shipped its billionth mouse.

Founded in a farmhouse in Apples, Switzerland in 1981 and shortly thereafter establishing strong ties in Silicon Valley, Logitech introduced its first retail mouse in 1985 and reached the 100 millionth mouse mark in 1996. Sales of Logitech mice topped 500 million seven years later. Today, Logitech sells mice in more than 100 countries worldwide and manufactures an average of 376,000 mice per day and 7.8 million every month.

That’s a lot of mice. Mouse?

Originally posted on December 11, 2008 @ 9:54 am

Yahoo Mail Going Social

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Yahoo reports that its mail service is turning social, particularly with an end-goal of unifying Yahoo and third-party social media services into one place.

A “smarter inbox” puts messages from friends or family in a separate, tabbed file so they don’t get buried under mountains of spam or work email.

The inbox for the the first time lets people install third-party applications such as movie-recommendation service Flixster and blogging tools from WordPress.

Technology from startup Xoopit (pronounced swoop-it) will fetch all pictures buried in stored emails, even retrieving images from website links found in messages.

Earlier this year, Yahoo opened up its email service to let third-party developers create add-on applications to the service, much like how one could launch applications on social networking site FaceBook. This move is meant to add value to email, which is considered among the top applications that people use the Internet for.

Ideally, this should make things easier to manage. But the concern here is that having yet another social media profile to maintain might make it more cumbersome for users. The idea of consolidating all of a user’s online presences (blogs, social networks, photos, lifestreams, etc.) under one site–or portal, which Yahoo! is–is an attractive proposition, though. But this might be difficult to achieve, given the different standards among different social networks.

Originally posted on December 16, 2008 @ 1:59 pm

Anvato raises $2 million to expand its “Human Eye” technology

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Anvato Inc. has raised $2 million of $4 million in Series A funding on the heels of launching its one-of-a-kind video identification and monetization service. Anvato uses computer machine vision to analyze videos and does not require meta-tags or watermarks to be embedded inside the videos. The company uses this technology to track copyrighted videos across the Internet and control their distribution and monetization from a single point. Using Anvato, publishers can opt in advertising where both publishers and distributors convert a legal liability into profits.

Oxantium Ventures was this round’s lead investor.

Anvato said it will use the funds to launch AdMatch, its video advertising platform that enables video publishers to track and monetize their online videos through contextual advertising.

With its Content ID product, Anvato already possesses the unique capability to index any video – including major national broadcast network channels – live and track their consumption on online video distribution sites such as YouTube, Veoh and DailyMotion. AdMatch expands this offering by allowing video publishers to insert relevant, unobtrusive ads into their videos and benefit from the viral distribution of their content.

Originally posted on December 11, 2008 @ 12:32 pm

Dailymotion is world’s largest independent web video site– comScore

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Dailymotion continues to be the most popular independent web video site globally, with over 38 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore Media Metrix Data. In addition, Dailymotion’s year-to-date monthly average of over 36 million unique visitors leads all independent online video web sites.

Dailymotion’s users have not only increased in numbers, but have spent a substantial amount of time on the site viewing web video. Year to date, Dailymotion users spent almost 13 billion minutes viewing approximately 17 billion pages on the site. Dailymotion lead in engagement with users averaging 10.8 minutes per session, 40% more than any other independent video sites.

Dailymotion US has been a key part of the global growth, with unique visitors more than doubling from 3.2 million in October 2007 to 7.3 million in October 2008, a greater than 128% increase year over year.

Originally posted on December 16, 2008 @ 12:51 pm

YieldBuild partners with Chitika to increase ad performance

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YieldBuild and Chitika announced a partnership that would support Chitika’s Premium Ad service within YieldBuild’s Publisher Solutions product, a deal that benefits both publishers and advertisers.

The partnership will allow interested publishers using YieldBuild Publisher Services to employ Chitika’s Premium ads to more effectively monetize their site content. Publishers will see their page revenue increase as their existing inventory has access to another high-quality ad network optimized by YieldBuild.

Chitika’s patented ad-targeting platform delivers ads targeted to end-users’ search queries, providing extremely relevant ads at high eCPMs. That, coupled with Chitika’s virtually unlimited ad-inventory and incredible ease of deployment made Chitika | Premium ads a great fit for YieldBuild’s userbase.

Chitika will join other top contextual and display ad networks, including Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Platform-A’s Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, BlueLithium, ValueClick Media, and others, made available to YieldBuild publishers. Publishers will maintain a direct relationship with Chitika, as they do with all other YieldBuild-supported ad networks.

Originally posted on December 10, 2008 @ 1:15 pm