PIR (Public Interest Registry intends to raise .org wholesale prices 18th October 2007 to $6.15.
Afilias announced rises for .info a few days ago and Verisign announced similar rises for .net and .com wholesale prices earlier this month.
Microsoft wants to bring computing to a further one billion people by 2015.
The Microsoft initiative was launched by Bill Gates in Beijing under the banner of its Unlimited Potential scheme, a program aimed at bridging the digital divide.
Five million of the laptops will be start to be delivered this summer to countries including Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Rwanda, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan and Thailand.
BBC News has more details about Xo & Microsoft here
Citizen Hawk have just launched a tool for detecting typosquatting sites. Their full service is expensive but they have an online typosquatting tool which displays a sample of possible infringers. For some marks it even identifies the parking company.
The BBC is reporting Google has launched its payament service in the UK just less than a year after its launch in the US in June 2006.
Google checkout differs from Paypal as it works using debit card and credit card transactions, whereas Paypal can also transfer money directly to and from buyrers and sellers bank accounts.
Now you can specify the location of your sitemaps within your robot.txt file and Ask, Google, Microsoft & Yahoo will all locate your sitemaps file. Ask has details here.
Specifications here www.sitemaps.org
Domains will soon be available in .asia the new gTLD from dotasia.org
Here’s the current timetable
June/July 2007 – Sunrise 1: Governments
September 2007 – Sunrise 2: Registered Marks
October/November 2007 – Sunrise 3: Entity Names
February 2008 – Landrush
March 2008 – Live FCFS registrations (First Comes First Served)
Interestingly Sunrise 2 has been split
2a Early Bird Sunrise – Marks registered before March 16, 2004 plus Certified use documents
2b Registered Marks – Marks applied for before December 6th, 2006
2c Extended Protection – Registered Mark + Words from the Class Description
Sunrise 1 is FCFS
Sunrise 2 & 3 to be auctioned between applicants if there is more than one applicant.
Ars technica has taken a look at a recently awarded Xerox Patent
“Companies may eventually be able to tell who we are, demographically, based on our Internet usage patterns alone. Xerox has come up with a method by which they can analyze a series of visited web pages in order to determine (at least) a user’s gender and age based off of a cache of test cases, as outlined in a recently-awarded patent entitled
“User Profile Classification By Web Usage Analysis.”
Abstract
Demographic information of an Internet user is predicted based on an analysis of accessed web pages. Web pages accessed by the Internet user are detected and mapped to a user path vector which is converted to a normalized weighted user path vector. A centroid vector identifies web page access patterns of users with a shared user profile attribute. The user profile attribute is assigned to the Internet user based on a comparison of the vectors. Bias values are also assigned to a set of web pages and a user profile attribute can be predicted for an Internet user based on the bias values of web pages accessed by the user. User attributes can also be predicted based on the results of an expectation maximization process. Demographic information can be predicted based on the combined results of a vector comparison, bias determination, or expectation maximization process.
Google is to hold a developer day around the world on the 31st of May 2007
Mountain View, California
Sao Paulo, Brazil
London, United Kingdom
Paris, France
Madrid, Spain
Hamburg, Germany
Moscow, Russia
Tokyo, Japan
Sydney, Australia
Beijing, China
From the press release
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – On May 31st, Google offices in ten countries will host Google Developer Day™, a global event featuring workshops, keynotes and breakout discussions on Google’s APIs and developer tools.
Focusing on the theme “Building Blocks for Better Web Applications,” Google Developer Day will explore innovative uses of Google developer products to create and enhance applications, integrate with Google services and reach millions of users on Google and beyond
On Monday AOL will produce their customised “white label” version of Adwords using Google technology.
Dariusz Paczuski, vice president of search products at AOL said “With the introduction of Search Marketplace, we’re bringing a full suite of solutions to our advertisers to help them maximize and manage campaigns across the AOL network,” including banner ads, search ads and other cost-per-click advertising.
The Washington Post has more details here.
GPM Group 