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New Media News Every Morning

Userplane to release APIs supporting Google’s OpenSocial

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userplane.pngUserplane will be releasing OpenSocial APIs, allowing OpenSocial application developers to integrate Userplane apps, such as Webchat, Webmessenger and Webrecorder, within their applications.

These products can be completely integrated into the OpenSocial ecosystem, giving developers access to integrate any Userplane app into their OpenSocial application. Userplane also will release OpenSocial applications of its own, to showcase Userplane technology.

In addition, application developers can use the Userplane Money API to deliver ads within their OpenSocial applications. The revenue sharing system provides virtually instant payout for any volume of display ad units. Currently, Userplane serves tens of millions of daily ad impressions for Facebook developers, providing a very attractive and stable monetization strategy.

Originally posted on November 13, 2007 @ 12:09 pm

AOL acquires Q&A service Yedda

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yedda.pngAOL has acquired Yedda, Inc., a social search Questions and Answer service. Yedda will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL.

Founded in 2006, Yedda employs patent-pending technology that automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics, while selecting the best available users to answer the question. Yedda’s semantic matching technology intelligently routes questions to relevant communities of Internet users who can “syndicate” their expertise and spark a community-wide dialogue of people invited to discuss and learn from each other’s experiences.

Using Yedda’s technology, AOL will incorporate the Questions and Answer functionality into select programming areas on AOL.com and will further integrate “Questions & Answers” into its experiences in the coming months.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Originally posted on November 12, 2007 @ 11:22 am

AOL acquires online advertising company Quigo

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quigo.pngAOL announced that it had signed an agreement for the acquisition of Quigo, an online advertising company. Financial details were not disclosed although earlier reports placed it at $350 million.

“With Quigo, we are putting the final pieces of Platform-A in place. We will be able to offer advertisers and publishers the most advanced set of tools, including contextual and behavioral targeting, superior analytics, and access to the largest display network in the marketplace,” AOL chairman and CEO Randy Falco said.

AOL said that Quigo will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL within the Platform-A organization. Quigo will allow AOL to expand the use of contextual advertising across AOL’s own web pages, as well as its third-party networks.

Originally posted on November 7, 2007 @ 2:39 pm

AOL launches Indian language portals, international Truveo sites

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aol.pngAOL announced the next steps in its ambitious global expansion effort with the launch of new local language versions of the AOL India portal and the launch of Truveo’s popular video search engine serving eight countries, including India.

AOL.in is launching content channels in the Hindi and Tamil languages, improving the breadth of AOL’s offerings at a time when the online audience in India is skyrocketing. The number of Internet users in urban India has grown by 28% in the past year, and about 60% of all active online Indians (30 million) prefer to read in local Indian languages. The Hindi and Tamil language portals will have language sections in News, Cinema and Astrology.

Building on the success of its industry-leading video search engine, Truveo has announced plans to expand its rapidly growing service into several major markets for online video worldwide including France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. The Truveo video search engine lets users search and browse through tens of millions of videos from thousands of sources across the web, and reaches more than 40 million users a month in the U.S.

Over the next two months, Truveo will build on this expansion with the launch of video search sites in additional countries including Australia, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Russia and Turkey.

Originally posted on October 31, 2007 @ 2:53 pm

AOLLatino.com relaunches

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901 amAOL Latino has unveiled a redesign of its award-winning Web site offering new easy–to-use features with a focus on expanding the community experience, providing more programming and adding extensive upgrades to current services.

With the burst in popularity of social networking and blogs within the Hispanic market, AOL Latino now allows users the ability to create personalized Web pages, chat live with other users, “snag” their favorite video content and more as part of the revamped community area.

The newly retooled site also includes access to more than 200 radio stations both in Spanish and English and customized lottery results for all major cities. Additionally, it has both photo and video upload capabilities where users can post user-generated content for friends and family to see.

Originally posted on October 24, 2007 @ 2:15 am

Filed Under: AOL