Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
According to Microsoft, people spend the bulk of their time online doing two things: checking their email and searching the web. So Microsoft's solution is to plaster ads inside your email messages. Run that past us again.
Microsoft's new email client Windows Live Mail Desktop will serve up
ads to you alongside the messages you receive in your email inbox based
on the context of the text-based content in your messages. Hang on, you
may protest. Isn't that an invasion of my privacy? After all, aren't
email communications supposed to be private in the same way as snail
mail letters are private?
Not according to Microsoft. In fact, if you believe the blurb written
in the software company's MSN Spaces blog, they're doing you a favour
and actually adding value to your emails.
According to Microsoft, much of what you need to get done online – from
planning your next vacation to remembering to buy flowers for your mom
on her birthday – is piling up in your inbox, just waiting for you to
take action, usually by looking something up on the web.
So in its benevolence Microsoft, Microsoft picks the eyes out any
message you receive and presents them to you as key search term links
with a search box directly underneath. And on the right hand side of
the page there are sponsored links. All this sounds very familiar of
course. It's similar to your standard Google search engine page. Except
it's inside an email client, using your private content upon which to
serve you search terms and context based ads.
In an effort to head off any privacy concerns, Microsoft insists that
the search terms, sponsored links and search results shown in its
Active Search will be generated by computers not humans. What's more,
Microsoft promises that none of the keywords it collects or advertising
services will be traced back to the email they were drawn from and
email content will not be shared with third parties without permission.
Finally, to underline that what Microsoft intends to serve up is a safe
system, the system never looks at attachments, never looks at credit
card numbers and never looks at junk mail. That sounds like one heck of
a smart system alright. For some people that might be just a little too
smart, which is why many may well opt for Microsoft's ultimate failsafe
option and turn Active Search off.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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