DoubleClick

Google announce acquisition of DoubleClick.DoubleClick provides a suite of products that enables agencies, advertisers, and publishers to work efficiently, that will enable Google to extend our ad network and develop deeper relationships with our partners.

This new partnership represents a tremendous opportunity for us at Google to broaden and deepen our inventory of available ads and to better serve both our publishers and users. Together, Google and DoubleClick will empower agencies, advertisers, and publishers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, which will, in turn, provide a better experience for our users.

Sponsored information served by Google has always been, and will always be, clearly distinguished from objective content available via our search results and across our partner network. We want you to find the information that you are looking for—be it in an ad or elsewhere—quickly and without hassle. We know that our collaboration with DoubleClick will serve and advance this goal.
Read More:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/next-step-in-google-advertising.html

Brain With Fantasy

LOTTERIES are a regressive tax on those who can't do math, runs the famous old saying. "Nonsense!" retort critics. "For a dollar, one can purchase the fantasy of being wealthy beyond dreams of avarice. It is cheap at the price."

Over at Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky says "But isn't that a waste of hope?"

But consider exactly what this implies. It would mean that you're occupying your valuable brain with a fantasy whose real probability is nearly zero - a tiny line of likelihood which you, yourself, can do nothing to realize. The lottery balls will decide your future. The fantasy is of wealth that arrives without effort - without conscientiousness, learning, charisma, or even patience.

Which makes the lottery another kind of sink: a sink of emotional energy. It encourages people to invest their dreams, their hopes for a better future, into an infinitesimal probability. If not for the lottery, maybe they would fantasize about going to technical school, or opening their own business, or getting a promotion at work - things they might be able to actually do, hopes that would make them want to become stronger. Their dreaming brains might, in the 20th visualization of the pleasant fantasy, notice a way to really do it. Isn't that what dreams and brains are for? But how can such reality-limited fare compete with the artificially sweetened prospect of instant wealth - not after herding a dot-com startup through to IPO, but on Tuesday?
Read More:http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/04/the_future_of_fantasy.cfm

How Internet Business Work

Think the concept of building a successful business on the Internet disappeared along with the money in your 401-(k)? Not so. Here's a collection of stories about businesses that not only have made the Internet the key to their strategy, but also have have developed innovative strategies to make it work.

How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows
... Its performance is the envy of executives and engineers around the world ... For techno-evangelists, Google is a marvel of Web brilliance ... For Wall Street, it may be the IPO that changes everything (again) ... Keith H. Hammonds
Business Fights Back: eBay Learns to Trust Again
The world`s most successful Internet company is based on two pillars of growth: the global spread of Internet-style capitalism and confidence in the basic goodness of the people who do business on the site. Both ideas came under attack on September 11. George Anders
Why Is This Man Smiling?
You'd think startup wizard Atiq Raza would be getting hammered. He operates in trouble-plagued Silicon Valley, he launches companies in the wildly overbuilt telecom sector, and he runs -- gasp! -- a business incubator. Based on his impressive results, you may want to think again. Bill Breen
The New Face of Global Competition
Not so long ago, India`s Wipro Ltd. sold cooking oils and knockoff PCs. Now its 15,000 technologists cook up vital software applications and research for Ericsson, GM, the Home Depot, and other giant customers. Are you prepared to go head-to-head with the best the world has to offer? Keith H. Hammonds
The Internet Power Grab
Everyone knows that the Internet is moving from free to fee. John Ellis
La Dolce Vita, Internet Style
Colletta di Castelbianco is a 13th-century Italian village that was on the verge of extinction -- until an architect gave it a new design and Internet connectivity gave it a new lease on life. The story of how it became a haven for mobile professionals. Ian Wylie
Don`t Shout, Listen
At Procter & Gamble, branding is almost everything. And in the age of the Web, almost everything is up for grabs. Here`s how P& G has turned the Internet into a device for listening to customers -- and for experimenting with its brands. Fara Warner
For more:http://www.fastcompany.com/guides/digital.html

Boober:New Way Of Banking

Boober launched last month, Boober is bringing peer to peer lending to The Netherlands. The start-up works much like Zopa and Prosper, with prospective borrowers listing the amount they want to borrow, their credit rating, purpose of the loan, interest rate they're willing to pay, etc. Credit ratings are determined by credit report agency Experian. And loans to AA and AAA borrowers are guaranteed by debt collectors Intrum Justitia, at 90% and 99.5% respectively. Investors are required to distribute their capital over at least 10 borrowers to minimize risk. Borrowers pay EUR 19.95 to have their credit rating determined, and if their loan is funded, they pay Boober a yearly fee of 0.5% of the loan. Investors pay a yearly fee of 0.5% over the funds they've invested, as well as an annual contribution of EUR 9.95.

Boober's founder, Guus Drijver, doesn't hesitate to share his feelings about why Boober is better than the Big Banks: "Boober doesn't work with hidden costs and is completely transparent. We don't sponsor yacht races or soccer teams, and don't have expensive headquarters or pay thousands of people high salaries." Boober isn't alone in this sentiment; many consumers are equally discontent with banks and their high profit margins, driving interest in alternatives like p2p lending. After a beta phase in The Netherlands, Boober hopes to expand to Belgium and Germany.

Website:www.boober.nl/

Money Machine

What a Bloomberg can do
Bloomberg users can set up their screens any way they like. These displays show the data an equity investor might order up.
Stock price monitor
Users can get real-time stock prices by paying extra. Delayed prices are part of the standard subscription.
Stock charts
Bloomberg offers data on 136,000 equities.
Sliding tickers
A variety of price, volume, and earnings information moves across the screen to help the user follow three individual stocks.
Live videochats
Subscribers with cameras can have two-way chats, or Bloombergers can offer real-time support.
A portfolio, analyzed
Bloomberg's database includes regulatory filings from all over the world.
Bloomberg tv
The company broadcasts in seven languages in 23 countries. All transmissions from around the world are available on any Bloomberg.
News stories
Bloomberg News has 2,300 employees and publishes more than 5,000 stories daily. Its widely read "top stories" foreshadow the next day's newspaper headlines.
The keyboard
You can navigate on a Bloomberg with a special color-coded keyboard. Yellow keys take you to domains like "equity," green is for functions, red is for logging on.
Tradebook
Subscribers can use Bloomberg's automated broker-dealer to buy and sell equities, futures and options, paying commissions to do so.
Stock data, volume-weighted
Analytics make it possible for a day's trading in a stock to be displayed in a bar chart depicting the total number of shares traded at each price.
For More:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/16/8404302/index.
htm?postversion=2007040506