Vacation Travel Hotels, Vacation Travel

Online social networking site Facebook is looking to expand its staff by as much as 50 percent this year, its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg news agency in an interview dated August 20.

Facebook’s website says it has more than 900 employees.

The company, which counts venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, Microsoft Corp and Russian Internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies among its investors, has more than 250 million registered users.

In June, rival MySpace, owned by News Corp, said it would cut 30 percent of its U.S. staff and two-thirds of its international workforce.

Advance Internet, which runs news and information websites in alliance with more than 30 newspapers has entered into an agreement with Microsoft that will allow its sales staff to sell ads on the Microsoft Media Network on the local level.

Under the agreement Advance Internet’s sales force will offer behavioral targeting and audience extension capabilities to its local advertisers on the Microsoft Media Network.

“We have the number one local news and information sites in each of our markets,” said Peter Weinberger, president of Advance Internet.

“According to Media Audit, five of our sites rank in the top 10 of newspaper affiliated sites based on local penetration of adults 18+. Now through our agreement with Microsoft, we will be able to serve our advertisers with even better online marketing solutions.”

Advance Internet will become a certified reseller of the Microsoft Media Network, offering local advertisers access to 76 percent of the online population. Advance says the deal will significantly increase its reach in all of its local markets.

The two companies have also signed a content agreement, and Advanced Internet will become a certified reseller of Microsoft’s search products.

“The local perspective that Advance Internet offers will be incredibly helpful as we develop our reseller efforts,” said Brian Handly, general manager, PubCenter, Microsoft.

“We are excited to expand Content and Search Ads into Advance Internet’s portfolio of regional Web sites.”

Two weeks ago, Adobe released a critical patch for Flash Player and Acrobat Reader. According to online security company Trusteer, about 80% of users are still vulnerable, and perhaps more startling, the company views this as being possibly the biggest security hole on the Internet today.

That 80% figure is based on Trusteer’s installed base of over 2.5 million online banking users of the company’s security service.

“The penetration of Adobe Flash and Acrobat is unparalleled,” a spokesperson for Trusteer tells WebProNews. “According to Adobe, 99% of Internet users run Flash.

So so many people on the web are running Flash, and Adobe released the patch two weeks ago, why are so many still vulnerable? Trusteer thinks Adobe just has issues with distributing patches.

“Adobe is facing some major security challenges and one of its biggest hurdles is its software update mechanism.  For some reason, it is not effective enough in distributing security patches to the field,” says Trusteer CEO Mickey Boodaei. “Given the lack of attention this situation has received to date, it appears that few people understand the magnitude of the problem. We recommend that all enterprises and individuals install the latest Flash and Acrobat updates immediately.”

Accoreding to Trusteer, targeting products like Flash and Acrobat is attractive to wrongdoers because they reach such a huge portion of Internet users. Browser use is much more diversified with Internet Explorer reaching about 65% of users and Firefox reaching 30%. Targeting Adobe’s products just covers a lot more people.

source: www.webpronews.com/topnews/

It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks at Yahoo, following the announcement to outsource Internet search technology to Microsoft and Yahoo stock’s subsequent 15 percent sell-off.

But the scene in Sunnyvale, California took a really odd turn on Friday when a staff memo left some Yahooligans wondering if the company planned to ditch the whole Internet thing altogether and get into the hospitality business.

In an 800-plus word memo, new Customer Advocacy EVP Jeff Russakow (pinch-hitting on the weekly memo for vacationing CEO Carol Bartz) held forth on the merits of all the hotels he’s stayed at.

Luxury hotels like the Ritz Carlton and The Four Seasons delight guests with “incredible culinary extravaganzas, personal activity and shopping attendants, and state-of-the-art spas promising to erase every worry and wrinkle,” wrote Russakow.

Good stuff, to be sure, he said, but too expensive for the average Joe.

More to his taste is Joie de Vivre, a chain of 40 boutique hotels in the U.S. which has built a business buying up “older, drab hotels in great locations,” refurbishing them with a hip veneer and developing a fanatical following without the costs of a huge staff and a rich menu of offerings.

That model, the memo suggested, could work at Yahoo as the company seeks to redefine itself and reignite its growth.

“Like JDV, the primary challenge for us is not to delight them with fancy bells and whistles and extravagant services,” explained Russakow, “but to make users’ every day experience on Yahoo! personally relevant, and even on occasion an identity refreshment.”

There you have it, the new Yahoo: an identity refreshment.
source:  www.reuters.com/article/