Miva Joins Contextual Ad Program Battle

Recently, Google is facing more and more competitors. After Yahoo successfully introduced Yahoo Publisher Network to answer Google AdSense. Last Monday, Miva, a performance marketing network, joined the battle by launching a beta global contextual ad program.

Not like the others, Miva gives publishers more control, letting them generate content while protecting their brands’ integrity. Miva also offers automated and manual system. Using automated system, Miva’s contextual engine dynamically serves relevant ads based on the page’s content, whereas the manual system allows publishers to select keywords manually to match ads to both content and visitor demographics.

Filed in: Contextual Ad Program, Google, Miva

Click Fraudsters Earn Billion Annually?

Internet ad-traffic scams become one of the hottest topics these days. Business Week reported that a web consultant, Greg Boser, created a software program as a clickbot to create the fake clicks. It routes traffic all over the Internet through anonymous proxy server, creating the false impression that visitors are from all over the world.

While companies such as Google and Yahoo are doing enough to reduce the number of fraud clicks, in fact, the fraudsters are always one step ahead. As a result, Google stock was downgraded last January. On the other hand, senior director of Yahoo! product management confidently said that click fraud is still manageable as Yahoo! system continually improve and update to any new patterns and problems. Meanwhile, Google employs teams to monitor fraud click activity.

Security experts agreed that it is trivial to filter out some not legitimate traffic. However, it will get more complicated when a hacker utilize a worm to infect thousands of vulnerable PCs to route traffic from actual computer all over the world to his sites. This technique is nearly impossible to identify.

Ssstttt... Microsoft' Secret Project

Microsoft has a secret... BetaNews reported, Microsoft registered www.origamiproject.com early this week. However, don't expect to see any product information there. If you wonder, Microsoft provides a few hints that might help you to guess. Once, you open the website, a flash animation will greet you and pop up 4 questions: "Do you know me? Do you know what I can do? Or where I can go? Or how I can change your life?" And finally, it ends up with the text: "you will learn on 3.2.06"

Several industry watchers are speculating Origami could be a new type of wearable PC or small digital camcorder referring prototype demoed at COMDEX 2001 or perhaps Microsoft answer to Apple iPod. Who knows?

Anyway, we'll know the answer soon...

Windows Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview

A long waiting browser from Microsoft, finally hit its milestone.. the beta 2 preview... With massive new features such as tabbed browsing, built-in RSS support and importantly the security enhancements, IE7 is worth to try.
However, most of the new features are not really new for me. I have been enjoying such features through Mozilla Firefox.

Despite of the facts, the new features of IE7 still look great. Importantly, it is not as greedy as Firefox in term of memory consumption.

If you are interested, you can download the beta 2 preview from: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4521302

Please note:
- Installation will involve windows validation. If your windows is not valid, just forget it :)
- The installation will replace IE6, and you cannot rollback the installation. So, just install if you are ready.

World's Most Expensive Chocolate

Ever wonder what is the most expensive chocolate in the world? For sure, it is not Godiva. Just give you an early shock, this chocolate costs you US$5.200 per kilogram. What does make this chocolate so expensive? As the maker said, "It's made of 70% Valrhona cacao, which is blended into a creamy ganache with truffle oil. The truffle is then hand-rolled with a dark truffle on the inside and dusted with cocoa powder."

This chocolate company is Knipschildt Chocolatier that was founded in 1999 by Fritz Knipschildt, who got his culinary education as a chef in Denmark. You can call this chocolate: Chocopologie. If you interested in, and want to know how does the worlds's most expensive chocolate taste? Go and buy... Visit the website: www.knipschildt.com