The nation’s largest Internet service providers all say they haven’t partnered with Silicon Valley startup NebuAd Inc. to monitor Web surfing and deliver targeted advertising to their subscribers. Here is a look at six smaller service providers, however, that have conducted trials. The companies say all the tests have ended, often to review privacy and related issues. No provider is known to be currently using NebuAd.

No, really.

Advertisers are grappling with the idea of Google, which spent many of its early years avoiding — and infuriating — advertising agencies, now shifting to embrace them.

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T-Mobile said Monday it plans to launch a mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software, making it the first operator to do so and posing a direct threat to Apple’s popular iPhone.

A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s German parent, declined to comment on the launch date for the device which is made by mobile phone maker HTC.

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Google has added a “Privacy” link on all of its homepage effective yesterday.

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A federal judge in New York has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a database linking users of YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far, with every clip they have watched there.

The order raised concerns among users and privacy advocates that the online video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed. But Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of YouTube viewers. Read the rest of this entry »

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Adobe Systems on Tuesday announced a new initiative with Google and Yahoo to improve search results for dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs).

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to enhance indexing of the Flash file format and uncover information currently undiscoverable by search engines.

This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player, according to the companies. That means RIA developers and Web-content producers won’t need to amend their content to make it searchable. Read the rest of this entry »

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Google just took away one of the world’s largest Outlook/Exchange installations for 1.5 million students at Australian schools, and replaced it with Gmail. Read the rest of this entry »

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