Google announced that the new version of its Google Mobile app for the iPhone was approved and is now available in the App Store. The new version includes a redesigned search results display that shows more results at once. It also opens web pages from the results within the app. “For those less utilitarian and more flamboyant, we’ve exposed our visual tweaks settings called ‘Bells and Whistles’ – some of our users had discovered this already in previous versions,” says Google software engineer Alastair Tse. “You can style your Google Mobile App in any shade: red, taupe, or even heliotrope. If you’re on a faster iPhone, like the iPhone 3GS, you may want to try the live waveform setting which turns on, as the name suggests, a moving waveform when you search by voice.” “On the subject of searching by voice, you can now choose your spoken language or accent,” adds Tse. “For example, if you’re Australian but live in London, you can improve the recognition accuracy by selecting Australian in the Voice Search settings. And now both Mandarin and Japanese are supported languages as well.”
PBS has partnered with YouTube to create a channel for its long running nightly NewsHour program. The YouTube Blog offers more details. “The PBS NewsHour channel on YouTube
Let’s not kick Yahoo while it’s down; after a glance at some financial charts, it’d be sufficient to say that the company hasn’t done as well as Microsoft and Google in recent months (the three companies are up 6.6, 19.1, and 28.0 percent since September 9th).
U.S. advertising spending in the first nine months of 2009 fell by 14.7 percent compared to the same period in 2008, according to a new report by TNS Media Intelligence. Ad spending during the third quarter of 2009 was down 15.3 percent compared to last year, marking the sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines. There were some bright spots with Internet display (+7%) and newspaper Free-Standing Inserts (FSIs) up 3.9 percent. Online growth was driven by telecom, travel and auto advertisers. FSIs benefited from CPG companies expanding their couponing efforts as consumers became more value-conscious. Among television media, cable TV networks audience gains led to a larger share of ad revenue. Year-to-date cable TV spending slipped by just 2.9 percent, a much stronger performance than the TV sector as a whole. Network TV saw year-to-date spending fall 11.5 percent and Q3 spending fell 25.1 percent. Magazines (-19.7%), newspapers (-22.8%) and radio (-22.8%) lagged the overall ad market during the January-September period. Third quarter losses for each of these media categories were less severe compared to the first half of the year. “The updated monthly trend line on total advertising expenditures still shows no meaningful improvement through October,” said Jon Swallen, SVP Research at TNS Media Intelligence. “The slump has now passed its first anniversary and year-on-year comparisons will become easier in the upcoming months. Going forward, the timing, strength and durability of an advertising recovery will ultimately be determined by the way consumer activity rebounds.”
A little less than a month ago, we reported that a beta version of Chrome for Mac might be released in December, and sure enough, it’s arrived.
Opera is reporting that usage of its Opera Mini mobile browser has jumped 11% in just a month, around the world. In addition, they say data transfers have gained 16%. About 40 million people used Opera Mini in October, according to the company. That’s an 11.3% increase from September 2009 and more than 155% compared to October 2008. page-views and data transfers increased at an even more impressive rate. Opera says that because of this, consumers can save 9.4 billion USD per year just by using Opera Mini. If you want to know how this translates to you personally, Opera has a cost calculator in its new State of the Mobile Web report . “Because Opera Mini compresses data by up to 90%, people everywhere can reduce the amount they pay each month for mobile data,” says Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner. “By making the Web accessible and affordable on mobile devices, we can usher in a communications revolution on an unprecedented scale. Opera Mini is helping to spur this change — potentially affecting the lives of billions — not just by making mobile browsing possible, but by making it affordable, as well.” The 39.6 million people using Opera Mini in October viewed 17.2 billion pages. From September, page-views increased 14.8%. From October 2008, they increased 238%. A few more interesting stats from Opera’s report include: