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Apple holds on to U.S. retail music lead

Apple is still the No. 1 music retailer in the United States, but Amazon.com's online store is coming on strong.

More U.S. music buyers are getting their music fix through iTunes than from any other source, according to data released on Tuesday by NPD Group. Earlier this year, Apple took over the top spot from Wal-Mart Stores, and it maintained that lead during the six months from January to June, NPD said.

Wal-Mart is still in second place, followed by Best Buy. Taking fourth place from Target was Amazon, whose own music store has been growing in … Read more

Veoh Networks launches behavioral ads

Veoh Networks, an online video start-up featuring content such as Lost, ESPN SportsCenter, and The Bachelorette, has begun a beta test of advertisements geared to users' earlier video-watching history and other activity at the site.

The new ad system "combines video consumption, searching, browsing, and community activity data from Veoh's more than 28 million viewers to deliver branded ads and content to viewers across multiple lifestyle and interest categories," the Los Angeles-based company said Monday. Tests of the system showed targeted ads perform more than twice as well as ordinary ads, the company said.

Behavioral advertising offers … Read more

Survey: Advertisers should acknowledge targeted ad concerns

Marketers ought to be aware that some consumers are suspicious about the phenomenon known as "behavioral targeting," a new report from eMarketer says.

Called "Behavioral Targeting Attitudes: The Privacy Issue," the report released Friday explores the digital ad strategy, which collects consumer information and uses it to serve up ads that they may find interesting or relevant. This has been the basis for high-profile programs like Facebook's Social Ads and MySpace's HyperTargeting, as well as Google's extraordinarily successful AdSense. (That's why you'll see ads for vacation homes in Gmail after you'… Read more

SodaHead.com slurps up $8.4 million

Its name might be wacky, but some investors with deep pockets think it's the real thing: SodaHead.com, a polling and answers site, announced Wednesday that it has raised $8.4 million in Series B venture funding. The money comes from new lead investor Mission Ventures, as well as existing investor Mohr Davidow Ventures.

The company's previous round, with veteran investor Ron Conway and Tech Coast Angels contributing, had totaled $4.3 million.

SodaHead was founded by Jason Feffer, former vice president of operations at MySpace, and his childhood friend Michael Glazer. Feffer describes the site as "… Read more

InterActiveCorp launches ad network, including for brands it's ditching

InterActiveCorp mogul Barry Diller may be getting rid of brands like Ticketmaster, LendingTree, and HSN, but he still wants to sell ads on them.

The sprawling media company announced Monday that it will launch an ad network to handle inventory across all its brands, such as Evite and Citysearch, as well as the ones that Diller and his executive team are opting to spin off into separate publicly traded companies.

"Maybe we're not brothers and sisters, but we're cousins," IAC Advertising Solutions president Rich Stalzer told AdAge about the companies it will spin off. The AdAge … Read more

YouTube ads for viral videos: 'buzz targeting'

Google is starting to share more details about its high priority of making more money off YouTube's popularity, introducing an advertising product on Tuesday called buzz targeting.

The ad product uses an algorithm to find videos that are about to "go viral," when word of mouth (or IM, or blog, or e-mail) promotes a Web site to a phase in which it spreads like wildfire. In this case, ads are overlaid on the bottom fifth of viral videos supplied by YouTube partners who share ad revenue with the search giant.

Making more money off YouTube is Google's "highest priority," Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said … Read more

Gadgettes 89: The Mother's Day episode

Mothers deserve more than a lousy microwave. Take it from the Gadgettes. Two out of three of us know from experience. As for Jason, he's hiding under the desk trying to avoid scary birthing stories. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 89

The photograph-to-digital-picture converter http://www.popgadget.net/2008/05/the_photograph.php

Track your missing purse via GPS http://www.popgadget.net/2008/05/track_your_hand.php

What Molly thinks you should buy http://themolly.com/blog/?p=73

What Molly got her mom for Mother’s Day: http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-QuickCam-Deluxe-for-Notebooks/ dp/B000O9GGLY/ref=pd_bbs_sr_5?ie=UTF8&s= electronics&qid=1210278711&sr=8-5… Read more

Just how targeted can that targeted ad be? Ad networks set new guidelines

Social media and Web-surfing habits have made it possible for advertisers to target their campaigns at the narrowest of niche audiences. But what happens when targeting goes beyond relevance and into insensitivity? That's something that a big digital-ad trade group has addressed in a new set of guidelines that effectively ban behavioral targeting pertaining to certain medical and psychological conditions.

The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), which encompasses ad networks like AOL's Advertising.com and Tacoda, Yahoo's BlueLithium, and Google's DoubleClick, published the draft of its "Self-Regulatory Code of Conduct for Online Behavioral Advertising" guidelines … Read more

Attackers booby-trap searches at top Web sites

Updated at 11:22 a.m. PDT Saturday to include a comment from Wal-Mart.

A million search queries have been "poisoned" at dozens of well-known Web sites over the past several weeks, according to security analyst Dancho Danchev.

Attackers are using programming errors to hijack keyword searches by automatically attaching malicious HTML code to specific search queries. Unwitting visitors who type in the selected key words while performing a search at the affected sites are then redirected to booby-trapped Web sites.

This is where the attackers attempt to install malware onto the victims' computers.

Among some of the … Read more