Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Bartz suggested Yahoo might seek to partner with social networking companies rather than build its own products in this area.

“I do not believe we can invent the next Facebook,” Bartz said.

“It is very clear we have to do that,” she said in response to a question about her thoughts on the tremendous growth of social networks like privately held Facebook and Twitter.

Bartz repeated her philosophy that every business in Yahoo is up for examination as the company seeks to revive growth and better compete with Google Inc.

While she opened the door to negotiations with Microsoft Corp about a search partnership, she stressed the importance of search data to Yahoo’s advertising customers.

If Yahoo and Microsoft decided to talk about a search deal, “We’re going to negotiate as companies negotiate, privately.” Bartz said.

The comments come a week after Bartz unveiled a major management reorganization. Investors are waiting to see if the new CEO can restart deal talks with Microsoft.

Last year, Microsoft made an unsuccessful bid to acquire Yahoo for $47.5 billion or $33 per share. The software company has said it is no longer interested in buying all of Yahoo but remains open to a search deal.

Bartz flagged Yahoo’s Web-based email product, as well as its news and front-door businesses as “core” Yahoo properties. She also said the company needs to be “running very tight fiscally.”

The CEO indicated that Yahoo is considering various strategies to strengthen its position in important markets, including mergers and acquisitions. She said the company could pursue acquisitions or partnerships to grow its footprint in Europe.

The online retail giant pledged to modify the Kindle 2 so that authors, publishers or any holders to a novel’s rights can choose whether to turn on the feature, which takes written text and converts it to human speech.

“Kindle 2′s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given,” the firm said in a statement on Friday.

“Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”

In an editorial titled “The Kindle Swindle” that appeared in the New York Times Wednesday, the president of the Author’s Guild, Roy Blount Jr., took Amazon to task for the function on the new Kindle, which began shipping this week.

The new Kindle can read books aloud, but unlike with audio books, royalties are not paid to authors. Blount argued the technology Amazon uses to turn text into a human voice is quickly improving, and authors need to be “duly vigilant” about this novel means of transmitting their work.

The guild, which is studying the issue, has called the Kindle’s speech function a “significant challenge to the publishing industry.” It has recommended its members bring up the issue of the Kindle when negotiating book contracts.

On Friday, Amazon said rights-owners will be allowed to decide — title by title — whether to enable the function.

Though a tiny fraction of Amazon’s business, the Kindle draws strong, regular interest from investors and gadget aficionados, amid speculation the device might eventually be enhanced to compete with all-rounded, hand-held devices like Apple’s iPod.

Mountain View, Calif.-based TrialPay offers just that kind of a deal, which it bills as a win-win-win for consumers, merchants and advertisers. It probably won’t change your buying habits dramatically, but it could help you get a (sort of) free lunch.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say you’re perusing a movie ticket Web site. If that site is working with TrialPay, you might be presented with the option to get tickets not by paying for them directly, but simply by completing a purchase or trial offer with another company. If you’re game, you can click to see a list of participating companies, such as Starbucks or Netflix. And if you agree you’ll receive e-mailed instructions on how to get your free movie tickets.

As TrialPay’s 27-year-old co-founder, Alex Rampell, describes it, the service is “kind of like PayPal for people who don’t pay.”

Rampell began building his own business in high school and college by selling shareware – software that you can generally download and try for free but are later prompted to pay for. He came up with the idea for TrialPay in 2004 as a way to get more consumers to “pay” for his software, after talking with a marketer friend who helped him realize how much companies are willing to shell out to acquire customers.

People might not be willing to pay for software, but they might be willing to pay for cat food, he mused. And if a cat food seller is willing to pay the software seller for sending it a customer, then the software seller could ostensibly give its product to the customer for free.

Most of the free items you can get through TrialPay retail for about $30 or less. And except for some deals, like one with pizza-delivery chain Papa John’s, most are not physical goods.

Still, the model appears to be working. Since the company started in the summer of 2006, it has grown to include more than 7,500 merchants and about 2,000 advertisers. TrialPay makes its money by taking a cut of what the advertiser pays the merchant.

It’s too bad you have to essentially stumble across TrialPay offers online. There is no master list you can check out. Rampell explained this is mainly because TrialPay wants consumers who are already interested in buying an item online but are hesitating. He sees these people as more valuable to the advertisers that are subsidizing the freebies.

This may frustrate some people, but it does make sense. If you do come across TrialPay offers in the wild, asking you if you’d like to get a movie ticket or computer software for free, it might be worth clicking through to check it out.

Bartz, who took the reins six weeks ago, announced the changes in a blog post on Thursday, as well as in an e-mail to Yahoo employees.

“Today I’m rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo a lot faster on its feet,” Bartz wrote on the corporate blog. “We’ll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer.”

Yahoo’s technology and product groups will be combined into one entity led by Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh, according to Bartz’s email to employees.

The company, which lags far behind Internet search leader Google Inc, has initiated a search for a new CFO, and Jorgensen will remain through a transition period, Yahoo said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.

Jorgensen is the latest executive to depart in recent weeks. Neeraj Khemlani, head of Yahoo’s news and information group, and Jill Nash, chief communications officer, have also left the company.

Bartz said in the memo to employees that Marco Boerries, head of the company’s Connected Life group, has also resigned. The Connected Life group, which focused on bringing Yahoo products to mobile devices, will be integrated into various parts of the new organization.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the company would not provide any official announcement on the reorganization, other than Bartz’s blog post, calling it an internal matter.

Yahoo shares were up 5.3 percent at $13.14 on Nasdaq. They had risen as much as 7.3 percent earlier in the day on Jorgensen’s comments at a technology conference on Wednesday that indicated the company was open to a sale of its search business.

Apple also added the Cover Flow interface now found in almost every piece of its software to let users scroll backwards through browsing history as if they were flipping through album covers, and what appears to be Apple’s own implementation of FireFox’s Smart Location “awesome bar” called Smart Address Field.

The new beta version is available for download at Apple’s Safari Web page with both Windows and Mac OS versions ready for testing. Mac users need to be running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 and Apple’s latest security update or Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 on an Intel Mac or a G3 or better Mac. Windows users need Windows XP SP 2 or Vista.

Safari is used by about 8 percent of Internet surfers, according to Net Applications, trailing Internet Explorer and FireFox.

Apple senior director of system software Brian Croll said the performance improvements are the result of a new JavaScript engine called Nitro. Apple used the SunSpider benchmark to post the JavaScript results, and the iBench benchmark for the HTML numbers, he said.

Croll emphasized Safari 4′s support for Web standards like HTML 5, which allows Web applications to work while offline, and CSS 3 for adding graphical effects. Safari 4 has passed the Acid3 test developed by the Web Standards Project, while FireFox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 have yet to do so, he said.

As far as changes that will be more visible to average users, Safari 4 moves the tabs from below the address bar to the very top of the window, and allows you to add a new tab by clicking a “+” sign in the uppermost right-hand corner of the window.

Apple added some new history browsing options, such as the aforementioned Cover Flow interface in the basic history view as well as a new feature called Top Sites, which checks the various Web sites you visit most frequently and arranges them in a grid pattern. If one of your Top Sites has published new content since the last time you visited, a white star on a blue background appears in the upper right-hand corner of the view for that site.

Windows users will notice a new “Windows-native look,” according to Croll, that uses the standard Windows font rendering. Safari has been available as a Windows browser since June 2007.

Yahoo, the leading provider of online display advertising, has been under pressure for nearly a year as it held fruitless merger or partnership talks with Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and Time Warner Inc’s AOL.

The new services include targeting graphical adverts to users who have searched for particular terms in Yahoo’s search engine and customizing the offers in adverts based on what websites a consumer has visited and what they have done on those sites, the paper said.

Another service that is expected to go live next month will allow marketers to buy text adverts next to search results that are targeted to users during a certain time of day or based on factors such as their age and gender, according to the paper.

“Targeting a site with a couple hundred thousand users…I don’t call that targeting. I call that wasted effort,” the paper quoted Joanne Bradford, Yahoo’s senior vice president of U.S. revenue and market development, as saying. “Size does matter.”

Bradford and Michael Walrath, a senior vice president at Yahoo, will discuss the new features during a keynote address at a conference in Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday, the paper said.

They will also use the speech to urge marketers to stop thinking about search and display advertising as separate products and to take advantage of tools such as Yahoo’s search-targeting product to bridge the two, the pair told the paper in a joint interview.

Hearst said on Monday that Neeraj Khemlani will join the newspaper and magazine publisher in March as vice president and special assistant to the chief executive for digital media.

Khemlani will report directly to Hearst CEO Frank Bennack Jr., and be responsible for promoting and coordinating “digital content transformation” across Hearst, which owns 16 daily newspapers and more than 200 magazines, including Esquire and Cosmopolitan.

His departure from Yahoo comes as the No. 2 Internet search company is expected to soon unveil a broad reshuffling of its management structure under Carol Bartz, who took the reins as CEO in January.

Bartz, in her weekly memo to staff on Friday, told employees to rest up as the coming week would be “a biggie.” The AllThingsDigital blog said a reorganization could be announced as early as Wednesday.

Khemlani, a former producer for CBS News’ 60 Minutes program, was considered a likely candidate to head up one of Yahoo’s three key divisions within the media group under the new organization structure, according to the blog.

A Yahoo representative was not immediately available for comment.

Yahoo’s stock was down 6 cents at $12.08 in afternoon trade on the Nasdaq.

The site, here, provides resources to help individuals gain the technical skills needed for acquiring jobs, the world’s largest software company said.

The economy has shed 3.6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007 with about half of the decline occurring in the past three months, recent Labor Department data showed.

The website provides access to several Microsoft online training programs, including how to use the Internet, send e-mail and create a resume, as well as more advanced programs on using specific Microsoft applications.

“We are also providing a full range of work force development resources for state and local governments so they can offer specialized training for their workers,” said Pamela Passman, corporate vice president of Microsoft Global Corporate Affairs.

Microsoft tapped Washington state as the first state to provide Elevate America to its residents.

Developed in partnership with Oodle, which operates the largest network of classifieds services in the U.S., buyers can easily find the best deals with access to more than 40 million listings aggregated from more than 80,000 different sites. In addition, AOL Classifieds links consumers directly to classifieds listings on other properties within the AOL network including AOL Autos, AOL Jobs, AOL Personals, and AOL Real Estate.

AOL Classifieds also offers a compelling platform for sellers to promote their listings by leveraging the reach of Oodle’s extensive network of more than 250 partner sites. Posting ads on AOL Classifieds is free.

“With the current economic climate, providing consumers with an easy way to buy and sell merchandise and services, or make local connections through classifieds is becoming even more important,” said Chris Spanos, General Manager, AOL Local and Specialty Verticals. “AOL Classifieds is a trusted outlet that gives sellers an extensive marketplace to reach their audience and gives buyers access to millions of listings.”AOL Classifieds, http://classifieds.aol.com, is the latest addition to the growing AOL Local Network, which is one of the largest online local networks with a monthly reach of 54 million unduplicated unique visitors.*

In addition to the launch of AOL Classifieds in the U.S., a site for Canada, http://classifieds.aol.ca, is also available beginning today. An AOL Classifieds site for the UK will be launching later this week.

The Wall Street Journal-affiliated blog, citing several sources inside and outside the Internet company, said the shift could be pushed out a week or two or rolled out in pieces.

The blog cited a February 20 Bartz memo to employees, in which she said, “Get well-rested, because next week’s a biggie.”

Yahoo officials declined to comment.

Yahoo, the leading provider of online display advertising, has been under pressure for nearly a year as it held fruitless merger or partnership talks with Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and Time Warner Inc’s AOL.

During that time, Yahoo lost market share in search advertising, while display ad sales have been badly hit industrywide by the U.S. recession.

The reorganization is expected to include a set-up where executives like chief operating officer, chief technology officer and a new, more powerful chief marketing officer all report to Bartz, the blog said.

In addition, several sources suggested Bartz may abandon a recent restructuring that split the world into four operating regions, the blog said. Instead, one executive could head the United States and a second head up all international efforts.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, supporter of a bill that would require Internet user records to be saved for police.

The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.

“While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,” U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said at a press conference on Thursday.

“Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level.”

Joining Cornyn was Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said such a measure would let “law enforcement stay ahead of the criminals.”

Two bills have been introduced so far–S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Each of the companion bills is titled “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act,” or Internet Safety Act.

Each contains the same language: “A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”

Translated, the Internet Safety Act applies not just to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and so on–but also to the tens of millions of homes with Wi-Fi access points or wired routers that use the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary addresses. (That method is called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP.)

“Everyone has to keep such information,” says Albert Gidari, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm in Seattle who specializes in this area of electronic privacy law.

The legal definition of electronic communication service is “any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications.” The U.S. Justice Department’s position is that any service “that provides others with means of communicating electronically” qualifies.

That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too.

Under the Internet Safety Act, all of those would have to keep logs for at least two years. It “covers every employer that uses DHCP for its network,” Gidari said. “It covers Aircell on airplanes– hose little pico cells will have to store a lot of data for those in-the-air Internet users.”

In the Bush administration, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had called for a very similar proposal, saying that subscriber information and network data should be logged for two years.

Until Gonzales’ remarks in 2006, the Bush administration had generally opposed laws requiring data retention, saying it had “serious reservations” about them. But after the European Parliament approved such a requirement for Internet, telephone and VoIP providers, top administration officials began talking about the practice more favorably.

After Gonzales left the Justice Department, the political will for data retention legislation seemed to ebb for a time, but then FBI Director Robert Mueller resumed lobbying efforts last spring.

This tends to be a bipartisan sentiment: Attorney General Eric Holder, a Democrat, said in 1999 that “certain data must be retained by ISPs for reasonable periods of time so that it can be accessible to law enforcement.” Rep. John Conyers, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that FBI proposals for data retention legislation “would be most welcome.”

Smith, who sponsored the House version of the Internet Safety Act, had previously introduced a one-year requirement as part of a law-and-order agenda in 2007.

A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any “record” in their possession for 90 days “upon the request of a governmental entity.”

Because Internet addresses remain a relatively scarce commodity, ISPs tend to allocate them to customers from a pool based on whether a computer is in use at the time. (Two standard techniques used are the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet.)

In addition, Internet providers are required by another federal law to report child pornography sightings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is in turn charged with forwarding that report to the appropriate police agency.

The Internet Safety Act is broader than just data retention. Other portions add criminal penalties to other child pornography-related offenses, increase penalties for sexual exploitation of minors, and give the FBI an extra $30 million for the “Innocent Images National Initiative.”

The software let Gundotra browse and read e-mail even after he switched the phone into airplane mode, which shuts off the wireless network.

Offline applications can’t of course retrieve new data from the network, but they do synchronize when network access is restored. Meanwhile, it stores e-mail in a local database on the phone, even when online.

“You’ll note that it’s very, very fast because it’s using that local database,” Gundotra said. The application also showed a floating toolbar that was visible even as he scrolled through his inbox.

It’s significant for several reasons that Google is eyeing a new version of its Web-based Gmail application for the iPhone. For one thing, the company wants to bring to the iPhone all of Gmail’s features — search, labels, and conversations, for example — and Apple’s built-in mail application lacks those abilities.

But more broadly, the move is significant because it shows how Web-based applications can bypass the control particular companies such as Apple or Microsoft have over a computing technology.

Apple has achieved tremendous success with its App Store, which lets people download and buy software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. But it controls that conduit, and it only can deliver software written specifically for those devices.

Web applications run in a Web browser, and all smart phones have browsers — though of course hardware and network constraints typically mean they’re anemic compared to desktop versions.

In case this point about the power of Web applications was lost on observers, Gundotra showed the same Gmail software running on the HTC Magic, a new phone using Google’s Android operating system.

“You now have an ability to build an app that spans devices as long as that device implements the latest specifications of these modern HTML 5 Web browsers,” Gundotra said.

The mobile phone version of the Gmail software uses a somewhat different approach to enable offline access.

Where the desktop version uses a Google-developed open-source browser plug-in called Gears to enable offline support, the iPhone version uses the offline data storage standard of HTML 5, the gradually emerging overhaul of the language used to describe Web pages. That technology can cache the state of an application as well as data such as messages.

Of course, getting a modern, full-featured browser on a PC with plenty of memory is hard enough, and mobile browsers generally lag PC versions.

However, it should be noted that Safari on the iPhone, like the browser in Android, is based on the WebKit open-source project, and WebKit has been building in offline support. So at least on some higher-end phones, a Web-based version of offline Gmail could be an option sooner rather than later.

Available to the public on YouNoodle’s Web site (http://www.younoodle.com), the global directory of startups — which currently includes more than 25,000 companies and pulls in over 150,000 startup news stories every day — allows business owners, customers and investors to measure and track both the progress and news stories associated with any startup online. A YouNoodle Score has been given to every startup — a quantitative measurement, on a scale of 0 to 100, of a startup’s impact and importance based on its traction, activity, and buzz. YouNoodle Scores are updated in real time and the three-month trend for each company is available.

“This is the first time there’s been a scoring system for startups that has been calculated based on such an incredibly rich data set,” says Dr. Sean Gourley, Director of Data Tools at YouNoodle, who led the development of the mathematical algorithm behind the YouNoodle Score. “There is a large and complex stream of information about startups which we’ve spent the last 12 months categorizing and structuring — using the latest techniques from the fields of network theory and probabilistic modelling. This is the world’s largest real-time startup index — opening the window to the world’s most innovative companies and making information surrounding them available to all.”

Startups, investors and journalists can use startup pages and YouNoodle Scores to keep track of a company’s impact relative to other startups and see who is talking about the company online. Prestigious third-parties have also taken notice, with media properties such as Wired, the Daily Telegraph in the U.K., and Venturebeat already using the scores on their sites to highlight interesting and high-potential startups — and exposing them to over a million people every month.

YouNoodle draws data from partners including CrunchBase (the largest public wiki of technology company information) and AngelSoft (a platform for angel investment groups). YouNoodle is also able to utilize the unique information contained within its own community (through which company owners can add their own startups) and proprietary tracking system, which draws from thousands of media, blog, and social networks to find and track companies within the startup ecosystem.

“For the first time, the business community has a single, definitive source where it can monitor the valuable impact that any startup is having on technology, industry and culture,” says Bob Goodson, CEO and co-founder of YouNoodle. “Through YouNoodle and its partners our scores are being viewed by over a million people per month. With the release of YouNoodle Scores we’ve taken a big step towards opening up the critical information needed to dramatically improve resource allocation to high-potential companies. This movement is vital for the global economy, where small differences in the startup industry can have a disproportionately large effect on economic growth and output.”

The online directory and YouNoodle Scores complement the suite of tools YouNoodle is developing to nurture the startup community and help private companies succeed. In August 2008, YouNoodle announced the release of the Startup Predictor, a sophisticated evaluation tool that gauges the feasibility and promise of a company’s future based on data provided by entrepreneurs or company management. The free online tool estimates a company’s dollar value in the next three years.

Business owners and media can register for a free account at http://www.younoodle.com to begin using the online directory, and can learn more about YouNoodle Scores at http://www.younoodle.com/scores. YouNoodle’s own startup page (and current score) can be found here: http://www.younoodle.com/startups/younoodle.

Dubbed a “next generation” live game show website, www.ItsEasyToWin.com went live on October 11, 2008 and has already signed more than 35,000 members. The new site features weekly live game shows and has given away over $20,000 in cash prizes this past month.

The beauty of ItsEasyToWin is that “Consumers tune-in and can immediately win,” said Eric Friedberg who developed the technology to stream the live game show. Consumers have to register to play and registration is free on www.ItsEasyToWin.com. To play and win, online, registrants are randomly selected to come into a one-on-one live chat with the host.

According to Friedberg, “This is a true evolution of the internet and an example of where game shows are going. www.ItsEasyToWin.com allows consumers who enjoy viewing game shows to finally get the chance to participate live.”

ItsEasyToWin has seen tremendous growth in the last few weeks and is gearing up for the first ever online live game show of $25,000. One member will have the chance to win $25,000.

The live game show site offers numerous branding opportunities as the show easily and cost-effectively incorporates sponsors right into the game shows. Clients such as Tourism Aruba, Jollytime Popcorn, Modell’s Sporting Goods and Trigg Labs are already showcasing their products. “I was truly struck by the creation of www.ItsEasyToWin.com and I believe that Friedberg’s innate business savvy will continue to bring us more innovative ways to attract customers,” said Mitchell Modell of Modell’s Sporting Goods.

Of course one cannot smell or taste wines through a computer screen but Laurent Habrard has made tasting his wines available at the click of a mouse.

Anybody interested in his wines — Crozes-Hermitage, Hermitage, Saint-Joseph and rose wines from the Ardèche, Drôme and côtes du Rhône areas — can order samples on his site (http://www.domainehabrard.com).

These are sleek glass tubes of 60 ml (2.112 fl oz).

One tube costs 3.90 euros ($4.98) and a set of three 6.90 euros. But Habrard reimburses these costs when a taster turns into a buyer.

“It all started because of my deep wish to change our production methods so that my profession has a better relationship with the natural elements,” said Habrard who is the fifth generation of his family to make wines at the village of Gervans, situated roughly between Lyon and Valence.

Gervans is known for its Crozes-Hermitage wines, apricots and a water-power station in the Rhône river.

Habrard started turning the vineyards into an ecological project in 2008 and plans to have fully converted the methods of production by 2011.

That means conserving rain water, isolating the buildings for energy conservation, using wind and sun power as electricity sources and cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions.

The Domaine Habrard uses used oak barrels, natural cork, is careful about using chemicals and Habrard has connected the site to the municipal waste water treatment system.

“All of that has a cost that my company cannot afford in its current state — I have to sell more bottles and sell them via the channel that I have chosen; the Internet,” he said.

Cutting out the middlemen means reducing transport of bottles and therefore fewer CO2 emissions. Habrard uses the postal service for deliveries and Habrard says that because the post makes its daily journeys anyhow, the wine deliveries do not create much more CO2 emissions.

He says the taste tubes in a way reproduce the visits to his winery.

“People arrive, I greet them, we talk about the wines and the production, I offer some samples to taste and they do or do not buy some bottles,” he said.

The tubes were designed with help from the Arts et Métiers engineering school in Paris and the INRA agricultural research institute of Montpellier.

The tubes are filled in a vacuum and Habrard says that he and his oenologist (http://www.oenologist.org) have found no loss of the taste in the process.

The Cuban variant, called Nova, was introduced at a Havana computer conference on “technological sovereignty” and is central to the Cuban government’s desire to replace the Microsoft software running most of the island’s computers.

The government views the use of Microsoft systems, developed by U.S.-based Microsoft Corp, as a potential threat because it says U.S. security agencies have access to Microsoft codes.

Also, the long-standing U.S. trade embargo against the island makes it difficult for Cubans to get Microsoft software legally and to update it.

“Getting greater control over the informatic process is an important issue,” said Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes, who heads a commission pushing Cuba’s migration to free software.

Cuba, which is 90 miles from Florida, has been resisting U.S. domination in one form or another since Fidel Castro took over Cuba in a 1959 revolution.

Younger brother Raul Castro replaced the ailing 82-year-old leader last year, but the U.S.-Cuba conflict goes on, now in the world of software.

According to Hector Rodriguez, dean of the School of Free Software at Cuba’s University of Information Sciences, about 20 percent of computers in Cuba, where computer sales to the public began only last year, are currently using Linux.

Nova is Cuba’s own configuration of Linux and bundles various applications of the operating system.

Rodriguez said several government ministries and the Cuban university system have made the switch to Linux but there has been resistance from government companies concerned about its compatibility with their specialized applications.

“I would like to think that in five years our country will have more than 50 percent migrated (to Linux),” he said.

Unlike Microsoft, Linux is free and has open access that allows users to modify its code to fit their needs.

“Private software can have black holes and malicious codes that one doesn’t know about,” Rodriguez said. “That doesn’t happen with free software.”

Apart from security concerns, free software better suits Cuba’s world view, he said.

“The free software movement is closer to the ideology of the Cuban people, above all for the independence and sovereignty.”

Trackle today launched its new service for tracking everything you care about on the Web, all in one place. Offering the industry’s most comprehensive index of popularly tracked categories, Trackle keeps tabs on everything in your life, from local, to social to shopping. The service is built with advanced algorithms that provide a layer of intelligence to tracked results, so that people can immediately answer important questions about their information, such as “what’s new?” With Trackle, people can share like-interests with groups of friends via Twitter, SMS and email. The public beta is available now at http://www.trackle.com .

“The Web is still a walled-garden for personal information. Whether you’re going to YouTube for videos, iTunes for new albums, Facebook for new postings, ESPN for score updates or NBC/FOX for late night show guest lists — you’re visiting the same sites, often multiple times a day, just to find out what’s new,” said Pavan Nigam, founder and CEO of Trackle. “Trackle provides a simple way to track it all in a highly relevant and fun way.”

    Trackle goes beyond basic alert models or RSS feeds, to provide a more
intuitive selection of categories that help people track exactly what they're
interested in, as well as new things that they'd like to explore in the
future, or share with friends. For example, you can use Trackle to stay on top
of:
    *  Local information -- specific to your neighborhood or city
       *  Any new crime reported in your neighborhood recently
       *  Your home price fluctuations this month
       *  Low airfares from your city
    *  Social stuff -- relating to your friends and groups
       *  New job leads through your network on LinkedIn; matching your
          criteria such as "VP Marketing within 10 miles of my home"
       *  Birthdays and special occasions
       *  "You" or your family -- on the web and blogs
    *  Shopping -- and whatever is interesting to you
       *  New classifieds listings on Craigslist
       *  Sports scores and standings (during the game and after)
       *  Price drops on a Plasma TV
       *  New PG-13 Thrillers

How it Works: You can set up customized “Tracklets” for the categories you’re interested in. Every Tracklet can be personalized by entering appropriate information, (zip code for weather alert, actor name for upcoming movie releases, and product details for tracking price drops). These personalized searches run continuously in the background and generate alerts whenever a new match is found, and can be set up to provide automatic notifications over the Web, email or SMS when Trackle finds a match. Trackle also offers a convenient “preview” feature which can be used to refine your custom parameters before setting up a Tracklet for a new category.

You can easily lookup the Tracklets being used by any of your friends as long as they have marked them as ‘public’. In this way, Trackle promotes serendipitous discovery of new and interesting things for people or groups with similar interests.

Kenshoo Ltd. unveils an integrated cross channel negative keyword manager for KENSHOO SEARCH(TM). The new feature allows search marketers to quickly and easily use negative keywords to better optimize search campaigns, reach target customers, improve quality scores and boost ROI.

KENSHOO SEARCH is a third generation end-to-end SEM platform that delivers automation through a unified and easy to use interface allowing you to manage all cross channel activity easily and efficiently. Negative keywords are handled differently in each search engine however KENSHOO SEARCH automatically and seamlessly manages the differences.

Kenshoo’s unique Quality Management(TM) approach to SEM is a holistic methodology that automates and optimizes all moving parts of search campaigns in order to gain high quality scores and build relevancy. Search Engines reward advertisers for relevancy, and targeted campaigns achieve lower costs than broad and poorly defined ones. Negative keywords block specific ads from appearing and are utilized to prevent unwanted irrelevant traffic.

The negative keyword tool in KENSHOO SEARCH provides search marketers an easy way to create, add, and remove negative keywords at all levels and across all channels. In addition to increasing relevancy and enabling more accurate spend management, this tool significantly reduces the work and time needed to build and maintain complex negative keyword lists.

“Our commitment to Quality Management focuses our efforts on developing features which increase the overall value and effectiveness of search marketing. Users of the negative keyword tool are already seeing increased ROI – up to 60% – through cost reductions and improved targeting. By filtering out irrelevant traffic, their ads are being displayed more often on value-driving keywords that increase CTR and conversions.” Said Alon Sheafer - VP of Products and Marketing at Kenshoo.

Average improvements as a result of the cross channel negative keyword manager:

    - CTR increase by 40-80%
    - ROI increase by 20-60%
    - Conversion Rate increase by 30-50%
    - Profit increase by 30-50%

CafePress, one of the initial users of the negative keyword tool, has already experienced success. “We manage massive amounts of keywords, so it was critical that our campaign managers have a way to easily manage negative keywords. This feature not only delivers value by increasing our campaign quality but it also saves us countless hours of work by not having to copy and paste keywords into every part of the system. ” - Jeremy Post, Sr. Manager, Acquisition Marketing at CafePress.