News Corp.. (NYSE: NWS) Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch celebrates his 79th birthday with a cameo on his own Fox Business Network. Among the topics ... the newspaper ad model not dead yet (if we were Gawker we’d have to follow that with “neither am I”); iPad will attract more…

This is the TV ad Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) hopes will give its search engine a fighting chance against Google. Made by WPP’s JWT, the “Bing and Decide” campaign will run for three months on UK commercial TV and web.

Here’s why Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is advertising Bing on UK TV: it’s barely making the tiniest dent in Google’s search leadership. Though Google (NSDQ: GOOG) piled on eight tenths of the 617 million additional searches Brits made since Bing launched in June, Bing took just four percent of them, according…

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) may have lost its exclusive search deal with T-Mobile USA, but it is banking on a major reorganization to help recharge the company’s mobile efforts. The changes, which involves breaking up the mobile group and redeploying those employees across the company’s individual product groups, is the result…

Mitch Lazar, Yahoo’s European Mobile managing director, is stepping down from his post after working at the company for four and a half years. Lazar marks one of many recent departures from Yahoo’s mobile group. Over the past year-or-so, departures range from all the way at the top, like Marco…

The long and rough road is still a long way to go, but they’ve at least started on it: Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Yahoo have received clearance for their search agreement, “without restrictions,” from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission, and will now focus on starting…

Is Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) turning to “research” in its pitch to paywall-happy news publishers? MSN UK content manager Alastair Bruce has published a 60-slide personal presentation on the topic (via J.co.uk) that nicely surveys 30 paid content sites - and then concludes: our search engine will protect your upcoming charging…

The race to buy IM service ICQ from AOL (NYSE: AOL) is heating up. Last week came the news about some possible buyers: Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies, which has investment in Facebook and Zynga; South African media giant Naspers, which holds a 30 percent stake in China’s Tencent;…

—Web drama: How much money is there in original web drama video commissions? Broadcasters and sites spent £4 million on the shows last year, according to Content Economics Research - a total of £30 million across Europe and the U.S., rising to £90 million by 2012. But U.S. budgets per…

A Russian search engine is going after Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and others it says are breaching its patent on a search technique. Quintura has been operating a visual search engine interface, which shows results in a relational, contextual cloud format, since 2005 and was last year awarded the latest of…

Under pressure from European regulators, Microsoft’s Bing is finally cutting the amount of time it stores some user search data. The company says it will now store user IP addresses for six months, instead of 18. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) had initially said more than a year ago that it would…

*Time* for Rupert Murdoch to mobilise the lobbyists? Search engines would be exempted in UK law from any liability for copyright infringement, under a remarkable amendment (292) proposed to the Digital Economy Bill. Conservative Lord Lucas is proposing a specific new clause so that… “Every provider of a publicly accessible…

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) wants a bigger piece of the Russian search market. Beginning in January, the company will become the default search engine on top Russian portal Mail.ru, according to a statement Mail.Ru put out today (Via TechCrunch). The statement confirmed rumors of an agreement, which first surfaced earlier this…

Having been thwarted by government antitrust authorities in its bid to invest in Russia last year, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is trying a different approach by signing a search deal with the country’s leading search and email company, Mail.ru, according to Yakov at Quintura, citing sources. We have approached Google for…

The Mirror’s associate editor urged the news business to rely less on search engines and more on its journalism, in a World Newspaper Congress World Editors Forum keynote in Hyderabad, India. Matt Kelly, who first began his public crusade this summer on paidContent:UK, said: “In our great frantic headlong rush…

News International’s exit from the online property search market continues apace. After selling PropertyFinder, of which it owned half, to Zoopla this summer, it’s now selling back its 50 percent stake in Globrix to its founders. The amount isn’t being disclosed. CEO Dan Lee writes: “We are delighted we have…

—SeeSaw: Arqiva has hired former Channel 4 business development manager Matt Rennie as the commercial head of its forthcoming consumer VOD portal. Rennie has held senior commercial positions at Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) and Music Choice and will now hire his own commercial team for SeeSaw. SeeSaw this debuted its…

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) continues to push ahead with mobile search distribution deals, despite its search agreement with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). The latest example: The company has displaced Google to become the default search provider for German mobile operator O2 Germany; O2 will also integrate Yahoo properties into its mobile portal.…

The Google (NSDQ: GOOG) juggernaut steams on. In the US, today’s launch of Motorola’s Droid phone, the first Android phone for the country’s largest carrier Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) dominated tech news. In Europe, France Telecom’s wireless carrier Orange announced that it has partnered up with Google to give its…