Terry Widener has been selling newspaper ads for 35 years. But until last fall, Widener, a 53-year-old saleswoman at The Knoxville News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn., had never sold an Internet ad.

Then in a two-week sales “blitz” intended to test an innovative partnership between newspapers and Yahoo, she persuaded advertisers to buy $200,000 in online ads that ran on the paper’s Web site and on Yahoo. That represented about a seventh of the amount she typically sells in an entire year. (more…)

The iPhone is like the bacon-wrapped scallop of the mobile world. Both are quite visually pleasing relative to their peers, easy to use, and generally liked by the masses. Spend a little too much time with either, however, and you start to see the flaws. With the scallops, the grease and animal fat that was oh-so delicious on the way down begins to clog your arteries and slow your saunter. With the iPhone, the interface that seemed oh-so-polished when it first met your fingertips begins to show signs of oversight and imperfection. (more…)

Yahoo’s tab in its efforts to fight off Microsoft last year ran $79 million, according to the company’s filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. (more…)

After the overwhelming response to Windows 7 and requests for features from users, Microsoft has finally released the feature list of the Windows 7 Release Candidate. This release candidate of Windows 7 is expected to arrive on April 10, 2009, as per Ars Technica. (more…)

Microsoft has announced the Release Candidate for Windows Vista Service Pack 2. The second Vista Service Pack will be available publicly via TechNet next week. This update will add support for newer hardware and emerging standards states Brandon LeBlanc, Microsoft’s windows communications manager in a post on official Windows Team Blog. (more…)

Google has added its AdWords program to the company’s News searches in the US and quietly ditched its Adwords business pages for mobile ads service.

Mountain View confirmed that it is now delivering text ads on the right side of the search results page on its Google News site in much the same way as it has done for normal web search results. (more…)

Although the enthusiasts that are testing Windows 7 have been generally positive on the product itself, some feel Microsoft has been less than eager to receive constructive criticism.

The issue came to a head last month in regards to changes Microsoft was making to make its controversial user account control feature less annoying. While the company did eventually make some shifts to address security concerns raised by testers, for some, the notions has lingered that Microsoft just isn’t all that interested in user feedback. (more…)

Welcome to the future, Safari fans, because the Safari 4 beta just hit the download shelves and it’s ready to tear some things up in Tiger and Leopard and even Windows. The download requires the latest security patch (2009-01) but other than that you’re ready to ride. Guess what? Javascript is 4X faster! (more…)

Thousands of Twitter messages carrying the words “gmail” or “gfail” will teach you that Google’s free web-based e-mail platform is currently down around the world. A Google spokesperson told Pocket Lint that their engineers are working on it but have no clue why the errors are turning up. (more…)

Microsoft Corp has dropped an attempt to recoup some severance money from 25 recently fired workers it mistakenly overpaid.

The Redmond, Washington-based company, which announced a plan to cut up to 5,000 jobs in January, acknowledged on Sunday that it had tried to get the overpaid workers to return the extra money. But late on Monday, it reversed course. (more…)