Finance Blog

Microsoft is launching its own online ad brokering service called adCenter.

Microsoft makes bid to take a bigger piece of a U.S. online advertising market estimated to be worth around $15 billion. AdCenter will be initially limited to paid search, but Microsoft envisions the service being a one-stop shop for online advertising across many of the company’s software platforms including Xbox games and mobile phones.

Microsoft’s stepping right into Google terriority of advertising (where pratically all their revenue comes from). However, Microsoft still has a long way to go as it only has about 11% of searches, compared to Google’s 49% and Yahoo’s 22%.

Microsoft has held discussions to buy a stake in Internet media company Yahoo to compete against Google, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wed.

The Microsoft vs Google battle is heating up, just recently Google complained about Microsoft browser and how IE7 will be integrating MSN search in their app.

Microsoft Reveals New Technologies, Including Internet Classified Service, Local Street Function

Microsoft launched their Live Expo service yesterday, it’s a new classifieds listings service where you can buy, sell or trade stuff, post jobs, services or announcements. Their hope is to compete against free classified service like Craiglist. They also hope to provide more personalized service, for example, narrowing down their search based on people from their work, a buddy list, and geographical location.

Another service they launched was the Local Street Feature for the Virtual Earth service. The new search function, dubbed “street view,” aims to give people a driver’s view of downtown Seattle and San Francisco, using pictures detailed enough to make out cars and people. Available in test form, it’s similar to Amazon.com Inc.’s A9 search engine, which provides detailed street-level views of certain cities.