Google kills radio ad service, may lay off 40

February 13, 2009 (IDG News Service) Google Inc. is abandoning its attempts to sell ads on broadcast radio, concentrating instead on its plans to make money from television advertising and online video sharing.

Google first tried to extend its Web-based ad-placement technology to the sale of audio advertising on broadcast radio in 2006 with its acquisition of radio sales network dMarc Broadcasting, but the business has not been a success. Now, as part of a broader plan to refocus on its most profitable and popular activities, it's pulling out of radio.

The company is looking for a buyer for Google Radio Automation, a business it set up to automate broadcast audio programming. And on May 31, it will close two services designed to automate the placement of audio ads, Google Audio Ads and AdSense for Audio, the company announced on its Google Traditional Media Ads blog. It expects to lay off 40 people as a result of the closure and move others to new posts.

In January, Google announced it would shut another traditional media sales division, Google Print Ads, at the end of this month. The service allowed Google AdSense users to place print ads in around 800 U.S. newspapers.

With its Audio Ads service, Google had hoped to make radio advertising more relevant to listeners and simplify radio ad sales.

Despite devoting substantial resources to the services, "we haven't had the impact we hoped for," Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management, wrote on the blog.

Without the tight link between advertiser and consumer that Google enjoys online, where it can track each page view and click, the company found it difficult to measure the impact of radio ads and make them relevant to listeners.

That explains its decision to focus instead on online streaming audio, where it can identify more precisely who is listening to what, and on TV advertising, where systems to measure audience response are more developed than those for radio. It launched its own system for selling and scheduling TV advertising in early 2007.

Google is also renewing its efforts to make money from online video, allowing users of its YouTube video-sharing service to download some clips rather than stream them, in some cases for a fee.

Mozilla delays Firefox 3.1 again

January 29, 2009 (Computerworld) Mozilla Corp. has delayed the third beta of Firefox 3.1 for the second time this month, a company executive said today, citing troublesome bugs in the browser's new JavaScript engine as the reason.

It's not yet clear if the latest delay will affect the delivery of Firefox 3.1's final, which Mozilla has said several times would appear this quarter. "I can't tell you that we're 100% confident that we will hit Q1," Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, said Thursday morning.

After a Firefox 3.1 status meeting yesterday, Mozilla noted that there are 18 bugs that still need fixing before it can move ahead with Beta 3. "At this time, we don't have a good estimate for when we'll be done," meeting notes read. "Many of the bugs are proving to be tricky and complicated to fully resolve."

Beltzner expanded on that theme. "The TraceMonkey team has 15 things that are priority 1 blockers," he said, referring to the JavaScript engine that Mozilla introduced last year in Firefox 3.1. A Priority 1 blocker is a bug that, if unfixed, would prevent the release of Beta 3.

Saying that TraceMonkey developers needed to "get a good handle on the problem," Beltzner said a revised schedule might be posted within a few days. "We'll check back with [the TraceMonkey team] in a couple of days, and see where they're at," he said.

There has been no talk of yanking TraceMonkey from Firefox 3.1, Beltzner said. "We really believe in the TraceMonkey engine," he confirmed. "It's twice as fast [at rendering JavaScript] as Firefox 3.0, and more than nine times faster than Firefox 2.0. People who are using the nightlies and Beta 2 just can't go back to the slower browsers," he said.

Mozilla has made much of TraceMonkey, and the performance boost it gives Firefox, since it introduced the new JavaScript engine last summer.

Firefox 3.1 has been pushed back several times. Two weeks ago, Mozilla announced that Beta 3 would ship on Feb. 2, a week later than previously scheduled. Last November, Mozilla inserted the third beta into its timetable to give more testing time to several features, including TraceMonkey.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, still the newest public release of the browser, debuted in early December 2008.

"The TraceMonkey bugs seem quite containable," said Beltzner. "They're the sort of instability bugs that don't affect a lot of people a lot of the time -- we're talking crashes that are affecting a small percentage of the Web [sites] -- but we don't want to crash on any."

Mozilla faces renewed pressure from Microsoft Corp., which is working on the next version of its Internet Explorer browser. On Monday, Microsoft issued IE8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1). According to Computerworld's tests, IE8 RC1, while still considerably slower than the current production version of Firefox, has closed much of the JavaScript performance gap that existed as recently as last month.