CNN.com

Google this week un­veiled its Chrome Web Store, which does for the web what Apple’s App Store did for mo­bile de­vices: It pro­vides a place to ex­plore and “in­stall” web-based ap­pli­ca­tions. The launch was an­nounced alongside a new net­book run­ning Chrome OS, Google’s browser-cen­tric op­er­at­ing sys­tem. And the Web Store is part of Chrome, Google’s su­per-fast web browser. Except that many Chrome apps can run in other browsers, since they’re ac­tu­al­ly just web­sites. Oh, and don’t mis­take apps for (...)

Groupon, the fastest-grow­ing web com­pa­ny on the plan­et, re­port­ed­ly turned down a $6 bil­lion buy­out of­fer from Google late last week. Sounds crazy, right? For most two-year-old com­pa­nies, the idea of get­ting a $6 bil­lion of­fer -- nev­er mind turn­ing it down -- is a wild dream. Especially for an idea like Groupon that seems so sim­ple: Daily money-sav­ing coupon of­fers for lo­cal busi­ness­es, de­liv­ered by e-mail and over the web (A $50 cred­it to the Gap on sale for $25, for ex­am­ple). So it's (...)

Facebook is invit­ing the press to a spe­cial event Monday, lead­ing some to spec­u­late that the com­pa­ny is set to over­haul its Messages pro­duct. The ba­sis for the spec­u­la­tion? The in­vite promi­nent­ly dis­plays Facebook’s in­box lo­go. With some ad­di­tion­al fea­tures, Facebook may even com­pete with your cur­rent e-mail provider, the the­o­ry goes. Let’s imag­ine that Facebook’s long-ru­mored over­haul of its Messages pro­duct does tran­spire, ei­ther at this event or in the fu­ture: Could it pose a threat to (...)

So you are prob­a­bly read­ing this post ti­tle think­ing that this is too good to be true. Well it’s not! And I will prove it… Back in March of 2009, I came across a reg­u­lar column on CNN: Small Business, called Website Remedies. This column “en­lists Web mar­ket­ing and search-engine op­ti­miza­tion spe­cial­ists to an­a­lyze small-busi­ness Web sites in need of an over­haul.” After read­ing one of the ar­ti­cles, I no­ticed some­thing that caught my at­ten­tion and re­al­ly got me ex­cit­ed. At the end of the (...)

CNN.com post­ed some pret­ty good traf­fic num­bers last night, thanks to the midterm elec­tions. How good? Like Michael Jackson dy­ing good. The news site post­ed its best traf­fic num­bers since the King of Pop's memo­ri­al ser­vice, way back in July of last year. The site pulled in 80 mil­lion page views--10 per­cent high­er than what it pulled in when news of the trapped Chilean min­ers first broke. The site al­so saw a 400 per­cent in­crease in video plays over the week be­fore. Mobile views were up (...)

Most agen­cies and big mar­keters still think of dig­i­tal ad­ver­tis­ing as a “cheap­er” medi­um that’s best suit­ed for di­rect-re­spon­se ads, rather than brand­ing cam­paigns. For the lat­ter, they still prefer news­pa­pers and TV. The Online Publishers Association, along with the Interactive Advertising Bureau, has been try­ing to change that per­cep­tion the last few years by pro­mot­ing a series of larg­er ad for­mats, like page takeovers. While the larg­er can­vas has im­proved the cre­ative qual­i­ty of on­line ads (...)