Glam Media has acquired AdaptiveAds, a startup based in Mumbai, India that serves display ads targetable by the demographic characteristics brand advertisers understand (such as “Women 24-40, Fashionista, Beauty”). It calls its contextual display ads BrandWords. They will now be called Glam AdaptAds.

In addition to the ad targeting, AdaptiveAds brings a self-serve ad server for ad agencies, as well as “brand engagement” tracking and reporting tools.

The purchase price was not disclosed, but AdaptiveAd was shopping around a series B round with a valuation in the $25 million to $40 million range when Glam entered the picture and snapped them up. The three-year old company raised $2 million in late 2007, and then another $1.5 million in a series A, for a total of $3.5 million. Draper Fisher Jurvetson is an investor in both AdaptiveAds and Glam Media.

Glam Media sites and its affiliate network collectively saw the second-fastest audience growth last year among comScore’s top 100 Web properties. It was also the ninth largest publisher of display ads, serving up an estimated 2.1 billion ad impressions per month.

With the acquisition, Glam will be keeping 20 employees, bringing its total up to 200. This comes after layoffs and other recent cutbacks. Also, in an effort to conserve cash, Glam has slowed down payments to its partner publishing sites.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Does the little blue icon pictured here represent the next huge Google product - the long-rumored “GDrive”? Maybe. Google Operating System has uncovered some more clues that lead them to believe a storage solution that syncs files on your computer with Google’s massive infrastructure is on the way.

In addition to the icon, discovered in a Google Apps CSS file, there is reportedly an update for Google Docs on the way that would include a desktop client for syncing files with GDrive. Docs would seem to be a natural home for a Google storage solution – it already offers support for lots of different common file types, and can more or less serve as an online backup, without the sync features of a desktop solution like Mozy.

If Google is indeed launching a storage solution for consumers, it’ll be interesting to see how it’s marketed and priced. Will it compete directly as a standalone product versus the dozens of other services that offer online backup on a subscription basis? Or will it be used as a way to lure more customers into Google Apps, in turn improving Google’s penetration within the enterprise? A hybrid model perhaps?

Whatever Google decides to do, the prospect of a storage solution is intriguing, which is why every new hint of the GDrive is big news. While some will no doubt raise questions over how much information they want one company to have, when it comes to storage, there are few companies I’d trust as much as Google to keep my data safe, and to be there for the long-haul.

—
Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:

GDrive for Google Apps Closer to Reality?
“Googley Blues” Video: What Happened to Gdrive?
GoogleDrive.com: Future Home of GDrive?
GDrive is Here; This Time We’re Not Kidding…
Google Closes Curtains on Paid Video Services
The Daily Poll: Would You Store Your Files with Google?
Google Reader Video Leaked?

A tipster is hearing from inside the Googleplex that the company, which is set to report earnings today, could lay off 5 percent of its engineering staff.

Google is preparing to announce its earnings as soon as markets close today. The search giant just had its first real layoffs last week, with 100 recruiters given the axe. (Previously, the company had only laid people off to consolidate jobs after an acquisition.) The company also closed some satellite engineering offices, but officials said the company would try to place those engineers elsewhere. If the layoffs are happening, there may not be seats for them.

That’s hardly the worst of the news, if the rumor’s true. Google has approximately 6,000 engineers; a 5 percent cut, 300 people, would barely be felt by the organization. But before Google lays off any engineers, it will surely slash payrolls in other departments — which means the total could well exceed 1,000. (A Google spokeman, Jon Murchinson, did not immediately return a phone call or email.)

The layoff may not happen. But the fear in the Googleplex is well-founded. It’s not that Google is bleeding money; Wall Street is expecting it to report 2008 revenues of $15.8 billion, with still-handsome profit margins. And it may even surprise analysts with better-than-expected numbers. But the economy is parlous, and Google is simply not growing like it did in the first years after its 2004 IPO. Google’s headcount has nearly doubled in size to 20,100 in two years. And we hear that Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who set out to recreate at the Googleplex the academic environment they knew at Stanford University, are growing increasingly disenchanted with how soft and spoiled Google’s engineers have become.

Before Google let go many of its 10,000 contractors last fall, they were doing much of the company’s gruntwork. For the first time, many Google engineers are finding they have to do serious, boring work that actually contributes to the company’s bottom line, rather than pursuing fanciful ideas of Googly new products. To the extent that they fit the caricacture of a Google engineer, many may whine — in which case, they may well find themselves unburdened of the work, and the paycheck that came with it.

Fired employees often say impolite things. But only at Microsoft are their pink slips unprintable. The software giant fired 1,400 people this week — some with specially encoded, read-only email.

A tipster who saw one of the notices says the email had DRM restrictions — similar to the ones that prevent the copying of music files — that prevented it from being forwarded or printed, and instructed the fired employees to pack up their things and go home, where their severance package would be mailed. As the tipster put it: “No meeting with their boss. No meeting with HR. Nada.”

It’s a bit surprising that no one has raised a stink about Microsoft’s email firings. Two years ago, when RadioShack laid off 400 people by email, it became a nationwide story. Perhaps Microsoft employees are more accustomed to doing business electronically. And give Microsoft HR some credit: Sparing the newly jobless an awkward, canned speech might actually be a blessing.

Update: Amusingly sarcastic Microsoft hyperflack Frank Shaw writes in a non-self-destructing series of emails:

Not accurate at all.

The company went to great efforts to notify people in person, with dignity and respect. It would have involved an email to supplement a discussion only in cases where people were remote.

And maybe nobody raised a stink because it’s not true, eh?

Our source witnessed the unprintable pink slip firsthand.

(Artist’s rendition of Microsoft email by Owen Thomas, using Microsoft Entourage, an actual Microsoft product)

By any standard, Internet Explorer remains the planet’s dominant Web browser. Even after serious shrinkage over the past few years, estimates of its market share range from around 70 percent to 80 percent, a figure that just about any player in any business would happily take. Yet IE is a beleaguered giant. It’s got companies [...]

The internet giant teams up with academic researchers working on tools for end users to test their broadband connections for traffic-shaping. Google launched three such tools Wednesday, including one that specifically sniffs for BitTorrent throttling.

Developers working on the Windows 7 project have expanded on the changes they’ve made to Paint and Wordpad, and promised not to leave the next update for so long.

Windows 7 brings an extensive refresh to the basic applications, which have been included with Windows operating systems for years.

“As you get to try out these applications you’ll see that while showcasing the Windows 7 platform innovations, we have also added some commonly requested features and functionality,” reads the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

“Some of them are: check and correct, calculation modes and templates in Calculator; new brushes, shapes and multi-touch support in Paint; Open standards support in Wordpad and Ink; and text, taskbar and search integration in Sticky notes.

“Maybe we won’t wait 10 years to update these again :-)”

Ribbon

Most prevalent for users is the integration of the Ribbon interface that’s become a feature of Microsoft Office, providing what Microsoft terms: “a rich, graphical user interface for all commands in a single place, without the need to expose various functions and commands under different menus or toolbars.”

“The Ribbon UI is direct and self-explanatory, and has a labelled grouping of logically related commands. While using an application that is built on the Ribbon UI platform, the user only needs to focus on his workflow and the context of his task, rather than worry about where a particular function is located or accessible.”

Windows 7 is already attracting a positive press, with the general consensus that it manages to be everything that Windows Vista should have been and more.

The new apps are already being tested by people who are signed up to the Windows 7 Beta, and TechRadar is already coating our collective desktops with colourful Post-its and drawing each other in a far more functional version of Paint.

Amazon.com is holding a press conference at the Morgan Library in New York on February 9th–and the New York Times’ Brad Stone is reporting that it will serve as the launchpad for the second-generation version of the Kindle e-book reader. Brad also says that the new version will likely use the improved, zippier version of [...]

Back in August, I showed you how to backup your mobile contacts and sync events to iCal using Address Book and iSync. Personally, I find it easier to edit contact information in Address Book then sync it over rather than filling in the fields on the phone. One field in particular is very prominent: the contact’s picture.

It’s nice to have a picture of the person who is calling or whom you’re dialing. It adds a more personal touch. But it’s quite a lot of work to manually search for pictures of your friends and adding them to their contact information. The easier method would be to let your Mac do the work for you.

Who doesn’t have a Facebook account? I’m guessing that you would surely have added most of your friends on Facebook by now. Provided that your contacts’ information in Address Book are accurate (First name, Last name), I will show you how you can add Facebook profile pictures to your contacts - the easier way to manage contacts’ pictures.

Using AddressBookSync, you can search through all of your Facebook friends and find those who you have in Address Book and sync their profile pictures over. Here’s how to do it.

Firstly, download and copy AddressBookSync over to your Application folder and launch it. On initial launch, it will ask you to log in to your Facebook account and approve the application.

Once you’ve done that, it will search through your friends in Facebook and generate a list of matches i.e. the same contacts you have in Address Book. Here’s why you need to properly fill in the contacts’ first and last name. AddressBookSync depends solely on the names to find matches. That said, it is actually pretty smart. Names like Richard and Robert are also matched to Dick and Bob. It will match common short names automatically.

To further narrow or in this case, expand the matches - you can choose to match using only the last name. Now, the application will go through the friends you have in Facebook and it will ask you if the last names between a match corresponds with each other.

After the list of matches is generated, you can go through them individually to check if the profile picture is properly aligned. If it isn’t, all you need to do is double-click the picture to bring up the picture editor. With that, you can pan and zoom the picture until it is corrected. It’s worth noting that AddressBookSync grabs the highest resolution profile picture from Facebook. This is very useful for iPhone users.

If you’re an iPhone user, you will cringe when I tell you that if Address Book manages/edits the contact picture, only a thumbnail will appear when that contact calls you. But because AddressBookSync grabbed the highest resolution picture and synced it over to your iPhone, all you need to do is to ‘Edit Photo’ in your contact information to expand that picture to full-screen and save. There’s no workaround for this, unfortunately.

Besides profile pictures, this application will also sync your friend’s birthdays if they added it in Facebook. After syncing them into Address Book, you can use this workflow I created a while back which will send you weekly notifications if a birthday is coming up and automatically set alarms for them using iCal.

AddressBookSync will only work on Mac OS X 10.4 and higher. And as all things on MakeUseOf, it’s free. Let me know how it works out for you. Lastly, remember that in order to make the best out of this application, you will need to organize your contact information so that it matches your friends’ names on Facebook properly.

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Categorized under: address book, avatar, contacts, Facebook, friends, iphone, Mac, os x, profile picture, sync

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There are many websites out there that teach you how to optimize your WordPress blog for faster response times and prepare it for the Digg effect. Today, I will spare you the details and will not go through all those things again. Instead, I am going to recommend to you a WordPress plugin that can quickly and easily optimize your site and improve your blog’s response time without too much effort on your side.

PHP Speedy is a WordPress plugin that cleans up and compresses your code so that it can load faster. There are few technical configurations that you need to make, but it is definitely manageable, even when you don’t have any coding knowledge

The details…

There are many factors that can cause your WordPress blog to slow down. One of them is having too many javascript and CSS files in your site that choke up your bandwidth. This often happens when you installed too many plugins, or placed too many advertisements on your site. The more javascript/CSS files you have, the more HTTP requests that your site has to make and the longer it take for the page to load.

What PHP Speedy does is:

• Consolidates all the javascript and CSS and combines them all into two files, one for the javascript code and another for CSS (only applies for those files listed in the <head> tag). This includes all the javascript and CSS file introduced by any of the other plugins.
• Minifies and compresses the combined file and saves it to the cache.
• Removes all the javascript and CSS link in the <head> tag and serves the combined file from the cache to the readers.

With PHP Speedy, your site now makes less HTTP requests and serve a smaller compressed version of the file to your reader. I have used it on my site together with the SuperCache plugin. The result has been impressive. I am able to shave three seconds off the loading time, and that is a whopping 40% improvement.

Installing and configuring PHP Speedy

The PHP Speedy plugin is not found in the WordPress plugins repository, so you have to download it from the developer’s site.

Install the plugin just like any other plugins.

On the plugin setting page, there are several options that you can configure.

Javascript libraries

This is the part where it lists down all the Javascript libraries used by the WordPress software. Although it is unchecked by default, it is wise to check them all and let PHP Speedy handle them.

Ignore list

If you have javascript or CSS files that you don’t want PHP Speedy to handle, here is where you list them all down.

Minify Options

This is the part where you specify whether PHP Speedy should minify your file. As before, it is better to choose Yes for all.

Compression

I would strongly recommend you to use the htaccess or the WP-SuperCache plugin to activate the compression function for your server.

Expires header

The Expires header informs the server that the content is still fresh and the clients (browsers) should load the files directly from the cache. There is no need to retrieve the files again from the database.

Some limitations

While PHP Speedy is very useful, there are some issues that it cannot solve:

• If you are using external javascript of CSS files, there is no way that PHP Speedy can handle them.
• It does not support javascripts that use the document.write feature. In such cases, it is better to include that particular javascript in the ignore list.
• PHP Speedy only sets the expiration for your CSS and JS files. It doesn’t (yet) handle the images, which would further reduce the site’s loading time.
• If you are using @import syntax in your CSS file, PHP Speedy won’t be able to support it.

If you can live with the above limitations, then I am sure PHP Speedy will be very handy to you.

What other plugins do you use to improve the performance of your WordPress blog?

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Categorized under: blogging, digg effect, optimization, php, wordpress, wordpress plugins

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