As there are so many movements about internet companies, as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have all acquired their Internet Advertising Agents. Nearly the whole internet advertising industry has been eaten in last month after Yahoo bought RightMedia for $680m, Google bought DoubleClick (a major client of Yahoo) for $3.1bn, Microsoft bought Aquantive for even higher $6bn and leading advertising group WPP bought 24/7 RealMedia for $649m.

After Microsoft paid $6bn for Aquantive, it is quite sure it would rather to build its own cheaper version of Yahoo than acquiring it for $50bn. I have not heard Microsoft has any advance advertising platform, maybe Aquantive could be the puzzle for its jigsaw. MSN messenger has given Microsoft an advantage for advertising channel and also user acquisition. However, as a portal and as a search engine, it is still far behind Yahoo and Google respectively.

Microsoft has also been working hard to catch up with Google in the internet world. Last few days, I read news about its launch of its own version of Google Earth, Microsoft Live Search Map, (http://maps.live.com/), for which you can have a 3D bird view of the major cities in US. Hmm… nice, but I have seen that in Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/).

Today, from internet, I read a new development from Google, which is a street view, and this time, I don’t need to install a standalone application on PC to have this great experience. Then I played for a while and walked on the street in New York, That’s cool, and its application is huge. Imagine if you see where you are exactly on mobile, and you will walk and see with the map (as I am a mobile person). That’s so nice~

(http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=new+york&ie=UTF8&om=1&layer=c&cbll=40.757279,-73.985787&cbp=1,218.61,0.5,0&ll=40.763089,-73.986053&spn=0.020673,0.039911&t=h&z=15)

However, since it is still beta, you have to make sure your PC is powerful enough to play with it. As even I am in office, which is also an ADSL company with tremendous bandwidth on internet, I experienced crashes on browser. :S

People said Google may go to the down cycle; however, maybe it is just at its early days. Hope they will cover Tokyo soon, so I won’t be lost in translation…

Cheers,

Eric