Bloomberg LP has confirmed it’s acquisition of Businessweek. Bloomberg will be paying $2 million to $5 million in cash.

“We are not buying BusinessWeek to gut it. We are buying it to build it” Bloomberg stated.

Businessweek.com has 20 million unique users and 100 million pageviews. It generates $60 million in revenue. It has not been decided what Bloomberg will do with the web operations.

Online video sites saw traffic soar by 41% in the month of August. Nielson Online just released figures to prove industry expectations correct.

The month-over-month growth for August was 2.40% and the year-over-year growth was 18.00% for unique web-video users.

Youtube was by far the industry leader, followed by Hulu, Yahoo, MSN/WindowsLive/Bing, and Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network respectively.

Italian regulators began an investigation into Google News after Italian newspaper publishers made a claim that their content was unfairly used to generate profit for the search giant. One argument the publishers claim is that having their content circulated within Google News is a forced contribution. The newspaper say that inclusion in Google’s news service hurts readership and the ability to generate revenue.

This investigation has now expanded into Google’s primary search business.

The Italian newspaper publishers have also expressed anger over their rankings in Google’s traditional search results. Italian Federation of Newspaper Editors alleged that any organization that refused to have content displayed in Google News Italy was immediately excluded from Google’s main search.

Youtube is the largest video website on the internet. Currently, Youtube is in the progress of negotiating a deal with Holly executives from Lionsgate Entertainment, Sony and Warner Brothers to offer full-length movies for rent on its site. Currently Youtube offers its content for free and makes an income from paid advertising–much in the same way as it’s owner does: Google. If negotiations are successful, Youtube would be directly competing against Netflix, Amazon and Apple for the paid, streaming media market.

Youtube is completely a dominant figure in the world of online video. In July of 2009 for example, nearly nine billion video clips were accessed through Youtube in the United States, which is about 10 times the amount of its closest competitor ( reported by ComScore ).

Investigative units of the National Advertising Review Council, Attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission are seeking to build more requirements for blogs to clearly differentiate between sponsored content and and regular content.

The Electronic Retailing Self-Regulation Program is an an investigative unit of the National Advertising Review Council for the e-commerce industry. The Electronic Retailing Self-Regulation programs are voluntary, but should the offending company refuse to comply then the complaints are forwarded to the Federal Trade Commission who will then potentially sue the offending company for violating guidelines.

The F.T.C. is close to updating its guidelines on endorsements and testimonials for the first time since 1980.

Apple and Google have created an unofficial agreement not to compete for each other’s employees. Supposedly no formal written agreement exists for the deal.

The Justice Department has looked into whether companies such as Apple and Google have violated antitrust laws by arranged the recruitment of each other’s workers.

Human capital is a prime resource for tech companies–perhaps the most important resource tech companies possess. That is why Microsoft sued Google in 2005 after it hired Kai-Fu Lee away from Microsoft.

Averatec N2700 is the missing link in the struggle for computer manufacturers and software companies to compete in a netbook world.

Averatec has created a full-featured notebook that weighs and costs only a tad more than a netbook. Averatec N2700 is a 12.1 inch laptop with a dual core Pentium processor, 4GB of RAM and toting a 250GB hard disk, along with an onboard DVD±RW drive. All this for a four-and-a-quarter-pound package total.

LegitScript.com reported that 89.7% of pharmaceutical category ads on Bing’s adCenter were from illegal pharmecies. Microsoft responded stating that the number of illegal ads was far lower than reported by LegitScript but admitted to the violations.

Microsoft adCenter has taken a number of security steps since to remove the bad entries, inlcuding: manually reviewing pharma-related keywords, investigating reports of hijacked and misused landing pages, documenting the process of how the illegal advertisers use the Bing/Microsoft ad system.

The multisearch extension to Firefox alpha 3 for Ubuntu Linux is being developed to help improve the default behavior of new tabs and  search capabilities. It was admitted by the company that there was one other purpose for the extension–to generate revenue by collecting user data unbeknownst to the user. The extension installs itself and offers no warning about potential privacy issues.

In order to get out of this, the user will have to disable the extension via the TOOLS > Add-ons menu.

Issues fixed in this extension:
1. Awesome bar does not do “feeling lucky” type search
2. The custom search results page is not aesthetically pleasing
3. The custom search page lacks useful functionality (images, videos, maps, etc…)
4. “Multisearch” is not a descriptive name
5. Search UI on New Tab pages is visual clutter, not useful
6. Currency conversions don’t work

Time Inc. announced that it will close Southern Accents magazine. South Accents is a lifestyle periodical that Time Inc. has published bi-monthly since 1985. The magazine’s online component will continue to operate.

Southern Living, Southern Accents had a circulation of 400,000, however in the past few months its advertising revenue had dropped 37 percent.