The social shopping community Wishpot recently announced the closing of a $1 million investment round (Series A). The round was led by Monster Venture Partners, along with Italian internet firm H-Farm and angel backer Adrian Hanauer, who had previously invested. Wishpot is a social shopping service that lets you collect and and share information about items you find online and in stores. By creating a common space in which users can browse, recommend products, get advice, and find new items they are interested in, Wishpot seeks to simplify shopping. Wishpot will launch outside the U.S. later in 2008. Wishpot was founded in 2006 in Seattle by veterans of Microsoft. Co-founder and CEO Max Ciccotosto was previously an Italy-based entrepreneur.

Europes leading business network, XING, is currently not available. No information found on the XING Blog so far but other blogger have noticed the downtime also within the last two hours. Even the Blog is very slow.

if anyone has futher information, please let us know.

Google´s market domination is staggering. Those guys attract far more search users and thus revenues than all its rivals (Yahoo!, MSN etc.) together.

Trends in search engine marketing tracked by the SEM report from eMarketer estimates that Google search accounts for as much as 75% in the US paid search advertising market in 2007. The Search Engine Marketing report tracks the trends that are driving the massive but still-growing search advertising market.

Second in the list is Yahoo!, accounting for a pathetic share of 9% share. Leaving behind others in the search engine market with a 16% maket share.
However, 16% is still big business. Assuming that as much as over $8.6 billion have been spent in search engine advertising in 2007, a 16% share accounts for almost $1.4 billion. According to predictions that search spending might doubble to $16.6 billion in 2011, even a small slice represents huge revenue.

Microsoft´s quick & dirty purchase offer towards Yahoo might indeed cause a kind of market consolidation in the search advertising market in the mid term.

Due to worries about Google´s market domination many in the online advertising business would favour a market consolidation. Hence it would be a smart move strenghtening its rivals and thus creating viable alternaties.

Amongst the top three market player in the US market, Google is outperforming Yahoo and MSN by far in terms of search advertising spendings in 2006 and 2007.


The search advertising business is slow but still growing and an indeed attractive bussiness according to Efficient Frontier.

Every increase in market share counts and the competion is fierce.- and there is still room for profitability improvements in terms of ROI and click through rates. eMarketer´s projections predict that in the US search and ad spendings might slow down in the years to come but are to remain the largest portion of the US Internet ad spending market.

Although eMarketer projects that US search ad spending growth will cool off through 2012 compared with recent years, search will remain the largest portion of the US paid ad spending market accounting up to a 40% share which will more or lesss remain stable over the coming years.