Ad giant Publicis Groupe this morning confirmed an agreement to buy Microsoft’s Razorfish online advertising agency for $530 million, along with a five-year strategic alliance under which Publicis will buy display and search advertising from the Redmond company at "certain minimum guaranteed aggregate purchase levels."
Razorfish was part of Microsoft’s $6 billion deal for Seattle digital [...]

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A few weeks ago we reported on speculation about a split between Amazon.com and Target. Well, it turns out the two are headed for a divorce. Target this morning announced it will take the reins of its own ecommerce operation starting in 2011. That would be a big loss for Amazon’s ecommerce platform business, which [...]

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We’ve certainly seen our fair share of "down rounds" in recent months, venture capital deals in which the valuation comes in at a lower price point than previous rounds. That recalibration is certainly part of larger economic forces as VCs and entrepreneurs re-think the values they placed on startup companies from a year or two [...]

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David Pogue heads to the beach to "curl up with a good electronic book." In the video, The New York Times tech columnist points out that Barnes & Noble’s new electronic book store of 750,000 ebooks is not exactly what it seems.
Pogue also notes that Amazon.com still has a better selection of books you actually [...]

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The social network built around short text messages was shut down from about 6 a.m. to about 8:30 a.m. Thursday by an apparently deliberate automated deluge of messages that overwhelmed its system., more  and Web attack targeted Georgia blogger  The cyber attack that brought down Twitter for several hours Thursday was aimed at a single blogger [...]

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Murdoch says his news properties’ Web content will no longer be free. But what shape will payment models take, and who will follow suit?, more  and Betting on the Real-Time Web  No one knows how the microblogging site and similar online social networks will make money, but investors see a new Web revolution, more 

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The beleagured memory chip market won’t see an immediate pick-up from Microsoft’s launch, IDG News Service reports, more  and Lenovo Sales Recover, but Still Under Pressure  The Chinese PC maker is tripling its sales staff in India, where sales are growing, IDG News Service reports, more 
and Sirius XM Battles for Subscribers  The satellite radio company lost fewer [...]

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Microsoft’s hardware group this morning unveiled a prototype of a pressure-sensitive keyboard that can detect precisely how hard each key is being pressed.
The company describes the potential uses as "limitless," saying it has tested concepts including pressing a letter harder to get a capital letter or a larger font size, or hitting the delete key [...]

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Amazon is making progress getting the major college textbook publishers on board with its Kindle electronic reader. Today, McGraw-Hill Education said it will begin offering 100 higher education titles on the Kindle. McGraw-Hill joins the other major textbook publishers, Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley, which are already selling Kindle [...]

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Microsoft this afternoon released an update for Mac Office 2008 that the company says will fix a file-format problem encountered by users after the July 20 release of Service Pack 2 for the Mac Office suite. You can download the fix here.
Mac PowerPoint users originally brought the problem to our attention, saying that the previous [...]

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