Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft today announced the acquisition of Israeli ad targeting firm, YaData. The company makes and sells analytic software to help Internet marketers segment audiences in greater detail for better ad targeting.

Microsoft today announced an agreement to acquire YaData Ltd., a provider of advanced tools for the discovery of unique customer segments. YaData’s technology will enable Microsoft to provide its advertisers with richer targeting capabilities so they can connect with their audience in more efficient and engaging ways, at the same time providing its customers more relevant and focused ads. The YaData team will join Microsoft’s Israel R&D center in Herzliya and YaData’s solutions will be deployed through Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group.

The price tag is rumored at $20-30 million. I offer my usual observation that better ad targeting inherently means less user privacy which may some day come home to roost at the hands of government regulators.

Today Microsoft is cranking up the hoopla for the 2008 refresh of their mainline server and tools products: Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. Visual Studio 2008 is already generally available and SQL Server 2008 won’t ship until 3Q, but some there is some claim to relevancy for the launch event beyond the marketing hype since Windows Server 2008 became generally available today.

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Today the European Competition Commission announced today that Microsoft owed them an additional € 899 million ($1.3 billion) for antitrust noncompliance through October 22, 2007 when they finally settled with the EU regulators:

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Last week Microsoft had a faux announcement for Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (for midsize companies) which are now classified as part of the Windows Essential Server Solutions family. Since they run on Windows Server 2008 and in some versions require SQL Server 2008, they won’t be out until later in the year after those products ship and can be integrated.

The current bill of materials is below and you’ll notice that there actually is some new news including Windows Live OneCare for Server (which adds more stretch marks to “Windows Live” branding) and integration with Office Live Small Business.

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Last week, Microsoft took the beta tag off their free Windows Live SkyDrive online storage service and raised the storage limit to 5GB. SkyDrive is now available to users in 38 countries. As I have observed previously, online storage services are hardly novel. If you would like even more free online storage, you can get 25 GB right now at MediaMax. Still, I suppose SkyDrive rounds out the Windows Live “user experience” and is miles ahead of Yahoo’s Briefcase which only offers 25 MB.