Earn more with your website
Google has introduced a new service called Ad Manager. It gives website publishers more control over their ad sales and ad serving. Google’s target users are SMBs. It’s a free service; there are no fees associated with Ad Manager. Google will, however, take a commission on revenue from ads it sells on your site.

Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management offering that can help sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all the directly sold and network-based inventory. It combines the direct sales team’s efforts with AdSense and ads placed from other ad networks and parses them through Ad Manager. It then selects and places the ads with the highest CPMs – cost per thousand impressions – into an open inventory on the site. According to Google, Ad Manager has a clear user interface and will help increase efficiency and productivity. It simplifies tagging because one has to tag the site only once. And it increases the reliability of inventory forecasting, which lets you always know what inventory is available to sell.
 

Energy boom in South Australia
South Australia could become the Saudi Arabia of the energy world with a cradle-to-grave uranium industry, a geology professor says. South Australia, home to the bulk of the world’s uranium deposits, is encouraging mining and exploration but does not want a nuclear industry. Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, Ian Plimer, said SA could do more than just export yellow cake – a term for the product produced during the processing of uranium ores. “Where we mine it, we convert it into yellow cake, we create the fuel rods, we lease these fuel rods to the major western countries that are wanting to use nuclear power. We take the fuel rods back, we clean them up and we dispose of the waste. That would make South Australia the Saudi Arabia of the energy world,” said Prof. Plimer.

In SA, 83 junior mining companies hold 339 exploration licences for uranium and many are gearing up to float on the Australian Stock Exchange. Uranium mining companies in South Australia may invest US$24 billion in as many as 30 projects and developments, including BHP Billiton Ltd.’s planned expansion of its Olympic Dam mine.
 

Alitalia, Air France-KLM merger
The US$1.1-billion takeover offer by Air France-KLM has been accepted by Alitalia, the struggling Italian national airline. The Air France-KLM offer values the airline at US$216 million, far less than expected, based on a share swap of 1 Air France share for every 160 Alitalia shares. The Franco-Dutch carrier also said it will pay US$946 million for convertible shares and will inject US$1.56 billion in capital once the deal is complete.

Air France is expected to have necessary government and regulatory approvals within the first half of 2008. It said it plans to relaunch Alitalia with an industrial and restructuring plan that will allow the Italian carrier “to rediscover the means of its development and to consolidate its status as a national leader.” Alitalia will maintain its national identity within the Air France-KLM group, the carrier said in a statement. The Franco-Dutch carrier said it expected to achieve operational profits in 2009. Alitalia has been losing US$1.56 million a day. The outgoing centre-left Italian government of Romano Prodi had been trying for more than a year to sell Alitalia.
 

Computers get faster
IBM scientists have made significant advance towards sending information inside a computer chip by using light pulses instead of electrons by building the world’s tiniest nanophotonic switch with a footprint about 100X smaller than the cross section of a human hair. The switch is an important building block to control the flow of information inside future chips and can significantly speed up the chip performance while using much less energy. This is an important step in the quest to develop next-generation high-performance multi-core computer chips which transmit information internally using pulses of light travelling through silicon instead of electrical signals on copper wires.

As many as 2,000 switches would fit side-by-side in an area of one square millimetre, easily meeting integration requirements for future multi-core processors. An important trend in the microelectronics industry is to increase the parallelism in computation by multi-threading, by building large-scale multi-chip systems and, more recently, by increasing the number of cores on a single chip. For example the IBM Cell processor which powers Sony’s PlayStation 3 gaming console consists of nine “brains,” or cores, on a single chip. As users continue to demand greater computing performance, chip designers plan to increase this number to tens or even hundreds of cores. It is envisioned that using light instead of wires, as much as 100 times more information can be sent between cores, while using 10 times less power and consequently generating less heat.

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