A week ago Adobe plunged deeper into Microsoft territory as it formally launched AIR, software which is meant to let applications run seamlessly outside the browser on both the Web and on disconnected PCs. This is a direct pitch to Microsoft’s core constituency: developers who have traditionally written for desktop machines but now want to tap into a hybrid Web/PC platform.

Here in Las Vegas today, Microsoft hit back. Its annual MIX conference has become an important venue for a group of people who have traditionally sat firmly in the Adobe camp: designers and creators of light-weight Web applications who do not fit the traditional Microsoft developer mold.

Leaving aside the always-awkward experience of watching Microsoft executives trying to look and sound hip in front of an audience like this, the technology on display looks pretty slick. The centrepieces are a new version of Silverlight, the Flash-type plug-in whose debut last year won Microsoft unexepected kudos among Web developers, and the first public demonstration of the IE8 browser.

The new browser (a beta version of which was released today to developers) shows that Microsoft, having fallen behind Mozilla’s Firefox in the innovation stakes, is trying to raise its game. New features should eventually make the Web easier to use. One, called “Activities,” will let users copy and paste parts of Web pages into each other, making it possible to access other Web services from inside a Web page. Another, “Webslices”, brings RSS feeds into the browser so that they can be combined more easily with other Web content (there’s a good description of how it all works here.)

IE8 also marks an important watershed for Microsoft. For the first time, the most widely-used browser on the Web will implement all the most common browser standards. Announcing this earlier in the week, Microsoft put it down to its new committment to interoperability, announced with great fanfare late last month. But as Mary Jo Foley and other bloggers have argued, this looks a bit disingenuous: in fact, unhappiness on the part of developers probably pushed Microsoft in this direction. Still, it represents something new, as even adversaries like Opera (whose complaint to the EC about Microsoft’s refusal to support standards in its browser is now under official investigation) have been forced to concede.

Mark Zuckerberg scored a coup on Tuesday by recruiting one of Google’s top stars to take the number two spot at Facebook, the fast-growing social network.

Among other things, Sheryl Sandberg’s appointment as Facebook COO will bring some adult supervision to a company that, for all the buzz and excitement,  manages every so often to remind the world that it is being run mainly by twenty-something computer geeks.

Sandberg, 38, graduated near the top of her class from Harvard College and Harvard Business School before serving as chief of staff to US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers during the Clinton administration. She joined Google in 2001, where she was responsible for developing the search giant’s wildly successful ad sales programmes. She also played an important role in launching Google.org, the internet group’s philanthropic arm.

Having captured the attention of millions of internet users, Facebook’s biggest challenge over the next year will be to deliver its own equivalent of AdWords - a technology capable of turning all those eyeballs into a reliable revenue stream.

Facebook tried to do just that last year with the launch of several new ’social’ ad technologies, including Beacon, a messaging service that broadcasts purchases made by users on outside web sites to their Facebook friends.  Mr Zuckerberg hailed the new technologies as a once-in-a-hundred-years innovation in advertising, only to see them overshadowed by a user revolt over privacy.

With Ms Sandberg on board, Facebook has an opportunity to move beyond this somewhat ham-fisted attempt and find a sustainable revenue model that takes advantage of the social connections between the site’s millions of users. There is no doubt that the raw materials are there. It may just take an experienced hand like Ms Sandberg to make things fall in line.

The creators of Pleo the dinosaur are declining to issue any sales data for their robot, which went on sale three months ago, but they have released its first software update today.
Ugobe has enjoyed plenty of good press and reviews for its innovative creature, including this article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, which shows grown-ups and the elderly can be fans.
However, at $349, it is a pricey toy and my children soon got bored with it when we were loaned a review Pleo. It didn’t do enough stuff, they said.
Ugobe seems to have addressed this criticism in its update. It says Pleo can now be more animated, interactive and expressive through a wider range of responses, motions and sounds.
Pleo will explore its environment a lot more and has been retrained to see objects better and navigate around them. If you can afford two Pleos, they should now be able to sing a duet.
While Pleo represents major advances in robotics, only 8,000 people are signed up to PleoWorld, Pleo’s online community, suggesting this is only a niche product at present, unlike its mass-market forebear, the Furby.

As we suspected, people are clicking on fewer Google ads because there are fewer of them to click on.

ComScore statistics that clicks on paid-ads fell 0.3 per cent year-on-year in the US in January caused a run on Tuesday on the internet company’s shares, which are down by almost a third this year.

But in a blog note on Friday, ComScore said a careful analysis of its data did not directly support the two concerns driving down the shares, which were:

1) a potentially weak first quarter outlook for Google, and 2) an indication that a soft U.S. economy is beginning to drag down the online advertising market.

ComScore says the evidence suggests that softness in Google’s paid click metrics is “primarily a result of Google’s own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings and, therefore, the opportunity for paid clicks to occur.”

The key paragraph:

“It is common knowledge in the industry that Google has been targeting what it deems to be low quality ads. It has introduced a ‘quality score’ that it uses to prioritize placement of ads or to decide to suppress an ad altogether. A suppressed, or ‘non active’ ad, can be reinstated by raising the bid above a quality-based minimum bid. In addition, the real estate available for ads is being reduced, squeezing the supply of available spots to bid on. The reduced supply, as well as the higher minimum bids, contributes to an increase in the price per paid click, which is what helps counteract the slowdown in the absolute number of paid clicks. Therefore, Google’s revenue will not necessarily suffer from this.”

So, panic over apparently. Even the former analyst Henry Blodget, who originally described the figures as a “disaster” and “shockingly bad”, says he’s come to agree that quality control was a factor in the fall-off in clicks.