News Roundup: Google’s $1 Billion Display Ad Biz and Translator Phone, AOL Is Close To Selling ICQ, Loopt’s Local Ads, Verizon Bans 4Chan, HTC Incredible, Riddim Ribbon, Nokia Class Action Lawsuit, TweetDeck Adds Flickr
Amit Chowdhry | Monday February 8, 2010 | 1,118 viewsToday is Monday February 8 and Super Bowl is now over with the Saints taking the win. Congratulations to everyone in New Orleans. It is a sad day for Peyton Manning and friends, but there’s always next year. Here is your Pulse2.com technology news round up.
Google’s $1 Billion Display Ad Biz and Translator Phone

This year, Google is expecting their display ads business to generate more than $1 billion. This is about 4% of their total sales this year. If $1 billion is achieved this year, this would be an increase of about 40% from the year before. [BusinessWeek]
Google is also rumored to be making software for a phone that would be capable of translating foreign languages on-the-fly. The software covers about 52 languages so far. [Times UK]
AOL Is Close To Selling ICQ

According to sources with AllThingsD, AOL is close to selling off ICQ for a price that is near $200 million. ICQ has about 40-50 million active users across the world with a major penetration in Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Israel. There is rumored to be about seven bids, four which are very serious. ICQ is based in Israel and has about 100 employees. ICQ is slightly profitable. [AllThingsD]
Loopt’s Local Ads

Loopt and Mobile Spinach have partnered to provide special offers and discounts for local businesses. As of right now the service is available in San Francisco and the company expects to roll out the service to other major cities in the near future. Loopt has about 3 million users. [MediaPost]
Verizon Bans 4Chan

4chan announced on Twitter that they have been “explicitly blocked” from Verizon. 4chan founder Christopher Poole attempted to reach Verizon to find out why they have been blocked, but Verizon was not able to give him a definitive answer as of yet. [ReadWriteWeb]
HTC Incredible

Above is a photo that was sent to PocketNow.com and it is believed to be the Verizon HTC Incredible. The phone uses Android 2.1 with HTC Sense and there is a Snapdragon CPU inside. The phone would come with 256MB of RAM and there is a 3.5-3.7″ WVGA screen. [PocketNow]
Riddim Ribbon

Tapulous has launched a new game called Riddim Ribbon. Tapulous decided that they wanted to move on beyond Tap Tap Revenge. The Riddim Ribbon game costs $2.99 and comes with several songs by The Black Eyed Peas. [Tapulous]
Nokia Class Action Lawsuit

A class action complaint has been made against Nokia alleging that the phone company had committed securities fraud. The complaint was filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. [PCWorld]
TweetDeck Adds Flickr

TweetDeck has created a new version of their desktop Adobe AIR-based software that allows you to view YouTube videos and add Flickr support within the software. The company has also increased the Twitter API requests for up to 350 API calls per hour. Posterous is also now supported. [Mashable]
Categorized under America Online, AOL, Flickr, Google, HTC, HTC Incredible, ICQ, Loopt, Mobile Spinach, Nokia, Posterous, Riddim Ribbon, Tapulous, TweetDeck, Verizon Wireless, YouTube
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