During the ongoing Paris Motor Show, French mobile network provider Orange has sparked interest among mobile Web users by mentioning that it has teamed up with Toyota to release an Internet modem intended to be used in the car, FranceMobiles.com reported Thursday.

The modem, named Flybox, will be available on demand in the Toyota Avensis and the Lancia Delta models starting in early 2009.

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Beginning in January, magazine publishers in the United Kingdom will have the opportunity to publish official online figures at the same time they publish their daily and monthly print circulation figures for six month periods, Press Gazette reported Thursday. Currently, regional newspaper publishers only have this option.

The UK Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) announced that magazine publishers would also have the chance to obtain additional information upon request and would be provided with visual content depicting publications’ Web activity.

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Mobile broadband access revenues are growing in Europe, according to data from Exane BNP Paribas, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2008 reported.

Mobile broadband access revenues in Europe only totalled less than €2.5 billion in 2006. However, it those revenues are expected to increase steadily throughout 2010.

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The deadline to submit applications for the Knight News Challenge, a U.S.-based foundation that gives away US$5 million a year for grants in digital, open-source innovation, is November 1.

Applicants must use or create a digital, open-source technology as their code base, the project should serve the public interest and it should benefit one or more specific geographic communities.

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Russian financial daily Vedomosti announced that it will be published in a larger format as of this week and would include 20 new sections, Gipp.ru reported Thursday.

The move is a response to the growing interest towards news and analysis regarding the global financial crisis. According to Vedomosti, subscriptions in the last two months have risen.

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Social networking site Bebo has sent messages and multimedia content from 501 of its members into outer space, Metro.co.uk reported Thursday. Regular users and famous personalities, such as UK’s Radio One DJ Scott Mills, got a chance to broadcast text and images that they thought “best reflects life on Earth.”

Earlier this year, the social network teamed up with production firm RDF Digital to launch a competition for the A Message From Earth initiative, wrote Pocket-lint.co.uk Thursday. The chosen content was transferred early Thursday morning from a radio telescope in Ukraine.

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Due to financial troubles, The Columbian newspaper will move out of its new offices and back into the old ones, the Seattle Times reported on Thursday.

The title, based in Clark County, Washington, United States, will either lease or sell the US$30 million building, which opened in January, said the newspaper's publisher, Scott Campbell.

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UK television station ITN (Independent Television News) will collaborate with a group of universities as part of a programme to digitise a century of broadcast news reports, making more than 3,000 hours of archived footage available online to students, Press Gazette reported Friday.

Nfo.ac.uk, the new site, offers historic news clips from ITN sources, the archive news licensing service that provides content from ITN and Reuters. NewsFilm Online is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

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U.S. social networking sites still rank among the most popular online destinations, especially among younger audiences, according to eMarketer.

Leading players MySpace and Facebook combined will make up 72 percent of the total U.S. social network ad spending, or more than US$ 1 billion, this year, according to AdWeek.

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Yahoo Inc.’s shares fell to their lowest level in five years on Wednesday due to a slowdown in core advertising, the San Jose Mercury News reported Thursday. The Internet firm’s shares dropped nearly 6 percent, closing at US$13.80 after being down to $13.20 in the morning.

Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Marianne Wolk predicted that there is a risk that the Yahoo-Google ad deal may not go through, as a result of Yahoo’s “deteriorating fundamentals.” The two sides said they are delaying the venture, which would have permitted Google to sell ads on Yahoo sites in North America.

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News aggregation and community Web site Newsvine has seen registration skyrocket by 963 percent in the past year, Beet.TV reported Wednesday. In the same period, unique users have gone up by 269 percent.

Newsvine was bought by MSNBC almost a year ago.

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The role social media plays in how customers receive and send information is leading many companies to create social media solutions, Market Wire reported Thursday.

According to a study by the Aberdeen Group, “Sales 2.0: Social Media for Knowledge Management and Sales Collaboration,” 59 percent of Best-in-Class companies have made “social media collaboration tools” within their sales department a priority. Meanwhile, 35 percent of other companies do so.

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3G mobile phone sales and subscribers in Europe are expected to grow by 2010, according to data from Exane BNP Paribas, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2008 reported.

3G mobile phone sales in Europe increase from about 30 million in 2006 to 140 million in 2010.

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German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) is hoping to better monetize its text, videos and pictures through a deal with Attributor, an online content monitor, paidContent:UK reported Wednesday.

According to dpa, it is the third largest news agency in the world, and the deal allows it to follow in the footsteps Reuters and Press Association, which also have partnered with the California-based Attributor.

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The chairman and chief executive of French advertising giant Publicis, said he expects “a difficult fourth quarter ... and a very difficult year 2009" Reuters reported him telling La Tribune Thursday.

Maurice Levy pointed out that the firm would be keeping that thought in mind when establishing its budgets for the coming year. He added that Publicis had a budget of €2 billion (US$2.7 billion), which he termed as “superior to our needs.”

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