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Online advertising contributes $300 billion to the U.S. economy, according to a new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The ad supported Internet accounts for 2.1 percent of the total U.S. gross domestic product. It directly employs more than 1.2 million Americans with above-average wages in jobs that did not exist two decades ago, and another 1.9 million people work to support those with Internet-related jobs.

Internet advertising revenues in the US reached $5.5 billion for the first quarter. This is according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. This is a 5% decline from a year ago.

Research from Forrester indicates that the US Web Analytics Market is on track to reach nearly a billion dollars by 2014. Forrester attributes this to a need for marketing organizations to be more accountable to businesses. Also at play is a shift in marketing budgets' allocation for interactive channels, for the purpose of matching consumers' migration online, the firm notes. The market is expected to grow to $953 million by 2014, which would be a 17% compound annual growth rate.

The European Commission has imposed a record fine against Intel Corp of $1.45 billion (1.06 billion euros) for violating antitrust rules and other practices used to exclude competitor AMD from the computer chip market.

It looks like the biggest April Fool’s Joke was on all of us. Despite persistent rumors that Google was in talks to acquire Twitter (the coolest thing since the last coolest thing since sliced bread), no deal is forthcoming.

Wireless revenues showed solid year-to-year gains, as wireless data service revenues for 2008 rose to more than $32 billion, according to a survey from CTIA-The Wireless Association. This represents a 39 percent increase over 2007, when data revenues totaled $23.2 billion. Wireless data revenues for 2008 amounted to nearly 22 percent of all wireless service revenues, and represent what consumers spend on non-voice services.

The number of people using mobile devices to get content is on the way up.

Cisco has launched an initiative to help cities use technology to cultivate sustainable, intelligent industries as well as citizen services and overall economic growth. The initiative is called "Intelligent Urbanization."