likely

Once the election smoke has cleared, Congress appears poised to pass Network Neutrality legislation. With promises from the Obama campaign about upholding neutrality principles, any remaining FCC opposition will be left standing out on a weak limb.

Since Microsoft acquired online ad firm aQuantive for $6 billion, the likelihood of Steve Ballmer and company following that up with a Yahoo purchase became greater.

As I've written before, I'm a big proponent of using closed loop feedback to improve marketing and lead generation ROI.  I came across a recent report by Aberdeen Group entitled, "Creating a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization," that reinforces the point with broader empirical data. Aberdeen found, "Companies that adopt closed-loop marketing processes are more than three times as likely to report a greater than 50% return on marketing investment (ROMI) than those that do not.”

Almost three-quarters of Americans who access the Internet via mobile phones do so by using one of the major online portals such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN, according to comScore. Percentage-wise, fewer Americans than Europeans are accessing the mobile Web at all.

Take a look at BusinessWeek's fascinating summary of the events that led up to the Google/AOL deal.

Just in case you were wondering which search engines had users with money in the bank (and I know you were), comScore Networks, Inc. reports that in the month of June, MSN searchers were 48% more likely to buy online than the average Internet user. Googlites were 42% more likely.

As marketing performance management (MPM) evolves, I anticipate that marketing and lead generation dashboards will likely be a hot topic.

A semantic upgrade by the Environmental Protection Agency in a report on perfluorooctanoic acid, a chemical compound used to make Teflon, moves the compound from "suggested carcinogen" to "likely carcinogen." The change in status may have huge legal ramifications.