partners

Today YouTube announced that some partners who sell their own ads will be able to serve the ads directly into their videos, as YouTube is trying out FreeWheel, which manages video ad inventory. In the past, ads sold by partners were still served by YouTube.

Video ZEO firm EveryZing has closed an $8.25 Million round of funding from its existing investors, which include Fairhaven Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners and BBN Technologies. EveryZing has also added GE and NBC Universal's Peacock Equity Fund as an investor. EveryZing will also be deploying its universal search and publishing solutions across a number of NBCU's Internet properties. The goal is to improve the video search experience for some major media sites.

MySpace is still huge despite not getting the degree of attention that other social media outlets get. According to Compete.com from January ’09 it slipped to second behind Facebook when ranked by number of monthly visits.

Microsoft has partnered with NASA to put the space agency's most interesting content, such as high- resolution images of Mars and the moon online. Microsoft's online virtual telescope, WorldWide Telescope will feature the images. Under the agreement, NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California will process and host the data.

Ask.com has partnered with security firm Symantec to offer users safer search results in an effort to attract more traffic. Ask and Symantec developed Safe Search that makes searching the Web safer by providing users with ratings before they visit a site that could damage or infect their computer.

Yahoo has announced partnerships with consumer electronics manufacturers Samsung, Sony, LG Electronics and Vizo to provide TV widgets to a new line of Internet connected television sets.

Google really has the ball rolling on the controversial Google Book Search project. Reuters is reporting that 20,000 publishers have signed on over the last year, doubling the number of partners that Google has. The company has also added two new library partners over the last year bringing that number up to 29.

A group of libraries that are participating in the Google Books Library Project want to make sure that their work lives on in case Google doesn't. They're forming a backup database of digitized books in case Google should go out of business in the future (insert joke or snide comment here). The database is called HathiTrust.