Yahoo getting into Hollywood content busines... Good info...

Privacy Reports:

These reports, known as specialty consumer reports, provide background information that such companies use to decide if they want to do business with you. Companies use these reports to try to quantify the risks involved in their business dealings, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (www.privacyrights.org), a consumer rights organization

CLUE Reports for Home & Auto Insurance:

· ChoicePoint CLUE Reports: ChoiceTrust.com or 1-866-312-8076.

· ISO Insurance Services A-Plus Reports: ISO.com or 1-800-627-3487.

MIB Medical Report:

· Medical Information Bureau: MIB.com or 1-866-692-6901.

Tenant Reports:

· ChoicePoint: ChoiceTrust.com or 1-877-448-5732.

· SafeRent: 1-888-333-2413

· UD Registry: UDregistry.com or 1-888-275-4837.

Check Writing Reports:

· ChexSystems: ConsumerDebit.com or 1-800-428-9623.

· Shared Check Authorization Network: ConsumerDebit.com or 1-800-262-7771.

· TeleCheck: 1-800-209-8186.

Keep in mind that many other companies operate in some of these areas, especially the tenant screening area. It makes sense to ask your prospective landlord which company he or she is using and get a report from that company.

Google: Free Web analyzer:

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) are already used by many top Web sites, including dozens of Fortune 500 companies. By making the service free, Google is seeking to draw a wider range of users to Web analytics, including individuals looking to more actively promote their topical Web logs, or blogs.

While most Web creation programs offer rudimentary site tracking tools, a more sophisticated set of costly tools are offered by companies such as WebSideStory (WSSI.O: Quote, Profile, Research), SPSS Inc. (SPSS.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and CoreMetrics.

"Google is giving away free software to improve Web sites. I fail to see how some of these Web analyst vendors could not be hurt by this," Jupiter Research analyst Eric Peterson said of the impact on the estimated $450 million-a-year industry.

All user data is safeguarded in line with a recently enhanced privacy policy. But with so much information coursing through its computers, Google must manage the data carefully so as not to raise suspicions about its actions, Peterson said.

Advertisers using Google AdWords, its popular pay-per-click keyword-selling service, will find Google Analytics embedded in their accounts. This will help marketers using AdWords to automatically drive traffic to relevant pages on their sites.

It also can track the results of an online marketing campaign, including banner advertisements, Web site referral links, e-mail newsletter promotions, and spontaneous or paid search traffic, which could expand Google's advertising base.

Analytics will come in 16 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, simplified and traditional Chinese, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish and Russian, with others to be added.

Google is not alone in seeking to open up more Web data to customers in order to encourage them to buy more services.

EBay Inc. (EBAY.O: Quote, Profile, Research) introduced a subscription analytics service last week to allow buyers and sellers to search pricing trends on eBay. Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) is testing its own search advertising tool, known as AdCenter, which also offers users a set of site analytics to optimize marketing efforts.

"Once marketers understand what they are spending money on, they are basically budget-unlimited, as long as revenues remain marginally positive," Muret said.

Brain Research: Dali Lama

Buddists investigate reality. So do scientists, he says. "By gaining deeper insight into the human psyche, we might find ways of transforming our thoughts, emotions and their underlying properties so that a more wholesome and fulfilling way can be found."

At the Society for Neuroscience meeting, several researchers are to present new findings on the meditating brain. In one study, Sara Lazar of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston put meditators and non-meditators into an MRI brain scan to study the structure (and ultimately the function) of their brains. "People who meditate always talk about lasting effects that go beyond the meditation session," Lazar said in a telephone interview last week. "If so, the implication is that different brain wiring supports this change."

According to Lazar's study, which appears tomorrow in NeuroReport, 30 volunteers who had practiced meditation anywhere from one year to three decades had thicker brain tissue in two regions - the insula and the prefrontal cortex - than 20 non-meditators in the study. The insula is involved in pain perception, hunger, the perception of heart rate and breathing, and the integration of emotion and thought. The prefrontal cortex mediates attention, memory and decision-making.

Tissue loss slows

This thickening, Lazar said, "gives credibility to the claims of meditators. It is not just sitting there quietly, but meditating, that is having a profound effect on key brain structures." Normally, the prefrontal cortex thins with age, but meditating seems to slow this tissue loss, she said.

The next studies under way in her lab are designed to test whether meditators have better working memory and attention. She wants to test whether meditators have better control over their daily planning and decisions. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have funded her research.

For more information on neuroscience and meditation: www .investigatingthemind.org. The Society for Neuroscience Web site is www.sfn.org.

Microsoft Web 2.0

One of the first services is Office Live, which Microsoft said will integrate collaborative services such as document sharing with customer relationship management (CRM) and business analytics for consumers and small businesses. But the service "is simply vaporware at the moment," MacManus said.

Scrutinizing Strategy

Though Microsoft plans to release Office Live in beta in early 2006, a company memo by Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie, made public in various news outlets Tuesday, implies Microsoft still does not know what final shape Office Live will take, MacManus said. "Ray Ozzie's memo indicates that Microsoft is still internally questioning the approach for Office Live," he said.

The way Microsoft made public Ozzie's memo outlining the company's comprehensive software-to-services shift also shows that Microsoft is behind the times on Web 2.0, said software guru and blogger Dave Winer.

Winer, who writes the Scripting News blog, hinted that the way Microsoft provided Ozzie's memo to the print media first rather than to bloggers shows it still may not fully understand the impact of the Web. He chided Microsoft in a blog entry Wednesday for tipping off The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times first about the memo rather than letting more Internet news sources break the story.

"Microsoft is talking about getting in the loop on the Web, and they're feeding the story to print people?" Winer wrote. "Surely there was one person inside Microsoft who felt that it was just a bit too ironic to try to get the new message out through the old guys." Both the Journal and Times have Web sites that are updated throughout the news cycle.

Frank Shaw, a spokesperson for Microsoft's public relations firm Waggener Edstrom, said Wednesday that he did not know who within Microsoft revealed the memo to the press.

Slow to Market

Another pioneer of Web-based services, Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, blasted what he views as the elephantine pace at which Microsoft has embraced the next generation of the Web marketplace. Salesforce.com, which offers a hosted CRM service and platform, has built its business over the last several years on the notion that hosted services would eventually replace packaged software.

In a memo viewed by the IDG News Service and sent to Salesforce.com employees Wednesday, Benioff said Microsoft's recent realization that Web-based services will eventually replace a traditional software business model is too little, too late.

"The era of the traditional software 'load, update and upgrade' business and technology model is over," Benioff wrote. "It is time for 'The Business Web.' ... Just as mainframe companies struggled for relevance in the client-server era, Microsoft finds itself in a worse position today, facing not just the obsolescence of a technology model, but a business model as well."

Ipod now focusing on Media:

Whatever it rolls out in the future, Apple's latest moves indicate that it plans to do for TV and film what it did for digital music – create the demand for downloaded media content by offering a customer-friendly experience.

Last month, Apple unveiled the widely-anticipated video-enabled iPod that allows users to download and play music videos, home movies, and one of five shows from ABC and Disney, including "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," from its iTunes Internet music store. What's more, they can watch content downloaded onto the video iPod on a normal television. Within a month, Apple sold one million videos and short films through iTunes.

But Apple's already facing stiff competition in the nascent new market, as CBS and NBC announced earlier this week plans to let viewers buy episodes of some of its programs on demand through their television sets at $0.99 per episode, a buck cheaper than what Apple is charging customers to download episodes of "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost."

Also, the technology for downloading feature-length movies hasn't quite caught up to Apple's ambitions. On a conference call with analysts last week, Steve Jobs, who serves as chief executive for both Apple and Pixar, acknowledged that it still takes too long to download feature-length films over the Internet