NST Online Business Times : latest

Posted: 28 Feb 2013 05:49 PM PST

Malaysia's improving exports and domestic demand will help the economy expand 5 per cent this year, even as general elections may fuel market volatility, according to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff forecast.

The national vote, which must be held by late June, is among risks to the country's outlook, IMF economists said in the report assessing the country's economy released in Washington late yesterday.

The main threats to growth are external, including a slowdown in China, it said.

"The next general election must be held by June 2013, but has been expected since 2011, leading to a pre-election political climate for the past two years or so," the IMF staff wrote. The elections "could lead to some market volatility," they said.

Malaysia's economy grew at the fastest pace since 2010 in the three months through December from a year earlier as Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak boosted spending ahead of the ballot. Najib, whose ruling coalition won the 2008 vote by its narrowest margin in five decades, must dissolve parliament by April 28 for polls to be held within 60 days.

The IMF growth forecast is in line with the government's prediction of 4.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent.-- Bloomberg

Facebook buys Microsoft ad technology

Posted: 28 Feb 2013 06:56 PM PST

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook Inc said on Thursday it had agreed to buy advertising technology from Microsoft Corp that measures the effectiveness of ads on its website, which should help in its fight with Google Inc for online advertising revenue.

Under the long-rumored transaction, Facebook will purchase the Atlas Advertiser Suite, an ad management and measurement platform that Microsoft took on with its US$6.3 billion acquisition of digital ad agency aQuantive in 2007. Facebook did not say how much it paid for the technology.

Unable to make it work for its own purposes, Microsoft wrote off US$6.2 billion of the aQuantive deal's value last year.

Facebook has long been dogged by doubts about the effectiveness of its ads and was embarrassed just days before its initial public offering in May when General Motors Co declared it was pulling the plug on all paid advertising on Facebook's network.

Since then, Facebook has introduced a number of tools and partnerships to prove to marketers that advertising on its social network delivers enough bang for the buck.

Brian Boland, Facebook's director of monetization product marketing, said the purchase of Atlas was not a step toward creating a much wider ad network beyond the Facebook site, but analysts believe that is Facebook's ultimate goal.

"Although the statement announcing the deal focused on Atlas' measurement tools rather than its ad targeting technology, we expect that Atlas will soon be using Facebook's data to target sponsorships, in-stream ads, and other rich ad formats across the entire web, and that's big news," said Forrester analyst Nate Elliott.

"The question now is how quickly and successfully Facebook can integrate its data with Atlas' tools, and whether they can avoid a privacy backlash as they do so. History suggests they'll struggle on both counts," he said.

Google leads the US$15 billion US market for online display ads with 15.4 per cent share, according to researcher eMarketer, followed by Facebook with 14.4 per cent.-- Reuters

Kredit: www.nst.com.my

Khamis, 28 Februari 2013

NST Online Business Times : latest

NST Online Business Times : latest

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