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There seems to be a few cities in Texas that want the online travel industry to ante up millions of dollars in lost tax revenues - and there is a possibility this could move to the other states. Houston and San Antonio - guess Dallas would be next if the decider is towns with NBA teams - have filed suit against online travel companies for not paying the right amount of occupancy taxes dues.

“Hotels in Houston must remit to the city the hotel-occupancy tax of 7 percent, based on the price at which they sell rooms. The city uses the money to promote tourism and to pay off debt for Reliant Stadium, Toyota Center, Minute Maid Park and the Hilton Americas convention hotel”.

‘The city took in more than $57 million in the occupancy taxes in 2007,” a Houston City official told the Houston Chronicle.

“On Tuesday, a federal judge granted San Antonio’s motion for class-action certification in its lawsuit against 16 companies including Hotels.com, Expedia.com, Priceline.com and Orbitz. The San Antonio suit alleges the online companies collect hotel tax at the retail rate but only pay taxes on the bulk wholesale rate they are charged, ” WebProNews reported

Obviously the travel industry is claiming increased costs will have an impact on tourism. That is absolutely true, while the local governement may not collect the taxes and does lose - the money comes in the pockets of those who visit and thus the average spend of the customers will be less. So maybe the local chamber of commerces should think about that and talk to the mayor.

Bookings will be down slightly because of higher prices - even though the prices will just increase across the board so people will not recognize the jump. Either way in a time of high gas prices actions like this will only hurt the travel industry as a whole. There are not many travel agencies left and few would be looking to invest in one right now.

Kate Kaye at Clickz has done some in-depth analysis of the online ad spending of Democrat Presidential Candidate Barack Obama. The Illinois Senator has spent $3.47 million this year in online advertising.

Of that, $2.8 million went to Google while Yahoo received $180,000. Smaller amounts also went to Facebook, CNN.com, Gothamist, and Politico.

Google, of course, dominates the online advertising market, so it’s a smart play by anyone to spend with them. But Google just happens to be number 13 on OpenSecrets.org list of top donors. The list compiles monies donated by corporate political action committees and individuals (who must report who they work for when contributing).

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A Belgian newspaper group has filed a suit asking for $77.5 million in damages from Google. The group, Copiepresse, claims Google has violated copyright law by publishing their pages on Google News and caching pages from their websites.

Copiepresse first brought a suit in 2006 and The Court of First Instance in Brussels sided with the newspaper group. Google has appealed, but removed the pages from its News and main search sites.

But Google began indexing the pages on its main site again, which drove Copiepresse to bring its latest suit. Google maintains that its search products are legal.

What do you think of Copiepresse’s lawsuits? Think they should just slap a robots.txt file on their site? Tell us how it is in the comments.

Cambridge, Massachussets-based JumpTap has announced the expansion of their European mobile search and advertising network. The company is adding offices in Madrid, Spain and Stockholm, Sweden as part of the expansion. JumpTap pointed to recent projections from eMarketer, which see European spending tripling over the next three years, as part of the reason for the expansion.

“We are experiencing stellar renewal rates from our advertisers in Europe which is attributed to highly successful campaign results,” commented Dan Olschwang, president and CEO of JumpTap. “We have established our superior leadership working with the mobile advertising medium across global markets, and our clients are gaining a competitive advantage derived from our expertise and lessons learned.”

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Viacom President and CEO Philippe Daumann joined Kevin Johnson, President of Microsoft, onstage last Wednesday at the Microsoft advance ‘08 client sumnmit to discuss the Future of Search. They didn’t discuss copyright infringement or Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. Perhaps they should have.

Google, YouTube’s owner, claims the $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit questioning YouTube’s ability to keep copyrighted material off YouTube.com threatens the free exchange of information on the Internet.

Google’s lawyers filed papers on Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in response to Viacom’s lawsuit alleging that the Internet has led to “an explosion of copyright infringement” by YouTube and others.

Viacom filed its lawsuit last year, asking for damages for the unauthorized viewing of programming from MTV, Comedy Central and other networks, including such hits as “The Colbert Show” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

In papers submitted to a judge late Friday, Google claimed YouTube “goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works.”

By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Google said Viacom “threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression.”

Google said YouTube was faithful to the requirements of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying the federal law was intended to protect companies like YouTube as long as they responded properly to content owners’ claims of infringement.

On that count, Viacom says Google has failed miserably.

The Associated Press reports that in a rewritten lawsuit filed last month, Viacom said YouTube consistently allows unauthorized copies of popular television programming and movies to be posted on its Web site and viewed tens of thousands of times.

Viacom said it had identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of copyrighted programming — including “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “South Park” and “MTV Unplugged” episodes and the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” — that had been viewed “an astounding 1.5 billion times.”

The company said its count of unauthorized clips represents only a fraction of the content on YouTube that violates its copyrights.

It said Google and YouTube had done “little or nothing” to stop infringement.

“To the contrary, the availability on the YouTube site of a vast library of the copyrighted works of plaintiffs and others is the cornerstone of defendants’ business plan,” Viacom said.

A thread over at WebmasterWorld has reported that Yahoo will be increasing its charges for domain registration as of July 1, 2008 to $34.95. Now I have not heard that the major domain registries have increased prices so is this another way Yahoo thinks it can help increase revenue?

Most companies charge about a third of the new price so it looks like Yahoo will be losing a lot of that business. Guess the ones left will pay extra and Yahoo can cut back on staff.

This is not a smart move given all that is happening right now. Almost looks like they don’t want to do it any more and figure to just boost the prices to a level where everyone leaves.

The price seems to include a starter hosting package. Curious would this have a spill over effect on visitor counts to Yahoo? Does it force sites to include Yahoo links or advertising?

I know gas prices are increasing a lot of goods and services but there is no gas needed to do this service.

Yahoo may want to reconsider this move. Sounds like desperate measures.

This morning investment bank Collins Stewart hosted a confrerence call for clients who wanted to learn more about Microsoft Live Search Cashback.

The buzz and excitement surrounding the Cashback launch has been palpable.

CNET has coverage of the Microsoft Live Search Cashback call this morning.

What’s truly brilliant about Microsoft’s move: share of searches is the most watched index of search engine success. What matters most, though, is the quality of those searches.

The most valuable searches are commercial searches. Helping satisfy the collective curiosity of a nation is, at times, a noble mission. Most searches, though, tend to be news and gossip-related.

While it’s great for the online tabloid industry, there’s not much value in being the go-to search engine for the Gossip Girl and lad mag crowd. Does a search engine really care if it delivers the best results for “elke the stallion,” gyrotonics, and “la rag mag?”

Microsoft wants all Americans who receive a $600 rebate check to think of Live.com search first. If you’re going to spend money online, what’s the most relevant result?

The SERP that delivers value, savings and bargains.

Yeah, you read that headline correctly. In a statement that no one believes, Steve Ballmer said in Moscow today that the bid for Yahoo was ‘never strategic.’

Ballmer has been going around saying that Microsoft wants to catch Google in the search game, which was the reason behind their Yahoo bid.

strat·e·gy noun - a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result (via Ask.com’s recently acquired Dictionary.com)

The Microsoft CEO is now boasting that it has $50 billion to spend on all sorts of acquisitions. Not that they’re strategic or anything.

Microsoft has announced the upcoming availability of advertising for Live Search Mobile. The service is currently in private beta, but Microsoft hopes to expand it in the second half of 2008.

The software giant also announced the availability of display advertising on its Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail products.

“In today’s connected world, the mobile device is emerging as a prime opportunity for advertisers to reach their audience,” said Brian Arbogast, corporate vice president of Mobile Services at Microsoft. “This announcement is evidence of our commitment to providing advertisers with further opportunities to connect and engage consumers throughout their ‘digital day’ — at home, at work and on the go across multiple platforms, devices and geographic regions.”

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Juniper Research has released data about search ad spending in the mobile market. Here’s what you need to know.

• 2008 mobile search adspend will reach $445 million, which is 34% of total mobile adspend.
• Mobile search revenues (including data charges) will reach $4.8bn by 2013.
• Both mobile search adspend and total mobile adspend will be highest in the Far East/China region, followed by Western Europe and North America.

According to Juniper Research’s Principal Analyst, Dr Windsor Holden, “While mobile advertising was historically dominated by campaigns conducted almost exclusively via SMS, the mass adoption of 2.5G and 3G handsets — combined with the development of applications enabling targeted, instant measurement and frequency capping — mean that we now have a situation where consumers can receive personalised advertising across a variety of rich media delivery channels.”

What do you think of this data? Are you exploring the mobile search ad space? Leave a comment!

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