This week, there are a couple of executive hirings in Silion Valley related to the search and social networking industries. First up, Penny Baldwin has been tapped as senior vice president, global integrated marketing and brand management for Yahoo! Is there any room left on her business card? That's quite a long title! Previously, Baldwin served as Managing Partner of Young & Rubicam Brands, Y&R Advertising and Wunderman Direct Marketing. "One of Yahoo!

Ever since search professionals starting talking about real-time search a la Twitter, Facebook, et. al, there has been a huge emphasis on the competitive nature and push of the industry. Twitter has even gone so far as to change the look of its search engine (when did that happen?) to look a little bit more like Google. It all makes me wonder, what's next? When will the real real-time search engine get here? And, more importantly, who will be the first to make it happen?

by Sage Lewis Search Engine Roundtable gave some interesting advice on upping your budget over at Bing/Adcenter. Check out our small business news site.

The Wall Street Journal has generated the latest report (paywall) about Dell creating a mobile computing device. The news would seem to substantiate Michael Dell's allusion in March that Dell was "exploring" mobile Internet devices, or MIDs. The key action item in the latest report is that it's rumored to run on the Google-created Android mobile operating system software. If this is true, it's a bigger a piece of news for Google than the T-Mobile G1 , T-Mobile myTouch 3G ,

Today, we're beginning to test new versions of Facebook Search with a small group â?" just a fraction of a percent of the people on Facebook. Those of you in the test group will be able to find content from the people, organizations and public figures that matter to you as soon as they share it on Facebook. Testing potential features is an important part of our product development process. These tests tell us if new features benefit people in the way we think they will,

Anuj from the communications team here again. I just read a great in-depth analysis on the PayPal business from investment bank, JP Morgan. The report notes that "among online-only players, PayPal has established a payment brand to compete with incumbent players such as Visa and MasterCard"  and examines four key areas .

The Internet is a-buzz with the latest offering from Firefox - the best browser available in my opinion - and the upgrades look absolutely tantalizing: It is twice as fast as Firefox 3: an impressive feat! You can save movies as easily as saving an image, It will download fonts from websites if your computer does not have the necessary font - this is very new and very very cool. Why?

This isn't social technology, but indulge me. I used to be a TV analyst. And this is big news for marketers. The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday decided to let stand a ruling that Cablevision can go forward with its virtual DVR product. Let me explain what this is, and what it means for marketers. Cablevision's service works just like a DVR, but uses storage on the company's VOD servers instead of a hard-drive in your home. So when you ask to record "Hung" on HBO,

We use the Internet all the time: at home, at work (especially at Google!), on the move, and, increasingly, at school. We believe that the Internet and cloud-based tools are a key part of a 21st century classroom, helping students learn and teachers teach in collaborative and innovative ways.

For a few months, we've been testing a feature for partners that lets them add "Call-to-Action" overlays to their YouTube videos to help them drive traffic to other websites. Many have used the feature in creative ways, such as collecting signatures or driving song downloads . Today we are making Call-to-Action overlays more broadly available by launching the feature as an option for anyone who uses Promoted Videos. Just go to ads.youtube.