Due to a default judgment in a lawsuit brought against the similarly named Orion Bancorp, a Florida court has ordered Orion Residential Finance to declare “orion” a negative keyword in any broad search advertising they embark on in the future.

What this means is that if Orion Residential wants to do search advertising on words like “bank” or “finance,” they must make Orion a negative keyword so that if somebody searches for “orion bank” or “orion finance,” their ads must not appear.

Orion Bancorp brought the suit arguing that the two had a confusingly similar name, and ended up winning when Orion Residential didn’t file a response to the lawsuit. Their default led not only to Orion Bancorp getting the orionbank.com domain name, but the judge added the following restriction:
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There are finally some concrete numbers from both Hitwise, Compete, and comScore about microblogging site Twitter’s rise in popularity.

According to Hitwise, Twitter.com is recording eight times as many hits now as it was a year ago. However, very few of the hardcore Twitter users ever visit Twitter.com–most of the traffic comes from smartphones or Twitter apps.

Hitwise report lists Twitter as having 1 million users, 200,000 “active” users, and about 3 million tweets being sent per month.
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Last Thursday at a web conference in Beijing, Google introduced the latest step in visual search technology, VisualRank.

Currently, image search delivers results based on the text associated with each picture rather than anything about the image itself. Theoretically, if somebody labeled a ham sandwich as the Taj Mahal, your image search of “Taj Mahal” would show you a sandwich. Google wants to eliminate this method by an analysis of many of the more popular images on the web.
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uTorrent, a P2P filesharing client that is owned by BitTorrent, doubled its number of installs over the last year as torrents continue to run rampant across the Internet.

uTorrent, which isn’t currently available for Mac, is a small but powerful torrent client that seems most popular amongst more tech-savvy users and Europeans. Limewire continues to be the most popular client, but is quickly losing popularity and has gained a reputation as being the more amateur of the torrent clients.
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At a time when some expected Apple’s hot ride to slow down, brisk sales of Macs during Q2 saw Apple exceed earnings expectations and keep their stock sky-high, if not higher.

The $7.5 billion in March quarter sales is an increase of 43% over last year. While iPhone and iPod sales were relatively close to expectations, over a quarter of a million more Macs (with their high price tags) were sold than industry insiders projected. Apparently, consumers are satisfied with the current iMac as sales were 50% higher than the same time last year.
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Smaller dating sites that target a specific group or interest are growing in membership as larger “one size fits all” sites decline.

Sites catering to specific religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientation are growing at extremely high rates. According to information from Hitwise, in March, the Top 3 gay sites on the web increased their US share of site visits by 54% over the year before. Religious sites increased their traffic by 69%, while the top five mainstream sites lost 7% of their hits over the same period.
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The next step in mobile advertising has arrived with Google launching their own mobile display ads through their Adsense network.

The ads will be sold on a PPC basis and come in a few different sizes. They are, of course, small, and only one keyword-relevant ad will be served per page. Each ad must link to a mobile web page. Here’s a demonstration of the ad size:
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On the heels of a massive increase in the amount of spam being served up, a major outage over the weekend is making it apparent that Twitter has a lot of growing up to do.

It’s not hard to imagine this would happen with the extreme growth of the micro-blogging site with so many people following huge numbers of tweets, and word-of-mouth leading to tons of new members every day. The issues may or may not have led to the exit of Twitter’s chief architect, Blaine Cook, a couple of weeks ago. Cook was the man in charge of scaling Twitter and had on previous occasions remarked about how simple it was.
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A 12 person staff composed of some former Google employees is working on a new social search service through their startup Mechanical Zoo.

They’ve managed to keep the development under wraps, but are expecting to release a beta sometime in the next month or two.

Details are slow to emerge from the proceedings, but we do at least have an idea of who’s working on it. Ex-Google employees Nathan Stoll, Max Ventilla, and Fritz Schneider. The team also includs old-school computer scientist Damon Horowitz.
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Phorm, the British data mining outfit discussed on this blog last month, has hired the former Doubleclick VP to be their Chief Privacy Officer.

Attempting to stem the tide of criticism that has followed their data mining operation, Phorm realizes it needs to be out front in showing its concern for privacy. Since their software, when partnered with ISPs, collects information about nearly everything a consumer does on the Internet, not being proactive has the possibility of kindling a public relations nightmare that would make Facebook Beacon look like a day at the beach.
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