MS agency sued over Bing ad

A Delaware firm has filed a lawsuit against JWT and parent WPP, claiming the ad agency stole its patented product-placement concept to use in a campaign for Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft, reports BusinessInsider.

Denizen calls itself an "innovator in advertising" for its method of "program-integrated advertisement". It says in its suit that, starting in 2002, it was in contact with London-based WPP and top executives at the holding company to discuss possible business ventures, including partnerships with WPP's media agencies.

Those talks fell through in late 2006, but Denizen said it had entered into a confidentiality agreement with WPP. The company now alleges WPP breached the confidentiality agreement and that JWT stole Denizen's technique of blending a TV show's content and characters into advertising.

IBM scientists have imaged the chemical structure of an individual molecule, increasing the possibility for creating electronic building blocks on the atomic and molecular scale, says Cnet.

Scientists in Zurich, Switzerland, have, for the first time, imaged the "anatomy" or chemical structure of an individual molecule with "unprecedented" resolution, using noncontact atomic force microscopy, IBM said.

Resolving individual atoms within a molecule has been a long-standing goal of surface microscopy, according to the computer company, which has a research and development programme dating back to 1945. This research will be essential for building computing elements at the atomic scale that are vastly smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than today's processors and memory devices, IBM said.

A senior Apple executive will meet France's consumer affairs minister to discuss a number of incidents in which screens on some of its popular iPhones were reported to have shattered for no obvious reason, states eWeek.

French newspapers have reported several cases in which consumers described problems with the popular devices, which have sold by the million and helped Apple defy the global recession.

In one case, a teenager said he was slightly injured when his iPhone made a hissing noise and shattered. He said his complaints to the Apple customer service staff had been dismissed.

Instant messaging is being adopted by a growing number of banking malware applications, which zap pilfered credentials to thieves in real-time, reports The Register.

The latest entrant is Zeus, a Trojan that monitors an infected PC for passwords entered into banking Web sites and other financial services. Over the past three months, investigators from RSA FraudAction Research Lab have observed the program, which also goes by the name Torpig and Mebroot, using the Jabber IM protocol to make sure the most valuable credentials don't get lost in the shuffle.

The move signals the growing focus on immediacy among scammers as they try to counter the increased use of measures designed to detect and prevent banking fraud.