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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness.   REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    Google introduces brand-image ads for phones

    SAN FRANCISCO
    Thu Apr 24, 2008 8:57am EDT
    A hostess holds a prototype of the Google Android mobile by British chip designer ARM during the Mobile World Congress (formerly 3GSM World Congress) in Barcelona, February 11, 2008. REUTERS/Albert Gea

    SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc said on Wednesday it has introduced brand-image ads for mobile phones, in a bid to extend beyond the computer-based Web market into the emerging market for advertising on phones.

    Technology

    In a statement on the Silicon Valley company's Web site, the company said it had designed mobile images to look like standard graphical display ads for desktop computer Web pages, but made them smaller to fit on mobile phone screens.

    The company said all mobile image ads are targeted according to the keywords users type into phones to search for information. The ads are priced on a cost-per-click basis, and must link to Web pages optimized to work on mobile phones.

    Only one image ad is displayed on each mobile page, a move to that appears designed to limit clutter on small screens.

    "For advertisers, mobile image ads serve as a branding tool and have shown to have good click-through rates," Alexandra Kenin, a product marketing manager, for Google Mobile Ads said in a blog post on the company's site.

    Mobile image ads are available in 13 national markets: Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the United States, Google said.

    (Reporting by Eric Auchard; Editing by Carol Bishopric.)



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