Twitter self-service ads, UK Government launches G-Cloud store, Microsoft's very own social tools: msnNOW & Google to refresh Chromebooks

Twitter releases self-service ad service
Want to advertise on Twitter without going through a salesman? This weekend, Twitter unveiled an automated system to allow advertisers to manage marketing campaigns on the social network.  Advertisers will need to specify their advertising budgets, geographic regions and 140-character messages that will appear on the network.  Twitter charge for the ads on a pay-per-click basis.

This move is just the beginning of Twitter's ambitious strategy to profit from its network. At the minute, the service is only open to advertisers that use American Express cards.

Government launches G-Cloud store
The British government's new cloud computing programme, called G-Cloud, today launched CloudStore, a database of 257 cloud service suppliers for the public sector. The programme aims to help public sector organisations and companies to reduce costs and to improve their efficiency. Suppliers in the databse include Capgemini, Google, Fujitsu, HP and Microsoft.  

Services listed on G-Cloud range from email to word processing.

Microsoft launches msnNOW
It seems every big tech company has its own internet trend tracker. After being a bit late to the party, Microsoft launched its very own web and social conversation tracker called msnNOW, strongly resembling Twitter Stories. msnNOW also has it's own Facebook and Twitter pages, and can be accessed via mobile and tablets.

Google promises faster Chromebooks
Google's goal of being part of every facet of our lives is becoming more and more of a reality, as the technology giants laid out its plans to improve harware offering, Chromebook.  The current batch of Chromebooks is often labelled as sluggish, so the company is hoping to appease users by providing faster machines with its minimal Chrome OS in a bid to challenge tablets and super-lightweight notebooks.