Microsoft announced yesterday the launch of the first ever add-in phishing protection, currently in a beta version. It helps provide “powerful dynamic protection” against the phishermen of the net. Earthlink has a bone to pick with the Seattle slew however. They say they’ve had a free tool available for over a year.

Lucasfilm inked an agreement with HP to use its Adaptive Enterprise solutions in game and visuals development.

Yahoo! is giving hopeful online video makers some great exposure plus a chance to win a 24-inch Dell widescreen monitor and DVD player.

Recently, Yahoo launched the Y!Q contest to see who could make the best use of this service though integrating it onto their web site. Well, the contest has officially closed and Yahoo has announced the winners.

I’m not very hep on comment moderation. I think it’s a line for bloggers that cannot handle criticism – why is the blogosphere so full of thin-skinned people? – but the usual line trotted out that it’s to stop comment SPAM.

Shel and I don’t get into much self-promotion, shameless or otherwise, for For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, our twice-weekly business podcast.

Winners of tickets to the Live 8 event in London apparently wasted no time posting their ducats on eBay.

On April 28th we held a contest for the first blogger to post five details of the Series B Socialtext closed. Now, the details are out in our local paper. Socialtext raised a $3.1 million Series B round led by Tim Draper at DFJ that closed on April 15th.

If you’re passionate about Windows and use it in a creative way, you could win valuable prizes.

Yahoo! Search Marketing, formerly Overture Services, announced the launch of its “Think Big” contest, which will award one small business with 10 million free ad impressions across the Yahoo! network.

A contest to develop a virus capable of infecting Apple OS X has been cancelled. DVForge.com, makers of a number of accessories for the Apple family, sponsored the competition.

Microsoft announced that New Zealand-based Ambient Design Ltd., creator of ArtRage, is the $100,000 grand prize winner of the Microsoft Tablet PC Does Your Application Think in Ink? contest, a competition challenging developers to utilize the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition Software Developer Kit (SDK) 1.7 to create new applications or ink-enable existing Windows XP-based applications.

Feedster has launched its developer network and contest for best new applications and uses for its technology.

The branded web search property developed for Cal Athletics by LookSmart, CalBearsSearch.com, will launch “Cal Bears Search & Win,” a unique contest that challenges participants to complete a “search puzzle” by finding answers to Cal-specific questions on CalBearsSearch.com.

The Nigritude Ultramarine seo contest just got nastier with the addition of an application that uses Google’s API to scrape Google’s cached pages of Nigritude Ultramarine sites. The wily creator of this app then cloaks the stolen pages as if they were his, and since he’s got higher PageRank he kicks the site he copied out due to the duplicate site penalty.

Nigritude Ultramarine Search engine optimization experts are having fun with Google.

DarkBlue, an affiliate network, has launched a SEO contest that has the SEO world churning out optimized pages and links (with optimized anchor text) for the selected term, Nigritude Ultramarine.

Are you a Flash animator or interested in learning more about Flash animation?

The FlashNewz Design Contest has come to a close as far as entries, but the voting is on! Submit your vote to help decide the top 3 entries! You can view all of the finalists below so make sure you cast your vote! VOTE VOTE VOTE!

The Challenge: Design a header for the FlashNewz newsletter and you could pick and review the feature sites for an upcoming issue AND get free promotion of your site in the newsletter.

If you belong to the right groups, you see requests for contest sponsors on a regular basis. So why should you just give away your products? What is in it for you?