New Yorkand#8212;Global online ad spending will reach $61.8 billion this year, up 11.9% over last year, according to a new forecast from eMarketer.

Redwood City, Calif.

San Franciscoand#8212;JiWire Inc., a location-based mobile media company, announced Wednesday that it has entered into an exclusive partnership with Borders Group that will enable advertising on the retailer's Wi-Fi network.

Scottsdale, Ariz.and#8212;Total in-flight broadband equipment investments should approach $500 million globally by 2013, according to a report issued Tuesday by research firm In-Stat.

Austin, Texasand#8212;Marketing automation company Manticore Technology has updated its platform to version VII, adding some 40 enhancements that include e-mail- and landing page-building tools as well as deeper Salesforce.com integration.

New Yorkand#8212;Kantar Media and GfK Custom Research North America have formed a partnership to provide an online data quality service

Tokyoand#8212;Spurning the pending Yahoo-Microsoft search implementation in the U.S. and other countries later this summer, Yahoo Japan Corp. has rejected Microsoft Corp.'s Bing in favor of Google as its default search engine.

New Yorkand#8212;Marketing groups and businesses are galvanizing their opposition to a U.S. Postal Service request to raise postage rates, appealing to the Postal Regulatory Commission on Monday to reject the USPS request.

Indianapolisand#8212;Aprimo Inc., which provides on-demand marketing software, has announced Aprimo Mobile, a new platform for mobile marketing.

New Yorkand#8212;LogicLab, which provides marketing analysis and research for the media-buying industry, has appointed Craig Gugel chief research officer. Gugel was previously senior VP-media analytics at the Advertising Research Foundation.

Read an updated post from the Social Media B2B blog, which details new changes in Facebook since the original, popular post seven months ago. It offers up examples of 10 marketers that are creating effective Facebook pages.

Paul Dunay, author of and#8220;Buzz Marketing for Technology,and#8221; says marketers still have a long way to go when it comes to closing the loop in closed-loop marketing.

The market for marketing automation software is doing very well, and there are an unprecedented variety of options from which to choose. But that also means the range of options can be dizzying.

In a July 22 post on and#8220;Joe Pulizzi's Blog,and#8221; Pulizzi contemplates the increasing similarity between publishers and marketers, who are publishing more of their own content these days.