New Acrobat version handles Flash videos

Adobe Systems is launching a new version of its document-sharing software Acrobat today, and this time it can package videos.

Acrobat allows users to package documents so they can be read across different hardware and operating systems.

Acrobat 9 comes with Adobe's video-enabling software Flash. Users can include Flash-based videos when they create and share documents with the portable document format, commonly known as PDF.

With a professional version of Acrobat 9, for example, users could package a Power Point presentation not just with images, but also with an audio of the presenter's voice.

Adobe also launched Acrobat.com, which will host Web-based software services to support document creation and sharing.

Airlines

Paper tickets now all but extinct

Global airlines stopped offering paper tickets on most flights Sunday, completing a switch to all-electronic bookings that are 90 percent cheaper to handle.

The International Air Transport Association, the main clearinghouse connecting airlines and travel agents, will no longer supply paper tickets.

The group, which used to handle 340 million paper tickets a year, will track all bookings online. Passengers will just get a printout.

Electronic tickets already account for about 95 percent of bookings, driven by the rise of Internet sales and airlines seeking to cut $3 billion a year in global processing costs.

American Airlines

New Moscow route challenges Delta's

American Airlines starts flying to Moscow today, ending Delta Air Lines' monopoly among U.S. carriers and seeking to tap into Russia's growing economy.

American is adding service between Chicago and Russia's capital. The move is a bet that the 6 percent annual economic-growth forecast by Russia and a surge in oil and natural-gas investment will fill the first- and business-class cabins of American's Boeing 777. Six-day-a-week flights will eventually grow to daily service.

Delta's service to Moscow is from New York's Kennedy and Atlanta's Hartsfield airports. United Airlines is starting Washington-Moscow service in October.

E-commerce

Ad network tries to boost coupon use

Mountain View, Calif.-based Coupons Inc. aims to improve coupon targeting with a new online distribution network based on a concept Google uses very profitably.

Its "Brandcaster" system, being unveiled today, won't require consumers to visit coupon Web sites. Instead, if the system works, people should start seeing more offers to print out coupons for products that have a contextual connection to a topic that piqued a reader's interest in the first place.

For instance, someone looking at a Web page about healthful food might be offered a coupon for organic milk.

It's the idea behind the text-based ad links Google displays alongside search results and other information at hundreds of thousands of Web sites.

Advertisers paid newspapers to distribute nearly 90 percent of the coupons issued last year for packaged goods, according to NCH Marketing Services.

Just 0.4 percent of the packaged goods coupons were printed out on the Internet last year, NCH estimated.

To start, Brandcaster will distribute coupons from about 200 brands to about 3,000 Web sites.

Like Google's ad system, Coupons Inc. will share revenue with the Web sites participating in Brandcaster.

Advertisers will pay only when a consumer prints out a coupon.

Google

Paid ad clicks leap in April

Google had a 20 percent jump in clicks on its U.S. text advertisements in April, a reversal from slowing growth the month before.

In March, clicks on Google's sponsored links, ads that run alongside search results, rose only 2.7 percent from a year earlier, according to comScore spokesman Andrew Lipsman. Sponsored links account for most of Google's revenue.

Google handled 61.6 percent of U.S. search queries in April, compared with 59.8 percent in March, comScore said.

Yahoo fielded 20.4 percent of searches, down from 21.3 percent, while Microsoft's share slipped to 9.1 percent from 9.4 percent.

Compiled from Bloomberg News and The Associated Press