Microsoft posted good numbers yesterday but buried inside the news were the huge losses of the Online Service Division. The OSD includes Bing and MSN. The losses in the division were reported to be $713 million, up from $411 million a year ago. That's a serious loss given how much money Microsoft's rivals are making. How are they managing to lose so much money given the size of their display inventory? And how long will Microsoft allow this to continue. Businness Insider has an interesting chart showing the losses in the division over the last 12 quarters. Interesting reading. [Business Insider]

Audience Science have signed a big Asian agency to use its Gateway Platform. CCI, a subsidary of Japanese agency powerhouse Dentsu, will look to use Gateway to develop solutions for the increasingly sophisticated targeting needs of its clients. ExchangeWire had a look at the Gateway technology a couple of weeks ago, and concluded that it could steal the march on the DSPs and other audience targeting platforms, including DFA and RightMedia - especially Europe and Asia where demand side platforms have yet to establish a strong foothold. See the nice press release below.

AudienceScience, a targeting technology company driving digital marketing success, has announced that leading interactive business, Cyber Communications Inc (cci), a subsidiary of Dentsu, Japan’s number one advertising agency, will be implementing The Audience Gateway™, its market leading Audience Targeting Platform.

The platform will enable cci to collect, collate and manage huge volumes of data from multiple sources to build precisely defined audiences for targeting. By integrating The Audience Gateway into its current technologies, cci will develop innovative solutions to support the increasingly sophisticated targeting needs of its clients.

As a business, cci is committed to driving forward the Japanese online advertising industry by adopting and developing innovative advertising solutions for the market. Combining the power of AudienceScience’s platform with its existing technologies and experience will allow it to help its clients deliver more relevant, effective campaigns through the use of advanced audience targeting.

Jeff Hirsch, CEO at AudienceScience said: “This deal, with one of the leading advertising agencies in one of the world’s largest advertising markets, highlights the growing importance internationally of data-driven audience targeting and we are pleased that AudienceScience is very much at the forefront of empowering this.”

The New York Times posted first quarter results yesterday. There was some cheer for the newspaper publisher as its revenue decline slowed to 3 percent. Its newspaper advertising is still falling off a cliff - a 12.3% drop year-on-year. The real news here though was the performance of its online advertising division. NYT is now making about $90 million from display and PPC, a rise of 20%. The newspaper industry is dying slowly. Looking at these numbers, wouldn't it make sense for NYT to dump the presses, cut the fat in editorial and go digital only. Focusing more resources on online could unlock more revenue and make it a more efficient new organisation. [Paidcontent]