Advertisers should be looking to target consumers through their mobiles, Microsoft said this week.

Speaking at the company’s advance08 forum for online advertising leadership, Microsoft’s corporate vice-president of mobile services, Brian Arbogast, commented that advertisers should take advantage of new opportunities available for mobile advertising.

"In today’s connected world, the mobile device is emerging as a prime opportunity for advertisers to reach their audience," he said.

Mr Arbogast’s comments came as the company announced two new initiatives for advertising on mobiles.

Marketers are to be invited to create keyword campaigns through Microsoft adCenter that target customers through Live Search Mobile.

And mobile banner ads are also to be made available on Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail in the UK, the US, France and Spain.

The company also announced this week the launch of a new cashback scheme, through which Live Search shoppers in the US will have a percentage of their purchases refunded.

Attorneys for shareholders in Yahoo! are calling for the release of information regarding Microsoft’s $47.5 billion (£24.2 billion) bid for the search pioneer.

The shareholders are alleging that Yahoo! is protecting documents in order to protect itself from a proxy takeover led by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, which would see the company pursue a deal with Microsoft once more.

But Yahoo! attorneys maintain that the information is confidential and should not be released.

It emerged earlier this week that Microsoft is discussing the possibility of a search advertising deal with Yahoo! that would stop short of a total takeover.

But Yahoo! shareholders claim the company betrayed its commitment to investors when it refused the software giant’s initial acquisition offer.

Meanwhile, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said at the firm’s UK conference earlier this week that it would be willing to extend the pilot advertising project with Yahoo! that took place earlier this year, which Mr Brin called a success.

Property advertisers may soon be able to pay for links on Google Maps, a new report suggests.

The feature has integrated a facility which allows users to search for homes for sale in particular areas or around specific postcodes.

Results can be ordered according to bedroom and bathroom numbers as well as price and location, the Times notes.

And the service could see the popularity of paid search on Google’s main site replicated by property advertisers on the mapping service, the newspaper indicates.

The company – which welcomed visitors such as Gordon Brown to its annual conference this week at the Grove hotel complex in Hertfordshire – could reportedly find the property market a lucrative bedfellow.

"Property is just one of the areas in which Google is seeking to make geography or location an increasingly important part of the results provided by its ubiquitous search tool," comments the publication.

Yahoo! and BT have suspended a security feature temporarily after it prevented some BT customers from being able to send emails, it has been reported.

According to the Guardian, the measure required messages to display a Yahoo! or BT address in the from field in order for it to pass through the server.

However, this meant that senders using their own domains found their messages blocked, being issued with the information that error 553 had occurred and asked to validate their domain by clicking on a link.

Phil Gyford, a freelance web consultant and blogger, commented to the publication: that BT’s attempts at honing security measures were essentially a good thing.

"Trouble is, they implemented it without telling anyone, then made it fiendishly complex to fix. The issue is even more confused by the apparently pointless partnership with Yahoo!," he added.

In related news, the Associated Press has reported that two spammers were given a $230 million (£118 million) judgement after failing to turn up to a court hearing over more than 730,000 spam messages sent on social site MySpace.