All posts tagged ‘Google’
by Jim Goldman, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, CNBC
A funny thing has been happening to Google lately. Have you noticed? It’s going up!
And I’m not talking about the one-day pop it got from those surprisingly good earnings, which shocked just about everyone on Wall Street and sent Google shares soaring.
I’m talking about the day to day creep-up, the steady momentum, the renewed interest in a company that never deserved to be on the outs to begin with.
The parallels to Apple are pretty striking.
Yes, the two are in decidedly different industries, but the status they enjoy in their respective industries is pretty striking. They are each the single, exciting brand, doing innovative things, controlling their markets, owning the buzz.
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by Kevin Maney, Blogger, Tech Observer, Portfolio.com
Reports, rumors and innuendos are bouncing around the Web that Google may not want to cut an advertising deal with Yahoo after all. This before there is actually substantiation that Google and Yahoo are crafting an advertising deal, which was something of a rumor and innuendo in the first place, allegedly planted to let Microsoft know that Yahoo had options.
Google is allegedly worried about ticking off Washington officials who might think that if Google is playing ball with Yahoo, Google has become an antitrust violator that must be terminated. As if Google isn’t already close to monopoly power in search. It gets 67% of all searches, and that share keeps growing. Google worrying that a Yahoo deal will push it over the brink in antitrust is like Kim Jong-il worrying that if he puts on a party hat he’ll be considered crazy.
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by Peter Kafka, Managing Editor, Silicon Alley Insider
News Corp. execs did more than just admit that they weren’t going to hit their revenue goals for MySpace and Fox Interactive Media today. They also fessed up to another open secret: Selling ads on social networks is really difficult. How difficult? Consider that even while MySpace and all of the other FIM sites continued to grow, FIM revenues dropped from $233 million in Q2 to $210 million in Q3; about a third of that total came from a three-year guaranteed deal from Google.
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by Andy Kessler, Co-founder, Velocity Capital Management
Microsoft was smart to walk away (for now) from its $44 billion bid for Yahoo. It’s never good to overpay. But the software giant–whose stock has flat-lined for eight years–was on to the right strategy in looking to the Web for growth. Can’t Microsoft build something on its own? Why the rush to pay billions for Yahoo? The simple (and wrong) answer was that adding Yahoo’s 20% Web search market share to Microsoft’s 10% meant that it could compete against Google’s 60% share. Technology changes too fast for that to make sense except on paper.
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by Owen Thomas, Managing Editor, Valleywag
Google’s top executives desperately want to convince Wall Street that it’s on the verge of cracking the $70 billion television-advertising business–automating it, rationalizing it and ruling it, as it has done with the considerably smaller search-advertising market. They’ve even hired an NBC executive, Michael Steib, to sell broadcasters on the idea. The only problem: It will never work, as Google’s own documentation shows. Google’s triumph in search is a product of its skillful use of data. By analyzing what Web searchers click on and what advertisers say they’ll pay, it’s able to continuously refine the ads it displays to yield the most clicks for advertisers and the most profits for itself.
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by John Murrell, Blogger, Good Morning Silicon Valley
When last we looked after the big 700 MHz spectrum auction wrapped up in March, Team Google was congratulating itself for successfully winning open-access requirements for the desirable “C Block” without actually having to spend billions of dollars, clearing a path for devices powered by its open Android platform even though Verizon Wireless won those airwaves. The search sovereign should have known it wasn’t going to be that easy.
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by Henry Blodget, Editor, Silicon Alley Insider
Yahoo’s search partnership with Google played a major role in allowing the company to fight off Microsoft. By offering the hope of immediately higher cash flow, it should also stop Yahoo’s stock price from falling back to the teens.
In his sayonara letter, Steve Ballmer urged Yahoo to kill the partnership, arguing that the engineers behind Panama were one of the main reasons Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo and that, if Yahoo did the deal with Google, they would leave.
And he’s right: They will (or at least they’ll move on to other projects). That’s part of the reason the outsourcing deal makes sense: It allows Yahoo to focus on businesses it can win, instead of throwing money at a war it has already lost.
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by Ben Kunz, Director of Strategic Planning, Mediassociates
Google’s biggest threat may not be Microsoft or Yahoo. No, one of the most formidable challenges facing Google is likely sitting in your pocket or purse. It’s your cellphone, and it will put added pressure on Google and other Internet companies to revamp the way they handle online marketing.
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by Julian Sanchez, Contributor, Ars Technica
All through the primary season, media and political pundits have enjoyed playing Six Degrees of Indignation with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. But the editor of the conservative Web site RedState may have come up with the most tech-headline-friendly pseudo-scandal yet: Lessig-Google-fabulous-lip-syncing-Jesusgate. The site, which is a conservative stalwart that regularly features guest posts from Republican Senators, is urging its supporters to phone the Senate Commerce Committee, where Google is currently advocating network neutrality legislation, and “tell the committee it is abhorrent to have Larry Lessig parroting Google’s call for open networks while Google censors and denigrates Christians.”
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by Saul Hansell, Blogger, Bits, The New York Times
Can Yahoo win by building a coalition of losers?
BoomTown reports this morning that CNET is going to announce an expanded relationship with Yahoo this afternoon. In once sense that is a yawner. Those two have hooked up and broken up so many times over the last decade that they are some sort of dysfunctional couple who can neither commit nor leave each other.
But depending on the details, there may be a clue that Yahoo’s current strategy may be getting a tad bit of traction. As I wrote after Yahoo’s earnings call, the company seems to be trying to build its ad network among the mainstream publishers who feel most threatened by the rise of Google.
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by Michael Learmonth, Senior Editor, Silicon Alley Insider
What do people like to watch on the Web? They don’t really know, according to a survey conducted by ClipBlast. The company says almost half of Web video watchers can’t tell you why or how they end up watching a specific video–they just do.
This is bad news for anyone trying to build a following around a specific show or series, but great news for YouTube, which services a world of people grazing for video.
The company asked 1,000 people how they find video on the Web, and of those that expressed a preference, 28% said they prefer “discovery” through browsing, the online equivalent of channel-flipping. That’s followed by recommendations from friends (27%) and search engine results (22%), all of which would heavily favor YouTube.
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by Joe Wilcox, Blogger, Microsoft Watch
Live Mesh is so messy to explain, I can’t cover everything in this post. But simply: Microsoft is launching a synchronization platform that the company claims is technology-agnostic. That absolutely is not true. Live Mesh is Microsoft’s attempt to turn operating-system and proprietary-services platforms into hubs that replace the Web. It’s the most anti-Web 2.0 technology yet released by any company. Microsoft is building a services-based operating system that transcends and extends Windows and also the function of Web browsers. It’s bold, brilliant and downright scary.
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by Vasanth Sridharan, Blogger, Silicon Alley Insider
Sick of hearing about the great, free food at Google? Skip this post. Want to know how much it costs Google to pay for all that grub? Read on. Here’s the math: Googlers in the U.S. get two meals a day free, according to the jobs page, but people we talk to at the Mountain View, Calif., Googleplex tell us employees there are often chowing down three times a day. Google is open 251 days a year. So let’s say that Google is providing about 600 meals per year, per employee.
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by M.G. Siegler, Blogger, VentureBeat
Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are often just one click of a bookmark away on users’ Web browsers. Google looks to be one-upping them by turning its personalized home page, iGoogle, into a social network of sorts. With the new developer sandbox for iGoogle, Google is offering hints of what could be a very grand scheme. The video Google has released is front-loaded with what seem to be routine updates for what developers can do with iGoogle. However, toward the end we’re hit with code for accessing friends’ data and yes, creating an all important (in this day and age of social networks), friends’ activity stream.
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by Rory Cellan-Jones, Blogger, BBC News dot.life
It’s easy to forget that as well as being an extraordinarily innovative firm, Google is also rapidly becoming Britain’s biggest advertising business. The latest figures–released on Thursday evening–show how rapidly it is growing in the U.K., earning $803 million (about £407m) in the first three months of 2008, about 40% up on a year ago. Let’s put that into context. Last year, ITV’s net advertising revenue was £1.5 billion. So, even if you just multiply Google’s earnings by four and assume no further growth this year, Britain’s biggest commercial television business–the original “license to print money”–is about to be overtaken by an American upstart which only arrived in the U.K. in 2001.
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