by Jessica Hodgson, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Thursday that he believes it’s a “shame” that Yahoo had decreased its focus on Internet search, through its recently announced partnership with Microsoft.
by Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
After today’s Google search press briefing, where I raised the issue of some poor quality search results in Google at one point, Sergey Brin asked me to demonstrate a few.
On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.
by Julia Angwin, Editor, Digits, The Wall Street Journal
Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Thursday evening that, for six years, he resisted the idea of building what became the Chrome browser and (soon) operating system, before succumbing to the enthusiasm of Google Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
The New York Post yesterday ran a squishy story with the nifty headline “Fear Grips Google,” that seems to be the talk of the tech blogosphere today on a fairly news-less Monday. The thesis is that the search giant has sprung into action out of concern of some of the early kudos Microsoft is getting for Bing, its new search engine.
The news that Google is placing ads on Google News has sent a renewed wave of hand-wringing through the newspaper industry. How dare those Googlers make online news a profitable business! Of course, Google is planning to keep most of that profit. Good on them!
Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google’s advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google’s long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs. But the real cut here is to Google’s ambitions.
by Lise Buyer, Founder and Principal of the Class V Group
The numbers are startling; one technology IPO last quarter, only six in 2008. Is innovation dead? Did Google/Microsoft/Cisco consume all the promising start-ups? Did Sarbanes-Oxley render IPOs too hard and costly? Yes, if you believe columnist, conference and collective wisdom. They’re wrong.
Is YouTube making Google a political player? The video-sharing site, with its stratospheric bandwidth bills and questionable new ad formats, may never pay Larry and Sergey back in cash for the $1.65 billion they shelled out to buy it in 2006. But it doesn’t have to. YouTube, having conquered online video, is taking over political broadcasting.
In June, 2006, Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, went to Washington, D.C., hoping to create a little good will. Google was something of a Washington oddity then. Although it was a multibillion-dollar company, with enormous power, it had no political-action committee, and its Washington office had opened, in 2005, with a staff of one, in suburban Maryland. The visit, which was reported in the Washington Post, was hurried, and, in what was regarded by some as a snub, Brin failed to see some key people, including Sen. Ted Stevens, of Alaska, who was then the chairman of the Commerce Committee and someone whose idea of the Internet appeared to belong to the analog era. (He once said that a staff member had sent him “an Internet.”)
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