Google are historically quite prolific buyers of other companies (94 and counting, according to Wikipedia), and don’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. Although most of their acquisitions are small companies, they also swallow up some reasonably sized fish, most recently air fare aggregator ITA Software for a cool $700 million.
Yep, it’s quarterly earnings season again. Google are usually first out of the gate with their numbers, and as expected they dished the dirt yesterday on the absolutely obscene amounts of money they’ve been making across the board. However the announcements were marred slightly by Google not managing to match analysts’ forecasts.
Ever since YouTube’s inception in early 2005, the site has been plagued by copyright issues. Manually reviewing every clip uploaded is impossible, with over 35 hours of video submitted each minute. Once YouTube established itself as the de facto standard in online video, the music, television and film industries leant pretty hard on Google Inc. to crack down on the rampant uploading of copyrighted material.
It seems to be the season for huge breaches in security right now. First we had the Epsilon email lists hack, which is why you’ve been getting “Sorry we lost your data” e-mails from Target, Citibank, etc., and now some nefarious types have broken into Wordpress.com’s servers and stolen a whole raft of sensitive data on their users.
It seems to be a sad fact of business life that if you suddenly make a ton of money, people will crawl out of the woodwork trying to take that money away through various forms of litigation. Facebook’s famously meteoric rise seems to have stirred more than its fair share of lawyered-up pretenders to the Zuckerberg crown, most notably the Winklevoss twins
Over at Microsoft Corp.’s MIX Developer Conference in sunny Las Vegas, Microsoft has demoed a new preview build of Internet Explorer 10, and also dropped a little premature Easter egg – the build of IE10, and the underlying Windows OS, were both running on a 1 GHz ARM chip. Sneaky.
Amazon.com Inc. appears to have a penchant for jumping into untested markets recently, for example with the launch of their Cloud Player, which has attracted more than a cursory glance from the music industry. Now the online retail giant is looking to shake things up again by offering a new, cheaper Kindle with build-in ads.
We get it – application stores are cool. With the two biggest games in town, Apple Inc.’s App Store and Google Inc.’s Android’s Market both running in to several hundred thousand apps and making developers millions of dollars, it only seems natural that others would want to irk the successful formula.
Funny things, analyst forecasts. The short-term ones tend to be fairly accurate, but the long-term predictions often fall entirely flat. That’s not the fault of the analysts, it’s due to the inherent unpredictability of mobile and technology markets. Nobody saw Android’s success coming, just as nobody thought poor old Nokia Corp. would be in the sorry state they are today ten years ago.
It’s been around ten years since Larry Page held the CEO position at Google, and now that he’s back in charge after Eric Schmidt stepped aside to allow the Google co-founder to take the reigns, it would seem he’s keen to make his mark on the now-huge company, and has this week dramatically reshuffled Google’s top brass
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Hot on the heels of the launch of fellow bookseller Amazon’s own Android Appstore, Barnes & Noble has today gone official with what has been rumoured for some time – an App Store for their tablet / eBook reader, the Nook Color.
Since Google Inc. announced late last month that the latest version of Android, Honeycomb, would not be open-sourced just yet, many in the development community have cried foul, labelling Google hypocrites and questioning whether Android is really “open,” as Google so loudly proclaims it to be.
Due to some kind of foul-up at Google Inc. a lucky man by the name of Tim Schiesser, who just so happens to be a tech writer, has been given access to a previously unheard-of Android Test Market, where it would seem app developers can trial their wares before releasing them to the general public.
In what many would see as a fairly bizarre move, Apple Inc. yesterday released a new app on the iOS App Store called iAd Gallery, the sole purpose of which is – you guessed it – to be a gallery for iAds. What purpose this app serves is completely unknown.
I’ve been fairly critical of Rupert Murdoch’s new digital newspaper The Daily, both over the ludicrously large investment News Corp. has made in the property, and the subsequent missteps in terms of social integration and target market.
When Apple Inc. launched the iPad the most striking thing about the device, which would go on to define the tablet market, was the price. Five hundred dollars for an awesome browsing slate was quite the bargain, especially coming from a company famed for their premium pricing.
In an effort to tackle the ongoing problem of Android fragmentation Google Inc. has apparently issued an ultimatum to its partners that from now on Android Godfather Andy Rubin will check all customisations and must approve them before they are released.
Although Google Inc. may be frying bigger fish right now, the Federal Trade Commission has just announced they have reached a settlement with Google over the search giant’s bungled launch of Buzz last year. The agreement stipulates that Google must submit to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years in order to make sure they do not violate privacy policies again.
Google Inc. has today taken the wraps off yet another enhancement to its increasingly diverse services, the +1 button. At its core the +1 button is the same as a Facebook “Like” button, although it can be deployed anywhere on the Web, most importantly in search results.
Those sneaky Amazon.com Inc. engineers are at it again. While rumours swirled that Google Inc. was preparing to launch their cloud-based Google Music service, Amazon.com has gone right ahead and stolen their thunder with a streaming solution of their own!
Ahh PayPal, both a handy way to shift money around and a perpetual thorn in the side. Anyone who has used the service at any great length will no doubt have a story about the, shall we say, “quirks” that exist within the ubiquitous payment system.
Through an apparent scoop by the Home Shopping Network (of all people) we have learned that e-book retailer Barnes & Noble Inc. may be planning to launch their very own store for the popular Nook Color tablet.
This one has been rumoured for a good few months now, but today Research In Motion Ltd. made it official with their plans to give their existing app selection a huge boost, by adding support for Android apps in their upcoming tablet, the PlayBook.
Just the other day Microsoft Corp. was making a song and dance about their latest browser, Internet Explorer 9, notching up a cool two million downloads in the first 24 hours. Now Mozilla has shown who the king of the browser hill really is, making download stats for the just-released Firefox 4 available publicly
It’s been many months in the making, but today Amazon have finally taken the wraps off their Appstore for Android sporting a modest 3,800 Apps, including an exclusive version of Angry Birds that will no doubt help drive uptake of the new platform.
