Technology Industry Archive

You’d think that a billionaire like Google co-founder Sergey Brin would be happy to channel some investment money into his wife’s start-up. And you’d be right. Only, believing in the old business phrase of Other People’s Money, he’s doing so not just out of his own pocket, but those of Google’s investors. And he — and Google — have doing so in...

More...

Governmental interest in online behavioral advertising has been heating up since last summer when the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued letters to online ad industry leaders about whether they track consumer web surfing to better target advertising. The process continues as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook appear before two House subcommittees. Yahoo and Google both plan to explain how...

More...

Continuing the game of “What business are we in now?”, Amazon apparently is moving quickly into the private-labeled goods business. There are already hundreds of Amazon-owned brands in home and garden, bed and bath, furniture, and tools . But when you add some of its other ventures — the Kindle and cloud computing — you have to wonder whether Amazon is spreading strategy...

More...

Search is dead; long live real-time search. Twitter playing such an integral role in the Iranian election protests that the U.S. State Department asked its management to delay a maintenance shutdown only hastened the inevitable. Like it or not, Twitter is here to stay, and competing search engines know it. Twitter is a public forum that can be searched in real time, for anything from political...

More...

Microsoft’s new web search site Bing has been increasing its market share, according to new figures from comScore. It’s going to take a lot of momentum to make serious headway, as Google continued to expand control of search between April and May. But that leaves the question of when — and how — search actually pays off for companies. Microsoft’s “search...

More...

Microsoft is trying to discredit Google’s enterprise push by highlighting a bug that probably affects fewer users than there are Democrats in the state of Utah. The issue revolves around a new feature introduced by Google allowing customers to switch to Google email and productivity applications while retaining the popular Microsoft Outlook front-end client. As I recently noted, many...

More...

Google’s recent moves in the mobile device market are aimed at a community more important than end users. Almost unnoticed in the flurry of Palm Pre, Research in Motion BlackBerry Tour and Apple iPhone introductions, Google announced a new scripting environment allowing developers to create new mobile features directly on devices using Google’s Android operating system. While other...

More...

Google was touting its new approach to making Google Apps work with Microsoft Oulook. But it now appears that Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook may disable Outlook’s the ability of Windows Desktop Search to search Outlook data. If Microsoft is being up and up about the bug report, then it’s another example of how far Google has to go to turn itself into a vendor that...

More...

Sun Microsystems had been working on a new chip project, called the Rock, for five years. The multi-threading, multi-core SPARC chip was intended for such applications as heavy computation and big database servers, going after the type of demanding use that had been a strong point for the company. Now there’s a report that the project has been cancelled. But, if so, was it mercy killing,...

More...

It’s been a tough day for MySpace as the company fired nearly 30 percent of its workforce. When it’s tough to tell whether the blood on the floors from the axing is flowing as fast as the printer ink as those who remain prepare resumes, the atmosphere is serious. However, what MySpace faces now is something to which both Twitter and Facebook should pay close attention. The world can...

More...