Meebo, the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up that popularized web-based instant messaging, is celebrating its second anniversary today. The three-person company we first wrote about in September 2005 is growing up literally and figuratively. The company is expanding beyond its instant messaging roots and is now embracing realtime interactions via what co-founder Seth Sternberg [...]
Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard, released last week, has over 300 new features. Too bad the latest Java SDK isn’t one of them. And the Java developers that use Mac OS are fuming.They’re feeling slighted: In January, Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs told the New York Times that “Nobody uses Java anymore.” Fast-forward to [...]
Maybe one of the smarter moves of the Terry Semel era was for Yahoo to give up on its China operations, settling instead for a substantial chunk of a native startup, Alibaba. That decision has powered Yahoo’s stock to a level that was barely imaginable a month ago - and it may send it [...]
Amanda Mooney has a great idea: Google (GOOG) should build “capability to import my Outlook, Ziggs, LinkedIn and Plaxo contacts into my Reader account and have Google instantly subscribe to news and blog feeds related to my people.” In other words, they can implement some sort of “auto discovery” and turn Google Reader into [...]
Microsoft (MSFT) has invested $240 million in Facebook at a valuation of $15 billion and gets the rights to sell third-party ads on the Facebook network. That’s about 2 percent stake. Not as crazy as the $900 million that MySpace (NWS) pried out of Google (GOOG), but still pretty steep. I thought the deal was [...]
This week I read a fascinating article by Joe Weinman that was published in Business Communications Review. In it, he proposes an innovative concept that could initiate a paradigm shift in Internet search, fixing what may be its biggest problem: too many results, many of which are of limited relevance.He argues that the [...]
The Wall Street Journal this morning is reporting that Microsoft (MSFT) and Google GOOG) are both pressing Facebook hard to close an advertising deal that would give the winner the right to broker ads for the site outside of the U.S. in conjunction with its planned international expansion. WSJ believes that the deal will also [...]
James Surowiecki, reknown author, speaker and the financial correspondent for The New Yorker, in a recent article explains why no one in the US is feeling the pinch by the sharp decline in the dollar, unless of course they are off on an European shopping trip searching for rare Hermes bags, or bespoke Saville [...]
I was in San Diego this week, and the wildfires there were extraordinary. Hundreds of thousands of people — normal, suburban, it-can’t-happen-to-me people — were displaced, stuck on roadways and desperate for information. The nature of the emergency — multiple fires, moving quickly — meant information was often conflicting.Traditional media have been hopelessly outdated in [...]
The slow and steady exodus of executives from Google (GOOG) has been in progress for a while now. Today, two senior members of the corporate development team left Googleplex for good, to start a new venture fund, Merus Capital.Salman Ullah, Google’s vice president of corporate development; Sean Dempsey, principal at Google’s corporate development group [...]
