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— multiple fires, moving quickly — meant information was often conflicting.Traditional media have been hopelessly outdated in [...]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 [...]
iPhoneSlide.com is a simple little web tool that solves the problem of instantly uploading iPhone photos to one (or more) of your favorite web services - Facebook, Wordpress, Flickr, Blogger, or Typepad - in one pass via email. Take a photo and email it with subject and text to post@iphoneslide.com. You will get a [...]
StumbleUpon, the social Web service, is doing something pretty cool. No, it’s not going to earn back the $75 million eBay (EBAY) paid for it. But it’s going to start overlaying the information its members have provided about a Web page — whether they like it or don’t, and what they’ve written about it — [...]
It is becoming increasingly obvious: Big media companies (content owners) are lining up against YouTube & Google (GOOG), and are coming up with their own strategies for online video. Today, NBC (GE) confirmed to NewTeeVee that it pulled its content off YouTube in a shift towards its own service, a joint venture with News [...]
Dave Winer, whom I have dubbed “The Constant Tinkerer,” has come up with yet another way to consume information in a simple and easily navigable manner. Well known for his work on RSS and OPML, he is now shifting his attention to finding new ways to consume news from large information sources such as [...]
