Trends. Crain's Chicago Business : Subscription Center. Alberto Moriondo came to TechStars' Demo Day last August looking for a partnership for a client. He ended up with a job and an investment. The 47-year-old former Motorola executive invested in WebCurfew, which makes technology that allows parents to control when devices, such as tablet computers, smartphones and videogame systems can access the Internet. He also joined the Toronto-based company as head of business development.
The initial draw was simple: “I have teenagers,” he says. WebCurfew's product is somewhat unique because it works with various kinds of routers, making it appealing to technophobes. “Parental controls are in most routers, but most individuals don't know how to program a MAC or IP address,” Mr. He estimates there are 50 million North American households with broadband, a router and one child between 7 and 17 years old. ABI Research estimates the worldwide market for parental control software at about $1 billion.
But Mr. Mr. de Silva is betting that the router will win.
Yahoo. SEO. Rank. Acquisitions. Discovery. Google's Worst Nightmare. So what’s Google so freaked out about? Recently posted on the official Google blog, regarding the Microsoft’s proposed buyout of Yahoo! : Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email, IM, and web-based services? Google’s incredible success to date teeters on a single, easily-overlooked prerequisite: that we continue to travel around the Internet through a web browser. Without that trip through the Web Browser Highway, Google’s billboards that dot that highway would never be seen.
If you can envision an operating system that neatly taps into various web services – email, instant messaging, photo sharing, collaborative documents and spreadsheets – without requiring a web browser, you can start to sense why Google would be freaked out. If you combine the massive population that Yahoo! And what of search? Wouldn’t it be nice to hit a simple key combination in Windows (Windows key?) View from the Top. Is Google Making Us Stupid?
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. Does Google have an Achilles' heel? By John C. Dvorak BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Investors wonder whether or not the recent downturn in the Google Inc. stock price is anything more than a major correction or a harbinger of bad things to come. I've put together a list of possible weaknesses and potential problems at the company, any of which could permanently harm its future. The fine line between simple and old-fashioned.
The best example of a successful site sticking with simplicity is Craigslist. The problem is, with a company like Google, "experts" will hound them to change their approach since you cannot win design awards with simplicity, and awards are what matter most to designers. My sense is that when people are looking for information, they want to expedite the process and simplicity is better than complexity and distractions.
Not expendable. Burning Man vs. Fickle advertisers. Lack of traditional marketing skills. Free ride from the media. So is there an Achilles' heel at Google? It's all image. Has Google Gotten Cheap? | Tech Stock Update | AMZN EBAY GOOG MSFT T VZ YHOO. Lindsay says Google is recession-resistant -- but not recession-proof. "They're not totally insulated from it," he says, noting that the company could take a hit if advertisers decide to pull back on spending. Consumers also will be less likely to click through ads for, say, a plasma TV, if they're feeling the pain. At the same time, with advertisers shifting their spending from traditional mediums to online, Google still stands to weather -- and even benefit from -- a downturn.
Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney notes that over the last two years, Google's forward price-to-earnings ratio has ranged between 25 and 35. At $500, Google's P/E ratio of 25 would suggest a bottom is at hand. As for any potential merger between Yahoo! (YHOO_) and Microsoft (MSFT_), Mahaney expects Google to remain on top. Google is widely expected to maintain its lead over the two companies in search, even if they combine their resources. "We think it's probably going to be a net positive for Google," he says.
GOP Calls for Closer Look at Google-DoubleClick Deal. Hewlett-Packard will apparently need close to two months to start fulfilling backorders for the (temporarily) revived TouchPad tablet. "It will take 6-8 weeks to build enough HP TouchPads to meet our current commitments, during which time your order will then ship from this stock with free ground shipping," read an email sent to customers and reprinted in a Sept. 7 posting on the Precentral.net blog. "You will receive a shipping notification with a tracking number once your order has shipped. "That would place the new TouchPads in consumers' hands sometime in either late October or early November. The reduced-price devices are not returnable, according to the email.
Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. How to beat Google? Work smarter and harder. By John C. Dvorak BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Insofar as the market is concerned, Google Inc is now the fifth-largest company in the USA. I am more than a little amused, as my suspicion that we are entering Bubble 2.0 is confirmed. It's not that Google /quotes/zigman/30194416/delayed/quotes/nls/goog GOOG +0.29% doesn't do a great job at what it does: finding stuff on the Internet. It's the idea that the company is seen as more valuable than 995 of the Fortune 1,000 firms, many of which have been in business for decades. Before the whole episode is over, I expect that Google will be No. 1. The company most affected by this is Microsoft Corp. Exactly what is Google doing that nobody else seems able to do?
It all boils down to hard work. Anyone who runs a blog and has good metrics immediately notices two things. Google knows it can be surpassed by something else. That's all there is to it; the rest is smoke and mirrors. Yet even Google knows it can be surpassed by something else. Google’s Latest Blog Addresses Public Policy Issues. Analytics.