Who’s asking for your data? Google, as a part of the newfound sense of transparency that hit not long after that whole China incident, just put up this government-tracking site to see where requests for user information were coming from. Something tells us the people of Brazil don’t have a lot of reason to be happy right now. source
Perfect response to this feature: “I like the TEXTp, but could you cut the font size in half? some videos look horrible and you can’t even make out what it is with the current font size. If it were 6 or 8 instead of what looks like 12 then you would still cut down on bandwidth but get more people to switch because they will still get their video.” (Oh, and people are downright angry about the new layout, which has been around for a while in beta form, and are threatening to quit the site where they watch all their videos. Because, as we all know, the most rational people in the world are YouTube commenters.) source
In fact, Topeka Google Mayor Bill Bunten expressed it best: ‘Don’t be fooled. Even Google recognizes that all roads lead to Kansas, not just yellow brick ones.’
Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt • In a post describing the company’s decision to change their name from Google to Topeka. The yearly April Fool’s joke is a homage to Topeka, Kansas, which symbolically changed their name to Google last month in an attempt to become part of the company’s trial super-fast broadband program. On the plus side, at least someone’s called Google still. (In other other news, it’s April Fool’s Day and Justin Bieber isn’t a father.) source
They had this business to themselves for years. Now everybody’s joined the party. The U.S. is probably tough for them now.
Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder • On Research in Motion’s declining sales this quarter. The company’s BlackBerry is being attacked on all fronts, by both the iPhone and the upstart Motorola Droid. As a result, the company only shipped 10.5 million devices, half a million off from estimates. They’re still profitable (and profits are up), but the sales suggest future weakness. source
The controversy stems from a bauxite mining project backed by China. Late Tuesday night, Google noted a series of cyber-attacks which seem to be targeted at Vietnamese people from around the world. While the attack isn’t as sophisticated as the China attack which led to Google leaving that country last week, it certainly left a mark on what Google calls “an important and emotionally charged issue in the country.” source
Google owns the “long tail” results. MS is just trying to accept its niche. Why did Microsoft reboot its entire search engine last year? Simple. They realized it was focusing on the wrong thing, good results for obvious searches, when the real money was to be made in more obscure results. “On any given a month,” said Microsoft Bing manager Yusuf Mehdi, “one-third of queries that show up on Bing, it’s the first time we’ve ever seen that query. A huge chunk of those, we’ll never see again.” As a result, Bing has a different focus, one that involves partnerships with startups and depth on intelligent queries. source