Dennis Hwang might be the most famous and yet unknown artist in the world. His work has been viewed hundreds of millions of times, but chances are that you have not heard of him. That is because Dennis Hwang is logo designer at Google. He has been drawing Google’s holiday logos since 2000. Continue reading ‘Most famous unknown artist in the world’
Archive for the 'Google' Category
Google will be investing $10 million in green startups, the company writes on its Google.org blog today. The company is specifically looking to invest in companies in the “green” transportation industry (e.g. hybrid, electric cars).
Today, Google.org has issued a request for investment proposals (RFP) to the tune of $10 million in order to advance sustainable transportation solutions. We are inviting entrepreneurs and companies to show us their best ideas on how they can contribute to this important cause. We need catalytic investments to support technologies, products and services that are critical to accelerating plug-in vehicle commercialization. That is why we have structured this RFP to offer investment dollars to for-profit companies to promote social and environmental change. The severity of global warming requires solutions from NGOs, governments, individuals and (very importantly) the private sector. We have already made $1 million in grants to a group of outstanding non-profit organizations, and want to expand our impact by spurring innovation in the private sector. While $10 million is a fraction of the total investment needed to transform our transportation sector, we hope this RFP will help catalyze a broader response. We need the automakers to bring these cars to market, but plug-in vehicles also need an entire ecosystem of companies to flourish.
Many analysts expect Google to grow its earnings by close to 40% a year for the next five years. Google will probably report a net income of $4.8 billion in 2007, and it should be very difficult to grow such bulk earnings for every company. In addition, the US search ad market has just slowed down a bit, forcing Google to make more money overseas. Another way of growing earnings is to go into other ad markets like online video, newspaper, radio and television ads. Google has already done experiments on these sectors, but the company hasn’t rolled out any competitive business units, yet. After all, analysts should watch Google’s progress in these areas before recommending bulk stock acquisitions.
Yahoo has been testing the beta version of its Yahoo Mail service since September 2005. Now it finally launched in finished form. Yahoo Mail has been worth the wait, because it is slightly better than Google’s popular Gmail service, in my opinion. Unlike Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo Mail allows users to exchange text messages with cell phones, too. It also offers unlimited storage of emails and attachments free of charge. In comparison, Gmail offers 2.9 gigabytes for free and sells additional storage space from $20 (6GB) to $500 (250GB) per year. Hotmail is going to offer 5GB for free and 10GB for $20 a year shortly.
What is nice about the new Yahoo Mail version, is that it acts more like a stand-alone computer program than a web-based application. For instance, you can now drag messages into folders, select groups of messages and right-click on messages to get a menu of options such as marking messages as read/unread or deleting them. Another handy feature is that you can open new tabs in Yahoo Mail, so you can have your inbox in one tab, a new email you’re composing in another tab and a live conversation in yet another one.
Overall, Yahoo Mail offers lots of features that Gmail and Hotmail still lack. But to be fair, Gmail has been in beta status since April 2004 and is still waiting to be released as final version.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google’s Chief Finance Officer George Reyes plans to leave the company, but he will help finding a successor for the top management position. Mr. Reyes will be the first top-ranked manager to resign at Google.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Postini, a global leader in on-demand communications security and compliance solutions serving more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide. Postini’s services — which include message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement — can be used to protect a company’s email, instant messaging, and other web-based communications. Under the terms of the agreement, Google will acquire Postini for $625 million in cash, subject to working capital and other adjustments, and Postini will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google. The agreement is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of the third quarter 2007.
This is still a rumor, and I cannot confirm it, but it does indeed make sense that Microsoft is considering to buy Facebook for $6 billion. Though, Google has its eyes on Facebook too and Big-G is likely to make a bid much higher than $6 billon for the hot web2.0 company. As said, right now it’s just a rumor, but it should be interesting to see how this will play out in the end.
There is a lenghty but very interesting article, written by John Heilemann, in the New York magazine that quotes an anonymous person saying that Google might acquire Apple.
“I think that Google is going to buy Apple,” this person says. “It would be a victory for Apple; they’d get major-league partners, money, and engineers. And it would be a victory for Steve—a huge win that lets him leave the stage.”
This doesn’t sound very far-fetched. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on the Apple board, engineers from both companies are developing Google Maps for the iPhone and Apple has a deal for their Apple TV service with Google-owned website YouTube.com.
Link: Steve Jobs in a Box
On Monday Steve Jobs will be speaking at Apple’s developer conference in San Francisco. He will probably tell us more about Leopard, new iPods and the iPhone, which will be shipped to AT&T in the USA on June 29. But Fred Vogelstein from Wired.com says he believes Steve Jobs will also announce a partnership between Apple and Google. Both companies have been hinting about this for months. Apple TV even has a channel for the Google-owned website YouTube. A partnership would make perfect sense, because Apple is far behind on his online services, although the company produces very popular hardware products. Google, on the other hand, has both a very good hardware and great popular Internet offerings. If Apple and Google partnered they would also form an alliance against Microsoft, which tries badly to get into the profitable market of Internet search and targeted ad links.
- Wired Blogs: A big Google-Apple partnership next week? Bet on it.
- GigaOM: Apple+Google: Now That’s Hot
