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My 2 featured articles for the week ending May 13, 2005:

Archived blogs for the week of May 9, 2005

864 - May 13, 2005 - 10.27 AM EST

Google's first shareholders meeting

Small (retail) investors had a seldom-seen opportunity to ask questions at top executives at Google yesterday, but some chose mostly upbeat topics of inquiry at the company's very first stockholder's meeting.

Google's executives used the opportunity to address the company's potential for growth abroad, its competition against Yahoo and Microsoft and its efforts to keep employees motivated.

"We're just getting started," said Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive. The meeting, held at Google's Mountain View headquarters, known as the Googleplex, attracted about 200 people.

As expected, investors who spoke were in a good mood. Many have profited handsomely from the company's stellar stock performance.

Since the initial public offering last year, Google shares have leapt nearly 170 percent to $228.72.

Posted on Businessblog™

863 - May 13, 2005 - 7.30 AM EST

Hung jury for Yahoo's dispute with FindWhat

FindWhat.com said yesterday its three-year long patent infringement dispute with Overture ended in a hung jury.

But Yahoo's Overture unit said the court determined that FindWhat infringed on Overture's patent claims at issue in the trial, and that the portions of the case still in dispute dealt with other matters.

"We are pleased to learn the jury has determined that FindWhat infringed on all of the patent claims that were before the jury and at issue in the trial. It is unfortunate that the jury did not reach a conclusion on the remaining issues. We look forward to resolving all remaining issues in the post-trial briefing that has been scheduled by the Court," Yahoo said in a statement.

The mistrial prolonged a legal dispute over the bid-for-placement technology that has fueled the lucrative paid search advertising market. Both FindWhat and Yahoo subsidiary Overture make money by using a pay-per-click business model that places company listings on their search engines using an automated bidding system.

Posted on Businessblog™

862 - May 12, 2005 - 10.18 AM EST

Google acquires Dodgeball.com

Google has acquired Dodgeball.com, a mobile social-networking powerhouse. Dodgeball.com allows you to find other dodgeball.com users via text messaging. In other words meet-up with friends, make new friends, etc. by actually meeting up in person.

For those wondering what Dodgeball is and how the Google acquisition will affect the company, here’s a nice little write up on the Dodgeball.com site. “On May 11th, dodgeball.com was acquired by Google. I’m sure a lot of you have some questions about what this means for you and the future of dodgeball, so we put together a quick Q&A.”

Q: Why did dodgeball sell to Google?

A: As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone. Since we finished grad school, we’ve been trying to figure out how to grow dodgeball and make it a better service along the way. We talked to a lot of different angel investors and venture capitalists, but no one really “got” what we were doing - that is until we met Google.

The people at Google think like us. They looked at us in a “You’re two guys doing some pretty cool stuff, why not let us help you out and let’s see what you can do with it” type of way. We liked that. Plus, Alex and I are both Google superfans and the people we’ve met so far are smart, cool and excited about what they’re working on.

Posted on Businessblog™

861 - May 12, 2005 - 9.31 AM EST

Mother’s Day online spending hits $4.4 billion

VeriSign announces that online spending on Mother’s Day hit US $4.4 billion in 2005, during the period from April 25 through May 8. This represents a 24 percent boost over last year's Mother’s Day. There were'nt any detailed category breakdown (i.e., flowers vs. apparel, etc.), although apparently jewelry purchases increased by 79 percent.

I sent my mother flowers from a local florist in her area. There was no e-commerce on the florist’s site—I sent an email telling them how much I wanted to spend and to call me in the morning to get my credit card number, which they promptly did at 7:30 a.m.! (Question: is that an “online transaction”? Answer: maybe.)

According to a December 2004 BURST! Media consumer survey, roughly 35% of workers with Internet access have done price comparison shopping at work, while slightly more than 31% have purchased products at work. Similarly, a Websense May 2005 survey indicated that 52% of respondents shop online at work.

Then there’s the “life events” Web behavior pattern. I wrote about that recently in our Local Media Journal.

Briefly, comScore recently documented what directory publishers have known for a long time— life-cycle events drive usage and spending. Events such as getting married, buying a home, having a child, and so on, were mapped to increased online activity and buying.

Posted on Businessblog™

860 - May 11, 2005 - 10.39 AM EST

Google secures licence to operate in China

Google-China will enable the search company to compete more agressively with competitors in the world's second-largest Internet market.

Google has bought a web address and is considering opening an office by the end of the year.

Paid Inclusion

Despite having no physical presence in China, Google already accounts for about 20% of online searches there.

The licence will enable it to compete more effectively with rival Yahoo and domestic providers.

Web-based services such as search engines are heavily censored in China with many firms preventing people from gathering information on sensitive political and moral subjects.

Posted on Businessblog™

859 - May 11, 2005 - 9.41 AM EST

Google expands its Scholar database

Google's Scholar pilot that went live in February is being expanded. Now, any library or institution that has the proper link resolving software can hook into Google Scholar and provide direct links to articles found via a GS search.

This is a service the library community has been asking for since Google Scholar launched last November.

Google also is releasing a help page for the service. Additionally, Google Scholar has increased the number of journals and books to which it can link directly. Previously, only articles with DOIs (digital object identifiers) or PMIDs (PubMed unique identifier) would work.

Now, after collaboration with many link resolver vendors, Google is able to gain access and crawl local holdings information for a specific institution or library, to help provide direct links to articles. In other words, DOIs are not required.

Google Scholar developer Anurag Acharya told ResourceShelf that most libraries should be able to turn on a configuration option in their link resolver and be up and running in a short amount of time.

He also told us that each participating library will appear as a selectable affiliation via a search on the preferences page. This will allow Google Scholar users to take advantage of these direct links when they are accessing the database off-campus or via a computer that is not on the campus network.

Finally, Acharya alerted us to a change on Google Scholar results pages. Now, if the searcher’s preferred library has access to an article found via Google Scholar, a direct link to the material will receive better placement on the search results page.

The link will now be found directly next to the title of the article or book and, in some cases, made even more visible by appearing in a different color than other parts of the entry.

Posted on Businessblog™

858 - May 10, 2005 - 8.56 AM EST

Google taken offline because of DNS outage

Google's global network was taken offline for a short period May 7, due to what the company called a DNS issue. Google was inaccessible during the outage, sparking fears that the world's largest Internet property had been hacked.

Fueling the speculation were bloggers, who quickly spread word of the problem and claimed they were being redirected to SoGoSearch.com when attempting to visit Google.com.

Posted on Businessblog™

857 - May 10, 2005 - 8:12 AM EST

Search engines get consumers' votes

As a whole, search engines get high points from consumers, although not as high as some supermarkets.

Every year for the past eight years, Harris Interactive has polled a cross-section of US adults to find out which industries are doing a good job or a bad job of serving their consumers.

This year, 92% of the respondents thought supermarkets were generally doing a good job, while only 8% felt they were doing a bad job, giving supermarkets a net score (i.e. good job minus bad job) of 84 positive percentage points and putting them in the number one position.

Posted on Businessblog™

856 - May 9, 2005 - 2.08 PM EST

Google's Web Accelerator has bugs in it

On Friday, Google confirmed that it was aware of as many as five sites where Web Accelerator was returning users cached pages under other people's user names.

Google's Web Accelerator uses a combination of local and server-based caching and preloading of Web pages to more quickly serve Web pages to a user's browser.

Google's servers, in many ways, act as an intermediary between Web sites and a user's browser.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has stopped caching pages from those sites, said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web.

Users of some smaller Web forum sites have complained in online postings that they began receiving Web pages which displayed other people's user names after downloading Web Accelerator. The forum site, Somethingawful.com, was among those warning its users to avoid Web Accelerator because of reports that pages from other users' logins were exposed.

"It is an unfortunate problem, but it looks worse than it is," Mayer said. "We are caching those pages on the server side with the user name on them…You see it, but it's important to point out that you are not logged in as user and you do not have the session cookies needed to perform operations as [that] user."

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2005. All rights reserved.

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