Microsoft, supposedly thwarted in previous bids for other Google-adjusting
properties, is paying $6 billion cash for aQuantive, a 10-year-old publicly
held Internet ad company that could be said to have been relatively unknown
when Microsoft announced that it was paying an outlandish 85% premium to buy
it to compete against Google.
Six billion is more money than Microsoft ever paid for anything. It said the
price was bid up by competition, but provided no color. It claimed that "it's
exactly the right company to buy, and hence we're willing to pay." Microsoft
has $28 billion in the bank. Microsoft is outspending Google, which said it
would pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick last month (unless it's stopped by
Microsoft-inspired regulators).
Microsoft also supposedly bid for DoubleClick and was reportedly willing to
pay a billion dollars for 24/7, which London ad agency ... (more)
That anti-Microsoft pair, IBM and Google, are kicking in $20 million-$25
million apiece for hardware, software and services to spread the gospel of
"cloud computing" in the academe.
They want budding computer scientists to learn how to write Internet-scale
programs that process trillions of secure transactions a day and master
massively parallel computing skills.
The University of Washington, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and
the University of Maryland have joined the initiative and will share a large
Linux cluster of several hundred computers composed of Google machine... (more)
Yahoo! released the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI) as a free, open-source
JavaScript and CSS library eighteen months ago along with a commitment to the
developer community: We'll share with you our best frontend tools, engage
with you about how they're built and why, and we'll document them fully. In
that short time, YUI has become one of the best-regarded frontend libraries
and has been adopted by individuals on their blogs, startups who are going
all-in with YUI as the foundation of their frontend architecture, and Fortune
500 companies using YUI as a trusted, tested, long-... (more)
"Our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to
site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled," wrote Google Search VP
Marissa Mayer yesterday, in a blogged explanation of the unfortunate fact
than most Google searches conducted between 6:30AM-7:25AM PST on Saturday
morning returned a message "This site may harm your computer" beside each and
every search result. "This was clearly an error," Mayer added, "and we are
very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users."
Google works with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with
criteria ... (more)
For a while there it looked like there was something Google couldn't find,
namely its own three-foot pet python Kaiser, which it managed lose somewhere
in its 300,000-square-foot New York City offices. The maintenance staff
finally found the little guy safe and sound and he was sent home with his pet
engineer. The mice and rats of New York can breath a sigh of relief.
Google Carries Coal to Newcastle
There is now a free beta Google Desktop available for the Mac that basically
does what Apple's Spotlight already does and that's to index the user's drive
and make it searchable. One t... (more)