Google

Google's Schmidt urges NASA to "create more luck" through open development

In a speech celebrating NASA's fiftieth anniversary, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt urged NASA to be more collaborative with other agencies and even the general public. He suggested that Google's successes often result from opening up without knowing where the breakthroughs would occur.

While Schmidt acknowledged that government agencies like NASA can't wholly adopt Google's "shift and iterate" model whereby it throws a lot of projects at the wall to see what sticks, it

...can learn from open-software development and projects like Linux and MySQL, where collaboration is necessary. And the agency can learn about the value of flexibility from companies like Google, he said.… Read more

Counting links the easy way

So I've been meaning to do some write-ups on some browser toolbars and plug-ins that may be useful for SEO purposes...and leave it to Rand at SEOmoz.org to remind me of this with his review of 12 popular browser toolbars.

Link Counter (download) is one that I absolutely love both for what it does and its simplicity. Links play a very important part in SEO, both internal links as well as external links. Are they live or broken, 301 redirected, HTML or JavaScript based? Unfortunately the one thing it doesn't seem to manage is showing "nofollow" links, but there are plenty other tools out there that do that.

The best way to get a feel for Link Counter is to see it in action, and one of the best places to see it in action is on an e-commerce site. E-commerce sites are often rather complex with many links on a page, links out to external sites, to product pages, JavaScript windows, and more. Let's use Onlineshoes.com for our demo.… Read more

D.C. Googleplex: 1,100 sq. ft. per worker, and built to party

WASHINGTON--I now know the real reason why Google just moved its 20-person crew here into a 22,000-square-foot work space: to host sprawling, glowing parties, of course.

On Thursday night, a few hundred familiar faces in the technology policy scene--a slew of think tank, advocacy group, and trade association folks; abundant congressional staffers; a smattering of government officials; journalists and public-relations flacks--braved unrelenting sleet and rain to see the search giant's new downtown digs awash in dim lighting that changed from one rainbow hue to another as the hours passed.

Google employees, on the whole, may be overwhelmingly Democratic … Read more

Google's Schmidt to NASA: Be more 'open'

WASHINGTON--Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt on Thursday suggested NASA could learn a few things from his company.

Speaking at a luncheon series to commemorate the agency's 50th anniversary this year, Schmidt urged the space agency to take after what Google attempts to accomplish with its products: Build open, collaborative systems, not closed ones--a reference to NASA's legacy of creating mission-specific vehicles. Create simple platforms upon which others can build. And while you're at it, why not let spacecraft talk to each other?

"Isn't it obvious that spacecraft should have Internet on them, too?" Schmidt … Read more

Twitter, Facebook called on for higher purpose

Google.org's technology project to help save lives in the event of natural disasters or public health threats is set to launch Thursday.

The project, called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD), is a nonprofit organization that ambitiously aims to help communities around the world use Web and communications technology to identify and warn others of outbreaks like Avian flu or disasters like Hurricane Katrina. That technology, which will include social software Twitter and Facebook, will be used to coordinate rescue responses and help save lives, according to Eric Rasmussen, president and CEO of InSTEDD.

"We'… Read more

Google betting big on mobile market--and Apple

(This post has been updated to reflect Google's announcement on Monday.)

On Christmas Day thousands of people opened up boxes with something cool and functional inside and wasted no time logging onto Google.com through their brand new iPhones.

As a result of those gifts, the number of global queries to Google's search site from iPhones surpassed the number of queries from people using market-leading Symbian-based phones for the first time. Google calls it the "Christmas cross-over."

That is huge given the fact that the number of iPhone units shipped is tiny compared to the number … Read more

Yahoo! ripening for an acquisition

An analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein pegs the value of Yahoo!'s cash and stock holdings below the value of its actual business. No wonder word on the street is that Microsoft is mulling over an acquisition.

At $24.09, Thursday's closing price, Yahoo has a market capitalization of $32 billion. When Mr. Lindsay looks at the company's $2 billion in cash, along with its holdings in Yahoo Japan, Alibaba (the Chinese e-commerce firm) and other entities it doesn't run, he comes up with a value of $13.24 a share. That leaves a value of $10.51 a share for the actual business of Yahoo, making the value of Yahoo's core business about $14 billion, or 7 percent of Google's $200 billion market value.

What is Yahoo! to do?… Read more

Linux Magazine's top 20 companies for 2008

There are some notable omissions from Linux Magazine's list of the top-20 companies for 2008 (MuleSource, MySQL, etc.), but it's an interesting list because it doesn't read like a standard list of open-source companies. Or, rather, it takes a more expansive, "Long Tail" view of what an open source company is.

Hence, the list includes the usual suspects like Alfresco (correctly reading that Alfresco is a serious threat to Sharepoint's growing dominance), Mozilla, Ubuntu/Canonical, Red Hat, and rPath, but also Google, Yahoo!, and...Microsoft.… Read more

Google's new motto: "Don't be arrogant"

If this sounds like a tall order for Google - renowned for its elitism - it's because it is. Yet a call for humility is precisely what Google CEO Eric Schmidt seems to believe will keep Google firing on all cylinders, according to the New Yorker.

[Google is] run by three computer scientists we're going to make all the mistakes computer scientists running a company would make. But one of the mistakes we're not going to make is the mistake that non-scientists make. We're going to make mistakes based on facts and data and analysis. What … Read more