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Google execs cheery about Silicon Valley economy

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The national and global economy is suffering something between a setback and a meltdown, but Google's top executives said Wednesday they're bullish about Silicon Valley's economic prospects.

"This is the sixth or seventh cycle I've seen in Silicon Valley. I think we're better positioned than ever," Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said of the Silicon Valley region during a meeting with reporters at the company's headquarters here.

Schmidt specifically said the venture capital community is more sophisticated and that a Northern California start-up can reach scale more easily. "Young … Read more

Epson announces three new sub-$100 printers

Color lasers, black and white multifunctions, color inkjets, compact photo printers--with a handful of options available to shoppers, the all-in-one (AIO) color inkjet printer is arguably the most functional. The ability to perform multiple functions within the same machine is a useful and convenient feature for the home-office entrepreneur, poor college student, or the everyday home user. Prices for these high-performance machines are affordable across the board. Today, Epson introduced three new AIO printers under $100. Let's take a closer look at the new offerings:

Epson Stylus NX100 Printer, scanner, and fax machine Two ink-cartridge bays with four total … Read more

LinkedIn spruces up Groups platform

LinkedIn on Thursday night folded several changes into its Groups platform that are designed to enhance the social-networking site's group and user management features.

Among the changes are a centralized hub page designed to allow members of a group to gather and converse, as well as a searchable roster, according to a post in TechCrunch, which notes some of the changes may go a long way in addressing concerns about buggy management features on the Groups site.

Make more room for the virtual Rolodex...

Would an Obama government be a Googleocracy?

There they were, two up and coming Senior Vice-Presidents discussing how they would change things if they got the top job.

The top job they were talking about was National CEO.

Barack Obama and the leader of the traditionally snooty, but now trying desperately to be hippish, UK Conservative Party, David Cameron, strolled through the British Parliament last week and didn't mention V for Vendetta once.

Instead, Mr. Cameron told Mr. Obama he should go to the beach. Really.

And Mr. Obama recounted how someone who has already gone through the White House experience told him "the most … Read more

Google reveals scope of Web-crawling task

It's a pity the National Security Agency can't talk about its computational challenges, because it's leaving a lot of the boasting rights to Google.

In a blog posting on Friday the company shared some detail about the challenges of one aspect of its search operation, the Web indexing and processing that must take place before the results are delivered to users. The short version: Google has no choice but to think big.

First comes surfing. "We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow … Read more

Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank

Though a distant third place to Google, Microsoft thinks it can teach its rival a thing or two about searching the Internet.

A big part of Google's rise to search engine leadership was an algorithm called PageRank that assesses a specific page's importance by how many other Web pages link to it and by the importance of those linking pages. Microsoft researchers and academic collaborators, though, detailed an idea this week it calls BrowseRank that seeks to bring more of a human touch to that assessment.

Essentially, the researchers tested out a system that replaces PageRanks' link graph--a … Read more

PageOnce iPhone app organizes your bills, life

Personal organizer PageOnce has a great iPhone application that I think many will find to be incredibly useful. Like its desktop sibling, PageOnce for iPhone is a feed aggregator the likes of Netvibes or MyYahoo. The only difference is that you're feeding it account information for utilities and services to get a quick overall view of your various balances and spending activity.

I've been using the application for the past few days, and have come to rely on it almost exclusively to keep track of bank accounts, mobile phone usage, and my Netflix queue. In fact, it's … Read more

Eric Schmidt's YouTube Holy Grail. It's time he listened to Larry Page

Google's Father, Father and Holy Ghost each released some some very interesting words about advertising yesterday.

Which makes me wonder what the private conversations of the Blessed Trinity must be like.

Mr. Schmidt declared that his Holy Grail was to find the right formula- I think he meant to say formoolah- for delivering ads to YouTube.

Should the ads crawl along the bottom of the video area? Should the run silkily across the screen before the video begins?

Or should they crawl onto your desktop and keep playing until you click a button to declare that yes, you got … Read more

As expected, MenuPages likely acquired

Looks like we were right: PaidContent reported Thursday that restaurant and take-out menu listing site MenuPages has been acquired. The buyer, they say, is New York magazine.

No financial details were provided.

We reported back in May that MenuPages had been acquired, but didn't have any hints as to a buyer. We speculated that it was possibly Yelp or IAC's Citysearch. With New York as a buyer, it's likely that MenuPages will stay locally rooted rather than continuing to expand nationally: there are editions for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, the Miami region, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, … Read more

My Yahoo graduating beta, adding new features

On Monday, Yahoo will begin the weeklong roll out of the new My Yahoo to users in all markets. The start page service is graduating from the much-coveted beta status, and integrating improvements made over the last several months like new and third-party content modules, a streamlined header, and advertising that's not as in-your-face as previous iterations. (See full list of updates below.)

The move paves the way for Yahoo's open-platform strategy, which was announced in late April. It lets developers create widgets that work on other Yahoo properties and OpenSocial in the hopes of expanding how and … Read more