Author: jgaynor

This came out today. Here's what they had to say about it in Mountain View at "the plex." Today is the 10th day of January and I'm counting four product announcements (or their equivalents) so far—ahead of last year's pace.

Thanks to PaidContent for pointing us to a TheDeal.com story (reg. req'd) about bidders for Knight Ridder. Potential suitors include: Thomas H. Lee Partners, Bain Capital, Texas Pacific Group and Hellman & Friedman Blackstone Group, Providence Equity Partners and Kohlberg…

Google, again pushing beyond the browser, announced (per a story in MediaPost per Forbes) that it would be working with Volkswagen to develop an automotive nagivation system based on Google Earth: VOLKSWAGEN AG AND GOOGLE HAVE entered into a deal…

According to The Wall Street Journal (sub. req'd), Yahoo! will be testing free Wi-Fi at two Starwood-owned hotels: Seeking new ways to distinguish their respective brands, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Yahoo Inc. said they will begin a…

It seems like everyone and his second cousin has an online advertising forecast these days. We're working on ours, expanding it to include more categories this year. But here's a nice write-up by Chris Sherman of the recent SEMPO survey…

Here's a piece on a Wi-Fi "cell" phone, introduced at CES, that can split calls between cell and Wi-Fi networks. This comes on the heels of the new Skype-Netgear Wi-Fi phone . The article talking about UTStarcom's new GF200 (discussed…

Kudos to SiliconBeat for unearthing TurnHere.com, which is posting local videos from all over the U.S.—watch a couple of them and you'll immediately see the local biz advertising and travel implications. Here's what the site says: TurnHere.com, a new Internet…

This WSJ article (sub. req'd) details plans (and negotiations) to charge fees of content providers for priority high-speed delivery of broadband content: Large phone companies, setting the stage for a big battle ahead, hope to start charging Google Inc., Vonage…

... for November are here. Here are the highlights: Google Sites —39.8% Yahoo! Sites— 29.5% MSN-Microsoft Sites —14.2% Time Warner Network— 8.7% Ask Jeeves —6.5% According to comScore, Google and Ask.com were the only gainers. Also: Americans conducted 5.15 billion…

Motorola has announced that it will integrate Google and Yahoo! into handsets ("button on the phone's keypad" ). A big deal—Motorola is the world's second-largest handset maker—this will raise user awareness of mobile search (and especially Mo-Lo) and is more…

SiliconBeat directs us to a post by Robert X. Cringely about the value and strategic potential of Google serving ads on TV (contextual targeting). At a high level, it's consistent with this report. On a related note, I took a…

It's already clear that this will be a BIG year for broadband video and offline "on-demand" cable and, maybe, telco IPTV. The fierce competition among Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL in the online ad/search world is spilling over into the…

Lots of news and releases are coming out of CES. Among the many news items worth noting is the Skype-Netgear Wi-Fi phone—no PC required. The phone will work: " ... in a home, office, cafe, open public hotspot, or any…

Here's what the WSJ (sub. req'd) has to say re Larry Page's forthcoming CES keynote: Google Inc. plans to announce Friday that it will begin allowing consumers to buy videos from major content partners through the Google site and will…

CES is in progress (we're not there), and the majority of the stuff that's hyped or presented there won't wind up in most consumers' hands, pockets, cars or living rooms. But some of it will, and one thing that's interesting…

have both Yahoo! e-mail and Gmail accounts and a Comcast personal e-mail account—all of which I use for slightly different purposes. But I've started to notice that in Gmails where addresses appear, "Map This" links are showing up in the…

According to this posting at Search Engine Journal, "Craigslist has blocked the spidering and indexing of its classifieds sites from search engine robots." This all began with the Craigslist-Oodle smackdown. What the blocking means is that individual Craigslist pages are…

Now I know partly why I feel so exhausted. According to the Google Blog , the company introduced 77 new products in 2005. So there are 52 weeks in a year ... that makes approximately 1.4 product announcements per week.…

On the subject of consumer electronics ... How low can it go? The price of PCs, that is. The cheapest desktop PC I was able to find online was selling for less than US$300. That's pretty cheap, but remember the…

Last week my fellow analyst Mike Boland, author of our recent IPTV/video search report, blogged about hot video-community site YouTube . So did many people at MySpace, whose references to the site were apparently removed by Murdoch's organization. (The site…