From all of us at StepForth, we would like to wish all of our American friends and clients a happy Thanksgiving!
StepForth will also be closing early Thursday Nov 27 at 3:00pm (PST), for our annual Christmas staff party. Yes we know it’s still November, but with everyone’s busy work and family schedules in December, tomorrow just works out best. We will be open during regular business hours on Friday Nov 28.
Again Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and let the Christmas shopping begin!
It’s 9:20 am PST on Monday November 24th, and access to Both Google AdWords & Postini, appear to be down. It seems strange that both Google services would be down without any formal notice stating a maintenance outage. Read more…
As if Yahoo doesn’t have enough financial troubles. San Diego based DivX is suing Yahoo for $25 million in damages. Allegedly Yahoo had breached an advertising agreement with DivX accounting for more than 20% of their revenue. Read more…
A lot of people are unaware of Google.org, the philanthropic wing of Google. Since its inception, Google.org has been involved in a variety of initiatives covering such global issues as health and disease, climate change, education, poverty and alternative energy.
Their involvement includes grants for a wide variety of projects, encouraging employee involvement and use of their own innovative technologies to help make the world a better place. Read more…
The figures from Nielsen Netratings and comScore are not in as of yet, but Hitwise has posted their latest numbers for October, and they show Google closing in on the 72% mark.
According to Hitwise, Google now sits with 71.7%, up 0.54%, Yahoo is down 0.3% to 17.74%, and MSN is pretty much the same at 5.4% (up a miniscule 0.04%).
As Google grows ever so slowly month after month, it will be no surprise if they manage to reach the 80% point. Will Yahoo or MSN ever manage to steal back some of this market share? Not likely in the near future, but time will tell.
Google has now made one big step forward in its initiative to have out-of-print books online. Tuesday, Judge John Sprizzo approved a lawsuit settlement between Google and numerous authors and publishers to the tune of $125 million. This money will be placed in a fund to go to copyright holders and will allow Google the rights to placing out-of-print material online. Read more…
Last night in a blog post at the Official Google Blog, Google announced that one of its Google Labs projects, Lively.com, will see its doors closed forever.
After only a few short months, Google has decided to pull the plug on this popular chat platform in order to direct resources to more important areas such as core search, ads, and apps.
While I have never used Lively, it seems to me that if this site is popular, there must be a way to make some money off of it, and I am somewhat surprised to see them choosing to shut it down so quickly. Would it not make sense to try and sell? Surely a company out there could make use of this to earn a living and keep the current user base happy. Maybe they should approach Facebook and turn it into yet another app?
It sounds more and more like Yahoo should have taken the Microsoft buy-out offer at $31 a share back in February. Since then Yahoo shares have been up and down, but as of today, they are hovering around the $10 mark, a small fraction of what they once were.
Yesterday Yahoo shares dropped to below $10 – the first time their value has dipped into the single digits in more than 5 years. One thing’s for sure, if Microsoft does step up and give Yahoo another offer it will be substantially less than the previous $44.6 Billion.
Yahoo is not the only major player in the search game to see significant value declines on their stock. Around this time last year Google shares were over $700 and as of today are at less than half that with the value at $310.31 at the time of this post. 2008 has also brought significant declines to Microsoft shares as well – at just under $20 today MS has seen shares drop by almost half with their 52 week high of 36.72 from back in December of 07.
Last week Google began turning PDF files of scanned printed documents into digital text, and as a result their searchable index has expanded once again.
Previously, only rarely would a scanned document appear in the organic search results. With the technology of optical character-recognition (OCR) implemented now these scanned PDFs will find their way into the results. Read more…
Well, this has certainly been a busy week at Google. One thing I can say for Google, they are very energetic and we’re never wanting for good writing material.
Yahoogle Deal Abandoned
Right on the heels of revising the scope of the agreement between the two search giants, Google announced this Wednesday that the deal will not go forward. This came to pass after the US Department of Justice decided it would file an anti-trust suit if the agreement was implemented. Read more…
