2009

Mountain View, California -- Google, which is reportedly busy tracking valuable start-ups, it seems that the Mountain View, company may be on the brink of acquiring yet again another company. This time the search giant is eying a San Francisco based DocVerse, a service that enables users to collaborate around Microsoft Office documents, according to source with knowledge of the deal.

According to published reports from various sources, this deal would be the latest in a string of acquisitions by Google, which recently pledged to make around one acquisition a month. This acquisition could strengthen Google's recent Appjet purchase. Appjet is the maker of Etherpad, which also offers Microsoft Office collaboration capabilities. Google is reportedly shelling out about US $25 million for the startup.

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San Francisco -- Search engine giant Google Inc.'s popular video sharing site YouTube has joined Google and Facebook in the latest bid to improve the way they spread across the web by launching its own URL shortener -- Youtu.be. The move apparently comes as the world starts to cut down its URLs to use in the likes of Twitter.

Speaking on the Official YouTube Blog, the video-hosting site said that it hopes cool things will be possible with the new service.

URL shorteners seems to have lived their heyday since earlier this year when every other startup was in the link shortening business, with an increasing number of web users using services such as TinyURL and bit.ly to condense links so that they can be shared more easily on social networking sites such as Twitter, which imposes a limit on the number of characters that can be contained within a single message. (more…)

Redond, Washington -- Software behemoth Microsoft Corp., lost its appeal of a lawsuit involving a Canadian company called i4i in May, after a jury ruled that the Redmond, Wash., software maker infringed one of i4i's patents with a custom XML feature found in Word, is preparing to modify its popular Word software to avoid an injunction on sales of the product.

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Los Angeles -- In a relentless race for market share, Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 has managed to overtake Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 as the most popular single version web browser, at least according to one statistical snapshot of which browser versions Web surfers use.

Earlier, there was only few like Netscape and its Navigator. Then came the most famous one, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, announcing the first browser war. And for a long time, IE has retained the market dominance it gained by Netscape's downfall to the present day.

And just last weekend, Mozilla announced a fifth beta of Firefox 3.6 rather than move on to a release candidate, which offers some new improvements, including the HTML 5 API, automating some important tasks which previously required a plug-in, such as video, a decision that will push the final code ship date into early 2010, a company executive said.

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Sunnyvale, California -- Internet search pioneer Yahoo Inc., in a cost-cutting move, is closing down its offices worldwide from Christmas through New Year's Day, except for “essential functions,” its first ever, as the Internet company searching new avenues to cut costs during the recession, reports WSJ.

This is the first time Yahoo has ordered most of its 13,200 employees to utilize vacation time or unpaid leave during the holidays, according to reliable sources. Although it has carried out pretty much similar move last year, but it was for U.S. offices only. The story offers instances of other big tech/media companies in the Valley: both Adobe and Apple have similar closures.

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San Francisco -- Yelp has rejected Google's acquisition offer, estimated at about $550 million. TechCrunch, which last week citing anonymous sources said a progressive discussion between Google Inc. to acquire Yelp, the popular review site Yelp was “very likely to close,” now says the deal is off-- and that Yelp CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman “has walked out for reasons unknown”.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote that he is not sure what “went wrong that made Yelp turnaround from the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they are not interested to sell, say multiple sources.” (more…)

San Francisco -- Privacy advocates are grousing about Facebook's recent privacy changes effected since the second week of December has had scores of users of the world's biggest online social network up in arms now calling on the US Federal Trade Commission to make Facebook undo the changes in an official complaint.

The subject of dispute is the default setting of the posts. The network, which has more than 350 million users, has kept the default settings to “visible to all” against keeping them private, thereby encouraging its users to share information with all.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, in association with eight other groups, filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission last week urging the regulator to open an investigation into Facebook's new privacy settings.

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Redmond, Washington -- Bing, the much-touted search engine from Microsoft, is feeling the heat of a trademark conflict, as a small Missouri company called Bing! Information Designs, having the word “Bing” in its name has sued Microsoft for branding its search engine with the same word, alleging trademark violation and unfair competition by the software giant in a lawsuit filed last week in Missouri circuit court.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Missouri-based computer design firm states that Microsoft's use of “Bing” puzzles the public and falsely infers the companies could be connected.

Bing Information Design registered the case in a St. Louis circuit court last week, seeking indemnification including corrective advertising paid for by Microsoft to eliminate confusion between the brands, the company's law firm said in a statement.

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Paris -- A French court last week imposed an astounding amount of fine €300,000 ($430,000), against Google Inc., owner of the most popular Internet-search engine, for copyright infringement and ordered the search giant to pull all the scanned books off its site, a Paris court ruled today.

The Paris Civil Court stated that Google breached the French copyrights of two groups representing publishers, editors and authors, for scanning entire books or excerpts that are put on line, “Google has committed acts of copyright violation to the detriment of Le Seuil” and to publisher Editions du Seuil SAS, which filed the lawsuit.

“Google violated author copyright laws by entirely reproducing and making accessible on the site” books owned by Seuil without its permission, the court wrote in a 22-page decision.

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Redmond, Washington -- Even though Microsoft's Windows Mobile business competes with iPhone maker Apple, the Redmond, Wash., software maker's new Bing app is pushing its Bing search engine pretty hard into the mobile space. The application made its debute in the iPhone Apps Store yesterday and can be downloaded directly to the iPhone if users so wish.

The company announced on its Bing community blog early this week, bringing together the many features of Web search supported by the company's Bing search engine to the tips of your fingers.

For instance, the app, which is available free of cost, supports straight Web searches (and even provides suggestions as you type search terms), as well as other specialized queries supported by Bing, such as voice search, which allows you to speak a search term into the phone, and Bing will locate the search results and map it if it has a location, plus images, videos, maps, business locations, and news.

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