Opening up online ads
Billions of dollars have been spent of late on acquiring online advertising companies, notably DoubleClick and Aquantive, but a small $5m investment may prove to be equally significant.
London-based Openads announced today it had received that amount in first-round funding for its free, open-source ad server software. Read more
Flickr falls afoul of China’s Great Firewall
Fans of the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing website Flickr.com have been struggling to access any of its images in recent days, and the company says it seems Beijing’s censors are to blame.
Nothing too surprising there: China’s Communist party blocks thousands of international sites, even though the secretive culture commissars generally go easier on ones that like Flickr are in foreign languages and run by big internet names. Read more
Fighting the Valley’s power addiction
Sun chairman Scott McNealy is fond of wearing his family’s automaking roots in Detroit as a badge of working class honour. Most technology execs, though, would rather run a mile than risk being compared to such an environmentally unfriendly industry.
Yet Silicon Valley’s image-makers face the same PR problem as Detroit’s finest when it comes to addressing the issue of global warming. The harder they work to paint themselves as environmentally aware, the more they draw attention to the rampant inefficiency of many of their existing products. The lastest case in point: today’s announcement of an initiative by Google and Intel to boost the power-conversion effectiveness of PCs and servers. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
