$100 isn’t what it used to be
It took Google’s shares 52 weeks to move from $400 to $500. It took another 46 weeks to get from $500 to $600.
The next hundred bucks? A shade over three weeks, by the look of things. The stock was less than a dime away from $700 at one point on Tuesday. Read more
Squaring up to Wikipedia
Larry Sanger is still predicting big things for Citizendium, the expert-moderated alternative to the "open" encyclopedia Wikipedia that he launched a year ago (we wrote about the launch here, and the implications of the Citizendium v Wikipedia battle here.)
Given the scale of his ambition, the results so far are decidedly modest: 3,300 articles, growing at the rate of 14 a day, compared to more than 2m on the English-language version of Wikipedia. Still, Sanger, who was in at the beginning of Wikipedia, is unabashed, as his update today demonstrates: Read more
What’s the Chinese for “bubble”?
Another day, another 3 per cent on Baidu’s share price. The Chinese search engine is now deemed to be worth more than $12bn, which is double what the stock market thought it was worth as recently as August. Not to be left behind, portals like Sohu and Sina are on a run of their own, with gains respectively of 160 and 130 per cent this year.
For Baidu, if you’re keeping score, that puts the company on a multiple of more than 30 times next year’s revenues, and 94 times 2008 earnings. Read more
VC returns: reversion to the mean?
The pain from the long dotcom hangover is finally starting to recede into the past, at least when it comes to venture capital returns. About time, too. But it is still far too soon to tell whether historic long-term profits from VC investment will hold up.
The story is told in the chart below. The thick broken line at the bottom shows five-year venture capital returns in the US. As write-offs from the dotcom disaster have receded and profitable exits are being found for the the companies that survived, this line has finally crept back into positive territory (the latest figures were put out today by the NVCA.) Read more
Hulu, a joint online video venture by NBC and News Corp that has been billed as an alternative to YouTube and other video sharing sites, launched today in private beta. Before the site crashed on us, we managed to get a glimpse at Hulu’s design and some of its features.
Hulu lets users browse an array of studio-approved content, including popular television shows such as The Office, The Simpsons and The Family Guy, copies of which are proving harder and harder to find with any kind of reliability on YouTube. Hulu’s media player includes the usual "share" and "embed" options found on most video sites. It also boasts an impressive video editor that allows users to select only the parts of a video they wish to display in an embedded clip. Read more
AOL + MSN + Y! < GOOG
It’s official. Google is now generating more in revenues than its three largest competitors combined (don’t even ask about its share of the profits.) To put it another way: just the $1.5bn in extra revenue it added compared to a year before was almost as much as the total produced by Yahoo!
The numbers for the latest quarter make sorry reading, particularly when you consider that a lot of Microsoft’s reported growth online came from its acquisition of aQuantive: Read more
AOL + MSN + Y! < GOOG
It’s official. Google is now generating more in revenues than its three largest competitors combined (don’t even ask about its share of the profits.) To put it another way: just the $1.5bn in extra revenue it added compared to a year before was almost as much as the total produced by Yahoo!
The numbers for the latest quarter make sorry reading, particularly when you consider that a lot of Microsoft’s reported growth online came from its acquisition of aQuantive: Read more
Web apps on the desktop through Mozilla’s Prism
The line between applications running on a desktop and in a web browser just got fuzzier
Or maybe it just got bent a little, like a ray of light. Read more
No confusion over Fusion, AMD believes in ATI deal
A year after Advanced Micro Devices’ acquisition of ATI, the Canadian graphics chipmaker, the merits of the takeover are still unclear to AMD shareholders.
The company has suffered four consecutive quarters of losses, its shares are down 39 per cent on their closing price on October 25 2006, the day the ATI acquisition was finalised. Gross margins are down 10 percentage points, key personnel have left the company and AMD has seen Intel move ahead of it in technological advances. Read more
Muni wireless signals slower growth
Municipal Wi-Fi networks have been suffering from bad reception of the political and economic kind lately.
San Francisco illustrated the two sides of the problem as elected officials said they did not like the terms being offered by Earthlink to set up a network in the city and the internet service provider decided to walk away from the project as its business model led to unsustainable losses in other cities. 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.
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