Google: two founders, one developer move on
As a company that makes a lot of acquisitions, it’s only natural that Google loses some talent now and then – like Chad Hurley of YouTube and Omar Hamoui of AdMob, both of who have just said they’re leaving.
But rock-star developers are another matter – particularly when they quit to join arch-rival Facebook.
Google TV – too buttoned up for the living room
Getting to know Google TV involves familiarisation with 80 buttons on Sony’s remote control, compared to just three on the recently launched Apple TV.
The extra 77 buttons, plus function-key combinations, sum up how, in trying to combine a full web experience with regular television, Google and its partners have added a complexity that may intimidate many consumers.
I reviewed Sony and Logitech’s Google TV units in the Personal Technology column in Friday’s FT Business Life section and compared them with rival systems. An extended breakdown of how Google TV shapes up against the competition is after the jump.
What Acer’s clear.fi does is, unfortunately for their marketing people, not easy to explain clearly. We took a shot at doing so when Acer first announced it in May, and on Friday it was JT Wang, Acer chairman’s turn at the world’s number two PC maker’s third quarter results conference.
Clear.fi, which automatically sets up a local area network between Acer devices, is intended to make it easy for users to access their photos and videos across different Acer products. It is such a big part of Acer’s new push to add software and services to their core hardware offerings that it will be installed on every single device Acer ships starting next year.
Facebook partners with DST rival Yandexr
Results from Facebook pages will soon begin appearing in Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia. Yandex.ru will also get a Facebook widget on its homepage.
It’s another example of search engines gaining access to the growing trove of information on Facebook’s social graph, and making search a bit more social. Just two weeks ago, Facebook deepened its ties with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.
But the partnership also puts a wrinkle in Facebook’s relationship with investor Mail.ru (formerly known as Digital Sky Technologies). Mail.ru and Yandex are rivals, competing aggressively for eyeballs in Russia’s booming internet market.
Computer attacks silence Vietnam opposition
A computer virus has infected more than 10,000 machines and directed them to connect with and attempt to overwhelm online forums critical of the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party, security researchers said on Thursday.
The resulting denial-of-service attacks on a handful of sites show how such programs are increasingly being used to target opposition voices.
Similar attacks have been waged on anti-Russian sites operated from conflict zones in the Caucuses and on some more mainstream sites run by politicians at odds with the Kremlin.
Researchers at SecureWorks, who dubbed the new virus Vecebot, said they couldn’t prove that it was unleashed by the government or someone working for it. Such software is rarely traced to an author.
But they noted a piece of interesting timing. On Oct. 19, a Vietnamese blogger using the name Dieu Cay was to be released after serving a 30-month sentence.
Ellison v Apotheker: the goading begins
With less than a week to go until a court showdown between Oracle and SAP in Oakland, California, Larry Ellison has turned up the rhetorical heat.
As we said a couple of days ago, it will be hard to stop the Oracle CEO having his say, whatever efforts SAP makes to prevent this case turning into a media circus.
Even by Mr Ellison’s standards, though, the statement from Oracle late on Tuesday carried a particularly venomous sting. Aimed at Leo Apotheker – the former SAP executive now at the helm of Hewlett-Packard – the message was blunt: turn up and appear as a witness at the trial, or risk being painted as a coward.
Yahoo e-mail improvements could stem erosion
For more than a year, Yahoo has been talking about two things that will help it stop losing users’ time to rivals including Google and Microsoft: making Yahoo core services work better and partnering with clear winners in adjacent web offerings such as Facebook and Twitter.
The biggest overhaul of Yahoo Mail in five years does both of those things. Out tonight in a beta version that will only be seen by users who request it, the new Yahoo mail is, as previously reported, twice as fast as the old one and integrates with social networking, photos and videos in an intuitive and unobtrusive way.
Six phone models and 20 months after they joined forces, the smartphone alliance between Asus, the Taiwanese computer maker, and Garmin, the US global positioning device company, is over – at least in its original form.
The two companies on Tuesday announced a new mode of cooperation. Instead of jointly developing Garmin Asus branded phones, Garmin will now only provide its navigation software to Asus, on an exclusive basis for the Android platform. Phones from the Taiwanese company, the world’s fifth-biggest PC maker, will from now on be Asus-branded in front, with a “Garmin Navigation” logo on the back.
Ozzie’s parting shot: the PC is not the future
Ray Ozzie has never hidden his view that Microsoft’s army of developers and product managers have clung to a PC-centric view of the world for far too long.
Now, on the verge of leaving the company, he has penned a memo confronting a subject that is still taboo at the world’s biggest software company: that we have entered the Post-PC era.
Coming from the inside, this is as direct a warning as you could expect to hear about the threats that are now looming for Microsoft’s Windows and Office cash cows.
SAP, Oracle… Infor?
Enterprise software analyst Josh Greenbaum has a colourful way to describe Infor, the biggest application software company you’ve probably never heard of: “They are the Frankenstein’s laboratory for literally hundreds of products.”
More than 70 acquisitions have turned Infor into the world’s third biggest applications company – and left it with the mother of all integration challenges. Now, in Charles Phillips, former co-president of Oracle, it has secured the services of a CEO with big-time experience in handling this kind of situation.
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