Will the new Droid smartphone be a hit for the anti-iPhone alliance of Motorola, Google and Verizon?

How is Carol Bartz doing in her effort to turn around Yahoo?

And what does the fading buzz around Nintendo’s Wii say about the future of the gaming business?

Listen to reporters from the FT’s San Francisco and Tokyo bureaus discuss some of this week’s big tech stories.

This event is now over - read the transcript by clicking on the link below.

Continue reading "FT techtalk - Waiting for Droid"

Sometimes it feels like every news story you read is about Apple. If it’s not the iPhone or the phantom tablet, then it’s Steve Jobs’ health.

So to make up for it, today’s headlines are being hogged by Google. There was the first appearance of the much-hyped Android 2.0 on the Droid handset, not to mention what Techcrunch called a “killer app” for the new mobile software platform: a navigation service (see item below).

But that’s not all. In other Google news: the launch of Music Search, and efforts to appease the FCC.

Continue reading "From today’s Daily Google…"

Two years ago, navigation devices of the kind that you find mounted on car dashboards were one of the hot gifts of the holiday season and the stocks of Garmin and TomTom were riding high.

Not any more. Wednesday brought a double-whammy that knocked 21 per cent off shares in TomTom and 16 per cent off Garmin. Of the two pieces of news, it was the second that sounded the more ominous.

First was a warning from TomTom that prices for these devices, which not so long ago commanded a hefty premium, are likely to continue to slide. They dropped 27 per cent in the company’s latest quarter to an average of under 100 euros, and that erosion shows no sign of slowing. Continue reading "Latest victims of Google: Garmin and TomTom?"

Google Social Search, out today, is one of those ideas that is more interesting for what it might foreshadow than what it actually delivers.

We’ve all been conditioned by now into thinking that Google=Algorithms, and that Facebook=Social. That dichotomy falls away with a service like Google Social Search, a demonstration of how algorithms can make use of social connections that lie within reach of Google’s crawlers.

The Social Search service works by trying to divine who might be included in your social circle (broadly defined), then drawing from any relevant material these people have posted on public websites when you search for a particular term. These “social” results appear in a separate section of the search results, near the bottom of the page.

Continue reading "Is Google + Twitter + FriendFeed > Facebook?"

Why is Google so tone-deaf to the interests of Wall Street?

The company’s latest quarterly earnings look good, and are enough to warrant Eric Schmidt declaring the search advertising recession well and truly over. All segments of advertising are improving again, he said, and pricing recovered from the second quarter (cost-per-click up 5 per cent.)

The earnings call that is currently underway, however, once again reveals the company’s lack of sensitivity to the way analysts work, and its over-enthusiasm for using technology to replace human interaction. Continue reading "Crowdsourcing Wall Street"

Paris Hilton must be breathing a sigh of relief.

Losing control of all the personal stuff on her Sidekick once was bad enough, without the threat that Microsoft would then just swallow it all. So for all the users of the “hiptop” device, the news on Thursday that the software company believes it can recover “most, if not all” of the data that was thought to have been lost after a data centre failure will come as a big relief.

It leaves some uncomfortable questions for Microsoft, though. Continue reading "That Sidekick data must be in here somewhere…"

As the Department of Justice gets further along with its investigation into how IBM maintains its dominance of the mainframe market, Lacy Edwards is certainly someone it will want to talk to.

Mr Edwards is the boss of Neon Enterprise Software, a small Texas company that is trying to make a living around the edges of the mainframe business.

Big Blue, however, is having none of it. It has written to some of Neon’s customers warning them that if they buy the company’s software, they could be in breach of their licences from IBM - even though it confesses it has yet to get a close look at Neon’s technology.

Does that sound like a case of FUD, designed to scare customers away from a rival’s product? That’s certainly the way Mr Edwards sees it. Continue reading "Living in Big Blue’s shadow"

Yes, it really looks like it’s finally over.

Sixteen years after the US justice department first started digging into Microsoft’s Windows monopoly, and six years after the European Commission ratcheted up pressure on the company, the end to Microsoft’s anti-trust battles is in sight.

A lot of lawyers will retire fat and happy on the proceeds of this saga. But what has it all meant for users of technology? On the face of it: not a lot.

Continue reading "Microsoft prepares to pack up its briefs and go home"