Online advertising revenues in the U.S. seem to be stabilizing. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers released third-quarter figures showing that online advertising in the U.S. approached $5.5 billion, up 1.7 percent from the second quarter of 2009, but still down 5.4 percent from the same quarter a year ago (which is in line [...]
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The brains behind Yahoo Boss, a young engineer named Vik Singh, is leaving Yahoo to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at Sutter Hill Ventures. Earlier this year, Singh was named to Technology Review’s 35 Under 35 list at the age of 24. Singh is exactly the kind of talent Yahoo should be trying to hold onto, but [...]
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Only a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon replace them. Twitter was supposed to kill blogs because it’s so much simpler to publish one sentence fragment at a time rather than whole thoughts bunched together into what is known in the trade as “paragraphs.” Today, blogs are [...]
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eBay has just announced that it has completed the sale of Skype, valuing the company at $2.75 billion. The investor consortium who is the buying party and will control an approximately 70 percent stake is a group led by Silver Lake Partners and includes Joltid (i.e. the company founded by Skype’s original founders) and “certain [...]
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Twitter COO: We’ll Have An Advertising Business Soon. And You’re Going To Love It.
Posted on 22. Nov, 2009
Twitter has apparently come across the Holy Grail of advertising, and it’s coming soon. Today during his interview at the RealTime CrunchUp, Twitter COO Dick Costolo told the audience a bit about the company’s upcoming advertising business. Costolo was vague on the details, but he did make some promises: “It will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And [...]
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Gmail Creator Thinks Email Will Last Forever. And Hasn’t Tried Google Wave.
Posted on 22. Nov, 2009
“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook. Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor [...]
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Last week, it was reported that AOL – amid restructuring efforts in the lead-up to the imminent Time Warner spin-off and IPO – was putting its instant messaging service unit ICQ on the block and had hired bankers Allen & Co. and Morgan Stanley to assist in the sales process. According to the reports, AOL [...]
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We’re here today in Mountain View, CA at the Googleplex for an event during which Google is promising to give a lot of details about Chrome OS. This includes a full product rundown and details about the formal launch, which is expected to occur early next year. Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and [...]
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I’ve been a remote-control-airplane enthusiast for years. I’ve never really been able to get my six-year-old son into it, though: Planes are difficult to control, and he’s a bit afraid of breaking the machines I’ve spent hours putting together. When the chance for him to try the new Spin Master Air Hogs Switchblade ($69.99 list) [...]
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If one telescope is good, 35 is most assuredly better. That’s the number of networked radio telescopes that just powered up to observe 243 quasars across the universe, according to Space.com. The goal, in what amounts to a record-breaking effort: “improve the precision of the reference time frame that today’s scientists use to measure positions [...]