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Are you looking for that edge online? Something that your competitors don't have? Forget wasting all your energy on a great design and developing superior content--it's not what you know, but who you work with.

Sooner or later, most of us in the industry get an e-mail, either passed on by someone we know, through our own e-mail, or possibly through one of our own sites that offers to help us achieve success online. Most of these are fairly nondescript and rather generic.

Then the other day, I had one passed on to me that was more than … Read more

Exactly how does Google's philanthropic project decide which NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and initiatives to fund? What kind of decision process do they employ to sort through the endless options to invest in clean water, education, and public health? The answer, not surprisingly, is rooted in the deepest and most pervasive parts of the company's culture.

Read the full statement by Larry Brilliant, head of Google.org, on Slate: "Gandhi's talisman: How Google decided what to give to"

It could be a sincere form of flattery or a way to vent two years of frustration, but after losing YouTube's business in December, hosting company ServerBeach filmed a four-minute video of staffers describing how annoying YouTube was to have as a client.

"For being a social site, these guys aren't very social," one ServerBeach employee said in the video, which it posted on YouTube in recent weeks.

Despite the harsh words, the video is a creative exercise in sarcasm, according to Angela Ramirez, manager of client loyalty at ServerBeach, a 6-year-old hosting company. She said … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Prototypes of the first mobile handsets using Google's Android software debuted at the GSMA's Mobile World Congress here on Monday, and I got a sneak peek at a demonstration.

Google launched Android, an open development platform in November. Phones sporting the Android software are expected out later this year. Google also announced the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 handset manufacturers, carriers and chipmakers that have said they plan to support Android products and services.

I was one of several journalists to get a private demonstration of Android at the ARM Holdings booth here at the … Read more

Box.net added a really cool, and useful collaboration feature to its online storage service yesterday. Any user can right click a folder and choose a new collaboration option that lets them invite anyone to gain access to those files, either as an editor or viewer. Box.net has always had the option of linking to the file, or sharing a grouping of files with everyone, or a just a small group of people via its premium service and snazzy widgets; however, this new addition is more advanced.

Once a user becomes a collaborator, the shared folder will show up … Read more

Valleywag is suggesting that Google is buying (or has bought) Plaxo, the online contact-sharing service. According to Valleywag, it may be a pure act of friendship.

I think it's much more likely a pure act of data gathering, as Tim O'Reilly might suggest.

Plaxo would be an incredibly smart acquisition by Google. As of October 2006, Plaxo had 15 million users. While Plaxo has not been as widely used (or, at least, not as widely discussed) in the past year, that's a heck of a lot of personal data sitting on its servers, data that Google can … Read more

Wired's Epicenter blog reported Thursday that rumors point to contact-management-service-turned-social-network Plaxo as Google's latest shopping purchase. Well, maybe.

The report is extremely thin, and very little detail is given except that the buying price is under $200 million and the buyer is "most likely" Google. Representatives from Plaxo said that the company does not comment on matters related to mergers and acquisitions.

It would make sense: Plaxo has been a loyal and vocal member of Google's OpenSocial initiative, and contact management is one thing that Google Apps really hasn't nailed yet. But Plaxo, like … Read more

Here's an oldie but a goodie if you're a Simpsons fan. It's an interactive map of Springfield, the fictional home of The Simpsons that has been painstakingly recreated based on various appearances throughout the show's 19 seasons.

The map was drawn using locations that were featured on the show, as long as they appeared more than once. Some of the spacing was determined using recent aerial shots (there's a listing here).

The map was started in 2001 by Jerry Lema and Terry Hogan. The current version is about four years old (so there are no … Read more