Google

Google is going green with its online store.

That means the company is selling organic cotton T-shirts, pencils made of recycled blue jeans, and other recycled and eco-friendly materials. And instead of plastic polybagging, it is using recycled wraps and stickers when shipping items. This is great news because plastic bags are a HUGE ecological problem. (Read about how plastic bags are killing birds and sea animals and have created a toxic floating debris island in the Pacific Ocean in the San Francisco Chronicle.)

Some of the items are kind of zany and fun.

For instance, this $39.95 zippered hoodie … Read more

I'm beginning to think that besides search advertising, hiring is the thing Google does best.

On Thursday, the company reported gains of 50 percent or so in quarterly profit and revenue from a year ago, beating analyst expectations. It wasn't a stellar quarter, but it was pretty darn good.

The notable thing was the hiring. The company added 2,130 workers to its roster, bringing the head count to 15,916. What do nearly 16,000 people do at a company that doesn't make widgets (at least in the hardware manufacturing sense of the word)?

That's … Read more

Three days after Google released its copyright-filtering technology for YouTube, the major studios have announced an alliance and guidelines of their own. It's all well and good, but things will remain in limbo until Google settles its copyright lawsuit with Viacom.

Given that Google's YouTube is the most popular viral video site on the Internet, the absence of Google from the alliance is significant. Until that lawsuit is resolved and Google and all media companies are aligned, the solution is theoretical.

"Keep your eye on the billion-dollar lawsuit at Viacom," says Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research … Read more

The term "Google bowling" has been floating around the Internet for a while now. The practice is one of many that can be put under the heading of negative SEO, and while I'm not a proponent of these methods, they are worth noting:

Google bowling: As Google attempted to curb link-popularity exploitation by penalizing Web sites that purchase link ads across the entire site, it also created the environment in which Google bowling came to be. As a form of negative SEO (search engine optimization), certain unscrupulous entities began buying sitewide links for competitor sites, thus causing … Read more

Taiwanese handset maker HTC is expected to ship about 50,000 cell phones by the end of this year that use a mobile operating system from Google, according to a Fortune article that cites a report from a UBS analyst.

The phones won't be for sale until next year; the initial shipment will go to developers, says analyst Benjamin Schachter. Google is likely talking to other handset manufacturers, he says.

Google has declined to comment on rumors of its phone plans. Google is hosting an analyst day on October 24, and Schachter expects the company to talk about its … Read more

Earlier today Google unveiled some new and upcoming features being added to their Analytics service at the eMetrics Summit in Washington, D.C. Site owners will soon be getting a way to see what their users are searching for within the site, potentially making it easier for them to reorganize, or prioritize the what's on the page. Users will also have their choice of several third-party search tools that work with the new search analytics, along with Google Custom Search, Google Mini, and Google's enterprise search appliance.

The service is also rolling out a new "Events Tracking&… Read more

Greer Park in upscale Palo Alto, Calif., isn't what you would call dirty.

Nor is it sprayed with graffiti, broken down, rusty or disheveled. In fact, nothing on the surface would indicate the need for a concentrated effort by Google employees and friends participating in Google's first International Cleanup Weekend, an endeavor born in part to publicize the MyMaps application and KML, the XML-based markup language used to make Google's interactive Web maps.

Yet here were eight of us, stooping to harvest bottle caps, gum wrappers and cigarette butts from the tanbark and grass at 9:30 … Read more

SAN BRUNO, Calif.--Google on Monday unveiled a new system for identifying pirated video on YouTube as it gets uploaded, but the system puts the burden on movie studios and other content owners to provide YouTube copies of the content first.

Content owners provide the video to YouTube and specify whether they want to block anyone else from uploading copies of it. They can also ask YouTube to allow others to post it and put ads next to it or otherwise promote it on their sites, David King, YouTube product manager, told reporters in a briefing at YouTube.

The automated YouTube video ID system looks at all video as it is uploaded and tries to match it with a database of visual abstractions of the copyrighted material that has been provided by content owners. If the system finds a match it will either block it, post it, or--depending upon the policy specified by the content owner--put ads on it, with the revenue being shared with the content owner.

If the copyright owner wants pirated copies to be blocked and the system finds a match, the pirated video may be posted, but only for a few minutes and then the system will remove it. The copies of the copyrighted content that owners provide YouTube for anti-piracy purposes will not end up posted on YouTube unless the company posts the content itself.

… Read more

Over the last few years, I have been to a whole lot of conferences. They've been in cities like Austin, Phoenix, San Diego, New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco and so on, and have covered any number of topics.

And over the years, I've started to come to the conclusion--as so many have before me--that the endless panels and keynotes are hardly worth the time it takes to sit through them. After all, how much value is there really in listening to six people talk over each other for 35 minutes?

In the end, as everyone knows, the … Read more