Both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg report that McGraw-Hill has hired an investment bank to explore selling its flagship magazine.
Both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg report that McGraw-Hill has hired an investment bank to explore selling its flagship magazine.
July 13, 2009 in Finance | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I have another post on CNBC.com about Google Chrome helping usher in the Post-PC age.
July 13, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
If there is any industry barely surviving on life support these days, it's the field of journalism. Forget banking, Wall Street trading, the auto companies. They're considered "too big to fail" and are getting bailed out with trillions in taxpayer money -- money taken from future generations of taxpayers.
July 07, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I admit it. I'm naive. Someone please explain this to me as though I were 12 years old. In simple terms.
July 06, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I've started a guest blog on CNBC.com. My first posting is up today.
July 06, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Both Larry and Sergey are Jewish, but that ethnicity has affected Sergey’s family more than it has Larry’s. Sergey’s father, Mikhail (changed to Michael when he came to the United States) is a curmudgeonly intellectual and a gifted mathematician. At first, he wanted to study physics at Moscow State University and become an astronomer. But he was turned down because the Communist Party banned Jews from the Physics Department; the government didn’t want them to have access to Soviet nuclear secrets. So he studied mathematics instead, and took the entrance exams in rooms reserved for Jewish students, appallingly nicknamed the “gas chambers.” Mikhail graduated with distinction in 1970. Sergey was born three years later.
In 1997, Mikhail attended an international conference, where he met foreign researchers and academics. It was a life-changing event. He went home that night and told his wife that they had to get out of the country and settle in America, where real opportunities lay. In 1978, Brin’s family applied for an emigration permit. Simply applying for emigration got Mikhail fired from his job; his wife Eugenia had to quit hers, and the family had to relinquish its Soviet citizenship. Sergey was six years old when his family finally landed in Maryland the following year.
Michael Brin is now a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. Sergey's grandmother—over sixty when the family emigrated—taught Russian for several years at the university. Eugenia became a scientist at NASA.
Michael Brin discovered his son’s promise one day when Sergey was eight or nine years old. Anatoly Katok and other colleagues from the university were sitting around the Brin house listening to Michael complain about how stupid his undergrads were. He had tried giving them a graduate-level math problem, just a little above the capabilities of most undergrads, he grumbled, yet not one of the students had had the brains to solve it.
Sergey, who had been quietly sitting in the corner, decided to speak up, and in his “squeaky little voice,” according to Katok, offered a solution to the problem. At first, his father dismissed him as too "stupid" for the conversation. Katok then interjected: “No, Michael. That’s the correct answer.” Adds Katok: “In my memory, it was the first time Michael took his son seriously.”
Sergey graduated from the University of Maryland in 1993 with a dual degree in math and computer science, and entered the Ph.D. program at Stanford in 1994. He had turned out to be such a brilliant mathematician that his father expected big things from him. But business mogul was not one of them. After Sergey dropped out of Stanford to start Google, Michael Brin said, “I expected him to get his Ph.D. and become somebody, maybe a professor.”
Larry and Sergey brought their left-wing bias and their love of the Internet and open systems to Google. It reflects the world in which they were raised from childhood through college: an academic shire of open systems and free software. After all, what college student doesn’t appreciate free beer, music, games, programs, and information to get him through the next exam? The Internet provides everything but the beer.
July 02, 2009 in Google | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Larry and Sergey’s families came from just beyond the outskirts of the status quo, a land embattled by class struggles and bigotry. Larry’s family waged labor union battles against the American auto industry, while Sergey’s family suffered through government oppression and discrimination in the Soviet Union.
Larry’s grandfather was an autoworker and a politically leftist member of the Teamsters during its antagonistic confrontations with a young auto industry. The union was led by factions with communist influence. Larry’s grandfather participated in possibly the greatest labor struggle of the early twentieth century, the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1937, when the workers took over a major auto factory. Larry still keeps a memento from those days: a hammer that his grandfather carried with him for protection during the acrimonious strike.
But Larry’s father, Carl, broke out of that environment and became a leading computer scientist, a talent his sons inherited. He was the first person in the family to graduate from high school (in 1956). He then went on to the University of Michigan to study engineering. While still an undergraduate in 1959, Carl Page was hired to work in the university’s Logic of Computers Group, a pioneering research team headed by legendary computer scientists such as Art Burks and John Holland. He earned two bachelor of science degrees in engineering in 1960, one of them in the specialty field of computer science—the first graduate with a degree in that field at the University of Michigan. In 1965, he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same university.
Larry got his undergraduate degree in engineering at the University of Michigan in 1995, winning many honors, including the university’s first Outstanding Student Award. But he’s fonder of telling people how he built a working programmable plotter and inkjet printer in a casing he made out of Lego blocks. He also started showing his entrepreneurial interest at Michigan, taking business classes and joining the LeaderShape program, which teaches its members the skills to be leaders in society.
July 01, 2009 in Google | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Contrary to popular belief, Google’s success was not simply a matter of inventing a better mousetrap and watching the money flow through the door. The initial design of Google’s search engine did not have technology much more advanced than its competitors. It was how they used and refused to abuse the technology that mattered. Larry and Sergey have been successful because they have completely rethought the process of catching mice. Not surprisingly, they’re upsetting a lot of business fat cats in the process.
Revolutions do not come easily. They arrive like an invading army, pillaging industries in their path. One group’s revolutionary is another’s corporate terrorist. Google’s fans see it as a corporate version of Thomas Jefferson, or a freedom fighter trying to spring dissidents from a Gulag work farm. Its enemies think of it more like Joseph Stalin, and are mobilizing to attack Google like capitalist idealists fighting the Red Menace. Competitors, Hollywood executives, book publishers, copyright holders, privacy advocates, civil rights activists, and government regulators are menaced by Google’s enormous power.
Larry and Sergey are wickedly clever. They break the rules. They challenge old industries and make a lot of enemies. They’re ruthless businessmen. Most of all, they’re idealists, believers in the power of the Internet to make the world a better place.
June 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Google now employs about twenty thousand people, but just two of them set the pace and guide its evolution. Larry and Sergey work together like two halves of a well-balanced machine. CEO Eric Schmidt is responsible for growing revenues, but the decisions that Larry and Sergey make are the fuel that powers that revenue growth. Everybody in the company refers to them by their first names—sometimes as the single unit LarryandSergey—but treat them like emperors, the final arbiters of all important decisions.
A young, smart, and athletic kid whose family escaped the oppression of the communist Soviet Union and a clever young geek from Michigan with a fondness for Legos would seem a very unlikely pair to create a business revolution. Asked by reporter John Ince in early 2000 what Google’s biggest challenges were, Sergey admitted it was learning to run a business:
“The most difficult part has been learning to deal with organizational challenges. We have over 70 people now. It’s a more complicated beast. It’s not very clear how to keep everybody productive and focused. That’s been more of a learning process. Business dealings . . . have been a little bit new to us.”
But they’ve turned Google into more than just a great company. They almost single-handedly revived Internet businesses and changed the rules of commerce on the Internet. They have commercialized the Internet and started an Information Revolution the way Thomas Edison helped start the Industrial Revolution by harnessing electricity and saying, Let there be light bulbs.
June 29, 2009 in Google | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
"Inside Larry and Sergey's Brain" to be released Sept. 17, 2009
“Good luck. I’ve been trying to do that for some years.”
— Google CEO Eric Schmidt after being told the title of this book
Google has become the de facto head librarian of the world’s information; the entity that guides us through the labyrinthine web of online information, philosophy, entertainment, opinion, debate, slander, pornography, art, and worthless blather that the geeks and executives of the Internet like to lump into the single category of “content.”
To say Larry and Sergey struck the right business chord would be the understatement of the twenty-first century. When they launched Google, they were entering a war that pundits were insisting they had already lost. In mid-1998, it was Yahoo Inc. that sat on top of the World Wide Web, the place where 75 percent of Web searches were begun. More than twenty-five million people visited Yahoo every month. In September 1998, it became one of the first pure Internet companies to claim a profit.
The previous March, Fortune magazine had summed up the prevalent view: “Yahoo! has won the search-engine wars and is poised for much bigger things,” its editors declared. Its stock peaked at $230 at the end of 1999.
Then it all fell apart. By mid-2000, Yahoo’s stock was in free fall, on its way to hitting the bottom at under $5 a share. Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle, once hailed as a great Internet visionary, was a year from being fired. Nobody seemed to know what hit them. Whatever it was, it missed Google.
As the cash flow that had kept the technology world afloat reversed direction, Google seemed to catch the runoff. In 1999, Google took in revenues of $200,000. In 2000, the start of the technology recession, its sales had grown 940 percent, to $19 million. By the end of 2002, when most dot-com companies were either desperately dehydrated or dead, Google’s revenues had bloated to $440 million. In 2003, just four years old, its sales hit $1.5 billion, its profit was $100 million, and it had taken over some 80 percent of the world’s search queries.
June 28, 2009 in Google | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 23, 2009 in smart phones | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
BRAD STONE and ASHLEE VANCE have a nice article at the NYTimes about Apple's "baked in" culture of secrecy and disinformation. It mostly comes down to marketing.
June 23, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The big question is, exactly what doesn't he like about it?
June 15, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Probably not as much as the New York Post reports. It's just not the best source of unbiased journalism. Neither is Fox News, which carried the story on its site. Fox News' slogan of "Fair and Balanced" is like McDonald's ads trying to convince people that fast food is good for them.
June 15, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
PC PRo News reports that Dell has brought in $3 million from tweets, $1 million of which came in just the last year.
June 15, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Technology Review has an article about a research project from the University of Washington that combines information from 500 million Web pages to answer questions. Instead of just returning Web sites, it returns snippets from Web sites that (it hopes) answers your English-based question. Google provided the database of Web pages for the project, called TextRunner.
June 12, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Rob Hof at Business Week has a nice article about Google's moves in online display ads.
June 12, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 10, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
One of the most interesting things about the DOJ investigating Google's deal with book publishers is the fact that the Obama administration gets so much support from Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is an adviser to President Obama and Google execs threw him a lavish inauguration party.
June 10, 2009 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tech Review has an article on Xunlight, a company that's making solar cells on flexible sheets of stainless steel. Says they can fit more easily on irregular rooftops or rolled up and carried in a backpack. To run your radio on those backpacking trips?
June 09, 2009 in environment | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


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