Ben Charny

Sanjay Kumar, former head of IT management firm CA, pled guilty April 24 to a number of financial fraud charges resulting from a $2.2 billion corporate accounting scandal that rocked the company in 2004. Kumar pled guilty to charges of obstruction of justice and securities fraud at the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, N.Y. CA […]

Talk about an identity crisis: Google Local, once known as Google Maps, is changing its name back to Google Maps. This monicker madness all began in 2005. At the time, Google’s online mapping and directions feature was called Google Maps. For strategic reasons, in October of that year Google merged Google Maps with Google Local, […]

Google confirms that it’s testing a way to preview and search within the results returned by its very popular search engine. In the past few weeks, some observers have spotted a graphical element shaped like an arrowhead next to the results from using www.google.com. When clicked upon, the arrow expands into a small window containing […]

The Los Angeles Times suspended one of its blogs after discovering that the author used an alias to post material at Web sites operated by the Times and others, which is a breach of the Times ethical policies. The blog in question is Golden State, which is written by Pulitzer Prize-winning Times columnist Michael Hiltzik. […]

Google honchos Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt promised they’d be short. And they were. The three top Google execs deliberately truncated their April 20 financial results conference call remarks in order to leave time for more questions from the financial community. (For more on the company’s well-received April 20 quarterly report that exceeded […]

Google’s first quarter financial results are in. They can be found here. One big number to consider: revenues for the quarter fell somewhere in the middle of what analysts expected. Google’s says it had $2.25 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 79 percent from the same quarter last year, and up 17 percent when […]

Google has unveiled the eagerly anticipated program interface that lets developers combine their work with Google’s new online calendar/day planner feature. Details about the Google API are available by pointing a Web browser here. Google explains here that the API can be used to write computer programs to query, create, and update Google Calendar events, […]

On July 1, search giant Google will start collecting a fee for a service it once offered for free. The changes, in this instance, affect Internet marketing and advertising companies that rely on data from AdWords, Googles do-it-yourself advertising feature. Googles move though raises a broader question about whether the firm will make similar changes […]

Google now lets anyone with a Google e-mail account sign up for its new Page Creator feature. When last heard from, the self-publishing feature was the subject of a very brief test release Feb. 24. Each page that’s created can be personalized with links and other material. Stored on Google’s servers, each page has a […]

It became clear April 19 that Net phone provider Skype, via a partner, cooperates with Chinese officials by filtering out some words from ongoing instant message conversations. On the same day, there was news that, for the third time, Yahoo apparently provided material to Chinese law enforcement that led to the arrest, conviction and jailing […]

Google has forged new partnerships with business software suppliers Oracle and Salesforce.com and others as it makes a big push into selling enterprise search features. As previously reported, Google has also coupled with business intelligence software provider Cognos. Essentially, the companies are now set to blend their features together through a new Google user interface, […]

Skype, the voice over IP provider, confirmed April 19 that its partner in China is censoring customers instant messaging conversations. The admission by Skype means another high-profile Internet company is ceding to Chinese government demands in order to do business with companies in China. Skype, a division of eBay in San Jose, Calif., is also […]