Clint Boulton

Google Nov. 15 unveiled an improved Google Product Search service, partnering with retail giants such as Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma to surface goods for online shoppers who are nearby. The search engine partnered with more than 70 retailers and software makers such as Oracle, JDA and Epicor to index inventory of local Best Buys and […]

After spending nearly a week using the RockMelt beta as my default browser, I’ve come to experience enough cognitive dissonance to make my head explode. In short, I love RockMelt’s concept and implementation, but the browser needs to get faster and work out some of the kinks to be as fast or reliable as Google […]

RockMelt Shows How Facebook, Social Networks Could Replace E-Mail by Clint Boulton Past and Present Gartner analyst Monica Basso noted that while organizations leveraged e-mail and other business-oriented collaboration applications in the past, the popularity of Facebook has spurred the creation of enterprise social network tools that include presence capabilities. These include IBM Lotus Connections […]

When we journalists talk about the rivalry between Google and Facebook, which Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu sees (WSJ paywall) as our new resident monopolists, we tend to speak in blanket scenarios. We might juxtapose the fact that Google has 1 billion searchers to Facebook’s 500 million-plus users with the fact that Facebook is […]

Netflix Nov. 13 said it will release an instant streaming app for Android on specific smartphones next year, delaying the launch because of content protection hurdles caused by fragmentation in the open source platform. Netflix product development member Greg Peters said that while the company offers Netflix for iPhone and Windows Phone 7 platforms to […]

Google Instant Previews, which lets users visualize results to help them decide if they want to click on them, is an interesting search technology but it might not see a lot of action because it’s barely noticeable on results pages. When users type in a query using the Google Instant predictive search technology, Instant Previews […]

Facebook Nov. 15 will launch a Webmail application to challenge Google’s Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Windows Live Hotmail and other messaging solutions. Facebook sent out media invites to a 10 a.m. launch event in San Francisco hours before the start of the Web 2.0 Summit in that city. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to speak […]

Google’s board of directors signed off on fat, 30 percent pay raises for senior executives, dwarfing the 10 percent raises detailed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a company-wide memo. The search engine said in this 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Nov. 8 that four top managers will receive pay hikes from […]

News Analysis: For those who thought Google was absolved of all its data-sucking sins over its Street View WiFi incident, think again. Privacy advocates for the National Legal and Policy Center claimed U.S. regulators forgave Google due to the search engine’s close ties to President Barack Obama’s administration. Google admitted in May its Street View […]

Google Nov. 11 launched Product Listing Ads from beta to help U.S. businesses promote their products with richer information alongside relevant search results. Introduced in beta one year ago, Product Listing Ads include product information in the ad, including pictures of the product, price and the name of the seller. The idea is to let […]

YouTube users are now uploading 35 hours of video per minute, or 2,100 hours of video uploaded each hour and more than 50,000 hours every day. YouTube, whose massive network of servers was sucking in 24 hours of video per minute last March, likes to frame its user stats in analogies. The comparison it uses […]

It might be one of the most clichéd aphorisms running, but Apple has again proven to be the rising tide that lifts all boats. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on how the company’s iAd in-application advertising platform for its iPhone, iPod touch and iPad is boosting advertiser interest in mobile phones and […]