Clint Boulton

IBM researchers have created a search engine that takes a different route from Google, Microsoft Bing and other search services to help users find untagged video, pictures and music content. SAPIR, which stands for Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval and was funded by the European Union, churns through pixels in 100 million […]

Less than 24 hours after turning on a feature that lets users receive and reply to text messages by e-mail, Google added an option in Gmail Labs that lets Google Voice users access their messages directly from Gmail instead of in a separate browser tab. Currently, Google Voice users get alerts about voice mails via […]

RightNow, a challenger to Salesforce.com in the market for hosted CRM applications, agreed to purchase enterprise social software concern HiveLive for $6 million in cash. RightNow’s SAAS (software as a service) applications include a multichannel agent desktop that connects businesses to customers via phone, chat, feedback, Web self-service and e-mail. The company also offers marketing […]

Socialtext Sept. 9 released Version 3.6 of its enterprise wiki platform, adding a mobile Web application similar to the Socialtext Miki mobile desktop application the company released three years ago. Socialtext Mobile works on Apple’s

The Google Voice team continued its feature roll-out cycle last night by adding the ability for users to receive text messages by e-mail. Now when you enable SMS-to-e-mail forwarding in the application, Google Voice will send you an e-mail alert every time you receive a new SMS on your Voice number. You can then reply […]

When eBay announced Sept. 1 that it was selling off 65 percent of VOIP giant Skype, the New York Times reported that Google was one of the losing bidders bested by Silver Lake Partners and other investors. What’s interesting about that idea is that Google already has a Web calling application in Google Voice. Why […]

Today was the deadline for proponents and opponents of the Google Book Search settlement to file support for or positions against the deal. Google Book Search is Google’s conquest to scan the world’s books online and offer them to users for fees, with authors and publishers taking cuts of the book and associated search ad […]

Last week I took a briefing with Ryan Gavin, director of platform strategy at Microsoft, who wanted to talk about the positioning of Microsoft’s Live platform in the market. When I asked Gavin what he thought was the cornerstone service of Windows Live, he said Windows Live Hotmail without missing a beat. I shouldn’t have […]

10 Google Services That Failed and Why 1) Google Lively A virtual reality application akin to Second Life, Google Lively never really had a shot for a company looking to curb exercises that don’t make money. Second Life is still viable, and IBM uses avatars internally for collaboration, but Lively wasn’t really geared toward the […]

20 Twitter Apps You Need to Know About by Clint Boulton TweetMeme TweetMeme is a service that aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme also makes the retweet button, which is for content publishers who want to invite their audience to tweet their content on Twitter. The button […]

Jeff Jarvis has a fine piece on BuzzMachine that deals with the bigotry toward Google. As someone who spends 75 percent of his professional time covering Google, I know exactly what he is talking about, and I’ve thought a lot about this issue. I’d love to divine the root causes, but I can only speculate […]

What’s with all of this coverage about the UFO doodle on Google? It’s tops on Google Blog Search Tech section Sunday. Twenty-eight blog posts on it! (soon to be 29): Google UFO blog search.png Here are some of the stories: What’s Up With the Google Logo Unexplained Phenomenon? — Search Engine Watch Google ‘ufo’ logo […]