Clint Boulton

If you’ve noticed an acquisition drought among high-tech companies this year, you’re spot on.The financial crisis forged in the putrid real estate market and the woeful Wall Street credit crunch has bled over into the high-tech industry in the last several months, handicapping some companies’ merger and acquisition schedules, according to a year-end analysis from […]

Google has made a lot of headway with Google Apps in 2008. This is particularly true of its Gmail Web mail application, which I’ve been positioning as Google’s unified communications hub because of the addition of voice and video chat, SMS text chat and other features that flesh out the app. But let’s not overlook […]

Opinion: This time of year brings the usual glut of high-tech prognostications from research firms all over the world.Invariably, there is one category that stands out during the waning year that is expected to continue to bloom in the next year. With all apologies to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, this year’s prize goes to cloud […]

I don’t have any inside knowledge into T-Mobile’s plans for follow-ups to the Google Android mobile operating-based G1, which according to Cell Phone Signal includes a G2 smartphone ready to roll out at the end of January. But I will say that VentureBeat’s MG Siegler looks at this notion through the proper lens—it’s absurd. Why […]

Google Research Datasets, we didn’t even know thee. Consistent with CEO Eric Schmidt’s pledge to cut experimental projects in the weakening economy, Google today, Dec. 19, confirmed that it is shelving Google Research Datasets, an experimental project for storing terabytes of open-source scientific data sets for life sciences, pharmaceuticals and other fields. A Google spokesperson […]

For users of Apple’s iPhone or T-Mobile’s G1, you’re probably well aware when something changes on that touch-screen of yours because you use it so much. Yet perhaps because you use it so much you may not pick up some of the more subtle changes. Google has been steadily improving the way search results are […]

Cisco Systems and Google have some new competition in the market for enterprise video, which when leveraged within collaboration tools should be a multi-billion-dollar opportunity over the next few years.Wistia is emerging from stealth mode Dec. 29 to lure more customers to its SAAS (software as a service) video sharing application, which businesses use to […]

Some readers chimed in regarding my position that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft seemed headed for zero retention policies in 2009, my response to Yahoo’s reduction of the length of time it stores users’ search records from 13 months to three months. As I noted in a response to a comment, I managed to speak to […]

Yahoo’s reduction of its duration for user log data retention has some industry watchers calling for Google and Microsoft to do the same and predicting that pressure from government regulators’ will lead to zero retention policies in search next year.Brendon Lynch, director of privacy strategy at Microsoft, told eWEEK zero retention policies are just not […]

Many enterprise search vendors offer their search software in multiple languages to help workers all over the world sift through corporate documents in sales, human resources and other areas. Google Enterprise Labs, an effort Google launched in 2007 to test potential enhancements to its enterprise search products, has taken the polylingual concept up a notch […]

There is a game worthy of the great “Tom & Jerry” cartoons afoot in the land of search engines. On one side are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, all of which collect user log data because they argue it helps them improve the way their search engines and other Web services work, maintain security and prohibit […]

Call it Gmail’s evolution by a thousand innovations. Gmail Labs has whipped up another interesting feature in the name of efficiency, letting users turn an e-mail into a Google Docs file with one click. The genesis of this, like so many other Gmail features, came out of a personal need from a Gmail software engineer. […]