Clint Boulton

DENVER-Apple and Google revolutionized the PC and search engine markets, respectively, but company leaders borrowed their key concepts from others who came before them.That was the crux of the Defrag opening keynote speech here Nov. 3 from Columbia Business School Associate Professor William Duggan.Duggan, whose speech covered the gist of his 2007 book, “Strategic Intuition: […]

Salesforce.com has built software tools to let developers write applications with Google’s Visualization API, which lets programmers create reporting tools and dashboards that may be published anywhere on the Web for business intelligence and analysis.The SAAS (software as a service) vendor will announce the integration at its Dreamforce event in San Francisco Nov. 3. The […]

I feel bad now for getting people all pumped up for naught. I published a post Thursday night on Google’s new SMS feature in Gmail chat, which allows users to send SMS messages from their desktop or laptop computers to contacts’ cell phones. Now, the company has shelved it for the time being to work […]

Google has repeatedly assured us that the recession hasn’t burst its search advertising bubble, and the company’s third-quarter earnings seem to bear this out. That doesn’t mean Google isn’t taking steps to make sure it maintains its ad sales. The company Oct. 30 announced two changes to enhance how its algorithm calculates ad quality scores […]

Surely by now you’ve heard the position that cloud computing is a great financial investment because of the money businesses save from not having to buy extra hardware and software infrastructure. SAAS (software as a service) lets companies pipe applications and other software over the Internet, aka the cloud. Businesses pay for this software by […]

Google late yesterday revealed that it has successfully implemented OCR (optical character recognition) technology to scan and convert a picture in a document created by Adobe’s PDF format into words. This renders these files searchable via the Web. Google Product Manager Evin Levey noted in a blog post that prior to this development, scanned documents […]

Because we can’t get enough new Gmail features, Google today rolled out a Gmail Labs feature that lets you send text messages from your Gmail chat window. I got a hands-on demo of this simple, but useful feature from Gmail Product Manager Keith Coleman a half hour ago, when he had me send a text […]

Update: Several bloggers breathlessly yesterday rushed to note that Google is supporting OpenID without reading the fine print in the OpenID developer documentation. It turns out that Google isn’t technically using OpenID, but has actually created its own flavor of the standard, according to The NeoSmart Files blog. The blog is published by Mahmoud H. […]

Google hedged its bets against SAAS downtime Oct. 30 by bringing the 99.99 percent uptime service-level agreement it offers Google Apps Premier Edition customers for Gmail to more Google Apps.The SLA extension for Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk applications comes after another Gmail outage beginning Oct. 15 crimped messaging and collaboration […]

Google’s Book Search agreement, in which Google agreed to pay $125 million to settle claims from authors and publishers for its earlier digital scanning and establish a Book Rights Registry to make sure the right parties get compensated, is a great play for all involved. I tried to find some negatives and failed, so obviously […]

Yahoo Oct. 28 launched Yahoo Open Strategy 1.0, the company’s bid to unify the disparate user networks within Yahoo and allow outside programmers to develop applications that augment the user experience.YOS includes a universal profile, basically a control panel where users can access and customize apps; a portable address book, allowing users to move their […]

LinkedIn Oct. 29 followed in the footsteps of Facebook, MySpace and other social networks in opening an applications platform that lets the business social site’s 30 million users share presentation files, blog posts and reading lists. Launch partners for LinkedIn’s Intelligent Applications platform, built on the OpenSocial APIs created by Google, include Amazon, Google, Six […]