Clint Boulton

I see a lot of demonstrations in my line of work and it’s sometimes tough to stifle a yawn, or keep my eyes from glazing over. Yesterday morning, when I watched the Webcast of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show Monday, I thought it would be a vague bluster. Yang surprised […]

The DataPortability WorkGroup is primed to gain some real traction thanks to the enlistment of Google, Facebook and Plaxo this week. Representatives from these vendors, along with folks from Flickr, Twitter, SixApart, Yahoo and others in the group, will work on the DataPortability Reference Design, which will let users access their friends and media across […]

Offering $1.2 billion, a 42 percent premium over Fast’s trading price is a princely sum even for the coffers of a company such as Microsoft. Clearly, Microsoft wanted a leadership in the market, and beyond the engineers with years of search pedigree and the 2,000 customers, Fast has technology that Microsoft simply couldn’t resist. Fast […]

Microsoft made a big bet in enterprise search, agreeing to acquire Fast Search & Transfer ASA for $1.2 billion, a 42 percent premium over the Oslo, Norway, company’s closing share price on Jan. 4. The Redmond, Wash., software company said on Jan. 8 that Fast’s board of directors has unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept […]

There is a somewhat interesting piece in the New York Times today that doesn’t dwell on Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, Android, OpenSocial or the pending 700MHz wireless spectrum auction. The story details an online prediction market Googlers are running and a study done by some economists on patterns regarding this fun gambling. Apparently, almost 1,500 […]

As expected, Wikia Jan. 7 is launching Wikia Search, a socially driven, open-source alternative to top-line search engines from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Wikia Search, forged from the floundering Grub distributed search project Wikia bought from LookSmart July 27, lets users filter sites and rank search results, and lets them see how the search results […]

Yahoo on Jan. 7 used the Consumer Electronics Show as the stage to launch a mobile software developer platform, its new mobile service platform for consumers and a redesigned home page for its Web site for mobile device users. Just as Facebook’s open development platform was created to help programmers write applications for social network […]

What bigger way to kick off a new year than by announcing that you are creating an open-source, socially driven alternative to search engines from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft? Apparently, that’s what Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales had it mind with Wikia Search, a new platform the Wikipedia creator launched Jan. 7. Built from Wikia’s July […]

Relax, and take a deep breath: Scoble is back on Facebook. Facebook on Jan. 3 reinstated Robert Scobles membership one day after banishing the high-tech blogger for testing a Plaxo tool that imports contact information from Facebook to the Plaxo Pulse service. Facebooks servers detected the automated script, which a representative told Scoble resembled the […]

When Facebook kicked blogger Robert Scoble off of Facebook Jan. 3, it revived the great debate over data portability. Who owns the data on a social network? You or the site? Scoble himself during a videocast admitted he broke Facebook’s terms of use agreement by using a Plaxo script to pull names and addresses from […]