Clint Boulton

This may be the year Google makes or breaks GAPE, the enterprise version of Google Apps that lets businesses license hosted e-mail, instant documents, spreadsheets and other applications for $50 per user per year. The numbers sound great on paper: 2,000 new businesses per day signing up for Google Apps. Then there are hearty testimonials […]

Attempts to buck the system and stick it to the digital “man” will rock the blogosphere every time, especially when the battleground is data portability and the adversaries are a celebrity blogger and an increasingly infamous social network. In the latest incident, Facebook disabled blogger Robert Scoble’s account after he ran a script on the […]

Ask.com and ChaCha Search on Jan. 3 introduced free search services to make it easier for users to find what theyre looking for from their mobile devices. Ask.com has added a voice activation utility called Click to Speak to its Ask.com Mobile Directions service. A first of its kind among search engines, Click to Speak […]

As much as e-mail, instant messages, blogs and their brethren technologies have helped knowledge workers better collaborate, interruptions and duplications derived from these forms of digital communication and content are overwhelming workers to the point of distraction. The result is an egregious lack of productivity that may cost the U.S. economy $588 billion a year, […]

Despite the public relations setbacks, Google and Facebook should get credit for attempting to make forays into online realms that scare up all sorts of ethical issues and privacy concerns. A month after Facebook got pilloried for sharing users’ online activities with its network, Google is taking flak for its Reader aggregation application. For the […]

It seems trying to make the Web more social is tricky for even Google, which prides itself on exercising caution before implementing new features that affect users. Following a privacy stir that ranked a few notches below Facebook’s Beacon social advertising debacle, Google said it has no current plans to change a feature in its […]

AP and Reuters are among several news outlets reporting that NTT DoCoMo will enlist some Google Apps, including search, e-mail and photo-sharing services on some of its handsets, marking another notch on the leading search engine’s wireless belt. Securing Japan’s top mobile phone carrier as an ally in its quest to help its Internet services […]

The New York Times Friday published several documents Microsoft used to make the case that a Google purchase of DoubleClick would give the search engine powerhouse several competitive advantages in the online advertising market. Microsoft was hoping the documents, which include a three-page diagram (PDF) of the so-called online ad “pipeline” Google would control should […]

The Federal Trade Commission has cleared Google’s $3.1 billion bid for ad provider DoubleClick, greasing the wheels of Google’s online ad engine in 2008. Acquiring DoubleClick will provide digital ad and search leader Google with plenty of new firepower: the ability to serve graphical display ads in addition to the company’s text-based links. DoubleClick’s technology […]

Microsoft has landed Viacom as a major online ad customer for its Atlas AdManager platform in the United States and managed to license the media giant’s short-form television and theatrical content from MTV, Comedy Central, BET and Paramount Pictures, for MSN and Xbox 360. Microsoft will also buy advertising on Viacom broadcast and online networks […]