Clint Boulton

Unlike my blogger peers, I’m not usually wont to skewer a so-called scoop. And I won’t start doing so, but I will point out that two intriguing pieces in the The Wall Street Journal came off as old news, warmed over instead of hot stuff. First is this piece about the Google cloud storage drive–something […]

Google, whose $12.5 billion deal to acquire Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) appears set for a Justice Department blessing, has pledged to uphold the phone maker’s existing practice to license patents under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms€”FRAND, in industry parlance. That includes supporting Motorola’s current practices for licensing patents at a cost of 2.25 percent of the […]

The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the Federal Trade Commission Feb. 8, compelling the agency to halt Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) privacy-policy changes before they go into effect March 1. EPIC argued that the privacy-policy changes, which include bringing 60 Web services under one umbrella policy and enable Google to share data between those services, violate the […]

Google Feb. 8 pushed Chrome 17 into the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux, paying out $10,500 to fix bugs and making the browser faster and more secure. Bug hunters squashed 20 bugs. Google paid for 11 of them, including $2,000 for the detections of “bad casts with column spans.” The Chrome maker paid […]

Apples iPhone, iPad A conversation about the App Economy has to start with the devices that started it all, beginning with the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. These products are still popular, with Apple selling 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads last quarter alone. TechNet noted: “The incredibly rapid rise of […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) started 2012 on a high note in search, garnering 66.2 percent U.S. market share through January from 65.9 percent through December, according to comScore. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) share edged up, from 15.1 percent to 15.2 percent. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), which is relying on Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) to power its search engine and search ads, continued its […]

Near field communications, also known as good-ole NFC, was one of a handful of rages in 2011. You couldn’t read a story about mobile payment systems without seeing NFC as one of the keywords, which is ironic because NFC-based mobile payment systems haven’t exactly taken off. I’m looking at you Google Wallet. What we do […]

As Android tablets go, Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle Fire is absolutely flourishing in the U.S., where industry analysts estimate the e-commerce company sold 4 million to 6 million of the 7-inch slates at $199 a pop for the holiday quarter. Yet each report of the Kindle Fire’s success adds some more salt to the tender wounds […]

WorkSimple, a startup in a performance management space that is heating up, has seeded its Free Forever goal performance application in the Google Apps Marketplace, the search engine’s online store for apps that hook into Google Apps. WorkSimple competes with SuccessFactors and Rypple, both of which have been acquired by larger companies seeking to improve […]

Updated: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is willing to pay online surfers to browse the Web and share data about their travels with the search-engine giant. The company has begun soliciting users for its Screenwise program, in which it will pay Chrome users in Amazon gift cards to surf Websites. Users must install a lightweight browser extension, which […]

John Battelle has been on a roll of late, opining on a number of Internet topics I hold near and dear, particularly the competitive dynamic of the Big 5 of the Internet. Those would be Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook, and all of their walled gardens, another Battelle topic du jour. Yesterday Battelle drew […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Feb. 7 launched a beta of Chrome for Android, a mobile version of the popular browser that is used by more than 200 million people worldwide on the desktop. The catch is that it is currently only available for smartphones and tablets based on the latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) operating […]