Michael Hickins

Google is one of several angel investors with a stake in Pixazza, a startup making technology that is supposed to allow publishers of e-commerce Websites and other sites to display information about the contents of an image. But if you set aside DoubleClick and Postini, which were hardly startups when Google picked them up to […]

Now what, Steve? Google just introduced a pair of significant changes to its search product, something Steve Ballmer recently said it couldn’t do because it’s got too darn much market share. As I suggested in my earlier post on Ballmer’s comments, its leader’s complacency explains why Microsoft has been allowed to float in a bath […]

Microsoft is closing its adCenter analytics beta. The adCenter community blog is trying to put on a brave face, but this has to be considered a gigantic failure and a huge win for Google and Omniture. “The insights you’ve contributed through your feedback and your use of the tool have served an invaluable purpose in […]

Google has been assailed in the U.K. for its Street View service because some people have complained that their privacy has been violated. As a result: “Scores of pictures, including one of a man exiting a Soho sex shop and another of a man being sick on the pavement outside a pub, were removed from […]

Poor Steve Ballmer. He’s so befuddled by Google (and his inability to defibrillate Microsoft’s stock price) that he thinks the new Undo Send Gmail function works for when he puts his foot in his mouth out loud as well as in e-mail form. His latest whopper is saying Google’s market share in search is so […]

Google is putting its book search technology to good use by allowing Sony to distribute more books for free. Financial details of the deal between Google and Sony were not divulged, but what matters is that more than half a million books published before 1923 will be available on the Sony Reader for free. Google […]

Google’s Chrome browser is more than just a poke in the eye at Microsoft. It’s a strategic move that should have both Microsoft and Adobe worried about the future of their applications. As Nick Kolakowski reported on eWEEK, Google introduced the newest beta of its spectacularly fast browser this week. Now, Google is launching Chrome […]

Google is gaining momentum in the smartphone market, as Taiwan handset maker HTC says it will introduce three new Android-based phones this year. It is also rolling out a second version of the G1 in the second quarter. This on top of news earlier this year that Motorola will consolidate its handset business around two […]

Fellow GARDers*, it is said that the gears of the gods grind slowly, which means that while they may take their sweet time, they inexorably get wherever they intend. * GARD=Google Attention and Reaction District Google is dead serious about Google Voice, make no mistake. It’s part of a pincer movement that began with the […]

Hi, Some of you may remember me from my days writing for the E-Piphanies blog now so ably managed by Stephen Wellman and Jack Margo. I will now be following in the footsteps of the inestimable Clint Boulton, and I will do my best to maintain his high standards. Now, I do know that guard […]

The success the Arizona Cardinals football team enjoyed in 2008 came as a result of attention to detail and team discipline. The same attributes were critical to building the IP-converged voice and data network for its new stadium, which opened only two years earlier. According to Mark Feller, vice president of technology for the Cardinals, […]

In some ways, Argonne National Laboratory, located 25 miles southwest of Chicago, is unlike most companies you’re likely to come across. A direct descendant of Enrico Fermi’s metallurgical research lab–site of the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction–Argonne was chartered in 1946 as the first national research lab. It is now a Department of Energy […]