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Though their reasons might be benign, news of executives unloading their own company's stock is always a bit disconcerting. Take the case of Hilary Schneider, the EVP of North America at Yahoo, who just sold about $1 million worth of company stock. Making the divestiture more unnerving is the fact that it coincides with news of yet another top official leaving the company in recent months. Michael Murray, SVP of finance and Yahoo's chief accounting officer is expected to leave at the end of the month.
Business Insider
The author of the forthcoming book "Twitterville, How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods," has come up with six ways for businesses to make the micro-blogging service work for them. In a nutshell: as a continuous newsletter; as a talent recruiter; as a platform on which to piggyback; as a niche audience finder; as a virtual marketplace; and as an image changer.
Wall Street Journal
YouTube potentially partnering with the major studios on a movie "rental" business is one of those deals that begs the question, "What took them so long?" YouTube, which isn't yet profitable, could certainly use a real business model. Albeit mostly short-form, the Google-owned site already accounts for over 40% of all videos viewed by U.S. Web users. And, the movie studios are always looking for new revenue streams to offset sagging DVD sales. Still, as Businessweek's The Tech Beat blog
notes, YouTube hasn't always seen eye-to-eye with Hollywood. "The talks follow a gradual thawing of relations …
Yahoo Finance
If only for a couple of hours, Gmail's outage on Wednesday managed to inconvenience tens of millions of consumer and enterprise users. It's impossible to immediately know how many, if any, users were permanently alienated by the disruption, but the implications are potentially troubling for Google as it continues to invest in Web-based services. With about 149 million users, the free version of Gmail is the third most-popular email platform worldwide.
PC World
Having already disaffected top publishers, Google's attempts to catalog the world's liberties have now earned the ire of the German government, which is now warning U.S. lawmakers that the Google Books deal could have international implications on copyright law, privacy, and the rights of authors. Germany's greatest fear is apparently that Google will sign an agreement with the European Union, which would obviously give the country less leverage in the debate.
Search Engine Land
Meet Netbase, an enterprise-facing software and search company that, according to analyst Greg Sterling, "appears to have one of the most advanced search platforms in the market." The company claims that no other search provider in the consumer or enterprise segment is as advanced, and seems to have some evidence to back it up. To prove its merit, Netbase just launched a vertical search site named HealthBase -- a "technology showcase" for the company's "content intelligence" platform and semantic search capabilities.
Business Insider
Along with actually using the micro-blogging-service, valuating Twitter's worth has become a favorite industry pastime. Buddy Media head Michael Lazerow says that Microsoft or Google should fork over $2 billion for the company -- undercutting blogger Robert Scoble's recent valuation of $5-$10 billion, but obliterating figures in the sphere of $250 million that only months ago were considered "staggering."
Wall Street Journal
Paving the way for Facebook's mobile future, phone maker Nokia is introducing a "Lifecasting" service that integrates its phones with the social-networking service. Well aware of consumers' keenness for mobile social-networking, it only makes sense that more phone makers will cater to Facebook and vice versa. In that vein, Facebook just relaunched its iPhone application after investing some serious man-hours into improving the service.
Dow Jones
Google chief exec Eric Schmidt says the company is so over the recession, and poised to begin "seriously looking at acquisitions again," reports The Nikkei. In what areas is the notoriously ambitious company looking to invest? Barring the off chance that some key qualifier was lost in translation, Google won't be wagering another $3.1 billion anytime soon (as it agreed to do back in April 2007 for DoubleClick.) Rather, it is setting its sights on venture-stage firms poised for growth, according to the Japanese newspaper. In particular, cloud computing -- in which data is stored on the Internet rather than …
PC World
Sony is reportedly planning to replace Microsoft's Internet Explorer with Google's Chrome as the default Web browser on all new shipments of its popular Vaio laptops. Sony began installing Chrome on North American PCs back in May, as part of a test run with Google's new browser. The computers, however, will still come installed with IE, which continues to dominate the market with a nearly 70% share compared to Chrome's less than 3% share.