Liz Gannes in Social on January 8, 2011 at 6:49 pm PT
Sundar Pichai, the man in charge of Chrome and Chrome OS at Google, is being aggressively courted by Twitter to be its next head of product, according to sources.
But Google is apparently fighting back hard on this latest effort by high-profile Web 2.0 companies, including Twitter and Facebook, to raid its huge talent pool.
Ina Fried in Mobile on December 14, 2010 at 10:42 am PT
The founder of Gmail is taking a dim view of Google’s Chrome OS, predicting that by next year the project will either have been killed or merged with Android. In a series of posts on FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit argues that the Web-based operating system brings little to the table that Android can’t do better.
Liz Gannes in Social on November 23, 2010 at 5:00 am PT
Facebook has a well-defined M&A strategy of bringing in talent from young, small companies and shutting down their products. But there’s also a pattern emerging for what happens to that talent. Acqhired CEOs hold prominent roles on Facebook’s product team; nearly every recent Facebook product launch seems to have been introduced by an acqhired employee.
Liz Gannes in Social on November 22, 2010 at 11:20 am PT
The best-designed site I’ve seen to help create digital scrapbooks is named Memolane, and it calls them “web time machines.” If you want to try Memolane out, the Copenhagen-based company is doing its first public release of beta invites today.
Liz Gannes in Social on November 12, 2010 at 10:59 am PT
Paul Buchheit, the well-respected developer and angel investor, is moving on from Facebook, which had acquired him along with FriendFeed, the start-up he co-founded and funded.
Voices
Geoffrey A. Fowler, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on May 5, 2010 at 12:00 am PT
Facebook is under a spotlight for new privacy settings that could lead users to unwittingly expose a lot more information about themselves. But in a keynote interview at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Facebook executive Paul Buchheit laid out the argument for why he sets his privacy settings to the most open level–”everyone.”
Voices
Voices, Intern, All Things Digital in News on November 20, 2009 at 8:00 am PT
Brizzly, the Web-based Twitter client from Thing Labs, covered in
Almost Famous two weeks ago, begins public beta today.
In addition to opening its “expanded” Twitter interface to the world at large, the start-up is offering an on-the-fly translation tool for foreign tweets. And it has hired former FriendFeeder and current Facebooker Ben Darnell.
Voices
Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on October 7, 2009 at 3:45 pm PT
When it comes to social-networking sites, women are more plugged in than men, according to data analysis by Brian Solis, president of Silicon Valley public-relations firm Future Works.
Mr. Solis used Google Ad Planner to determine the gender breakdown of users signed up for the most popular social-networking sites and found that in most cases, women outnumbered men. “The point of interest that’s worth review and discussion is that in social media, women rule,” he wrote.
Peter Kafka in Media on September 4, 2009 at 9:40 am PT
What happens to a start-up whose business never materializes? One option is to try to peddle the company based on the value of its human capital–aka the “acqhire.” Or would-be employers can simply wait for the start-up to flame out, then pick up the people they want on an a-la-carte basis. Did that just happen with Time Warner Cable and former Joost CTO Jason Gaedtke?
Kara Swisher in News on September 2, 2009 at 10:33 am PT
Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave what he just had to know would be a much quoted comment to the Nikkei today, explicitly saying that the company had “begun seriously looking into acquisitions again.”
Music to the beleaguered mergers and acquisitions market, to be sure, especially after a recent uptick from other big companies pulling out their wallets again as the impact of the econalypse subsides.
According to sources, Google is working on at least a half-dozen acquisition deals, most of which are small start-ups in the online advertising and cloud-computing arenas.
That would be welcome news for many.
