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Beijing: "Google is Not God"

John Paczkowski — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:41:07 +0000

Google’s principled stand in China has very quickly turned into an ugly clash with the country’s government. On Wednesday, The People’s Daily, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, lobbed a searing editorial at the company, decrying its arrogance and accusing it of collaborating with U.S. intelligence agencies. It was accompanied by the cartoon above (is that supposed to be Eric Schmidt?). Its title: “Google is Not God.” An excerpt:

For Chinese people, Google is not god, and even if it puts on a full-on show about politics and values, it is still not god. Actually, Google is not a virgin when it comes to values. Its cooperation and collusion with the US intelligence and security agencies is well-known, which aroused spats with Europe. If some information is “unfavorable”, Google must delete it under the order of relevant US agencies. The data of its search results is also “stored for inspection.”

After Google launched an attack on China’s censoring, American officials and media responded vigorously. Is it still a corporate incident or commercial action? All this makes one wonder. Thinking about the US’ big efforts in recent years to engage in Internet war, perhaps this could be an exploratory pre-dawn battle.

A blistering attack, though Google (GOOG) clearly invited it by directing Chinese searches to an uncensored search engine based in Hong Kong, essentially using Beijing’s “one country, two systems” policy against it.

There will undoubtedly be more like it in the future, especially if Google continues to tweak the Chinese government as it did today by indexing Twitter posts on its Chinese search site in open defiance of the country’s ban on the microblogging site.

[Image credit: China Daily]

Microsoft’s Bing Deal

John Paczkowski — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:15:55 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

LogMeIn Logs IPO Gains

John Paczkowski — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:00:22 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Who Said Web 2.0 Was R.I.P.? Microblog Tumblr Raises $4.5 Million, Expectations.

Peter Kafka — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:00:52 +0000

Tumblr is exactly the kind of start-up that’s supposed to be gasping for air in today’s dismal economy: A trendy but niche Web service with a prominent founder and exactly zero revenue.

Instead, the New York-based company has just raised a $4.5 million Series B round that its CEO, 22-year-old David Karp, says will fund it for two and a half years. Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, which led the company’s first $750,000 round a year ago, also led this financing. My educated guess is that its investors now value Tumblr at around $15 million.

Tumblr is a “microblog” platform that is supposed to let its users quickly create nice-looking posts with a minimum of effort; it sits somewhere between Twitter and full-fledged blogs like Blogger and TypePad. It is popular with a relatively small but prolific user base: Its 500,000 users have created pages that draw 15 million unique visitors and 61 million page views a month, Karp says.

Money? Nope. Tumblr is free–and has no ads cluttering up its hipster vibe.

Way back in 2007, those kinds of numbers would have been catnip for the likes of Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO). Now, though, even deep-pocketed buyers aren’t racing to snap up revenue-free start-ups. But Karp says raising money from his previous investors was easy: “These guys came to us with a deal that made us incredibly comfortable.”

Karp says he’s going to start generating money in early 2009. Not by selling ads on his members pages–Karp thinks the site will eventually incorporate ads in some way, but not yet–but by selling users “premium” services, most of which he’s not ready to describe. He does promise they will be “really sexy.”

More practically, Karp points out that other Web services, like the WordPress blogging platform and Yahoo’s Flickr photo service, have been able to upsell many of their users with goodies like extra storage. He figures many of his users will pay up, too.

The new money means he’ll have time to prove his thesis. Karp has just doubled his staff–which means there are now all of six people on payroll. One of them, hired in September, is John Maloney, Karp’s former boss at Urban Baby, where he started his Web career. Maloney is now in charge of business operations.

The money also means there are heightened expectations. Karp has done much more than people twice his age (and has the press clips to prove it). But the newest funding round means his investors think the company will be worth as much as $50 million by the time he sells it or raises more cash. In order to prove them right, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him.

[Image Credit: David's Log]