Reuters has called Starbucks out on their accounting tactic that sees them report a loss to the taxman while boasting healthy cashflows to investors. From the article, “Over the past three years, Starbucks has reported no profit, and paid no income tax, on sales of 1.2 billion pounds in the UK.” Of course, our coffee […]
Google’s free websites are great for the micro business out there who’s not online at all. They’re going to hurt those digital firms who’ve built a consultancy around helping getting such SMEs online. Well, putting a positive spin on it, perhaps it’ll just put more fish in the digital pond and those newbies may get […]
The modern business model from Silicon Valley is build. Don’t just make a computer, make digital products (as Steve Jobs said by launching a music player, then a music store, then a phone). Build and build again is what the dominant players are showing us to be the winning formula. Google was just a search […]
Answers.com sold this week for $127m. This coupled with the growing buzz around Quora, highlights the fact that Q&A sites are the poster-boy targets on the web. Added to that firestorm is Mahalo giving up on human powered search and pivoting to answers. Although it looks like they’re going for ‘how to’ queries more than […]
Two of the world’s top tech companies announced overhauls at the top this week. Sadly, Steve Jobs’ health will see him step aside for an as-yet unannounced successor at Apple (Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook will stand in at least in the short term). And Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, surprised most of us by tweeting, […]
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is now a year old and it’s been a good one. They’ve clawed 12.7% of the enormous search market, which is no small feat. And they’ve got what political campaigners crave: momentum. Bing will be powering Yahoo search from this autumn and Yahoo’s got 18.9% of the market. Granted, it’s early […]
Akamai’s ‘State of the Internet report’ shows the average UK broadband speed is 3.5 Mbps and just one in 12 surfers are achieving 5 Mbps and above. At present, South Koreans can get speeds of up to 100 Mbps and Soth Korea plans on raising the bar further with a tenfold increase in their ultra […]
On the right – Prevent search engines from indexing news content and have readers pay through a variety of subscriptions to recoup lost earnings from physical news sales. People have no right to free journalism and aggregator sites (especially Google News) are to news, what Pirate Bay is to music. On the left – If […]
A while ago, I had the pleasure of listening to Google’s Robert Swerling talk saliently about site design. The brief version of his presentation: Velocity – give it fast and let them get on with other things Visibility – don’t surprise consumers Value – provide real value Variation – never come out of beta (love […]
We all know history shows us nothing lasts. The Roman Empire, the Warsaw Pact, the telegram, the Two Ronnies… whatever. You name it and time will show itself to have moved swiftly on. Google had another record month in June performing 7.1 billion searches, but I predict, with a prize-fighter’s confidence, that Google cannot remain […]