Sunday, October 21, 2012

Is Google Anti-Competitive?

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase
I have not made up my mind. But Google gets the benefit of doubt from me.

FTC moving closer to Google antitrust case
The majority of top decision-makers at the Federal Trade Commission believe that an antitrust case should be brought against Google Inc, meaning the search giant could soon be headed into tough negotiations ..... Google illegally used its dominance of the search market to hurt its rivals ..... Google rivals specializing in travel, shopping and entertainment have accused Google, the world's No. 1 search engine, of unfairly giving their web sites low quality rankings in search results to steer Internet users away from their websites and toward Google products that provide similar services. ..... Google refuses to share data that would allow advertisers and developers to create software to compare the value they get on Google to advertising spending on Microsoft's Bing or Yahoo. ..... the FTC is looking at Google's handling of valuable patents, which are determined to be essential to smartphones. The agency is trying to determine if they are licensed fairly and whether patent infringement lawsuits are used to hamper innovation.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Mobile: Stating The Obvious

To say right now we are in the mobile era is to state the obvious. It is like in the 1980s AIDS became big news. But people are still figuring out AIDS. I have a feeling mobile is something like that. Tech giants might spend the rest of this decade trying to figure out mobile.

Mobile first companies have a leg up in that sense. But then they are going to have to figure out the web in due time.

Mobile is not the Internet as we knew it, just like the Internet was not computers as we knew them. Mobile is a new beast with its own particulars.

A child is not a small adult. Mobile is not a smaller version of the web, it is not MiniMe. Mobile is no child.



Fred Wilson, Mark Zuckerberg And Mobile
Mark Suster's Web Second Applies To Instagram
2011-2015: A Mobile Stretch
Netizen Has Arrived: A Link From AVC
Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies

Mobile revolution, economy trip up tech giants
consumers' waning love affair with the stalwart PC and infatuation with mobile -- the most significant tectonic shift in the industry since the advent of the Internet ...... raging mobile hardware demand .... About 800,000 shoppers made their first-ever eBay purchase through a mobile device. ..... "Mobile is not proving to be as straightforward as people thought." ...... a worsening macroeconomic environment. ..... The biggest stunner was perhaps Google, which shed more than $20 billion of market value after it reported that its core advertising business had slowed. ....... Click prices declined for the fourth consecutive quarter .... Zynga, the poster child for mobile transition woes ..... the evolution of mobile Internet, social networking is usually the first to spread around the world, followed by games and then advertising ...... Perhaps hardest-hit are Intel and others closely tied to the PC chain .. While Intel dominated that space in its prime, in smartphones its market share is less than 1 percent
Enhanced by Zemanta