A friend has just logged into the Revenue and Customs web site to submit her tax return. (She was unable to do it yesterday because the site was, er, unavailable.) She was greeted by this reassuring dialog box. What’s going on? The return-submission site is unreachable today too.
This is an agency of the government which expects us to trust it with ID cards.
I always thought the MySpace/Google deal was a work of genius — for Rupert Murdoch. It’s beginning to look as though I was right.
The stock market may be fretting over Google’s disappointing earnings, but somewhere Rupert Murdoch is smiling.
One of the weaknesses that Google’s management highlighted in its conference call was advertising on social networks. The company said its traffic acquisition cost, the money it pays to sites on which it places ads, rose in the fourth quarter because of required minimum payments it must make to certain sites.
“We have found that social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as we would like,” said George Reyes, Google’s chief financial officer, implying that the sites on which the minimum payments are due were social networks. By far, the largest social network on which Google sells ads is MySpace, which is owned by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp. In 2006, Google agreed to a three-year deal to sell ads on MySpace, committing to pay a minimum of $900 million.
People involved in that deal said that Google never assumed that it would earn its $900 million back from that deal, but it appears to be losing even more than it had expected.
From The Register…
[Google CEO] Schmidt is very proud of the company’s international growth, and he says there’s still “tremendous potential” for further growth outside the US. In Q4, overseas revenue hit $2.32bn, which amounts to 48 per cent of the company’s overall revenue. In Q4 2006, international dollars accounted for only 44 of overall revenue.
No, you needn’t do the math by yourself. Total revenues for the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2007 were $4.83bn. That’s a 51 per cent jump from Q4 2006. Meanwhile, Q4 profits were $1.2bn, a 17 per cent jump from the previous year.
Believe it or not, this is bad news for Google. For just the third time in the past 14 quarters, the company failed to meet the expectations of Wall Street analysts.
So, even though world domination is a distinct possibility, Google’s stock price is on the way down. At least for the moment.
From Technology Review…
Now a company called Delver, which presented at Demo earlier this week, is working on a search engine that uses social-network data to return personalized results from the larger Web.
Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site connects information about a user’s social network with Web search results, “so you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph.” He explains that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name. Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user–such as a public LinkedIn profile–and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom. The consequence, says Agmon, is that each user gets a different set of results from a given query, and a set quite different from those delivered by Google…