Google statistics

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Interesting list compiled by Jeff Jarvis…

• Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06
• Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise.
• Google was searched 4.4 billion times in the U.S. alone in October, 2007 (three times Yahoo), says Nielsen. Average searches per searcher: 40.7.
• Google’s sites had 112 million U.S. visitors in November, 2007, says Nielsen.
• Google’s traffic was up 22.4% in 2007 over 2006, according to Comscore.
• Google earned $15 billion revenue and $6.4 billion profit in 2007, a profit margin of 26.9%. Its revenue was up 57% in the last quarter of 2007 over 2006, says Yahoo Finance. As of late 2007, its stock was up 53% in a year. The company has a market capitalization of $207.6 billion.
• Google controls 79% of the pay-per-click ad market, according to RimmKaufman. It controls 40% of all online advertising, according to web site HipMojo.
• Google employed almost 16,000 people at the end of 2007, a 50% increase over the year before.
• Google became the No. 1 brand in the world in 2007, according to Millward Brown Brandz Top 100.

Not that we didn’t know this already. But the stats still amaze me.

Me too.

The Personal MBA

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A few years ago, marooned in the departure lounge of a big international airport, I fell to perusing the books in the (huge) ‘business and management’ section of the airport bookshop and wondered whether it would be possible to mimic an MBA ‘education’ from a combination of booklists and air-miles. It turns out that Josh Kaufman had a similar idea, but has done something useful and interesting with it — the Personal MBA Manifesto.

Business schools don’t have a monopoly on worldly wisdom. If you’re serious about learning advanced business principles, the Personal MBA can help. The Personal MBA recommended reading list is the tangible result of hundreds of hours of reading and research, and features only the very best books the business press has to offer. So skip the fancy diploma and $150,000 loan – you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.

I’ve scanned the complete list of the 69-volume ‘canon’ he proposes and am ashamed to say that I’ve only read two and hadn’t heard of most. He’s done an interesting deal with Amazon.com who will sell you the ‘PMBA Motherlode’ for $1267 — or “about 1.26% of the cost of a $100,000 business school education”. Neat, eh?

BusinessWeek ran a feature on the PMBA a while back.

Later: The basic flaw in this approach is in its implicit assumption that ‘content is king’. Just reading the same stuff as students at HBS or the Wharton School or the Judge Business School doesn’t provide the same educational experience as being at these institutions. Why? Because it’s always been the case that students learn at least as much from one another as they do from their professors.

The five ‘coolest hacks’ of 2007

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Just in case you thought that the Dark Side had gone away. From Dark Reading

Hackers are creative folk, for sure. But some researchers are more imaginative and crafty than others. We’re talking the kind of guys who aren’t content with finding the next bug in Windows or a Cisco router. Instead, they go after the everyday things we take for granted even more than our PCs — our cars, our wireless connections, and (gulp) the electronic financial trading systems that record our stock purchases and other online transactions…

Mapping Professional Networks

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I’ve often reflected on the discrepancy between the structures of companies shown in official organisation charts and the informal networks that orchestrate the real work that’s done. An obvious way of charting the ‘real’ networks would be to map the email and other communications of workers — though of course it would raise privacy and other issues. (Not that corporate employees should assume that their email is ever private.) Now comes an interesting post about how IBM has developed tools (one code-named Atlas) for doing just this:

Atlas’s most powerful features rely on the data available through Connections… It collects information about professional relationships based not only on job descriptions and information readily available through the corporate directory, but also through blog tags, bookmarks, and group membership. Atlas can be configured to look at e-mail and instant-message patterns, and to weigh different types of information more or less heavily. The result, Lamb says, is a set of tools that go beyond the simple networks that are clear from a corporation’s structure…

Getting your retal… er, review in first

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Rory Cellan-Jones has written a pre-emptive of 2008

January

At CES in Las Vegas, Bill Gates makes his final keynote before stepping down at Microsoft. Guess what? The digital home of the future is here at last and it is powered by Windows Media Center.

One week later in San Francisco, Steve Jobs uses his Macworld keynote to show us round the iHome (“way cool”). It is run by a revamped Apple TV set-top box, and allows you to get all your stuff – movies, music, photos and groceries – piped to you through iTunes….

Neat idea. Wish I’d thought of it.

Blogging: reality check

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I’ve just come across a lovely New Yorker cartoon by Alex Gregory.

One dog is saying to another: “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking”.

Copyright thuggery takes a new twist

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Interesting report in the Washington Post…

In an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

“I couldn’t believe it when I read that,” says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. “The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation.”

The piece attracted 283 comments, one of which usefully pointed to the RIAA’s own FAQ page. This says:

11. How is downloading music different from copying a personal CD?

Record companies have never objected to someone making a copy of a CD for their own personal use. We want fans to enjoy the music they bought legally.

Quite so. But later there’s a link labelled “for more on what the law says about copying CDs, click here”. This leads to the MusicUnited.org site and the following claims:

# It’s okay to copy music onto an analog cassette, but not for commercial purposes.

# It’s also okay to copy music onto special Audio CD-R’s, mini-discs, and digital tapes (because royalties have been paid on them) – but, again, not for commercial purposes.

# Beyond that, there’s no legal “right” to copy the copyrighted music on a CD onto a CD-R. However, burning a copy of CD onto a CD-R, or transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player, won’t usually raise concerns so long as:

* The copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own

* The copy is just for your personal use.

What this highlights is that there is no limit to what the copyright industries will seek to extort from consumers unless they are constrained by law. It’s only a short step from the RIAA’s apparent position as revealed here (that being allowed to rip a CD onto your hard drive for your personal use is a privilege which “won’t usually raise concerns”, rather than a right) to arguing that merely looking at a web page constitutes making a copy — because a computer can only display a web page after a copy of the page has been loaded into the video RAM of the user’s computer.

If these industries were allowed to get their way, they would reduce the web to a shambles of permanent ongoing micro-payment negotiation.

Thanks to Chris Walker for the original link.