StuckOn » Google

Yahoo surrendering the video battlefield to Google?

Carl Hopkinson — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:02:21 +0000

For any Internet company to challenge Google in the field of online video they’d need a bottomless money pit and years of patience. Even Yahoo it seems has given up in breaking into the market that is completely dominated by Google owned YouTube and Google Video as they’ve just announced they’re closing yet another video website, Maven Networks.

Yahoo paid a cool $160 million for Maven Networks last year, and now that money seems to be wasted as Yahoo is winding down the company.

This strange retreat from Yahoo is just a month after the battle cry from Carol Bartz, the Yahoo chief executive, that Yahoo would be moving into video technology in a big way by acquiring more businesses.

Despite the move to close down Maven Networks, Yahoo is putting a brave face on it by declaring they’re still dedicated to video technology, they’re just scaling back investment in some areas.

Maven had some very big clients for video content, including CBS Sports, but Yahoo will be winding down the contracts. There will also be redundancies as Maven employees are laid off to save costs.

Yahoo has also closed two other video sites this year, Y!Live and Jumpcut.

The message to Google seems to be, help yourself, the battlefield is yours.

Google to buy Twitter?

Cheryl Mathews — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:37:16 +0000

We all know that Google has the financial clout to buy up what it deems worth it. Those Internet based companies that Google thinks it can turn from traffic generators to cash generators are generally snapped up by the big G machine quicker than you can Tweet your latest activity.

Now Titter could be the next in the sights of Google’s buying power.

According to Internet news site TechCrunch, Google are at an advanced stage in talks with Twitter to purchase the new company, one that has seen huge advances in the last four months.

Twitter turned down the advances of Facebook last year, but they may find Google’s enormous pockets too much to refuse, especially as Twitter’s financial backers will want to make a decent return on their investment.

Scam artists went phishing for Google users

Cheryl Mathews — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:46:20 +0000

Users of Google’s Gmail service were hit by a phishing scam this week, through the Google Talk messaging service. Users of the service received a message, which appeared to have come from one of their contacts, but instead contained a link to a spam website called ViddyHo.com.

Google has acted fast and has blacklisted the ViddyHo.com website.

The scam attempt wasn’t the first issue Google experienced that week with regards to Gmail, as the whole service crashed at 9:30am on Tuesday morning, with UK users being unable to access their email.

Acacio Cruz wrote about the incident on Google’s blog:

We know that for many of you, this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could. Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.