Google has just announced their Q4 2010 earnings. Looking them over quickly, they look good. But that’s the secondary story right now. The bigger story is that Google has just announced that co-founder Larry Page will be replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO of the company. This transition will take place on April 4, Google says.
Schmidt will take the role of “Executive Chairman” and will focus on “deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership,” the company says. He will also continue to act as an advisor to Page and fellow co-founder Sergey Brin. Speaking of Brin, he’ll be working on “strategic projects, in particular working on new products,” the company says. So it sounds like no big change there. → Read More
New York City art world startup Art.sy, which launched at our first TechCrunch Disrupt and won the Rookie Award, is raising $1.25 million from a very impressive group of super angels on both coasts.
The investors include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Wendi Murdoch (wife of News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), VC Jim Breyer, art “czarina” Dasha Zhukova, Founder Collective, Keith Rabois (Square, Slide, PayPal), Charlei Cheever (Quora, Facebook), Dave Morin (Path, Facebook), and David Kidder (Clickable). The round was led by Josh Kushner through Thrive Capital. → Read More
Today at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage for a Q&A with hosts John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly. One topic: Google TV.
Specifically, the hosts asked about the backlash Google TV is now seeing from some of the major U.S. television networks. While saying he didn’t want to speak for them, Schmidt noted that this is the first time someone has tried to do this merging of Internet at television at a huge scale. Obviously, he said, some of them are going to initially be hesitant about such a transition. → Read More
Earlier this evening, Henry Blodget of Business Insider reported that a “loyal reader” told them that Google was giving all employees a $1,000 holiday cash bonus and a 10 percent raise starting on January 1, 2011. If true, that’s a very significant gesture likely to the tune of well over a billion dollars (though dampened a bit by a roll back of certain other bonuses). Usually with these types of stories, Google doesn’t bother to respond or simply gives a “no comment.” But I decided to ask anyway. And the answer is far from a denial.
“While we don’t typically comment on internal matters, we do believe that competitive compensation plans are important to the future of the company,” a Google spokesperson tells us.
So while that’s not a “yes”, it’s just about as close as you can get to a “yes” without saying “yes”. And it’s definitely not a “no”, which if they were willing to comment, you’d think they’d say if the story weren’t true. In other words, it seems as if Blodget’s source is accurate. → Read More
Earlier today, Google announced their Q3 earnings. And they were good. Really good. But that doesn’t mean that questions still don’t linger about the company going forward. Namely, how are they going to make money off of something besides text-based search advertising?
Google’S position is that they already are. Today they shared three key numbers to show how well three other areas of their business are doing: YouTube, display ads, and mobile. And mobile came up again later during the Q&A session on the call. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on the call and took the question about how Android will make money for the company. → Read More
During Google’s third quarter earnings call today, CEO Eric Schmidt was asked, “With the Web becoming more social and realtime, how does Google compete in that world?” The question comes on the heels of yesterday’s announcement by Bing that it is bringing in more data from Facebook to make its search results more social.
Schmidt’s response essentially is that the Google’s search algorithm will absorb more realtime and social data over time: “With respect to social and realtime, we use complex signals to do ranking. Over time we will add realtime and social cues.” Some of this comes in the form of direct data feeds, such as Google gets from Twitter. But to really be social, search needs to be personalized to each individual’s own social stream. Schmidt acknowledges as much: “We are quite convinced that produces a better search result for people who choose to give us that information. We want people to be more logged into Google.” → Read More
So if Google can actually deliver a car that can drive itself and a phone that acts as a translator for me, I will become a full-on MG Siegler-style fan boy for Google. Never mind the horrible transcription of Google Voice, the disappointing “Priority” in-box that sorts spam and ecommerce newsletters above emails from friends and the fact that they just cancelled Goog-411. (Apparently a service only I used.) Google’s boneheaded moves in China that did more harm than good? All forgiven.
Seriously: If I could have two wishes it would be a self driving car and some sort of mobile, auto-translation device. When I’m home in Silicon Valley I have tons of meetings on the peninsula and feel time in a car is wasted time. My mind wanders onto whatever story I am working on and pretty soon I’ve arrived at my destination with no memory of getting there. That in turn freaks me out and makes me think I’ll die in a fiery death one of these days thinking about a startup. I hate driving so much I’ll take an extra hour of public transportation just to avoid it.
When I travel, I don’t have the driving problem, but I am constantly trying to communicate in a language I don’t speak. I like to just wander around and discover a place without guides and I’m constantly miming things in frustration. Between the two, it’s like Google read my mind here. It’s uncanny. The two things that frustrate me most; two things I wouldn’t have thought a large commercially sound venture would try to fix.
Yesssss. This is exactly the kind of if I-had-three-wishes, Star Trek, futurist stuff I was hoping for when I wrote that the Valley was at a crossroads between media and science. → Read More
I wrote a post Sunday about the difference between cultural waves in Silicon Valley and the individual companies that come out of them. Many of the individual companies survive but the wave itself always has to crash. That’s the nature of waves. But it’s also the nature of waves that another one always comes along. I have no idea what that will be. After all, the smartest people in the Valley thought social networking was a feature not a business ten years ago.
But it’s clear that the Valley is at a crossroads: Will it follow the Web 2.0 path further down the road of media and entertainment or go back to its roots of hardcore science and technology? → Read More
Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage to give a speech about his thoughts on the future. It was a very interesting talk which spanned a variety of topics. Naturally, the most important topic that Schmidt talked about was search.
“We want to give you your time back,” Schmidt said. He noted that we live in an age of information overload, where we all have too much to do. The first step in getting your time back is Google Instant, the realtime search feature that Google recently launched, Schmidt said. While the feature may only shave a couple of seconds off of any search, in aggregate (Google is doing 2 billion searches a day), this is a huge amount of time saved. → Read More
“Something interesting is about to happen.”
That was what Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s opening remark at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco today. He continued on to say that the people in the audience represent another transition in the ways people use computers. We now have “an augmented version of humanity,” Schmidt said. The future is about getting computers to do the things we’re not good at.
Schmidt noted that it’s ridiculous that humans and not computers drive cars. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense,” Schmidt said. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers,” Schmidt remarked. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt starts Monday – just three days from today. And we’ve just gotten word that Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be speaking. We’ve added him to our amazing list of speakers. Schmidt will join Disrupt on Tuesday at 10 am.
This is a surprise guest. We’re not quite sure what Schmidt will talk about. Will it be about that new social layer Google is adding to its services? Will it be about how Google is doing in mobile with Android? Will it be about the forthcoming Chrome OS? Whatever it is, it will be interesting. Come to Disrupt to find out. (Yup, there are still a few tickets left). → Read More
During a keynote at the IFA in Berlin, Eric Schmidt topped off presentations on Voice Powered Search, Street View Search and Google TV by emphasizing how much Google values being fast and that current technological advancements are nearing the realm of science fiction, or what he called, “The age of augmented humanity.”
The IFA stands for International Funkausstellung, which roughly translates to International Radio Exhibition. In a press release, IFA Director Jens Heithecker explained the interesting choice of keynote speaker. → Read More
Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with a group of reporters after his panel at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA. He said he was open to taking any questions, so I decided to ask him about Foursquare.
It’s a particularly interesting question for Schmidt because back in 2005, Google bought Dodgeball, the company Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley previously started that was similar to Foursquare. Crowley and Dodgeball co-founder Alex Rainert famously left Google in a huff in 2007. A couple years later, Foursquare was born. → Read More
Remember back in the day when Google was only activating 100,000 Android units a day? You should — it was May. By June, that number had jumped to 160,000 units a day. And today it now stands at 200,000 Android units activated a day. That’s pretty incredible.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed as much today during a sit down with a group of journalists after his panel at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA. When asked about how the Android platform is doing, Schmidt was practically glowing. He cited the recent quarterly shipment numbers (the ones showing total shipments passed those of the iPhone in the U.S.) and said that he just checked their own internal numbers this morning. → Read More
As you may have heard, Google Wave is dead. But why is it dead? Google CEO Eric Schmidt took some time today after his panel at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA to answer that.
When BBC reporter Maggie Shiels asked about the reasons behind the product’s demise, Schmidt noted that Google liked the UI and a lot of the technology behind the product, but it simply to take off. “We try things,” he said. “Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely okay to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that,” he continued. → Read More
Today at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA, the first panel featured Google CEO Eric Schmidt. As moderator David Kirkpatrick was introducing him, he rattled off a massive stat.
Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says.
Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003. → Read More
By this point everyone and their mother knows that Google is trying to make a Facebook-type social networking service. It’s been confirmed by Quora’s Adam D’ Angelo, given an ETA by a source internal to Google, and a name, “Google Me” by Kevin Rose.
And now the The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is trying to get a piece of the Facebook pie, the filling of which is primarily composed of social games, hence the rumored discussions with the new Disney acquisition Playdom, EA and as well as Google’s recent $100 million investment in Zynga. → Read More
Mobile gifting startup Giiv raised $3.35 million in a series A round announced today. Investors included Google CEO Eric Schmidt (through his personal seed fund TomorrowVentures), Saban Ventures, Founder Collective, and SK Telecom Ventures. Schmidt was already a seed investor.
If the investors could have texted the $3.35 million into Giiv’s bank account, they probably would have. Giiv is a mobile gifting service which works via text messages, an iPhone app, and a Facebook app. It’s tag line is “texting with benefits.” → Read More
I was planning on liveblogging Eric Schmidt‘s keynote speech here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but a serious lack of any kind of Internet connectivity threw a wrench into those plans. I’m not too bummed about it though, because the whole thing was frankly quite boring.
Apart from some history lessons about the convergence of telecommunications and cloud computing, all we really got from Schmidt and fellow Googlers was that Android handsets are now seeing over 60,000 shipments on a daily basis, and some previews of add-on features for existing Google mobile products that were cool but not earth-shattering in any way. → Read More
Some people are suggesting that Google CEO Eric Schmidt may have just created a Facebook profile for himself, after signing up for Twitter in early December 2009 and right on the heels of Microsoft founder Bill Gates setting up an account on the wildly popular social networking service.
Evidently, we can’t be 100% sure that this is his real account at this point – unlike Twitter, there’s no ‘verified account’ stamp for Facebook profiles and the man has yet to confirm our friendship (I forgive him, since it’s the middle of the night in the United States). → Read More
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