Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us

Who called it?
Via Slashdot

Google Buys Android, Inc.

In what could be a key move in its nascent wireless strategy, Google (GOOG) has quietly acquired startup Android Inc., BusinessWeek Online has learned. The 22-month-old startup, based in Palo Alto, Calif., brings to Google a wealth of talent, including co-founder Andy Rubin, who previously started mobile-device maker Danger Inc.

Via BusinessWeek Online

Economist Weighs In On Dot-Com II; TiVo

Slashdot recently pointed to an article at Economist.com which offers some thoughts on Google leading a new dot-com boom. Focus is on Google, eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo!.

In other news, JP Morgan recently downgraded TIVO, causing it to drop back to the price I bought it at. Panic reactions to analyst coverage changes are usually short-lived, or so I'm told, so I'm not yet worried.

Thoughts on TiVo

I have a TiVo. It's great - I wouldn't go back to regular, time-constrained TV.

Last month, I wrote about TiVo in my article "Who Will Google Buy Next" as a possible acquisition, in the "From Left Field" section. Since then, Google has released its video viewer, and it's showing that Google Video is more than just a closed-captioning searchable parlor trick. Also, while reading up on old TiVo news, I noticed that TiVo announced in late 2004 that they would add contextual ads to the service during fast-forwarding.

All this adds up to an upgrade for TiVo, to the "Sensible Acquisitions" list. That doesn't mean that Google is buying TiVo, or that I think it will - though it may. It means that I believe the personal video recorder industry is ready and willing to experience some Google-inspired innovation, even if Google isn't the company doing it. As I explained in the previous posting, I use Google as a metaphor and a meter stick, not for a tangible or literal prediction of the future.

I'm eating my own poison - I recently bought some stock in NASDAQ: TIVO. I bought it at 6.61 and it closed yesterday at 7.20. Not bad.

Raison d'être

Welcome, everyone, to the Googablooga. Undoubtedly some readers are wondering why the web needs another to join the multitudes of blogs about Page, Brin, Schmidt, and company. Well, this introductory post will explain all that and more, as well as outline my plans for this blog and what I expect to accomplish.

Earlier this month (or last month, since it's now 2:40 am and thus no longer June 30th) I authored an article (my first) for Kuro5hin entitled "Who Will Google Buy Next?." The article was promptly Slashdotted (to my immense delight) and propagated all over the web (to my further delight), causing many to blog or comment with their own ideas for possible Google takeover targets, as well as some who pointed out my mistakes and oversights. This started me thinking: if only there were some way to incorporate all this feedback. Kuro5hin does not allow edits or additions to articles once published, and I wouldn't have it any other way. However, why should my article be static and unchanging? If I had wanted that, I'd have written the article for a processed tree publication. As any Googler will tell you, the WWW is supposed to be about dynamic and up-to-date content.

So, to make a short story even shorter, I decided to make a blog about what companies Google could buy next. It would feature semi-frequent alerts about tech companies that are doing things of the interesting and innovative sort. My ideas have a tendency to expand with time, though, and become more ambitious. This idea was no different, and thus, Googablooga was born, a larger-scale blog about Google, other search companies, the changing Internet, and the future of information technology.

So what makes this blog different than the hordes of other Google-obsessed news & commentary clearinghouses? Well, the cheesy name and the snazzy ripoff logo don't sufficiently elucidate this, but I don't intend for Googablooga to be just another source for reporting on the big G's doings and my own uninspired opinions on them. A cliché that I will use (against my better judgment) to describe the scope of this site is: "the bigger picture." Specifically, the picture is one chronicling a second dot-com bubble, or, more accurately, the continuation of where the first one left off; history books will see it as one large information renaissance with only a brief hiccup in the early 2000s. The terms "dot-com boom" or "tech bubble" are therefore in this context disingenuous, but they will have to do until I can coin better ones.

If there's this whole wide-spread information renaissance brewing, as I say, then why Google specifically? For two reasons: one, because GOOG is the quintessential example of a company oriented around access to, enjoyment of, and manipulation of information, be it news, maps, science, art, culture, entertainment, or anything else, and two, because Google is very much in the public eye. It's not the only company that meets these criteria: we all know that in addition to Google, there are the well-known Yahoo, Apple, TiVo, Amazon.com, Adobe, eBay, IBM, Sony, and even Microsoft trying to use information to turn a profit (and of course many others I haven't mentioned). But Google is unique and interesting in many ways, which I hope to discuss in this blog. At any rate, it's certainly the best fit for what I intend to write about.

(I'd like to take a moment to say that while open source and non-profit companies à la Wikipedia or Mozilla seem like interesting possibilities for what I'm talking about here, they really don't work for the kind of blog I'd like to develop. Non-profits probably aren't going to be driven by the same things, and probably won't, for example, acquire a lot of other companies. I'm not going to ignore these guys, but I won't really spend a lot of time on them.)

I'll spare you further confusion and just put it this way. Googablooga will focus not on Google, but on the space around Google. I have determined after the fact that my list of companies Google might be interested in buying was less about Google itself and was really more useful as an exercise to turn up some interesting tech companies with possible Google-like success in the making. In using the more well-known Google as a model, I was able to create a list of companies who will probably not be bought by Google, but are interesting on their own. I liked how the folks at Make You Go Hmm put it when commenting on my K5 article: "I like looking at lists like this because it often turns me onto new sites/services that I haven’t seen before." This blog will use Google in the same fashion as my article to achieve that, but in a broader scope.

So what should you expect from Googablooga? Forward-thinking coverage of the information age as it develops, for one. I intend to maintain up-to-date lists of "Tech Companies to Watch" and "Google Acquisitions So Far," which will grow out of the Kuro5hin article lists. There will of course be a lot of Google coverage, but only when it's relevant outside of just being Google news. To give you an idea, here are some ideas I have for upcoming blog post topics: "Google & Collaboration," "I'm Buying GRU and MNST," "Google & The Slashdot Effect," "Flickr & Web Application Building," "The Future of P2P," "Metadata & You," "Web Appliances," and "Chronicles of the Power Outage." You probably don't know yet what sort of ramblings these titles will spawn, but I think you'll find them interesting.

Anyway, thank you for reading, and I hope you will enjoy this endeavor. Please bookmark this page, blog about it, and tell your friends: I do love a good audience.