There's a never a dull news day at Google. Last week the founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page astonished the Valley by sealing a deal with Nasa for a coveted landing rights at the space agency's base near Mountain View, California near Google's heaquarters. At $1.3m, that has to be the world's most expensive parking space, plus the pair have to carry Nasa equipment on their Boeing 767 as part of the deal. (San Francisco Chronicle)
The Facebook killer
This week, Google reportedly called a 15-person brainstorming meeting to tackle "the Facebook problem". TechCrunch, alongside a rather peculiar "social graph", says Google plans to open up some of its key applications to developers and transfer information between them all.
That will start on November 5 - according to three people who broke their non-disclosure agreements to talk to TechCrunch - by opening the social networking site Orkut and the iGoogle customisable home page. That could extend to Gmail, Google Talk and the rest to create a social networking layer across all Google's services. (TechCrunch)
In other Google news...
- Gracing the cover of today's San Jose Mercury News, the two founders are now listed at fifth in Forbes' list of this year's wealthiest Americans. Sergey and Larry each have a personal wealth of $18.5bn this year, up from $4bn in 2004. (Forbes)
- At the same time, the search giant has reportedly recruited its first Washington lobbyists, rather than employing external lobbying firms. Google's representatives will lobby on issues like privacy, child safety and net neutrality. (Associated Press)
- Google's share price has reached a record high of $560.70 today, an eight-fold increase since the company floated in August 2004. That brings the company's total worth of $175bn, ahead of more established companies IBM, Hewlett Packard and five times that of Yahoo. (Associated Press)
- A report by CommsDay says Google wants to lay a super-fast, multi-terabit cable under the pacific from the US to Asia and Australasia. The "Unity" project would broaden the availability of cheap broadband across Asia in particular and would open in 2009, although Google's only comment was from spokesman Barry Schnitt: "Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We're not commenting on any of these plans." (Comms Day)
- Google has applied for European Union approval for its $13.1bn takeover of Doubleclick, the web ad tracking service. Concern about a monopoly of the online ad market had been raised by Yahoo, amongst others. (Associated Press)
- Google is also exploring how to change its advertising offering to allow more targeting by industry, or "vertical-specific" in Google speak. targeting features will include better keyword management and some market research initiatives. (InfoWorld)
- Peter Kirwan's summary of Google-versus-the-press is an interesting viewpoint. On the recent deal with news agencies, he says Google's "rapidly expanding army of publicists" hammer out templated responses to tricky questions. For news companies, "alienating Google might not be in their best interests. Meanwhile, Google News contributes a small fraction of the traffic arriving at most mainstream news sites. In most cases, it's a low, single-digit, percentage proportion of in-bound traffic. A lengthy conflict isn't worth the effort - yet." (Press Gazette)
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