by admin
Google cornered !!
Tech Giants come together in a legal feud with Google.The fight against a legal settlement that would give Google Inc. the digital rights to millions of copyrighted books is starting to resemble a heavyweight brawl in the library, according to BBC news.
Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are joining a coalition that hopes to rally opposition to Google’s digital book ambitions and ultimately persuade a federal judge to block or revise the Internet search leader’s plans.
The group, to be called the Open Book Alliance, is spearheaded by the Internet Archive, a longtime critic of Google’s crusade to make digital copies of as many printed books as possible.Both Microsoft and Yahoo have confirmed their intention to join the alliance. Amazon declined to comment because the group hasn’t been formally announced yet. The Open Book Alliance also will include an assortment of nonprofit groups.
Google plans to offer free access to some books through its search engine and sell others as part of a registry that will share revenue with authors and publishers if the class-action settlement is approved.Opponents of the deal believe it will give Google too much pricing power, and have raised concerns about the company’s ability to stockpile more personal data about the users of its search engines by tracking what they’re reading.Microsoft and Yahoo could be hurt if Google’s expanded index of digital books propels even more traffic to its search engine. If that
were to happen, Google might process even more search requests than it already does, allowing the company to show more of the text ads alongside search results that generate most of its revenue.Hoping to siphon advertising away from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo last month announced a planned partnership in search. The proposal, which still must be approved by the Justice Department, calls for Microsoft to run the search engine on Yahoo’s web site in return for 12 percent of the revenue generated by accompanying ad sales.
“The Google Books settlement is injecting more competition into the digital books space, so it’s understandable why our competitors might fight hard to prevent more competition,” Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said.Stricker also took a stab at Microsoft, which abandoned its efforts to make digital book copies to focus on more profitable online opportunities.
The writer is a software engineer but occassionaly writes to silicondunia
Travelguru that was recently buzzing with activity has been acquired by online giant travelocity. According to the latest news travelguru was acquired by the US based online company. Travelocity has a online booking of more thant 10$ billion dollars. Travelguru has more than 4000 hotel bookings in its capacity in the sub-continent. Travelguru has a large customer database. The deal size is still not disclosed but it needs to be seen what would be impact of a such major acquisition in the market. Some of the other competitors of travelguru are makemytrip.com,yatra.com, cleartrip.com… Well whatever the acquisition could give a better valuation for the dominant internet space and it may add some value proposition in the Internet segment.
company that was considered the leaders in printers and desktop computers seems to have realised that they have to move for higher end to cut cost and improve the margins. By acquiring the recent giant of IT services EDS for 25$ Billion Dollars HP was moved into second place in overall revenues after IBM.
Facebook the social networking website that started as a project from Harvard dormintory by Mark Zuckerburg seems to be interested in taking a new twist as reported in Economic times. The socio-net gaint aims to take on leading internet gaints like yahoo and google in their own play yards. With more than 250 million members, Facebook was the world’s fourth most visited website in June, according to comScore. It is on track to bring in more than $500 million in revenue this year, most of it from advertising sales. Facebook in its new initiatives represent the natural evolution of the service, said Facebook Vice President of Product Christopher Cox. He downplayed the increasing overlap between Facebook’s new search engine and Twitter’s search engine, or Google’s dominant Web search engine. Facebook has recently acquired friendfeed where it lets people search across networking sites and social blogs. Facebook is very interesting to know about the new avatara it could take on its global gaints.
Well as silicondunia had mentioned in its old article the Indian IT and Telecom sector has truely come to age. With IBM clinching the deal of the decade in the year 2004 for 750$ million dollars. The Indian IT behmoths TCS, Wipro and Tech Mahindra are vying for a greater share of IT contract from our own Desi Bharti company. With the recent announcement of its optical fibre network maintainence contract with an ever expanding customer in its broadband with the costs of broadband nosediving and ever increasing indian population and growing number of internet users. Its a great interest to know who would bag this prestigious contract when already the revenues from offshore had started dwindling for the Indian IT companies.