The free food days at Google are numbered. Googlers will no longer be getting free dinner, tea trolley, or afternoon snack attack services. Valleywag broke the story and according to their source, “Google has drastically cut back their budget on the culinary program”. As the publication puts it, “Google has long milked its cafeterias for their publicity value; company executives have crowed about the company’s resistance to recessions and its commitment to coddling its employees. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin even promised shareholders they’d add perks, rather than cut them.”
In 2004, More»

Labels: Apple, Facebook, google, iPhone

If you were an Apple employee or shareholder you would be about 300% richer today than a Google employee or shareholder. This is based on a comparison of GOOG and AAPL shares over a five year period between Aug 27, 2004 to Aug 22, 2008. Over that period, Google returned an impressive 355.73% and Apple returned a staggering 1050.52%. Year-to-date GOOG is down about 5% and AAPL is up about 36%.
The perception is that all Google employees are making a killing. The first one hundred employees struck it More»

Labels: Apple, google, recruiting

In a possible bid to improve the company’s cool factor and appeal to a younger audience, Microsoft is reportedly in talks with comedian, Jerry Seinfeld, to become the company’s key pitchman in a $300 million ad campaign. Jerry’s pay will be no laughing matter at a reported $10 million for appearing in ads alongside Microsoft Chairman, Bill Gates.
The ads are expected to be for the latest Microsoft operating system, Vista, which has had strong sales but whose “The Wow starts now” campaign didn’t quite debut to rave reviews. Apple, on the other hand, has had a very successful “I’m a More»

Labels: Apple, Microsoft

Apple continued to scramble over the weekend to limit the damage caused by MobileMe, the company’s first step into cloud computing, by posting on Friday an additional longer, four-paragraph apology, and acknowledging that the new service was still not problem-free.
Intended to supplant the company’s aging .Mac Web service, MobileMe is meant to make Apple a player in the online portal world now dominated by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. So far it has served only to tarnish Apple’s reputation for producing solid, pain-free, software. More>>
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Labels: Apple, cloud computing

Apple sold one million of its new and improved iPhones, the iPhone 3G, over the weekend after its much anticipated release on Friday, July 11.  According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, “iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend. It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world.” Additionally, more than 10 million applications were also downloaded over the weekend from its new App Store.
The new iPhone 3G combines all the features of iPhone plus 3G networking More»

Labels: Apple, mobile web, usability, user experience, web, web 2.0

It seems like everyone is excited about the new iPhone that was introduced by Apple on Monday (many people are actually calling it the Jesusphone) but I think everyone’s missing the big picture.
What triggered those thoughts was yesterday’s blog post from Mashable, discussing what was really revolutionary about the new iPhone:
And, The Really Big Thing About The New iPhone Is… GPS. Global Positioning System . Geo-anything. Location based services. (…) Why hasn’t all this happened before? Three words: ease of use. While you could have done all these things for the Symbian More»

Labels: Apple, GPS, iPhone, Local Search, mobile web

Mozilla’s latest version of its popular Firefox browser, Firefox 3 (Release Candidate), is available for testing purposes only. So, in the ongoing browser wars between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (version 8 beta available), Apple’s Safari browser, the Opera browser, and Mozilla’s Firefox, who is winning? The Netscape Navigator browser died a slow death and eventually dropped out of the race leaving the others to duke it out. So, who is winning? No surprise, based on Q1 2008 data from Net Applications, IE leads the pack with More»

Labels: Apple, firefox 3.0, internet explorer, Microsoft, mozilla, msft, web browsers

A series of patents filed by Apple Computer today, and uncovered by Apple Insider, suggest that Apple is working on enhancements to the iPod to make is a “lifestyle” companion. Based on the patents Apple appears to be working on ways to have the iPod monitor the health and exercise of the user via new programming and new peripheral monitoring devices that may attach to the body or use motion detection to keep track of walking and other exercise routines.
Although lifestyle contraptions are nothing new, Apple appears to have some clever social networking ideas up it’s More»

Labels: Apple, apple iPod, Social Networking, social networks

Apple´s feeling the fury and heat for a somewhat tricky feature that led many users to inadvertently install the Safari browser during a recent Apple update. Although it possibly was an innocent mistake, it is more likely that Apple marketing pushed this approach knowing that making the install a defaulted feature would lead to an increase in installs, and assumed the benefits of this would outweigh the criticism.
CNET’s Tom Krazit inexplicable suggests that this is the users fault, saying in his post Look, people, it’s 2008: You’re responsible for what you install on your More»

Labels: Apple, CNET, software

The launch of Alltop.com has been announced by startup guru and former Apple PR mastermind Guy Kawasaki. Alltop is a new website that aggregates media from many online sources.
Today on Kawasaki’s blog he wrote:
A good metaphor is that Alltop is an “online magazine rack” that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Our goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99% of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page.
Alltop carves up their information space in a somewhat unique way, starting with the More»

Labels: alltop, Apple, kawasaki, startups