Tag Archives: Google Plus

Computers

Head of Google China leaves post, to be replaced by executive from Europe

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Google’s leader for its China operations, John Liu, is leaving his position as the company continues to maintain a low-key presence in the nation following heated disputes over online censorship.

Liu has “decided to pursue other opportunities,” Google said in an email on Monday. Liu had been at Google for nearly six years, and originally was head of sales for the company’s Greater China operations. In 2009, he was elevated to head of Google’s Greater China business after the departure of his predecessor, Kai-Fu Lee, a tech entrepreneur well-known in the country.

Liu worked at Google as its search business in China slowly grew to compete with the country’s largest search engine Baidu. But in 2010, Google decided it would no longer agree to China’s demands for online censorship, and initiated a partial retreat from the Chinese market.

Since then, Google’s presence in China has diminished. The company’s market share for search is at 3 percent, according to Chinese analytics site CNZZ.com. In addition, many Google services, such as Google Play, YouTube or Google Plus are either blocked or not offered in the country.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Is Amazon Becoming the Facebook of Books?

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By Kevin Chen, The Motley Fool

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E-commerce giant Amazon  recently bought Goodreads, the seventh-largest social network on the web today, thereby bringing the total number of Amazon’s social media efforts around books to a total of three. So are these signs that Amazon may soon build out a bigger social networking effort to transform itself into a Facebook  of books? 

Not likely.

Fool contributor Kevin Chen thinks that social media networks thrive on hype. Modelez International-owned Oreo best understood that as it demonstrated social media prowess on Twitter during the Superbowl blackout. Unfortunately for Amazon and Goodreads, books are meant to be long and engrossing.

So if it’s not possible for Amazon to become the next Facebook, what is the e-commerce giant trying to do? Well, in the video below, Kevin discusses how Amazon is really mimicking Google . Just as some Googlers like to say that Google Plus is a “social layer,” so, too, will Amazon and its Goodreads acquisition add a social layer to book recommendations.

To learn more on what Amazon has in store for Goodreads, watch the video below.

Everyone knows Amazon is the king of the retail world right now. But given its sky-high valuation, most investors are worried the company’s share price is due for a correction. The Motley Fool’s premium report will tell you what’s driving the company’s growth, and fill you in on reasons to buy and reasons to sell Amazon. The report also has you covered with a full year of free analyst updates to keep you informed as the company’s story changes, so click here now to read more.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Is Google Finally About to Get Serious About Messaging?

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By Evan Niu, CFA, The Motley Fool

Headless Drive Through Prank

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For a company that’s been trying to focus more lately, Google‘s current amalgam of various messaging services is in dire need of some unification. The search giant has a plethora of different offerings geared toward mobile and desktop messaging, and none of them have made major impacts on the market.

Google Talk is a desktop platform for chatting and video calls. Google Voice offers free SMS texting, but requires using a separate number. Google Plus Hangouts are meant for group video chats, and Google Plus Messenger is geared toward messaging on the go. That’s a lot of services that are needlessly distinct, since a unified service would have greater brand strength.

This is nothing new; Google product manager Nikhyl Singhal conceded last summer that the company has “done an incredibly poor job servicing [its] users here,” noting that Big G was planning to merge the services. The name of the unified service has been rumored to be Google Babel, which is expected to be a cross-platform chat service available on Android, Apple iOS, Chrome, Google Plus, and Gmail.

Last week, a Digital Trends report suggested that Google was in talks to acquire popular cross-platform messaging app WhatsApp for upwards of $1 billion. The search giant and the mobile start-up have been at the negotiating table for a little over a month, with the latter still trying to fetch more.

Source: WhatsApp.

WhatsApp has promptly taken off as an SMS alternative, since the service uses existing phone numbers, supports numerous different operating system platforms, and uses existing data plans in lieu of SMS plans. For $0.99 and no ads or in-app purchases, that’s quite a value proposition that wireless carriers are none too happy about, and why the app is the No. 2 paid app in Apple’s App Store currently.

Apple’s iMessage has also taken off in popularity, in part because of its tight integration with iDevices so there are no extra steps required by users. On the last conference call, CEO Tim Cook mentioned that the company now sends 2 billion iMessages per day. iMessage also ties into Apple’s desktop platform, offering another layer of convenience. On the video chatting front, Apple also has FaceTime.

Facebook has also been beefing up its mobile messaging capabilities. Not only does it offer texts and media, but the social network even just added free voice calling to its iOS Messenger app, using the phone’s data connection. Facebook just wants to be the sole communications medium between you and your friends, even if it doesn’t monetize messaging directly.

Apple, Google, and Facebook are all vying for messaging domination, much to the chagrin of wireless carriers. It’s about time for Google to finally get serious.

As one of the most dominant Internet companies ever, Google has made a habit of driving strong returns for its shareholders. However, like many other web companies, it’s also struggling to adapt to an increasingly mobile …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

The Hidden Value of Google Plus

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By Joe Tenebruso and Richard Engdahl, The Motley Fool

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Google  Plus may not be your first stop for checking out pictures of your high school sweetheart’s cats, but if you’ve ever logged into Google, chances are you have an account. Google Plus works hand-in-hand with the rest of Google’s apps and products, and could be surprisingly valuable to the search giant.

It’s more important than ever to understand each piece of Google’s sprawling empire. In The Motley Fool’s new premium research report on Google, we break down the risks and potential rewards for Google investors. Simply click here now to unlock your copy of this invaluable resource.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Global Colocation Solutions Provider CyrusOne Sponsors Global Peering Forum 8.0

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By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

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Global Colocation Solutions Provider CyrusOne Sponsors Global Peering Forum 8.0

Attendees to share technical knowledge on the latest in data center connectivity

DALLAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Global colocation solutions provider CyrusOne (NAS: CONE) will be a sponsor at the Global Peering Forum 8.0 on April 8 to 11 at the Loews Coronado Bay in San Diego, Calif.

“We are pleased to be involved in this global event,” said Josh Snowhorn, vice president and general manager, Interconnection at CyrusOne. “This will be the eighth Global Peering Forum, bringing together almost 200 peering coordinators negotiating and managing the interconnections that make the Internet so robust.”

Best-in-Class Facilities and Networks

CyrusOne’s Texas IX peering and interconnection platform enables enterprises, content companies and ISP‘s to exchange traffic in a customized data hall, designed for maximizing power usage effectiveness (PUE). It dynamically enables peering within a single location, within a metro at multiple facilities or city-to-city, to more quickly and affordably pull content from the edge of the Internet to the heart of the data center.

“Our industry-leading IX design encompassing the latest Brocade and Infinera hardware allows mass scale interconnections,” said Snowhorn. “Bringing this webscale technology to our data centers brings a true paradigm shift in the way an enterprise connects their production and disaster recovery environments.”

In addition to bringing the first-ever statewide IX to the United States, CyrusOne specializes in highly reliable enterprise data center colocation, engineering facilities with the highest power redundancy (2N architecture), and power-density infrastructure required to deliver excellent availability. CyrusOne has designed 24 carrier-neutral data center facilities across the United States, Europe, and Asia that give customers the flexibility and scale to perfectly match their specific growth needs.

The data center provider is renowned for exceptional and personalized customer service and for building enduring customer relationships and high customer satisfaction levels. Customers include nine of the global Fortune 20 companies and more than 100 of the Fortune 1000.

For more information about CyrusOne, call 1-866-CYRUSONE (1-866-297-7663) or visit www.cyrusone.com. Connect with us on Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

About CyrusOne

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

The Marketing Measurement War: Facebook vs. Google

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By Daniel Sparks, The Motley Fool

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As advertising becomes increasingly digital, publishers are demanding statistics to help them determine the success of their ads. Fortunately for advertisers, Google and Facebook are battling to offer their ad clients the most useful measurement solutions, improving available metrics and tools while they’re at it.

Increasingly complex and interrelated paths to measure
Google’s latest addition to the fray was its Full Value of Mobile Calculator. The calculator has an ambitious goal. Its purpose is to help users understand return on investment, or the “full value of mobile for your business,” across five different paths:

  • Cross-device: Users often use multiple devices when making a purchase (e.g., they find the item on a mobile product and purchase it later on their desktop).
  • Mobile site: An effective site that is optimized for mobile can drive significant sales.
  • In-store: Many customers use devices to lead them to a store location and make in-store purchases.
  • Apps: Customers can download and use apps to make purchases.
  • Calls: Smartphones facilitate phone calls.

Notably, the fact that there are five different paths available to customers highlights the complexity of the digital advertising market. And it doesn’t yet take the value of social connections from platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus into consideration.

Show me the data
Google’s Full Value of Mobile Calculator is fairly useful for Google clients, since the inputs are based on data that Google provides. But it’s pretty much useless when it comes to measuring return on investment on social platforms. Consider a few of the calculator’s inputs:

  • The number of times someone clicked “Get Directions” from their mobile search ads
  • The number of clicks from mobile search ads that led to phone calls
  • The percentage of “Call” clicks from mobile search that converted into a sale (it’s possible to track this by assigning a unique mobile number to mobile search ads)
  • The number of visits to your site generated by clicks on mobile search ads

The Google Click Type Data report makes all these numbers clear as day for Google advertisers. But it’s far more difficult to track the value of a comment, share, or connection with this tool.

While Facebook provides a handful of data to advertisers, much of it revolves around “reach” and connections. But what are the business implications of “reach” to an advertiser? What business outcomes does a connection produce?

Even Facebook’s own James Dailey, from the company’s measurement and ad effectiveness team, admits that a user’s “contribution to actual business metrics like sales” is a key insight. He goes even further to say that “focusing on business outcomes rather than only media metrics like clicks is … critical.”

Show me the money
Ultimately, clients’ choices will come down to return on investment, or ROI. Advertisers ask: Did the return on my advertising expense exceed the cost?

According to Brad Smallwood, head of measurements and insights at Facebook, a joint effort with Datalogix revealed that 22 recent Facebook campaigns, reaching a total of 70 million customers, produced a 22% …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Facebook Can Afford to Redecorate

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By Rick Aristotle, Munarriz, The Motley Fool

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Facebook is changing again.

The social networking giant is hosting a media event tomorrow at its headquarters. There isn’t any need to guess what this will be about. The invitation clearly explains that tech journalists are being invited to “come see a new look for News Feed” at Facebook.

Facebook is never shy about mixing things up. There’s an outcry from users when things change. They adapt. Facebook winds up making more money and attracting more net new users, validating the tweaks.

Rinse. Repeat.

However, Facebook doesn’t peel back the curtain for media types unless it’s significant. Graph Search and Facebook Gifts are some of the more recent event-backed initiatives.

Some are speculating that this will be a more photo-centric facelift, and that makes sense given the popularity of Flipboard and Facebook’s acquisition last year of Instagram. However, investors will want to know how Facebook plans to monetize the new initiatives.

Facebook’s been pretty good about milking more money off of its free site with more than a billion active users. Revenue climbed 40% in its latest quarter, even though monthly active users have only grown by 25% over the past year.

Facebook doesn’t need to take chances, but it can afford to do exactly that. Where will people go? Google is pushing Google Plus as a Facebook alternative, but it has yet to sway most Facebook users. LinkedIn just celebrated passing the 200 million member milestone, but that only means that the career-oriented social networking site has just a fifth as many users as Facebook.

There may very well come a time when Facebook does go too far, with Google and LinkedIn there to make the most of the opportunity. However, the likely news tomorrow will be modest changes that will enhance both user experience and the monetization potential of the newsfeed.

Facebook has come too far to get too greedy.

Due diligence makes a friend request
After the world’s most hyped IPO turned out to be a dunce, most investors probably don’t even want to think about shares of Facebook. But there are things every investor needs to know about this company. We’ve outlined them in our newest premium research report. There’s a lot more to Facebook than meets the eye, so read up on whether there is anything to “like” about it today, and we’ll tell you whether we think Facebook deserves a place in your portfolio. Access your report by clicking here.

var FoolAnalyticsData = FoolAnalyticsData || []; FoolAnalyticsData.push({ …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

News, Politics, Government

Linux Founder Linus Torvalds Blasts PC Industry, Praises Google's Chromebook Pixel

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By Jason Evangelho, Contributor

Linux founder Linus Torvalds recently picked up a Google Chromebook Pixel, and the hardware left such a positive impression that he posed the question “Why do PC manufacturers even bother any more?” on his Google Plus page. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

News, Politics, Government

Sorry, Google. Here Come The Inevitable #IfIHadGlass Bashtags.

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By Kashmir Hill, Forbes Staff

Google is finally launching Glass in a big way with a beautifully designed website and a contest to allow members of the hoi polloi to try “augmented reality for your face.” In a savvy social media move Google is encouraging people to enter a contest for a pair of the geeky chic glasses — available in “Charcoal, Tangerine, Shale, Cotton and Sky” — on Twitter and Google Plus using the hashtag #IfIHadGlass. It will both help spread the news of the product far and wide, and because Google requires that contest entrants follow @/+ProjectGlass on Twitter or Google Plus, will up the new product’s social media following right away. However, there are some drawbacks though to both winning the contest and to running it the way Google is doing. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

Articles of Interest

Biden To Promote Gun Control In Pro-gun Virginia

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By Breaking News

Joe biden 8 SC Biden to promote gun control in pro gun Virginia

WASHINGTON (OfficialWire) — Vice President Joe Biden is launching a White House campaign of road trips to promote gun control with a visit to Virginia, a state that has experienced its own school shooting tragedy yet maintains an avidly pro-gun tradition.

Biden will travel to Richmond on Friday along with other Obama administration officials and Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, the White House announced Wednesday. And on Thursday, Biden will take questions on ways to reduce gun violence during a Google Hangout, an interactive video chat that will stream live on the White House website and on the Google Plus social network.

President Barack Obama said last week that he wants Congress to require background checks for all gun sales and ban both military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines. The president conceded passage will be difficult, with support for gun ownership rights strong among lawmakers.

Biden headed the president’s task force to study gun violence in the wake of last month’s massacre of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. White House aides say Obama also plans to travel to push the issue, although his destinations have not yet been announced.

Read More at OfficialWire . By Nedra Pickler.

Photo Credit: Floyd Brown (Creative Commons)

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism

Linux

Stephen Michael Kellat: January Business Meeting for Ubuntu Ohio

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A look at a window of Pidgin where the IRC meeting happened to have been underway

The Ohio Local Community Team met for a business meeting on the night of Wednesday, 23 January 2013. No action items were formally adopted at the meeting. The need to bolster the LoCo’s online presence was discussed in-depth as well as how the weather currently is impeding the ability to meet together. For example, the community’s podcasters in Ashtabula have been coping with multiple days of a “Lake Effect Snow Warning” that has dumped 10 inches of snow on them and has made travel treacherous. Efforts will continue to beef up the team’s presence on Identica and Google Plus while research continues into finding an appropriate video-conferencing solution that is not Google-based that the team can use.

The log of the meeting can be found on the Ubuntu Wiki Infrastructure for viewing.

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

News, Politics, Government

Why You Should Be On Google Plus (Even Though No One Else Is)

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By Dorie Clark, Contributor Consultant Linda Sherman says you should definitely be on Google Plus. Do you ever get the impression no one is on Google Plus? That it’s utterly devoid of the vast audience that makes Facebook so powerful? That’s exactly why you should get involved now, says consultant Linda Sherman, who is also […]
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest