Finance Geek

Google’s daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

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MobBase debuts another interesting entry in the budding market for helping bands build apps: an HTML5 app that’s free for any band to create, and which runs on any platform, delivering music, photos, tweets and videos.

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On Wednesday afternoon, Google rolled out an update to its Google+ iPhone app. The revamped, redesigned app now looks so stunning it may make you wish the social network itself wasn’t such a ghost town.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! U.S. stocks were on track to break a six-day losing streak Thursday, rallying despite a warning from Cisco (CSCO) and yet another round of grim news out of Europe. “Perhaps the U.S. market is getting anesthetized to Europe because it has been a steady drip, drip of bad news,” [...]

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GigaOM yesterday published an article about How Google is growing up into a real IT company, which talks about how the world’s favourite search engine has switched from releasing lots of ‘science project’ applications like Google Wave and Google Knol, and Google Questions to a fewer number of well thought through and solidly engineered products like Google Drive, and BigQuery.

There are lots of good reasons why Google is making this shift, the most important and obvious of which is the need to focus on a smaller number of things and make them work. The second most important, is maybe less obvious, and that is a desire to strengthen the enterprise side of their business, and this is what made me think about Microsoft.

As I see it the parallels are:

• Both started with a fantastic monopoly business – Microsoft Windows and Google Search
• Both expanded successfully into adjacent areas which leveraged and protected their monopolies – Microsoft Office and Google’s Android
• Both ran into trouble with regulators for abusing their monopoly position to advance their other products – Microsoft with IE and MediaPlayer and Google for using individual’s search data in their other products
• Both were blindsided by a major market evolution which undermines their core franchise – Microsoft by the internet (espescially Google) and Google by social (especially Facebook)
• Both have sought to reduce their dependence on their threatened monopolies by moving into the enterprise

Google has probably been 6-7 years behind Microsoft in each of these steps and 6-7 years ago Microsoft looked about as strong as Google does today. Hopefully Google will hold its current position more effectively than Microsoft was able to.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Home prices have hit 10-year lows, falling 25% to 35% from the peak in 2006. But hope is in the air, as is often the case in springtime, and for some ‘hope springs eternal’ means a bottom in the housing market. “Many, myself included, think we are at a [...]

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Provided by Business Insider: Shares of Cisco plunged 9% after hours yesterday when the company warned of a cautious business outlook, slowing revenue, and trouble in Europe on the company conference call. Probably the best summation of the company’s perspective on things right now came in this question and answer, via Seeking Alpha. Tal Liani [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! No one likes to admit failure. The word represents defeat, disappointment and imperfection. Rick Newman, the chief business correspondent at U.S. News & World Report, studied 12 successful, well-known people from various professions and determined that they all had one trait in common: failure. These individuals suffered professional rejection, [...]

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Provided by Business Insider Chinese export growth slowed to 4.9 percent year-over-year (YoY) in April, from 8.9 percent the previous month. Expectations were for 8.5 percent growth. Import growth also came in wide off the mark rising just 3 percent YoY, against market consensus at 10.9 percent. Trade surplus however widened to $18.4 billion, from [...]

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Google’s daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

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The Samsung Galaxy S III has plenty of power and cool features, but lacks exterior style to match.

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Google’s Android operating system infringes on two patents owned by Oracle, according to Stanford professor John Mitchell, an expert witness hired by Oracle in the ongoing court battle over Android and its use of the Java programming language.

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