Wow, have you paid attention to the recent earnings of Google? For the first quarter of 2007 “… Google reported profit of $396.2 million” (Source: washingtonpost.com) which is almost double from the earnings last year in the same time period. This booted out Yahoo’s profit which “… dropped by nearly a third from a year” (Source: CNET News.com). That is a lot of profit for Goliath under the search engines and most of the earnings are from online advertisement not only on the Google website but also on their partners sites.
Why am I writing about this? I stumbled upon a blog entry by Jeol Downs from Answerbag.com (Referred by: We are all end users…) with the title “Why Google doesn’t care about Search“. And even though I like a lot of the services that Google offers I think he makes a very good point in naming Google an ad network. Don’t get me wrong I use a lot of Google’s services and like them and I also understand very well money has to be made somehow. The recent acquisition of Adscape for $23 million by Google (Source: TechCrunch) also sends a clear sign into the direction of building a stronger and powerful ad network.
Update 5/25/2007: I found an article from Ionut Alex Chitu with the title “What has Google done is Search lately?” that is contradicting the above mentioned article from Jeol Downs and argues that Google does a lot to improve their search functions and results.
Filed under: Search Engines, WorldWideWeb , internet, media, search engine
John Kremer, the vice president of Yahoo, announced at the end of last month that Yahoo Mail is lifting the limit of their inbox storage space. Wow, I remember quiet well that I did search for unlimited storage space for backup copies of presentations, manuscripts, photos and the occasional music file. Right now they are scattered all over the place.
However, Asher Moses wrote in The Age an announcement about this and refers to comScore Media Metrix stating that Gmail “… has 51 million users worldwide, [and] offers 2.8GB of space; Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail offers 2 GB and has 228 million users.” What I personally didn’t know so far is, that Yahoo is the leader with 250 million users of their mail service. Which makes sense, since they have been around the longest, for 10 years to be precise.
The question remains, how long it takes for Gmail and Window’s Live Mail to catch up or offer features that convince users to use their services over the one from Yahoo Mail?
Filed under: How-To, Technology, WorldWideWeb , email, internet, storage space, WorldWideWeb
Dan Atkins, John Seely Brown and Allen Hammond compiled for the Hewlett Foundation a report about the Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative. Open Educational Resources (OER) have been mentioned in this blog before and this report is a great and worth reading addition to it.
Filed under: Evaluation, Open Access / Open Content, eLearning , Education, Higher Education, K-12, OER, OpenCourseWare, Policy