NY-Based Yext Launches League of Advertisers That Are Not Google

Marissa Mayer On Google's Failed Groupon Bid
WebNewser: After incessant buzz that Google was looking to buy Groupon, word finally came that the fast-growing "deal of the day" company had turned the tech giant down. So, does that mean Google might launch its own coupon-type service instead? "When you look at our overall suite of services, especially around our advertising, we already have some things that are like [Groupon]," said Marissa Mayer, Google VP of consumer products, in our Media Beat interview. Read the whole stor...

Three Tech Trends to Watch in 2011
Last year in technology had plenty of highlights. It also had its share of surprises -- and disappointments. What are some things in the tech world to look forward to in 2011? Briefly, here are a few things in my crystal ball worth keeping an eye on in the tech sector: 1. More Enterprise Technology Consolidation. Last year marked frenzied buying by big Enterprise Software and hardware companies like Salesforce.com (CRM), Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). The logic? Their coff...

Facebook's Goldman Deal Is Another Sign of a Comatose IPO Market
A few months ago, I had lunch with a prominent technology Venture Capitalist. Like many other VC leaders, he was focused on businesses growing in China, but he was adamant that his Chinese portfolio companies not list in the U.S. -- and with good reason. For small-cap technology companies, he explained, the U.S. has become an undesirable and difficult place to list. Sarbox regulations are costly to fulfill. Institutional investors are gun-shy. And analyst coverage has contracted enormously, m...

Goldman, Digital Sky invest in Facebook: source
By Alexei Oreskovic and Nadia Damouni San Francisco/NEW YORK | Mon Jan 3, 2011 7:25pm EST San Francisco/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook has raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, in a deal that values the world's No.1 Internet Social Networking company at $50 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. The firms also plan to raise at least $1 billion in additional funding for Facebook, the person said speaking on condition of an...

Social Network: Tech Bubble 2.0? (GS)
But the real eye popping fact is that this latest deal values Facebook at $50 billion. That’s right, $50 billion, which is more than the current Market Cap of Time Warner, Baidu, Yahoo, and almost twice that of Dell, Inc. Even though Facebook is not publicly traded, the company has raise about $850 million to date in total through a secondary market. Facebook’s value reportedly has roughly tripled over the last year--not bad for a company that’s only in business for six years....

The Information Technology Roller Coaster
A glance at The New York Times this morning (downloaded to my iPad in Rome) and it’s evident we’re already inhabiting a Matrix world. A threat by Julian Assange on Nov. 29 to “take down” a major American bank and reveal an “ecosystem of Corruption” plucked from an unnamed executive’s Hard Drive, has set off a massive internal investigation by a team of five to 20 top Bank of America Staffers who fear that the missing hard drive may be from one of their o...

Goldman, Digital Sky invest in Facebook: source
By Alexei Oreskovic and Nadia Damouni San Francisco/NEW YORK | Mon Jan 3, 2011 7:25pm EST San Francisco/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook has raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, in a deal that values the world's No.1 Internet Social Networking company at $50 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. The firms also plan to raise at least $1 billion in additional funding for Facebook, the person said speaking on condition of an...

Goldman, Digital Sky invest in Facebook: source
San Francisco/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook has raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs and Russian Investment Firm Digital Sky Technologies, in a deal that values the world's No.1 Internet Social Networking company at $50 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. The firms also plan to raise at least $1 billion in additional funding for Facebook, the person said speaking on condition of anonymity. The funding, which gives Facebook a richer valuation than established Internet gian...

Adsense, no sense at all - what it's like being sacked by a computer...
© DuckWorksMagazine My name is Dylan Winter. I am a freelance Journalist and film-maker from England. I am 55 years old. Two weeks before Christmas, I was sacked by a Google algorithm. I have worked for the Newspapers, magazines, Radio Stations and TV stations. One of the things you get used to as a freelance is being sacked. After all, that's why they take us on - we are easy to sack. Sometimes being sacked is as simple as coming to the end of a contract - and no-one offers you any mor...

Adsense, no sense at all - what it's like being sacked by a computer...
© DuckWorksMagazine My name is Dylan Winter. I am a freelance Journalist and film-maker from England. I am 55 years old. Two weeks before Christmas, I was sacked by a Google algorithm. I have worked for the Newspapers, magazines, Radio Stations and TV stations. One of the things you get used to as a freelance is being sacked. After all, that's why they take us on - we are easy to sack. Sometimes being sacked is as simple as coming to the end of a contract - and no-one offers you any mor...

eBooks and Open Standards.
At Balloon Juice, mistermix worries about the future of the ebook market: The existence of a digital music dystopia was thwarted by an open standard (MP3), the existence of high-quality digital copies (CDs) that could easily be converted to MP3, and music sharing services like Napster. This made consumers demand players that could play their existing MP3s, and it gave them an alternative when labels were screwing with them by releasing content on a format they couldn’t play.Unfortunately, ther...

Google search key to NJ missing mom plea
TRENTON, N.J. — A recently uncovered Google search was a key factor in a New Jersey man’s decision to plead guilty this week to killing his mistress. Rosario DiGirolamo faces a 25-year Prison sentence after admitting to killing 27-year-old Amy Giordano in June 2007 and dumping her dismembered body in a New York pond. DiGirolamo left the couple’s 11-month-old son in the Parking Lot of a Delaware Hospital. The Times of Trenton reports that newly discovered evidence that DiGirola...

How Google is like bananas
By weird coincidence, Whole Foods was sold out of bananas today, as the latest issue of the New Yorker arrived on newsstands with a great (but sadly paywalled) article about the way in which the world of bananas-for-export is threatened by something known as Tropical Race Four. It turns out that the banana we all know and love — the Cavendish — is actually the second type of banana grown in enormous quantities and exported across Europe and North America. The first was the Gros Mich...

Censorship: The Great Enemy of Skype, Facebook, and Twitter
Could Skype be prevented from doing business in China? There are rumors that all VoIP systems originating outside the People's Republic could be blocked. Some analysts see this as a form of Censorship. A more cynical view is that China wants to protect the franchises of its state-owned telecom companies including China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom. Such action could threaten the growth potential of Skype and other tech giants like Facebook and Twitter. The growth of Facebook and Twitt...

Google Search Key To NJ Missing Mom Plea
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — A recently uncovered Google search was a key factor in a New Jersey man’s decision to plead guilty this week to killing his mistress. Rosario DiGirolamo faces a 25-year Prison sentence after he admitted to killing 27-year-old Amy Giordano in June 2007 and dumping her dismembered body in a New York pond. DiGirolamo left the couple’s 11-month-old son in the Parking Lot of a Delaware Hospital. The Times of Trenton reports that newly discovered evidence that Di...

Get your hands dirty
Is working with your hands better than just with your head? Why write a diary? If the new year and inevitable return to work leaves you yearning for change, is working with your hands the answer? The time for reflection is nigh - a new year, a new you. But is that workstation you've slotted back into looking depressingly familiar? As millions of workers drag themselves back into the office to contemplate another 12 months of drudgery, many will be wondering if they are in the right job. ...

Android to get a newsstand too? D'oh!
According to a report last night, Google is building a virtual newsstand for Android phones and tablets.  Why not just push HTML5? I'll admit it.  I don't get it.  Why are magazine publishers trying to build apps for different platforms when they should all be building HTML5 magazines that work across all platforms? Sure, it is nice to have a presence in Apple's (AAPL) App Store in which millions of iOS users have instant access and saved Credit Card info.  But what abo...

170-Calorie Pizza: What's The Point?
Would you mistake this pizza for being 170-calories a slice? We realize that people want to be healthy. We also realize that "organic" and "healthy" ingredients like vegetables and whole grains do really taste good, and when combined with cheese could make for an excellent pizza. And yet, there is something about a 170-calorie slice that is making us uncomfortable. Especially when the Post describes it as "Skinny Jeans friendly." Revd Up Pi (can 2011 be the year we stop randomly dropping vowel...

EpicMix
Bob Lefsetz is a Music Industry observer, and publisher of the Lefsetz letter: ~~~ How did Apple (AAPL) become one of the most valuable companies in America? By doubling down in a Recession. Remember the dot com crash?  Everybody in tech pulled back.  Not Apple.  The Cupertino computer company invested.  And then released a product that was supposedly overpriced and undesirable.  That product?  The iPod. Remember when Apple was a joke?  You’re on a Mac?  They&

Group texting: Tech's next breakout hit?
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Sometimes the winner in a tech field isn't the company whose invention is the fastest or the sleekest -- or even the first. It's the company that hits the exact right point in the timing curve. Meet GroupMe. The current darling of the New York tech scene, the group-text-messaging startup created its prototype product in May during a 24-hour "hackathon" at TechCruch's Disrupt conference. Fast forward seven months: GroupMe just closed a funding round rumored ...

A Consequence of Mr. Keynes
Mr. Samuelson is correct that this contradiction exists, and that Mr. Summers ignores it.  But the problem isn’t with Mr. Summers per se as with the Keynesian mindset that Economists of his ilk bring to their role as policy advisors.  As my GMU colleagues James Buchanan and Richard Wagner warned years ago, an ill-consequence of Keynesianism is that “allocative efficiency” (the achievement of which is severely hampered by Pres. Obama’s social and regulatory agend...

Where will the gays Democrats go after they get what they want?
Comes interesting news this week that an internal Democratic poll shows strong support for President Obama among gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and the transgendered. Of note, this poll was done before the Repeal of DADT last month. Some serious concerns about the interpretation of this poll. First of all, the poll was released only to the Huffington Post blog and only “on the condition that the full survey not be published.” Whenever a) the internals of a poll are not released and b) ...

Income, Inequality, Status, and Health
Nicholas Kristof too uncritically accepts Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s conclusion that peoples’ health would be improved by greater government efforts to equalize incomes through redistributionist policies  (“Equality, a True Soul Food,” Jan. 2). First, the fact that low-status Macaque monkeys suffer more Health Problems than do their high-status fellows is dubious evidence for the desirability of income-redistribution among humans: Macaque monkeys ha...

Islamophobia in Western Media
-- being inferior to Western societies; -- barbaric, irrational, primitive, sexist, violent, aggressive, threatening, supporting Terrorism, and clashing with Western civilization; -- an ideology used for political or Military advantage; -- irrationally criticizing Western values; -- warranting discriminatory practices that exclude Muslims from mainstream society; and -- believing anti-Muslim hostility is natural and normal. A 2004 UK Commission on Muslims and Islamophobia report titled, "Islam...

The Second God That Failed
Investor’s Business Daily on “The Abiding Faith Of Warm-ongers:” Prognosticators who wrote the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, Global Warming report in 2007 predicted an inevitable, century-long rise in global temperatures of two degrees or more. Only higher temperatures were foreseen. Moderate or even lower temperatures, as we’re experiencing now, weren’t even listed as a possibility.Since at least 1998, however, no significant wa...