"Kara Swisher
August 2, 2011 at 11:08 am PT
According to multiple sources close to the situation, Ning has been talking recently to a large pool of companies about selling itself, including Google and Groupon, as well as to a number of private equity companies.
Interest has been both incoming to and outgoing from Ning.
The talks around the fate of the high-profile social networking platform - co-founded by Silicon Valley icon and investor Marc Andreessen - are still early and might not result in a sale, although a number of sources said the company was being valued at up to $150 million.
That price is well below previous loftier valuations for Ning and would mean only a break-even for investors, who have put close to $120 million into Ning since it was founded in 2004."
"Ahmed ElAmin
Published Jul 20, 2011 at 9:18 am (Updated Jul 20, 2011 at 8:01 am)
Belgians have invented Smurfs, make some of the best beer in the world, and know how to fry a potato chip. However, one must say the country's leading newspapers scored an own goal when they took Google to court last year for listing their content in the search engine's news section and won on copyright.
I guess they didn't look at how people arrive at a typical online newspaper site, which derives up to 50 percent or more of their visitors from Google. In addition to taking the group of papers out of its news section, Google also stopped indexing them in its search engine. Now the newspapers are complaining that they are being discriminated against unfairly!
(...)
Google has big power and the danger is how the company wields it in pursuit of profit. It brings traffic to websites, but the company that claims to "do no evil" can also taketh away ostracising those for good and bad reasons.
The company is also stepping up its aggregation news service by trying to attract more volume through the "gamification" of Google News. Google is following a trend among news sites to bring readers in. With their consent, readers will be rewarded with "news badges" based on their reading habits. Badges of varying levels will be given out depending on the amount and types of articles you read. About 500 badges are available to suit a wide range of topics. Google News indexes about 50,000 sources. Keep reading and get those badges! Maybe."
How Google Dominates Us
August 18, 2011
James Gleick
"This much is clear: We need to decide what we want from Google. If only we can make up our collective minds. Then we still might not get it.
The company always says users can "opt out" of many of its forms of data collection, which is true, up to a point, for savvy computer users; and the company speaks of privacy in terms of "trade-offs," to which Vaidhyanathan objects:
Privacy is not something that can be counted, divided, or "traded." It is not a substance or collection of data points. It's just a word that we clumsily use to stand in for a wide array of values and practices that influence how we manage our reputations in various contexts. There is no formula for assessing it: I can't give Google three of my privacy points in exchange for 10 percent better service.
This seems right to me, if we add that privacy involves not just managing our reputation but protecting the inner life we may not want to share. In any case, we continue to make precisely the kinds of trades that Vaidhyanathan says are impossible. Do we want to be addressed as individuals or as neurons in the world brain? We get better search results and we see more appropriate advertising when we let Google know who we are. And we save a few keystrokes."
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