Microsoft Invests $300 Million into Nook College Business

This deal benefits Barnes & Nobles and Microsoft. B&N gets cash for their war chest, a powerful partner and more credibility. Microsoft gets its foot into another door.
Investors responded this morning, B&N (BKS) shares jumped from $10.41 to an opening price of $25.79 this morning. It will be interesting to see if B&N spins-off its digital business, which includes the Nook.

Is There a Social Media Bubble and Will it Pop!

As a relatively amateur investor, I manage to do a little research for new stocks (mostly all tech stocks) that might make me a few dollars. Basically, its my way of avoiding fantasy baseball at the office. Every so often I  notice  an opportunity or a warning sign.  I mentioned Zynga in an earlier post, but there are a few others that will raise an eyebrow or two. For example, Friendfind (FFN) and Groupon (GRPN). As Google and Amazon and Apple, beef up their offerings they can easily cut into to anyone's revenue. , Unfortunately for Groupon, they are in the cross hairs of all of the giants. And this could be the case for other Social darlings like Angie's List (ANGI) and Yelp (YELP). But the true test will be to see how this category reacts once Facebook goes public - it could be the fuse.

Shoot 360° Panoramic Videos on Your iPhone

Admittedly, I love gadgets and I Need to have the newest ones. This one caught my eye - GoPano Micro clips on to your iPhone - allowing you to take 360° panoramic videos. All for $79. Take a look.
Buy your own  360° Pano, click here.

Google Cracking Down on WebSpam

Google took what it calls as a step towards rewarding high-quality sites , by announcing its new ranking changes, Panda Changes. These changes are aimed at improving web surfers experience and a page layout algorithm penalizing (lower the page rank) of sites that do not include content "above the fold".
According to Google, "We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal."

Google Unzips the Past with a Cool Doodle

Google pays homage to Gideon Sundbäck (April 24, 1880 – June 21, 1954), a Swedish-American electrical engineer. Gideon Sundbäck is most commonly associated with his work in the development of the zipper.

Zynga Stock Continues to Slide

Zynga makes a living off of selling virtual products to social gamers through its games on Facebook, which accounts for somewhere near 90% of their income. The stock has been in a steady decline after the company made public its intentions to make focus on large acquisitions, similar to its OMGPop deal. Investors are growing concerned that the company could squander away its $1.8 Billion cash and assets more acquisitions. That coupled with rumors of defections by acquired top developers, who refuse to work for Zynga,  one developer having referred to them as an "evil company". Now sprinkle some questionable accounting practices - and you have a problem. Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, has seen his overall wealth decrease by at least $400 Million if not more over the last week. With the Facebook IPO looming, the debate surrounding whether to buying Zynga or leave it allow has started. The stock is trading below its IPO price of $10.


Read the Forbes Article "How Zynga, Facebook and Groupon's Go-To Auditor Rewrites Accounting Rules"

Spring Cleaning at Google

Wondering if Google is nixing your favorite, well read Matthias Schwab, Director, Cloud Services post. A quick summary of what is being shelved is below.

• No more support for Google Sync for BlackBerry, starting June 1.
• The mobile web app for Google Talk is being shut down.
• Starting today, the Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac and Picasa Web Albums Plugin for iPhoto will no longer be available to download.
• No more updates for Picasa for Linux.
• The Google Flu Vaccine Finder has been retired, with anyone interested in this being redirected to the HealthMap Flu Vaccine Finder.

Google Alerts 20,000 websites they might be infected with malware

According the Google Search Quality team, they are concerned that the 20,000 site might be injected with a javascript redirect malware.
 -"Specifically, we think that JavaScript has been injected into your site by a third party and may be used to redirect users to malicious sites,"

The folks at Google are advising sites to search ( HTML, JavaScript or PHP files) their sites for  files containing "eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,r)" in particular.

WordPress is King Among the Best Blogs

Chances are that you locate your information the way I do, you Google it. And its very likely that once you select a blog post to read the site you get sent to is running WordPress. According to a study conducted by Pingdom, 49 of the world's 100 most popular blogs use WordPress. As its popularity continues to grow I fully expect to see WordPress replace existing custom developed blogs and legacy solutions. By next year I wouldn't be surprised if 65% of the most popular blogs were running WordPress.

Moshi Monsters Are Taking Over Music

It must have been a year ago when my son came home from school and proclaimed that he needed Moshi credits for his Moshi Monster.  All of his friends at school were on to this Moshi thing and now over 60 Million other kids worldwide are members. Well the Moshi Monsters are now in the music business and their little fans can't get enough - Music Rox! Their debut album has catapulted to the top of the UK music charts and industry analyst expect record sales numbers.

Botnet Malware to have Infected Macs

I saw this pop up on Monday and its gaining strength in the news.  According to a anti-virus vendor Doctor Web, over 600k Macs have been infected by a new version of the Flashback Trojan horse. This variant of the Flashback family uses Java exploits to distribute itself. Apple released a Java Update to address the vulnerability being used to infect the Mac. So do yourself a favor and download it.

Next Issue Media - All You Can Eat Magazine Content

Over two years ago , I wrote a blog titled "Google Ain't Go'in Away!" and several other posts directed at traditional media organizations, who needed to reinvent how they viewed media, Google and themselves. The creation/evolution of Next Issue Media is an indication that some organizations are willing to take on Amazon and Google at their own game, by building a content distribution platform. As I have said, new media is all about sharing.  That is the sharing of content as well as revenues. Organizations who still haven't established a tablet strategy will do well to hop on board.

Over 2 years ago:

Google ain’t go’in Away!
 by Louie Torres

Whether you think Google is evil or not, Publishers need to face up to the fact that they aren't going away.

I cringe every time I hear "well-paid" executives blame Google for their financial woes. This is the equivalent of telling the teacher the dog ate my homework.

So, here's a news flash. The media game has changed and Google had a lot to do with it. Now get over it. Google provides services that wouldn't generate revenue if companies didn't consider it a necessity for creating competitive advantage (Google Ad Words). Sure, if you're not on the receiving end of the big checks being drawn from advertising dollars, it stinks. But what Google has done is create a marketplace where one didn't exist and let the market create the demand. This is capitalism at its best. Google was willing to rethink, reshape and take the risks that traditional media organizations wouldn't.

Many media brands have been arguing that Google is "stealing" their content and that is not the case at all. Any publisher can prevent Google from scanning their websites through the robots.txt file, but they won't. Why? Google sends an enormous amount of traffic to all of these media organizations. Which translates into increased traffic and ad revenue for them. So, I don't expect anyone to be blocking Google's bots.

I find it fascinating that so many executives are wasting time telling Google how it needs to change to better accommodate them. These executives need to start focusing how they can adapt their business' to the new media landscape and start creating their own rules, like Google does.

Google Takes On the White House

Google has teamed up with the President to offer a virtual tour of the White House. President Obama and his wife want to make the White House more accessible - "The White House isn't simply a home to first families or meeting space for world leaders, it's also known as 'The People's House,' a place that should be open to everyone."
"And that's why we've made it a priority to invite young people, military families and Americans of all ages to join us here at the White House," said Michelle.

The tour will be accessible at www.googleartproject.com