The Google Phone by LG Electronics

LG Electronics, the world’s fifth-largest cell phone maker, unveiled a new model Wednesday, which offers the full services of Google, the global No. 1 search engine.

LG said the handset, dubbed LG-KU580, will hit European markets including Italy and France this week with a price tag of somewhere between $300 and $400.

“Google’s strong search services are just one click away with our phone as we put a hot key that directs users to Google services in a fraction of a second,” LG official Choi Je-wook said.

“In addition, the phone provides other Google services such as e-mail (G-Mail) and map-viewing (Google Earth). We hope this will be a grand slam,” Choi said.

Google’s applications have been embedded into cell phones before but this is the first time its big three features _ search, e-mail and mapping _ have all been incorporated into one.

The three services, originally designed for desktops and laptops, were transformed to be compatible with a cell phone with a 2-inch screen.

“We know Google services are not good for all cell phones due to screens being too small in comparison to a PC monitor, and mobile data transmission is too expensive,” Choi said.

“However, Google provides a mobile-specific service lineup. As a result, handset users will be able to enjoy a decent service,” he said.

On top of the Google applications, the LG handset enables people to place or receive a phone call while seeing the face of the user on the other end because it is based on the third-generation W-CDMA system.

Short for wideband code division multiple access, W-CDMA is the next-generation mobile telephony platform that is catching on across the world.

The phone boasts other peripheral devices such as a 2-megapixel camera, an MP3 player and Bluetooth technology.

Bluetooth provides a way to connect and exchange information between a cell phone and a headset through short-range radio frequencies.

It allows different devices to talk to each other and is based on low-cost transceiver microchips in a cell phone for communication with a headset.

Accordingly, users of Bluetooth handsets can talk on a cell phone or listen to music via a phone-incorporated MP3 player through a wireless headset.

Google Contacts Partners: We will Continue to Allow Adult Monetization of Domains

In a reversal of Google’s policy regarding Adult monetization for domains, Google is contacting its partners and letting them know that adult domains will continue to be allowed in the Google Adsense for Domains program.

“We are committed to maintaining a positive experience for end users and advertisers, in addition to partners. We have determined that continuing to allow adult domains in the program will be beneficial for advertisers and users, and our domain partners. In the coming months, we will continue to improve our policy on the technical implementation of adult domains, but we will continue to allow adult domains in the program for the forseeable future.”

Google was planning to have Adult domains completely out of the advertising mix at the end of May. It looks like they have changed their mind.

Google 1Q Profit Rises 69 Percent - Blowing Away Estimates

Google Inc.’s first-quarter profit rose 69 percent, maintaining the online search leader’s penchant for blowing past analyst estimates.

The Mountain View-based company said Thursday that it earned $1 billion, or $3.18 cents per share, during the first three months of the year. That compared with net income of $592.3 million, or $1.95 per share, at the same time last year.

If not for expenses incurred for employee stock compensation, Google said it would have earned $3.68 per share. That figure topped the average estimate of $3.30 per share among analyst surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Quarterly revenue reached a new company high of $3.66 billion, a 63 percent increase from $2.25 billion last year.

After subtracting advertising commissions, Google’s revenue totaled $2.53 billion. That amount was about $40 million above analyst estimates.

Pleasant earnings surprises have become routine as Google has established itself as the most profitable — and perhaps most powerful — business on the Internet. Google has now beat analysts’ estimates in all but one of 11 quarters since its ballyhooed initial public offering in August 2004.

The scintillating performance has helped elevate Google’s market value to nearly $150 billion, despite a 6 percent decline in the stock price since the company’s last earnings report.

As usual, Google’s financial firepower flowed from its ubiquitous search engine, which has become the hub of the Internet’s largest advertising network. Google delivered 225.9 billion advertising links during the first quarter, an 85 percent increase from 122.3 billion at the same time last year, according to data compiled by online research firm Nielsen/NetRatings Inc.

Although Google has been trying to develop other revenue channels beyond the Internet, online advertising continues to produce virtually all of its profits. Google is expected to become an even more dominant force with last year’s $1.76 billion acquisition of online video leader YouTube Inc. and its recently announced $3.1 billion deal to buy Internet ad distributor DoubleClick Inc.

Google to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1B

Seeking to expand its already well-honed ability to sell targeted Internet advertisements, online search leader Google Inc. said it has agreed to pay $3.1 billion in cash to acquire ad-management technology company DoubleClick Inc.

The two companies announced the deal after the markets closed Friday. The boards of both companies have approved the takeover, which is expected to close by the end of the year.

New York-based DoubleClick helps its customers place and track online advertising, including search ads, which Google — more than its nearest search competitors Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Microsoft Corp. — has turned into an extremely lucrative business.

Shares of Mountain View-based Google rose 3 cents to $466.32 in after-hours trading. DoubleClick has been privately held since 2005.

The sellers are San Francisco-based private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, along with JMI Equity and DoubleClick management.

Commentary:
From DoubleClick’s announcement of the exchange:

Using the new platform, publishers and other sellers make specific inventory available for purchase. Sellers define a minimum bid value - or “reserve price” - for the inventory and specify rules to restrict certain advertisers, formats and content. In parallel, buyers specify the inventory they wish to purchase, and the associated bid value for that inventory. They can also specify a rule to dynamically control the bid so that the bid price is automatically adjusted in line with inventory performance.

From the New York Times:

DoubleClick, which was founded in 1996, provides display ads on Web sites like MySpace, The Wall Street Journal and America Online as well as software to help those sites maximize ad revenue. The company also helps ad buyers — advertisers and ad agencies — manage and measure the effectiveness of their rich media, search and other online ads.

DoubleClick has also recently introduced a Nasdaq-like exchange for online ads that analysts say could be lucrative for Google.

“Google really wants to get into the display advertising business in a big way, and they don’t have the relationships they need to make it happen,” said Dave Morgan, the chairman of Tacoda, an online advertising network. “But DoubleClick does. It gives them immediate access to those relationships.”

From Bloomberg

`Deep Pockets’

Google declined to give financial details for DoubleClick, whose headquarters are in the same building as its own New York offices. The purchase eclipses the $1.65 billion Google spent to buy video-sharing Web site YouTube in November and was 50 percent more than Hellman & Friedman had wanted. A person with knowledge of the talks said last month the firm may seek about $2 billion.

“The amount is mind-blowing,” said Richard Fetyko, an analyst at Merriman, Curhan and Ford in New York. Fetyko follows DoubleClick rival AQuantive Inc., which he rates buy and doesn’t own. “Apparently there was very competitive bidding. Microsoft has deep pockets, but apparently everything has its limits.”

Friday’s Trip Around the Blogosphere

Kathy Sierra’s - Creating Passionate Users
You really ought to check out Kathy Sierra’s recent post about “outspending vs. outteaching”.

Is Google Acquiring G.CN ?

The China Search Engine View blog writes:

[W]hen you search the whois here, you may find there is one item more, “Registrant Organization: 北京刘元和君咨询有限公司” (Jan Liu & Associates), the attorney for Google’s case of googel.com.cn and googel.cn. Has Google really got g.cn?
This looks pretty realistic to me – and I must say that it’s an interesting branding play for Google China!

Speaking of Google – Aaron Wall has a great discussion about Google being and invisible hand in online marketing .

Aaron takes a look at the perception of trusted advertisers and how that affects your marketing spend and budget.

Their newest ad unit is an unmarked text link ad, which only displays any ad notification AFTER people hover over the link. Publishers who refuse to sell links directly will publish the ads, and if they spread anything like AdSense does, what happens to links to commercial sites? What happens when virtually nobody is willing to link to a commercial site unless it is through Google? What happens when their affiliate payouts are not high enough to solicit a review? And what happens to those businesses when Googlers decide they want that market for themselves, like real estate?

Top University Sites that Google Trusts (Top 20)

Check this out!

Alexander Fedrov has posted the top 20 universities (American), that have the highest Google “Conditional Trustrank”.

1. [uic.edu] trust [673]
2. [uiowa.edu] trust [580]
3. [byu.edu] trust [564]
4. [mit.edu] trust [457]
5. [loyno.edu] trust [428]
6. [umn.edu] trust [383]
7. [uoregon.edu] trust [345]
8. [ua.edu] trust [340]
9. [stanford.edu] trust [312]
10. [ucdavis.edu] trust [312]
11. [cwru.edu] trust [269]
12. [vjc.edu] trust [263]
13. [dongguk.edu] trust [245]
14. [case.edu] trust [239]
15. [harvard.edu] trust [223]
16. [cie.edu] trust [210]
17. [ucne.edu] trust [199]
18. [sdsu.edu] trust [199]
19. [cmu.edu] trust [197]
20. [sage.edu] trust [184]

Get Caught up on Search Marketing & VC

Kontrib Offers a Digg Alternative for Non-English Speakers

One thing that Digg lacks is foreign involvement due to the interface being in purely English. Kontribb offers the solution!

To submit and vote on articles at Kontrib, you first register. After you submit an article, Kontrib’s linguistic machines immediately translate articles into supported languages. These are Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, with more to come later. Kontrib is slick because it translates both the article summary hosted at Kontrib’s site, and the original article linked to. Comments are also translated.

Until now, language translation has remained clumsy. There are text translation sites such as BabelFish, or Google’s language tool. The coming Worldwide Lexicon Project promises to help bloggers translate their sites by mobilizing interested readers. Human volunteers will translate sites with higher quality, argues Brian McConnell, the project’s leader, and they’ll translate into any language. Though, we’d argue that human efforts will vary in quality.

What is FaceBook up to?

Recent traffic statistics at social networking site Facebook are impressive and we’re wondering if there’s a wider story here.

Facebook tells us the site is seeing about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from about 1 billion daily views last month — statistics that haven’t been released until now. That’s a huge jump.
Read more over at VentureBeat

So How Did you Learn SEO?
Here’s part of Rand Fishkin’s Story about SEOmoz:

“In 2001, the company that would become SEOmoz (at the time just Gillian, Matt & myself) began taking on some e-commerce development projects. Previously, we had designed static websites in Flash & HTML and done some consulting in usability, but with the addition of Matt to the team, we were ready to take on some beefier projects. We designed and developed several sites for clients and”

Rand over at SEOmoz would like to know how you got your start!

ZoomInfo - The HeadHunter’s Best Friend Expands

ZoomInfo today launched its Business Information Search Engine, a service that offers information on more than 3.5 million companies. Although the company profiles are similar to those offered by Hoovers.com and other subscription-based providers, ZoomInfo business profiles are free. More about Zoominfo at Search Engine Land

Matt Cutts Blog Hacked on April Fools Day

Ok, I was a bit surprised to see this nice little piece of hacking work done on Matt Cutt’s site by the DarkSEOTeam.

Click for the full size screen capture of Matts Blog:

Once you take a look at Matt’s Site, you’ll want to cruise over to the www.darkseoteam.com site where you’ll see the following:

Of course I’m lying when I make everyone believe that content is King.
Of course black hat SEO and spamdexing are the only Kings.
Google is just a stupid algorithm relying on spammy backlinks.
But you guys had no right to let everyone know. That’s why I defaced your bloody DST site. To show the entire world how evil a white hat can be.

In fact, I’m as evil as my employer
All your backlinks are belong to us !

Elaborate April Fools Joke? Or really good hack job?
You be the judge!

Drum Roll Please: YouTube Video Award Winners

Drum Roll…….YouTube named its first ever Video Award winners Monday.

On top of the list is the Chicago band OK Go for their music video featuring treadmill choreography. You have probably seen this video on MTV and other music award shows, the popularity of this YouTube Video is just amazing. That video, which was seen by 13 million YouYube users took the best creative prize, though in the actual best music video category, voters chose LA-based singer-songwriter TerraNaomi. Users had a week to vote on a dedicated section within YouTube.

Other top winners include:
> Best Series: Ask a Ninja
> Best Comedy: Smosh
> Best Commentary: The Winekone
> Most Inspirational: Free Hugs Campaign
> Most Adorable Video: Kiwi

This is a pretty cool way that Video has changed the internet - I guess you could call it ” CoolSiteOfTheDay 2.0 “

Is Neil Patel Proving the 10% / 90% rule?

Neil Patel challenged Jason Calacanis have had a little bet going on lately to see if SEO is really a useful strategy or if it’s just a bunch of Bull.

Whitehat is the name of this game, and Neil showed Calacanis that by making a few changes he was able to increase his traffic by 21%. Oh and by the way, only 10% of the changes that Neil recommended have been implemented. Is this the 10%/90% rule in action? If you make 10% of recommended changes and they are the changes that are big enough to make an impact, will you see 90% of the value right off the bat?

This really makes me think about time management for an SEO – Do you have to spend numerous hours collecting links and digging through content or even building content for that matter to receive the full, or almost full benefit? — Or can you implement just a few Key SEO techniques and receive a huge amount of value by focusing on what you do well, and outsourcing the time consuming aspects?

Take a look at the results, What do you think?

Find The Best Happy Hour Tonight With Unthirsty.com

So if you’re cruising around the town and want to find a local spot and hit up their Happy Hour but don’t know where to go, Unthirsty.com is the place to go! Matt King, a fellow PDX Designer has taken part in creating this unique mashup of Google Maps and Happy Hour Hotspots.

VoiceThread Brings Voice to Images

A cool little feature that you probably always wish existed is now a feature that “voicethread” is banking on!
Now you can add voice or text comments to image albums very easily, an artist or photographer can take their album and put it online with a little extra spark by adding their own description of how they made the piece or a little background of the photograph. Here’s a great example of a VoiceThread in action!

Users can also embed widget versions of Voicethreads on blogs and other Web sites, making this a simple concept that will most likely take off like wild-fire in a short amount of time.

I wonder how Google and other SEs will Index this!

A Trip Around the Blogosphere

Fasten your seatbelts - we’re going for a trip around the blogosphere!
Jeremy Shoemaker is interviewing Melissa Harrington next week, whom is going to be on the Howard Stern show next week. Melissa Harrington apparently is a Top Web Porn Star.
Some of the questions that Jeremy will be asking are:

-How do you acquire subscriptions?
-How do you get new customers?

Crave shows us a $1 million laptop by a company called Luxury Launches that supposedly is “believed to integrate real diamonds and other precious jewelry into the chassis of the system.”

Google has launched their latest version of Google Spreadsheets while one of Google’s First investors and board member, Michael Moritz is stepping down.

SES New York is coming up and if you’re on the fence about whether or not to attend, Lee Odden has 5 reasons to attend SES NY.

And lastly but most important!
Sir Paul McCartney has broken a 43-year relationship with EMI to sign with a new music label set up by Starbucks, the coffeehouse chain. Starbucks is launching their own label to coincide with their HearMusic offerings. This is a pretty smart brand extension for Starbucks if you ask me!

Google’s Schmidt: Datacenter is King, Not Content

Two Stanford biz students, Matt and Julio, have been interviewing some of the biggest names in the Valley on a podcast called iinovate. They posted an interview with Eric Schmidt yesterday, in which they tell Eric that Google is becoming more of a content company. To this he takes exception:

You used the term content company. We don’t use that term. Google is an infrastructure company that enables content. Google is not in the content business. We have many partners that produce content. We are a distribution mechanism and a monetization mechanism for our partners. This is an important line that we’ve decided not to cross.

Now to the Google Grid, as David Scott Lewis terms it. Schmidt describes it in terms of datacenter (which I think is the same thing as David’s Grid):

Google is much more capital-intensive than our competitors and we’re much further along in the datacenter. We have a competitive advantage because we have the cheapest and most scalable architecture. We hope that in the course of innovation, we will be able to build products that are impossible for our competitors to replicate. Virtually all of our capital expenditures go into the datacenter.

Not a lot of technical detail there, but it gives a good sense of why Google will become the Microsoft of its generation (not in the sense of anticompetitive practices but in the sense of “owning the stack”). Just as nobody could write Windows apps like Microsoft because they simply knew much more about the OS than anybody else, in the future, noone will be able to touch Google in Interet apps. They will deploy their products on architectures so much higher-performing, with less network latency, more scalable, more reliable, etc., that as Schmidt says, they can’t be touched. To beat them you would have had to invest hundreds of millions and had years to build out and have had your pick of the best engineers - and that’s what Google has quietly been doing.

The guys asked Eric where the opportunity is for new biz school grads.

The opportunity is in targeted advertising. That’s essentially the business model of Google. I’m quite convinced that targeted advertising will be a very rich area for many years to come.

He added that the trillion dollar advertising business can be transformed by the targeted advertising approach. He sees not only the “advertising business” per se, but all of the ad-intensive businesses, like cars, as ripe for getting Googlized in a big way.

He would probably object to the term “Googlization.” After all, he thinks its the net, not Google itself, that is changing American business.

Google is an example of an iconic company around a set of changes that are systematic, which are quite significant. It’s really the Internet that is changing companies, and google is a representative of the internet.