Google - Page number 2

Solar technology is exploding, despite what the cynics say. And so is progress. Companies like Solyndra, which looked like a good bet because it claimed a 30% gain in price-performance, crashed before take-off this year because price-performance improved 50%.

In such an environment, the benefits of keeping a new technology proprietary far outweigh the benefits of crowdsourcing. There are a host of companies at various places in the solar power business process, from planning commercial roll-outs to scaling production to delivering prototypes to researching new solutions. Each is going in a different direction.

Which is not to say open source has no place in solar. It does. In niches. » Read more

What is the state of the open data movement? During my opening keynote at the Open Government Data Camp (held this year in Warsaw, Poland) I sought to follow up on my talk from last year's conference. Here's my take of where we are today. » Read more

If you look at the evolution of the IT landscape over the past 30 years, you see two distinct trends: the continued growth of the IT dinosaurs (mainframe computing and mainframe wannabes like Sun) and the emergence of highly modular, adaptable systems, which, by their very process of evolution, not only best suit the current needs, but plant the seeds for the next computer revolution. In the 1980s, modular UNIX systems sowed the seeds for Linux, which in the 1990s sowed the seeds for the rapid spread and adoption of the World Wide Web, which in the 2000s, sowed the seeds for companies like Amazon.com, Google, Facebook, and Twitter to aggregate and disseminate content as never before. » Read more

Google is making its Dart system open source.

This is very important, not just for open source.

Dart is a structured language for web programming. That means you can actually build a website as you would write a little Javascript. In fact, Dart can be run on a Java Virtual Machine, or compiled into Javascript. » Read more

Almost every time I’ve turned on the television in the past week, I've seen an ad for Google Chrome. What started earlier this year as a sprinkling of ads here in the United States has become a torrential downpour.

For me, Google has long been one of the poster children for a new breed of company born in the age of the Internet that doesn’t need to rely on traditional advertising to build its brand. » Read more

We're sure you have some other thoughts on this. Chime in using the comments after you vote.

I recently wrote about the $4.5 billion auction for Nortel's portfolio of 6,000 patents that went to a consortium that included Apple, Microsoft, and RIM (Blackberry) -- three of four smartphone platforms. In the wake of this sale, Interdigital has contemplated monetizing its portfolio of 8,500 patents, perhaps even putting the company up for sale. Google announced that it has bought over 1,000 patents from IBM for defensive purposes. Perennial investor Carl Icahn suggested that Motorola cash in on some of its immense portfolio of 18000 patents. » Read more

"There is no standard Google anymore," says Eli Pariser in a recent TED talk. And he's right. Try it. Google the same thing as the person sitting next to you and compare the results. Chances are, they're different. According to Pariser, that's because Google uses as many as 57 different signals to determine the unique search results it serves you. » Read more

Google Health was doomed from the start.

It was based on a legal fallacy and a technical one. » Read more

I can't bring myself to write a headline that involves the words "Google+," "Facebook killer" and a leading question mark. But that's no doubt what they're hoping for with this announcement, isn't it? » Read more