A Head-Spinning Day for Tech Brands

By Guest Author

This is a guest post from RJ Bardsley, a Senior Vice at Racepoint Group. Follow him on Twitter @RJBardsley.

If you’re on the West Coast and just waking up, run, don’t walk to your nearest news source.  What you’ll find is a blistering barrage of news from some of the biggest and coolest tech brands this morning.  Here is a quick run down of what hit the Wall Street Journal today.

• Microsoft buys Skype for $8 billion.  This is the biggest-ever acquisition for Microsoft.  Can they make it work?  It makes sense – Skype will add a lot to MSFT’s gaming and communications platforms.
• Google Unveils Web Music Service… uh, watch out Apple?  I don’t know about that, but Amazon and Spotify may be shaking in their boots a little bit.  Google still has to secure licenses from the four major record labels.  Expect the system to operate like a remote hard drive.
• Apple and Google will both testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on mobile privacy.  Yes, location-based information is really neat, but it turns out people don’t really like it when you know where they are all the time…
• LinkedIn set the terms for its IPO: how does $3 billion+ sound?  This could be the first in a flood of US tech IPOs.  Expect Groupon to follow suit later this year and Facebook maybe next year.  Freescale, the chip company also set price terms for its IPO yesterday.  Can you say 1998?
• Silicon Valley wild child, NVIDIA, also announced an acquisition this week.  It bought Icera, a UK start up focused on baseband chips.  The move will make NVIDIA more of a competitive force in the mobile phone market.
• Gilt, the online luxury retailer (and @rdeplazes’s frequent digital haunt) has raised $138 million form investors.  Yeah, I guess you really can say 1998…
• Video game maker Activision announced a 32% jump in sales.
• Apple and Conde Nast announced that many of your favorite media outlets – including Wired, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Allure, Self, GQ, and my personal favorite, Golf Digest – will be available for subscription on the iTunes store.  Yey. 

3 comments May 10th, 2011

Microsoft Wants You to “Bing It” On Internet Explorer

By Ben Haber

As Firefox 3.5 flew past 1 million downloads yesterday Microsoft unsealed a new video commercial taking aim at the popular Internet browser. The video (which is a little strange) touts the benefits of  Internet Explorer’s in-private browsing (Firefox does have private browsing).

This video reminded me of another video that Google made a couple weeks ago in Times Square (below) , where they asked people passing by what a browser is.  Less then 8 percent of the people surveyed actually knew what a browser was and one of the most popular answers to the question was Google.

According to this chart (below) in May 2009 Firefox had nearly a 48 percent market share – a number that has been steadily increasing. Chrome has also seen its market share increase, but is still only at 5.5 percent. While Internet Explorer still had over 40 percent market share it has seen its numbers continuing to decline, which may explain its new marketing push and (strange) video.

3 comments July 1st, 2009

Do You Google it with Bing??

By Kyle Austin

Microsoft is spending a lot of money on marketing Bing and a lot folks actually like the search engine. The problem is, as the “kids” from CollegeHumor note above, Google is a verb in many people’s vocabularies, which means searching on the Web.

2 comments June 29th, 2009