Google continues sales and profits growth

Wednesday 1 February 2006

Google has continued its sales and profits growth by reporting an 86% increase in sales for the fourth quarter ended 31 December, but the shares fell as the search engine giant missed analyst’s expectations.

The quarterly sales of $1.92bn (£1.12bn) produced a $372m net profit, an 82% increase on a year-on-year basis. ... Article Continues Below ... For the year, Google reported total sales of $6.14bn, an increase of 92.5% compared to 2004. Net profits for the year skyrocketed to $1.47bn from the $399m posted in 2004. “We are very pleased with our results as we achieved excellent performance across our businesses,” said Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt. “We generated significant revenue growth in our core search and advertising business, driven by continued strength in traffic and monetisation. We will continue to invest significantly as we develop innovative new products,” he said.

Google personalises the news

Tuesday 24 January 2006

Google has enhanced its news site with reader personalisation features.

Google.com/news aggregates news stories from around the web. This week Google added Personalised Search to the site, which allows the user to indicate to the site which headlines they are interested in.

With this feature, to which users can sign up, the site automatically delivers the headlines based on what the reader has viewed in the past.

Recommended headlines will appear whenever a user signs into their Google account.

These headlines appear to the left of the screen, to allow readers to still view the main news.

Google News, which was launched in 2002, now also features a display of the most popular recent stories.

Sober virus 'attack' is foiled

Thursday 12 January 2006

An attack of the Sober virus predicted for Friday 6 January turned out to be a non-event, possibly because of earlier publicity predicting a potential onslaught.

Systems that were compromised by a variant of the Sober worm in November had the potential to download malicious code from certain websites and then launch...

But security analysts F-Secure and MessageLabs both confirmed there had been no evidence of a successful attack, and that the foiling of the attack demonstrated the benefits to the antivirus community of everyone helping each other out.

F-Secure added that despite the success of foiling an expected attack, now was not the time to be complacent, as the hacker could still try to activate the download routine in the future.

It's encouraging to know that the antivirus community has worked together effectively to curb, for the time being, new versions of Sober. Could this collaborative working be consolidated - or extended?

Hackers target IM products

Thursday 12 January 2006

Many experts in the field of extended communications agree that in 2005 there was a tipping point for recognition by enterprises of the usefulness of instant messaging (IM) products.

IM moved out of its hitherto acknowledged ghetto of simple text messaging and... Article Continues Below
... file serving and became part of unified messaging services, even being integrated in state of the art voice over IP (VoIP) products.

The apparent benefits of such versatility and adaptability are manifest but before you embark on the IM road, remember that the hacking community is increasingly targeting IM as an easy way into your organisation. Reports suggest that electronic attackers see potential in using IM as a viable vehicle for malicious threats leveraging global IM directories.

Enrique Salem, senior vice-president of security products and solutions at Symantec, says, "Real-time communication solutions like instant messaging are powerful collaboration tools that create a new attack vector for threats to enter an enterprise network and new forms of digital communication with the same government, legal, and business requirements to retain and retrieve as email."

You could do well looking at those IM products that are backed by security and/or document management solutions experts. The cost of failure to comply with regulatory and corporate governance policies may far outweigh the benefits that IM could deliver.