On2’s shareholders – or at least a vocal subgroup of them – are not at all happy about the planned Google acquisition. Two lawsuits have been filed to stop the deal, with both complaints alleging that On2 more or less served itself on a silver platter.
Google offered to acquire On2 for 60 cents per share (or $106.5 million in all), which represented a 57 percent premium over On2’s closing price the day before. However, the day after the acquisition was announced, On2 gave its best quarterly financial report in over a year, which made the deal look less sweet.
Google Reader Gets Much Needed Social Features
Google has added a number of new features to Google Reader. The biggest one, which is long overdue, is the ability to share content on other social networks. This seems like it should have been available for ages, but it has been MIA until now.
Google Talks Future of Search Advertising
Google AdWords Business Product Management Director Nicholas Fox gave a keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies. He talked about where the search industry is going, and where it’s been.
On the history of AdWords, he says Google quickly realized that banner ads didn’t make sense with search, sow they tried the text ad, and it has worked pretty well. Google is now running over a billion text ad auctions a day.
Google’s Latest Move as a Social Network
Last week, Google introduced social gadgets for iGoogle in Australia. Today they have made them available in the US. Well, they’ll be gradually rolling out starting today, anyway.
The social gadgets let users share, collaborate, and play games with their friends. There are 19 of them at this point that have been debuted today. They include things like:
Google’s Latest Facebook Page is for AdSense
Google recently launched its Facebook Page. Now they have launched one specifically for AdSense.
Google refers to this as one-stop shop for up-to-date info. It will be synched with the AdSense blog and Twitter account, and will also contain optimization photos and videos that are found on the AdSense YouTube channel.
Google Welcomes NetSuite as a Checkout Partner
Google announced today that NetSuite is now a featured partner of Google Checkout. This means that NetSuite users can now offer Google Checkout as one of their payment options.
Getting to Know the Google Analytics Data Export API
This week Google unveiled the Data Feed Query Explorer for the Google Analytics Data Export API. This was essentially created to help users get a grasp on what can be done with the API.
Google Calls Upon Users to Expand Webmaster Central Channel
Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel has provided countless valuable videos for webmasters and search engine marketers. They often come from Google’ Matt Cutts who has uploaded numerous videos in which he answers user questions.
Cutts isn’t the only one that can provide useful content though, and Google knows this. The company is now calling upon users to submit their own videos for possible inclusion on the Webmaster Central YouTube Channel.
How Google Reader Sharing Contributes to Real Time Search
Google has announced that Google Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol for shared items. This is a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol, as defined on this Google Code page.
Here’s a visual overview of what that means:
Google Makes Chrome Faster
Google has released a new beta version of Chrome today, which the company says is much faster and improves upon the tab page and Omnibox features. It also comes with some new options for themes.