WebProWorld
The 2009 TechCrunch 50 conference was held this week, and 50 start-ups each had a chance to make a presentation, and then the judges picked one grand-prize winner at the end of the whole thing to win $50,000.
The winner this year, was a company called Redbeacon, which just happens to have been founded by three ex-Googlers – Ethan Anderson, Yaron Binur, and Aaron Lee, who were product managers and engineers with the Internet giant.
An anonymous group of Googlers have helped create a tool citizens can use to whip Congress—and by “whip,” they mean call to voice support of the Fair Elections Now Act.
Having the title Ex-Googler is probably a good thing if you’re in the startup business. Twitter, after all, is run by ex-Googlers. That credibility worked the old hype machine for Cuil, too, until it couldn’t perform. Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan, ex-Googlers, suggest it’s a bad idea to take on Google where Google is strong—like Cuil did with search—but taking it to Google where it is weak can work.
And so they’ve fairly quietly launched Likaholix in private beta.
Google employees in different cities around the world have been doing their best to prove that Google is not evil. Well, I haven’t seen this cited as an official reason, and I like to think that they’re doing it because they care, but different branches of Google are helping children in a variety of capacities this holiday season.
Google’s top executives have been selling their holdings non-stop for almost three and a half years, a trend that ultimately gained some attention from the market.
InfoWorld has an article about a study by a consulting firm that says Google Apps isn’t the right move for any sort of decent sized mature business, that it better fits smaller businesses with very limited needs. Bad enough to have in the press, no doubt, but then there’s this:
The financials for Google’s second quarter of 2007 proved uninspiring for Wall Street as earnings missed expectations, and Google blamed a higher headcount for rising expenses.
The US Presidential race has candidates chasing dollars like hounds after a fox, and one of their favorite destinations in rich Silicon Valley has been Google.
Google has argued that everything’s just fine, yet the company seems to be losing employees like never before – a few important people, including Vanessa Fox, have certainly made other arrangements. Several well-informed onlookers also seem to support the “greener pastures” theory.
This August, it will be three years since Google’s initial public offering (and since I started this blog as a way to track the company). When that happens, according to NBC News, nearly 3 billion dollars in pre-IPO options will vest, with over 450 early Googlers earning an average of $6.5 million.
