The New York Times reports that “Google said it has seen no effect from a slowing economy on its advertising business, as it reported a 17 percent jump in profit and a 51 percent growth in revenue in the fourth quarter. The result represents a slowdown in Google’s growth rate and fell shy of expectations. The company said it remained bullish about its business, regardless of the outlook for the overall economy. ‘We have not seen any impact as of now,’ said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, in an interview Thursday afternoon after the financial report was announced.”
In a different article, the New York Times writes that “[t]he U.S. Federal Trade Commission has asked a federal court to require an alleged Web page hijacking operation to obey previous orders barring unfair and deceptive practices. Walter Rines, business partner Sanford Wallace and Rines’ company, Online Turbo Merchant, diverted users of MySpace.com to other Web sites and barraged them with ads to earn advertising commissions, according to court papers filed with the FTC. The defendants used pagejacking, phishing and other methods to target MySpace users, in violation of a previous court order, the FTC said in a news release.”
Internetnews.com reveals that “Symantec has released is second-annual Risk Assessment survey and the results show that the definition of ‘risk’ is expanding, as are the threats facing IT. The survey of 405 IT managers, undertaken between February and November 2007, found that their top concern is network availability — with 78 percent citing it as a business-critical or serious risk. The finding marked the first time that network availability surpassed security among IT managers’ concerns. Security, which 70 percent of IT managers said was business-critical or a serious concern, was followed by performance (68 percent) and compliance (60 percent).”
According to the International Herald Tribune, “[t]he head of China’s $200 billion government investment fund, seeking to reassure Americans nervous about the possibility of foreign takeovers, said this week that China would invest mostly in portfolios rather than individual companies.” Lou Jiwei, a former Finance Ministry official in Beijing, “was on a visit to the United States to tell U.S. officials that China had no intention of gaining controlling interest in any companies, and that it would be a ‘good corporate citizen’ and not invest in companies that damage the environment, waste energy or produce tobacco. He said he understood that Americans ‘have concerns about the size of our capital and also people have concerns about our motives.’ But Lou said his fund was established to invest part of China’s estimated $1.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, most of which is in dollar-denominated Treasury notes, to meet Chinese monetary policy needs.”
The Mercury News reports that “[a] federal appeals court handed TiVo a key victory Thursday in its lawsuit against EchoStar and Dish Network, which it had accused of violating TiVo’s patented television program recording technology. Dish said it would appeal the ruling and, meanwhile, has downloaded new software developed by EchoStar engineers into customers’ digital video recorders. The new software doesn’t infringe on TiVo’s patent, Dish said.”
