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Microsoft reported worse-than-expected earnings yesterday. The company was about a billion dollars off analysts consensus expectations. According to the Microsoft release, the company had huge revenues but still missed: $13.10 billion for the fourth quarter ended June 30, 2009, a 17% decline from the same period of the prior year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $3.99 billion, $3.05 billion and $0.34 per share, which represented declines of 30%, 29% and 26%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period. For the full fiscal year revenues were $58.44 billion, a 3 percent decline from fiscal 2008 and the first time that sales had declined in the company’s more than 30 year history. The decline was blamed on the economy, among other factors, but also the rise of netbooks. According to Microsoft netbooks have a roughly 11 percent share of the PC market. Microsoft’s OS dominates there but margins are much smaller. Online … [Read more...] about Microsoft Misses Earnings, Yahoo Board Meets About Potential Microsoft Search Deal

Time for the second monthly update on howSearch Engine Land is growing. As Isaid with my review of December 2006 traffic, I hope our traffic statistics willbe both interesting and also provide helpful tips to other search marketers.This review especially covers social media sites as a driver of traffic. It alsocovers the importance of thinking if you can produce "number stories" for socialmedia sites and howbeing an "untrusted" site with Google can give you the frustrating experience ofwatching references to your articles rank higher than the articles themselves. For January 2007, we had about 194,000 page views, or about 6,250 page viewsper day. Those are actually "AdViews," the number of times ads were shown asreported by our ad serving software. Overall, our views went up 109 percent fromthe previous month. Our Google Analytics reportsgave us higher figures: 227,000 page views for the month, with 141,000 visitors.It’s not uncommon for different metrics programs to give … [Read more...] about Search Engine Land: January 2007 Statistics Review

Google has rolled out a new GooglePatents search engine (Official Google Blog post here), allowing people tosearch across the full-text of US patents from 1790 through the middle of 2006.The company plans to update the service further with more 2006 filings and moveto a weekly or better refresh schedule in the future. US patents can already be searched by the general public using, among otherresources, the search serviceprovided by the US Patent & Trademark Office. So why bother with a new servicefrom Google? "We’ve really applied the Google experience to it. It’s easier so you don’thave to apply the fielded searches," said Bill Brougher, a group product managerat Google overseeing the project. "I think it will open up patent search to alot of non-lawyers." Google has used the scanning technology used forGoogle Book Search to create a full-textindex of all US patents through the middle of 2006. The USPTO also offersfull-text searching, but only for patents going … [Read more...] about Google Launches Google Patents, Full-Text US Patent Searching

Google was recently assigned a number of unusual and interesting patents from Outland Research, LLC, from inventor Louis B. Rosenberg, a Stanford PhD, Cal Polytech Professor on leave, and most recently professional film maker. A number of Rosenberg’s inventions have been developed into commercial products found in BMW automobiles, surgical similators and medical imaging systems, and computer mice from Logitech, as well as a 3D animation tool used on films such as Shrek and Ice Age. It appears that Louis Rosenberg now spends more time as a screenwriter with his company Outland Pictures than as an inventor, but there are a good number of patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office assigned to Outland Research. A number of those showed up recently in the USPTO’s patent assignment database as having been assigned to Google, with an execution date of August 1, 2011, and an assignment recording date of August 29, 2011. These patents cover a wide range of inventions, but none of … [Read more...] about Google Picks Up Hardware and Media Patents from Outland Research

Here’s our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web. From Marketing Land: Facebook’s Marketing Effectiveness Backed By Two Of Its Biggest Advertisers Just days ahead of Facebook’s IPO, GM dropped Facebook Ads citing that they weren’t effective. While Facebook lost that $10 million dollar account lost last month, today Facebook gathered support from their two largest advertisers, Ford and Coca-Cola. Both brands stated that Facebook ads bring value to their marketing efforts. painting a much different picture in the […] Flipboard Partners Up With Google+ Thanks To New & Improved API Google has been very hesitant to share Google+ data with 3rd party partners. Today however, Bradley Horowitz, Google’s VP of product management, announced the integration of Google+ on Flipboard. The announcement was made at LeWeb ’12 in London. The new integration is made … [Read more...] about Marketing Day: June 20, 2012