Google shares on a high

Google’s shares reached an all-time high, valuing the company at nearly $175bn, just a few billion short of leader Wal-Mart, notes Tech Trader Daily. This, despite the small disparity in revenue – $11.5bn compared with Wal-Mart’s $377.8bn.

What is driving the climb, the site speculates, is a couple of investment comments – one showing financial services firms cutting back advertising but leaving search advertising intact, the other suggesting Google has a 9 to 24 month lead over competitors in several important technology areas.

 

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Microsoft to buy into Facebook?

Forrester’s Charlene Li reports that Microsoft is close to acquiring 5% of Facebook for between $300m and $500m. That would value to fast-growing social networking site at $10bn – or $238 for each of the 19 million monthly visitors. Based on the total value of US advertising per adult ($2,500 – $250bn divided by 100 million adults) that would equate to 6-10% of all advertising. Feasible, she says, if people spend as much time on Facebook as they potentially could.

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Antidote to feed overload?

FeedHub is a new service, showing for the first time at the Demo conference, which aims to be a custom version of TechMeme. The idea is that you load your feeds and then train it which posts are most relevant and it then acts like Techmeme to identify the most important one.

Scoble has some concerns:

  1. how big is the market? (how many people have 800 feeds?)
  2. how will they make money? If by ads, won’t that put off the customers?
  3. what about the attention information they will get?

 

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Second Life embedded

Robert Scoble praises startup SceneCaster which he says will allow people to embed “scenes” into web pages and Facebook and so on. This he says has several advantages which may make Second Life more accessible to commercial organisations – in particular:

  • large numbers of people can enter a scene
  • linking to scenes becomes really easy

The service, which isn’t officially launched until tomorrow, is one company missed off this year’s Demofall 07 – a pity says Scoble.

 

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Google presentation

Google’s long-awaited presentation application has been launched. It’s not very fully-featured but it’s a start and no doubt Microsoft will be watching with great interest.

Update: I think I missed one of the really important things here: it’s the online collaboration companies like Webex who should be the first to worry about Google Presentation as it makes simple presentation sharing over the internet with nothing to install really, really simple….

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