Google and AOL

There’s an old saying that if you owe the bank £100, you have a problem; but if you owe the bank £1m, then the bank has a problem.

This is the reason most commonly credited as being behind the AOL/Google deal. The $300m earned from AdSense on the AOL portal was just too large a percentage to comfortably put at risk.

But there’s another saying the money makes money. And it seems from the SEC filings that the deal creates the conditions for a floatation of the AOL business in the foreseeable future and if that were to happen – and if Google’s other properties like Video Search really work some magic with the underused AOL content – Google’s stake could end up as a real investment.

How’s that for having your cake and eating it?

Human Chip Firm Plans IPO

Red Herring reports that VeriChip, a firm which specialises in RFID tags for human implantation, intends to file for an IPO. In 1993 when I was involved in the Reed Elsevier Innovation Programme with Strategos one of the more outlandish discontinuities we came up with was the move to chip everything, including humans. This seemed to be hard to take at the time, but it’s interesting how, bit by bit, the story is unfolding. The Red Herring article goes on to say that the RFID industry is slated to become a multi-billion dollar industry over the next five years.

Co-incidentally, CIO Insight reports at the same time that Kimberly-Clark, the paper products giant, is investing millions in a factory to prove the uses of RFID – even though it is not expected to bear fruit for a couple of years.

by Jim Muttram