It’s no surprise that Google, who lists “you can make money without doing evil” on their official company philosophy page, has spoken up against the recent SOPA online privacy act, which gives the US government the ability to “hijack DNS and censor search results” at their own whim. It’s a controversial bill that has people on every side of media production and publishing speaking up about the proliferation of free and pirated content on the web.
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Bloomberg Game Changers has been a game-changer for Bloomberg.com, as comScore data showed a record traffic spike in October, with the media company’s Web properties totaling some 21 million unique visitors for the month, and the seven episodes of the documentary series contributing to those robust numbers.
Episodes of Bloomberg Game Changers account for four of the 15 most viewed videos on Bloomberg.com, with the installment featuring Apple chairman and CEO Steve Jobs coming in at No. 2 on that list and totaling nearly 500,000 views.
Other subjects of Bloomberg Game Changers: Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Google co-founder and president, technology Sergey Brin and co-founder and president, products Larry Page; Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart; Kohlberg Kravis Roberts co-founder Henry Kravis; hip-hop mogul Jay-Z; and Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison.
Fortune released its 2010 40 Under 40 rankings Thursday, and technology and media are well-represented, with Andreessen Horowitz co-founder and Netscape Communications founder Marc Andreessen occupying the top spot, followed by Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and a third-place tie between Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page tied for fifth; News Corp. chairman and CEO, Europe and Asia James Murdoch was No. 8; Univision Networks president César Conde No. 12; Aol chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong No. 18; there was a three-way tie at No. 27 between Facebook vice president of product Chris Cox, VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, and chief technology officer Bret Taylor; foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley was at No. 29; Slide founder Max Levchin and Vevo president and CEO Rio Caraeff tied at No. 31; Google head of location and mobile services Marissa Mayer at No. 34; Hulu CEO Jason Kilar at No. 37; and Microsoft global head of advertising Carolyn Everson at No. 39.
The 2010 40 Under 40 rankings will appear in the Nov. 1 issue of Fortune, which will be on newsstands Monday. The full list appears after the jump:
Bloomberg Television is continuing to boost its coverage of the technology sector, following up Tuesday’s announcement of the addition of Cory Johnson and last month’s hiring of former CNN China correspondent Emily Chang with a profile of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs on this week’s installment of Bloomberg Game Changers.
Airing Thursday at 9 p.m. ET, the Jobs episode of Bloomberg Game Changers will feature interviews with fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, former Apple CEO John Scully, journalist turned venture capitalist Michael Moritz, Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, former Apple “Mac Evangelist” and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki, and technology journalist and former Apple employee Robert X. Cringely.
Bloomberg Game Changers will profile Jobs from Apple’s start in his garage through the success of the iPad, touching on his departure from Apple, the failure of NeXT, his bounce-back at Pixar, and his return to Apple.
As for its recent hires, Bloomberg TV said Johnson and Chang will work on a yet-to-be-announced new show based in San Francisco. Prior to joining Bloomberg, Johnson had been a hedge fund manager and private investor, with media roots as a founding reporter for TheStreet.com, a writer-reporter at Time, a senior editor at Vibe, and CNBC’s first Silicon Valley reporter back in 2001.
Somehow we think Cuil, the latest challenger to Google Search, expected more from their debut. BusinessWeek reports that Cuil launched Monday to what it refers to (diplomatically) as a “cool reception.”
Basically, the search engine works—sort of. Many users reported trouble even accessing it, receiving amusing errors such as “Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now,” which spawned doubts about the company’s long-term ability to resolve outages.
Plus, the search results themselves were a little off; if you searched for “Cuil” or “Cuil search engine itself,” you’d get nothing from Cuil.com. Another famous pundit noted that if you searched Sergey Brin (the founder of Google) you’d get 250 matches, whereas if you searched random Cuil employees, you’d get results numbering in tens of thousands. A little hand-tweaking of search results, anyone?
In short, without accurate search results, without rock-solid reliability, and without mobile components of any kind, Cuil is off to a rough start.
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said on Thursday that he was unlikely to meet with Microsoft reps at this week’s Sun Valley meeting of media and tech executives in Idaho, according to Reuters.
The report said that many folks at Sun Valley are watching Yang, as well as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and other representatives from both companies, for clues as to the saga’s next twist. (It’s like a soap opera, except that everyone is a geek, and bazillions of dollars and the future of the Internet are at stake.)
Yang “chatted for over a half hour” with Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and was “seen with his head in his hands at their table by a duck pond in the resort,” where many executives gather after lunch, according to the report. “I think he’s a good leader but under stress,” Brin later told reporters at the event. “There’s obviously a lot of frustration, but he’s doing pretty well.”
