The irony. Congress berates Big Three automotive companies for flying one their corporate jets to ask for bailouts. while Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors flies into Washington on his private jet (and takes 10 flights in the year charged to Tesla the company) to finalise the details of Tesla’s loan. Victory for capitalism? Greenwash? Hypocrisy?
Google autocomplete tries to anticipate what a Googler is searching for as they type. Alex Kelleher, CEO of Cognitive Match obviously celebrated the closing of his Series A funding by analysing the Google alphabet – the results that Google.com offers when you type, ‘A’, ‘B’ etc. You can see his list here.
It got me thinking about what regional differences there were so I did the same analysis on Google.co.uk Then sitting in front of the news last night I got thinking about what other differences there were. So I looked at Germany, France, India and China (get it while you still can…).
It is actually striking how few super brands there are on the internet – Facebook and Yahoo are about the only two brands that appear consistently across all of the county sites in number one slot.
Some national stereotypes reflected in results. In India, the results are littered with cricket sites. Banking, news, rail travel and careers sites all feature far more prominently than the retail brands of the UK and online brands in the US. Perhaps counter intuitively, France and Germany probably have the highest representation of home grown web companies whereas they don’t really appear in UK lists at all where the results are dominated by large traditional retail brands.
If you want to forward any other country results, happy to include them & credit.
UK – Google.co.uk
Germany – Google.de
France – Google.fr
India – Google.In
China – Google.cn (Results in CAPITALS denote results with Chinese characters)
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Inspired by the excellent Alex Kelleher, who has just produced a Google.com version of the Google alphabet.
As Alex explains, “Start typing something into google, and the now established “autocomplete” or live suggestions or whatever it’s called today pops up. I thought I’d take a look at the Zeitgeist, and see what each letter brings (and the #2 result in brackets). All pretty big-brand, although the second most common search beginning with an “r” is “reverse phone lookup”? Seems like an unanswered mega-site right there”.
Go and visit his US version here.
Meanwhile, here is the UK version of the Google Alphabet. These are the suggestions, in order, that Google thinks you might be looking for when you type a letter of the alphabet into the Google search box.
It seems that Googlers in the UK are obsessed with shoppping, the weather, light entertainment and going on holiday. Only one person makes it into the top 78 places – Katie Price. (In the US, only Lady Gaga and Tiger Woods appeared in the top 52 places).
See the list here:
Amadeus Capital Partners led a $5.5 million round of investment into AMEE. AMEE aims to build a system that can measure the carbon footprint of anything. As regulatory and consumer pressure increase in an effort to tackle climate change, this is an emerging sector that could be worth up to $4 billion a year by 2017 according to some analysts.
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Leo Apotheker, CEO of SAP has resigned with immediate effect according to a company statement on Sunday evening. SAP has just failed to come to terms with the new (to them) concept of SaaS. Apotheker became CEO after the company abandoned a joint leadership structure at the beginning of last year.
“The new setup of the SAP Executive Board will allow SAP to better align product innovation with customer needs. The new leadership team will continue to drive forward SAP’s strategy and focus on profitable growth, and will deliver its innovations in 2010 to expand SAP’s leadership of the business software market,” SAP Company Statement
The company will now have two co-CEOs Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott, both SAP veterans.
The main problem for SAP is it just hasn’t been able to react to the rise of organisations like Salesforce who have increasingly been targeting their customer base. It is a highly political organisation and has had no clear leadership for years. Salesforce and others by contrast have far stronger leadership that have managed to focus their organisations around beating other organisations – SAP included. SAP’s new return to a multi-headed leadership structure is almost guaranteed to ensure that its inexorable decline will continue.
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The Cognitive Match startup is applying artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content (product, offers, or editorial) to realtime content. Last year it raised a Series A investment from Dawn Capital, rumoured to be in the $1m+ ballpark. Today Dawn has stepped in again with a follow-on Series B investment of $2.5m which the company will use to accelerate its growth. That takes it’s war-chest to around $3.5m
Rumour: GSK, following their announcement reported in the FT on 31st January of a likely 3,000 job cuts globally, are to close their Harlow branch, formerly the Smith Kline Beecham flagship facility, with the likely loss of 2,000 jobs. Workers at the facility were told they would be made redundant on Thursday.
Rumour: We are getting reports that GSK, following their announcement reported in the FT on 31st January of a likely 3,000 job cuts globally, are to close their Harlow branch, formerly the Smith Kline Beecham flagship facility, with the likely loss of 2,000 jobs. Workers at the facility were told they would be made redundant on Thursday.
A reminder, if one were needed that, the employees of the junior partner in any ‘merger’ rarely enjoy long term job security. GSK was formed out of the takeover/merger of GlaxoWellcome plc and SmithKline Beecham plc in 2000. Like most pharmaceutical companies, it is reducing its headcount in western markets and focusing on growth in emerging markets.
GSK - GlaxoSmithKline
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Jonathan Schwartz signed off from Sun with a nicely self induglent Twitter message in the form of a haiku.
“Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more”
@openjonathan
I think I prefer the unofficial version doing the rounds:
“A thing of beauty/trampled by a philistine/he blames all but self”
Sunset haiku
History is written by the victors.
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