Wow, haven't heard of anything like this before.

Quoted: The exchange raised Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people )'s closing price to $400.52 - a 5 percent gain for the day - and canceled all trades below that amount and above $425.29 between 3:57 p.m. and 4:02 p.m. EDT.

I agree that the look of the interface is sort of a letdown.

Quoted: It feels smooth and fast, although the interface looks a bit dated and mixed. It kind of reminds me to a 1990s Windows desktop manager, specially next to the glossy, ultra-polished iPhone interface. However, there are certain aspects of it which are droolworthy, like the accelerometer-based Google Maps Streetview.

More on the Zoho story. They have employed some interesting tactics...

Quoted: Pay one year of college fees. This is a salary, not a loan, with no strings attached. According to Raju, 90% join Zoho at the end of that year, but there is no obligation. This gives Zoho an edge with the brightest at school as they have an unusual offer.

Nice story. However, I find myself using the lighter-weight Google and 37Signal offerings over Zoho.

Quoted: Defying Conventional Wisdom
...
Everything about this story is improbable. And gloriously old fashioned. When I met Raju Vegesna, I kept on thinking this was some kind of time warp. Zoho has simply ignored much of the conventional wisdom. Consider:

Quoted: Writing web apps today is a tedious and error-prone process. Developers can spend 90% of their time working around browser quirks. In addition, building, reusing, and maintaining large JavaScript code bases and AJAX components can be difficult and fragile. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) eases this burden by allowing developers to quickly build and maintain complex yet highly performant JavaScript front-end applications in the Java programming language.

Time to invest in Google?

Quoted: But it bugs me that the stock has been so weak on so little volume lately. It's like nobody on wall street cares about Google anymore. At the same time, Google is acting very strategically toward one of the most important markets (information technology) in the world economy. As Umair Hague puts it:

Latest post to the blog.

Quoted: I recently gave the following talk to the Chinese Institute of Engineers on the Microsoft campus. The talk is an introduction to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), focusing on Search Advertising and Search Engine Optimization. I also explain the search business model and ranking algorithm to the extent that is needed to effectively implement SEM.

Reread this after a long time. Definitely a classic -- both for the quality of thinking (duh) and how clearly and succinctly it is written.

Google Insights is a pretty useful marketing tool. I searched for social bookmarking and got a a state by state break down of "regional interest". In theory, it would make sense to invest disproportionately on marketing efforts for a site like Faves in those states.

"Social bookmarking" searches are distributed across a number of states whereas "microblogging" searches are only popular in California. And overall, "microblogging" is a far less popular search term than "social bookmarking".

It's also fun to type in my last name and get a breakdown. Presumably, this tracks the relative concentration of Indian Americans in the U.S.