Google brings in some money, plans on getting more

Quick and techy for your Thursday: Google breathes easier: Cisco's Tandberg deal hits opposition; better news for Sidekick users; taking stock of economic recovery efforts.

Googling along: Google reported a 7 percent jump in revenue for its third quarter, bouncing back from a virtually flat second quarter, and chief executive Eric Schmidt said the Mountain View search giant will start hiring again.

And, in its first effort to make money off its book-scanning project, Google announced a service to sell electronic versions of books for download to computers, phones and possibly e-readers. Google Editions will start with 400,000 to 600,000 books in the first half of next year, said Google's Tom Turvey, making the announcement at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

More, please: A poll of Tandberg shareholders found that 21 of them — owning more than 24 percent of the stock — won't sell at the terms currently offered by Cisco. The San Jose networking giant early this month offered $3.1 billion for the Norwegian maker of videoconferencing equipment.

Cisco called its price "fair" and said it wouldn't comment further during the tender process, which ends Nov. 9. The deal requires acceptance from more than 90 percent of shareholders.


Sidekick, Part 3: The news is getting better for users of the ill-fated phone. Microsoft Corp., whose subsidiary Danger makes the phones, said it has recovered "most, if not all" of the personal data lost during a server failure over the weekend and will restore it soon.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is distancing itself from the culprit, reports the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog. Said a spokesman: "The Danger Service platform, which experienced the outage, is a standalone service operating on non-Microsoft technologies, and is not related to Microsoft's cloud services platform or Windows Live."

And more GMSV on phones: a round-up of early reviews of the BlackBerry Storm 2 and Motorola's Android-powered Cliq.

The slow road back: A clutch of news stories hit today on the theme of economic recovery:

-- The House Financial Services Committee, split on party lines, voted for regulation of privately traded derivatives. It was a first major step for President Barack Obama's plans to overhaul federal regulations governing the nation's financial institutions.

-- The Senate is considering a plan to extend and broaden the home-buyers' credit, which allows income tax reduction of up to $8,000. The proposal would remove the first-time requirement, raise the eligibility income and extend the plan until June 30. It is now set to expire Dec. 1.

-- For the first time since the automatic adjustments were adopted in 1975, there will be no cost-of-living raise for Social Security recipients next year.

And finally: Anheuser-Busch is buying all the national ads on this weekend's "Saturday Night Live" to promote Bud Light Golden Wheat. The sponsorship — a first for the 35-year-old show — will mean 6 to 7 minutes of extra show time, NBC said.

Which doesn't sound near as intriguing as the full-show product placement of Windows 7 in the upcoming variety show by "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane,

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Ads drive Google's profit way up

oogle Inc. reported third-quarter results that easily topped expectations on Thursday, the second straight period of gains for the online search titan and a clear sign that Internet advertising is bouncing back from the depths of the recession.


As the dominant Internet player, the Mountain View company's performance is widely viewed as a gauge of the online industry's overall strength.

"We believe the worst of the recession is behind us," said Eric Schmidt, the company's chief executive, during an investor conference call. "We're very optimistic now about the future. We now have the business confidence to invest heavily in the next phase of innovation, hoping to invent the future as we see it."

Specifically, he said, the company is stepping up hiring, eyeing acquisition opportunities, expanding its mobile offerings and improving its search engine technology.

Investors applauded the late-day announcement, bidding up shares more than 3 percent, or $17, in after-hours trading to about $547.

Google said revenue totaled $5.94 billion, a 7 percent increase from a year ago, thanks to rising ad spending on its sites and those of its affiliates. Net income reached $1.64 billion ($5.13 per share), a 27 percent leap. The Wall Street consensus called for earnings of $4.69 per share on sales of $4.2 billion, according to a survey by Bloomberg.

Aggregate paid clicks, the instances when consumers click on ads, rose 14 percent from a year ago during the third quarter. The average cost per click was down 6 percent from last year, but up 5 percent from the second quarter, when it fell a record 13 percent on an annual basis.

The results represent "improvement over the depths of the recession" and demonstrate the online ad sector is stabilizing, said Clayton Moran, analyst at Benchmark Co. Until the second quarter, Google's revenue had declined for more than a year.

Google boasts a commanding lead in online search, controlling 64.9 percent of the market in September, up 0.3 percent from the month before, research firm comScore Inc. reported Wednesday. Microsoft Corp. has increased its market share since releasing Bing in June, but still owns only 9.4 percent of searches. No. 2 Yahoo Inc. slid 0.5 percent last month to 18.8 percent.

Separately on Thursday, Google said it will introduce a service for booksellers next year that will take square aim at Amazon.com. Google Editions will allow readers to purchase books and read them over any device that connects to the Web.

The program will start with from 400,000 to 600,000 books in the first half of 2010, with prices set by publishers, said Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search's publisher partnership program.

"The way the e-book market will evolve is by accessing the book from anywhere, from an access point of view and also from a geographical point of view," Turvey said Thursday at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair.

It's the first time the company will attempt to make money from its books program, which began in 2004. The ambitious plan to scan millions of books at research libraries and make them searchable online sparked a spate of lawsuits by authors and publishers.

A controversial settlement proposal that would have established a system for identifying and compensating the appropriate rights holders was recently scrapped, after the Department of Justice raised antitrust and other concerns.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/15/BULU1A6446.DTL#ixzz0UJNQG4TL