She may have been a highly regarded tech executive when she joined Yahoo in January 2009, but the summary firing of Carol Bartz as chief executive of the struggling web property has been greeted positively by the company’s investors. When news broke overnight that Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock had given Bartz the flick over the phone the aging internet company’s shares shot up 6 per cent. At the time of writing they are still up almost 5 per cent. (more…)
Dominic Coyle and Barry O’Halloran discuss the Government’s jobs initiative, Cian Blackwell from Grant Thornton on corporate governance and Maeve Kneafsey on the IIA annual conference.
Simon Carswell discusses AIB’s record annual loss, Suzanne McElligot of IAB Ireland on the growth of internet advertising and Urban Frog co-founder Angie McMenamin on setting up a new sports clothing brand. John Collins presents.
This morning we launched the new look business section of irishtimes.com. Regular readers of the site will notice some pretty significant changes so I thought I’d explain the thinking behind them.
In the top navigation of the site you’ll now see something called Sectors, rather than Latest. On our business team we’ve got specialists covering a range of different areas from the pharmaecutical industry to the energy sector. Each of those industries now has its own homepage so if, for example, you are mostly interested in media & marketing there is a dedicated page with all the latest news from that sector.
In the Opinion & Analysis section we’ve also made it easier to find articles by some of our best known writers namely business editor John McManus, economics editor Dan O’Brien, finance correspondent Simon Carswell and business affairs correspondent Ciaran Hancock.
We think the new layout better highlights the breadth of our business coverage – not just in terms of what’s written for the paper but also the unique content we are creating for the web on a daily basis.
We plan some further changes in the coming weeks – including expanded data coverage of international and local markets. We’d love your feedback on the changes, either in the comments below or by emailing finance@irishtimes.com.
John Collins, assistant business editor.
On the internet it’s invariably the kiss of death for your business if Google decides to enter your space. With the exception of social networking it’s become a major player in almost every new category it enters – just look at the popularity of Gmail where Hotmail once reigned supreme.
This interesting Businessweek article highlights the internet giants latest addition – a trading floor staffed by former Wall St types. They have been hired to manage Google’s $26.5 billion in cash and short-term investments. As you’d expect Google’s engineers have written them some very funky tools to help them with the job.
Can’t imagine there was too many problems luring staff from Wall St to California with the lure of Google stock, a laid back environment etc. But I think the big investment banks can rest easy for the time being that Google is going to start luring away their clients.
Thousands of Google employees, or Googlers as they like to call themselves, are in the south west for Engage 09, a sales conference for staff from the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. The mood is upbeat and not just because Google, which is regularly voted one of the best places to work, has a young and vibrant workforce that it takes good care of.
Last week the internet giant, which now spans everything from mobile phones to a nascent PC operating system that will pit it squarely against Microsoft, as well as its core search engine, posted strong growth in third quarter revenues and profits. Revenues for the three months for the beginning of July to the end of September were up 7 per cent on 2008’s figures at $5.9 billion and net profit was up 27 per cent to $1.64 billion.
The approximately 2,500 Googlers, who are providing an Autumn revenue injection to the Brehon and Glen Eagles hotels in the Kerry town, will also be buoyed that their employer is now firmly an international player. The third quarter figures show that 53 per cent of revenues now come from outside the US. The €3.1 billion of international revenues announced on Thursday last was an increase of 19 per cent. The firm, which employs about 1,500 staff in Dublin at a European operations centre, doesn’t break out country by country figures, except for the US and British markets. Sales in Britain were down one per cent but while the company blamed that on foreign exchange fluctuations and weak macro economic conditions its conference call with analysts suggested it was the former rather than the latter that did the damage.
Despite this slight blip on an otherwise upbeat announcement, Eric Schmidt, chief executive proclaimed “The worst of the recession clearly behind us and because of what we have seen we now have the confidence to be optimistic about our future and we’re going to invest as a result, and that I think is ultimately good for the long term of Google.”
Schmidt is in Killarney (having reportedly piloted his own plane here), along with his global head of sales Nikesh Arora, to address the assembled Googlers. I’m attending a media round table with him this afternoon and the results of the interview will appear in tomorrow’s paper.
Regardless of the content of this afternoon’s Budget speech it smashed a couple of records in terms of internet traffic. The Irish Neutral Exchange (INEX), the organisation which allows Irish ISPs and large corporates to efficiently exchange their internet traffic, had its record traffic volumes this afternoon. Just after 4.00 pm traffic spiked to 7.284Gbits/sec. The previous record was 5.345Gbits/sec on the last Budget day in October ‘08.
Meanwhile over on Twitter “bludget” became the fastest growing term in use on the service, or top “trending topic” as Twitter puts it. The term bludget came about after Marian Finucane stumbled over the word budget on her show last weekend. Suzy Byrne aka political blogger Maman Poulet liked it so much, because it captured the expected bludgeoning that people would receive, that she suggested it as the tag that people should put on their budget related Twitter posts. I wonder have the people at Twitter HQ in San Francisco figured out what Bludget is yet?
Both stats show the appetite that now exists for online business news. Maybe Mr Lenihan should have considered an internet levy rather than the mooted SMS tax which never appeared.
No sooner has the dust settled on Eircom’s settlement with the music industry, which both sides have hailed as a far-seeing agreement to “work closely together to end the abuse of the Internet by P2P copyright infringers”, than cracks have begun to appear.
Clearly Eircom doesn’t want to be the only Irish ISP that monitors peer to peer traffic (which is very different than monitoring what websites someone visits, although media commentary elsewhere makes it sound as if they are the same thing) and implements a three strikes and you’re out rule. If it was any new customers would obviously take their business elsewhere. As a result the statement from Eircom concludes with the line: “The record companies have agreed that they will take all necessary steps to put similar agreements in place with all other ISPs in Ireland.” (more…)
