Read More »

August has been a lucrative month for the Wikimedia Foundation. Last week, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia received a $500,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Now it has been given a $2 million grant from the Omidyar Network.

Read More »

Google announces Google Ventures, a $100 million venture capital fund. Plus, Bill O’Reilly on Twitter, layoffs at Sun and Microsoft kills Encarta. (Mar. 31)

Read More »

In January, Wikipedia claimed nearly 97 percent of the visits that Web surfers in the United States made to online encyclopedias, according to research outfit Hitwise. MSN Encarta received 1.27 percent. Little wonder, then, that Microsoft is discontinuing it. The company announced Monday it would stop selling Encarta software by June and would shut down the encyclopedia’s MSN Web sites on Oct. 31.

Read More »

Jerry Yang and Co. say Microsoft was never committed to a whole-company acquisition of Yahoo. But if that’s the case, why is it that Microsoft seems entirely committed to a whole-company acquisition of another search company–Powerset?

Read More »

Read More »

Embrace, improve and extinguish. That’s what Google has done to search, Web advertising, digital mapping and the like; now it plans to do it to online encyclopedias as well.
Yesterday the company announced Knol (defined as a “unit of knowledge”) , its improvement on the social encyclopedia. With it, the company hopes to encourage experts on [...]

Read More »

Note: John Paczkowski is on vacation and won’t be writing or posting videos until he returns Monday, Aug. 27. To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. We’re calling it the Tech 10 and it appears here.

1. Although they made no jokes about their secret marriage, as did Apple’s Steve Jobs when he appeared with Microsoft’s Bill Gates at D5 in May, the CEO schmoozefest between Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and John Chambers of Cisco today in New York City yielded news of increased cooperation between the two tech giants, according to eWeek. Ballmer also deflected questions from moderator Charlie Rose about whether Microsoft was contemplating acquiring Yahoo, writes Elizabeth Montalbano of IDG News Service.
2. Adobe’s Media Player isn’t quite ready for show time: the eagerly awaited player won’t be fully released until next year. In an exclusive, Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser gets the word from an Adobe spokesman and posts a video interview with Adobe’s Chris Hock, head of its Flash media group.

Read More »