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Google Finance, launched in March last year, has failed to
put a dent in Yahoo Finance’s lead as the most popular web source of financial
news and data.

Google’s service is not even in the top 15 of financial
sites and has yet to break 1m unique visitors a month.

If there is a challenge to Yahoo, which has rested on its
laurels for too long, it comes from AOL’s Money and Finance site. It
unveiled a new version today that is still in its beta testing phase.

Yahoo Finance had 79m unique visitors in October, compared
to 70m for AOL, 46m for MSN Money, 18m for Dow Jones and 15m for CNN Money.

Marty Moe, senior vice president of AOL Money & Finance,
told me the revamp was part of AOL’s strategy of focusing on “key verticals”
rather than clinging to its traditional portal for success.

The site has some impressive features. Its real-time
headlines and news feeds are powered by Relegence, which AOL acquired last
year. Relegence provides a news engine to top brokerages, with more than 3,000
sources. Mr Moe said Yahoo had about 40 in comparison.

The new site will also have “heat indicators” letting users
know when a stock is driving news coverage and users will be able to set up
custom searches on any company or topic.

One of the simplest and most useful features for me was
historic returns being easily available next to Flash-based charts. You can
instantly see how the stock has performed over one month, six months,
year-to-date etc. There is even a “Return since” button linked to a calendar,
so any date can be entered to find out the percentage return since then.

“We want to bring the power of a Bloomberg screen to
individual investors, but make it easy to digest,” said Mr Moe.

The free service is expected to emerge from beta in
the next six to eight weeks and AOL has “a very aggressive 18-month plan” to
continue to add data, he said.

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Here’s food for thought. The average Infosys employee produces roughly the same amount of profit for his or her company in a year as the average worker at Accenture. And that’s in absolute terms, not relative: an engineer hacking out code in Bangalore is adding as much to the corporate bottom line as a consultant in Manhattan, at around $14,000-15,000 a year.

This was pointed out to me by Infosys chief financial officer V Balakrishnan, who stopped by while visiting San Francisco recently. It’s a sign of the considerable leverage in the business model of the Indian services companies (at around $50,000 a year, revenues per employee for Infosys are only 40 per cent those of Accenture, so the parity on profits looks impressive.)

There are two ways to look at this. One is that the Accentures and IBMs of the world have ample room to expand their margins. If it brings costs down closer to the level of their Indian rivals, the "global sourcing" both are pursuing should fuel profit growth for some time.

The other side of the coin is that price deflation could be about to turn scary for the Western IT services firms. The business model of the Indian firms - with healthy profits despite much lower prices - leaves them in a strong position to attack.

For now, the Western firms publicly brush off the threat: the Indian firms are stuck with lower-value work, and are not big enough to be a force in many parts of the IT services market. But that is changing fast (Infosys, for instance, plans to add 30,000 workers next year to the 80,000 it already has.) The Indian firms have also been recuiting consultants and other "front end" workers in the West to build deeper links with customers there.

It may still be the case that noone ever got fired for buying from IBM - but when it comes to future services deals, they might at least get to bargain harder over the price first.

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It’s beginning to look like the Search Wars are over, at least for now: Google has won.

Despite everything Microsoft and Yahoo! have been able to throw at it, Google’s share of the search business has just kept going up, to the point where it finally seems time to declare this contest done (though with two caveats - see below.) Whatever the next front in the battle for online dominance, it looks like it won’t be in search.

The latest figures from ComScore today make the point. Already dominant in Europe, Google’s share of US searches reached 58.5 per cent in October. That is up from only around 35 per cent in November 2004 - the month when Microsoft formally took the gloves off with the launch of its own search engine. In almost every month since, Google has bitten off a little more of the business. (Nielsen NetRatings figures show a slightly less dramatic rise, but the story is essentially the same.) Who would have predicted that three years ago?

A growing awareness that Google’s lead now looks impregnable has underpinned its latest stock price rise, and led one analyst this week to suggest that $900 a share is now in sight.

So what could go wrong? One caveat is that, despite Google’s massive brand and technological advantages, there is still nothing to stop its users defecting en masse for a better experience elsewhere. It has become fashionable to compare the maturing Google to Microsoft, but the lack of customer lock-in is formidable. The search wars are over for now, but this is a fight that can easily resume - after all, who would have expected a return to the Browser Wars?

The other caveat is China. Fair or not, Google has not been able to make much of a dent against Baidu in what is set to become the world’s biggest internet search market.

Still, it will be years before China boasts an online advertising business to match the scale of its internet audience. For the next few years at least, the lion’s share of the booming profits from internet search now look destined to flow into Google’s coffers.

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MC Hammer may have left his 90s chart hits and wide pants
behind, but the rap star is still capable of some nifty dance moves, notably the
launch of DanceJam.com, a new online video site.

While YouTube is the home of everything from stupid pet tricks to movie trailers, the
explosion of online video means new video “verticals” are emerging – such as
the comedy clips on Will Ferrell’s FunnyorDie.com and now DanceJam, still in a closed beta stage.

Giving us some Hammer time at the FT’s San Francisco
office, “the dean of urban dance” proved he was extremely tech-savvy and was
providing much more than a pop star’s endorsement for a site he has co-created
with Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young, founders of the social networking browser
Flock.

His interest in the internet dates back to 1994: “It was
purely ego-driven,” he says.

“I thought if the Net is so great, why can’t I see my videos
on it.”

He remembers visiting Silicon Graphics and going over to Apple and "seeing some kid writing the code for Quicktime."

The idea for DanceJam has evolved over the past two years.

"The challenge i saw was that there was a dramatic decline in the music industry and there was a need to create the next music model."

He decided to build a community around dance in all its forms and tested his ideas in talks with Google and Ron Conway, a well known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, before hooking up with Flock’s executives.

DanceJam allows members to upload videos of their dances and will combine this user-generated content with music and dance from major media companies. It categorises dance into different styles and geographies and lets its community vote on the hottest exponents.

Its video player is innovative - allowing slow-motion and "scratch" type effects where it rewinds three seconds.

MC Hammer says he has been lining up "five-star sponsorship" and will extend this to offline "dance-off" competitions. In turn, these will be filmed and become premium content on the site.

He sees endless possibilities: "Cheerleading - I’d need another rack of servers just for [those contests]," he says.

Hammer himself does not aim to dominate DanceJam with his skills.

"I’m trying to downplay Hammer," he says.

"But there will be the Hammer brand, some instructional videos, and we’ll be doing some very exciting things to help you sharpen your dance repertoire."

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The junior staffer at HM Revenue and Customs who just mislaid personal data concerning 25m people is in good company. He/she can draw solace from the experience of Jared Ilovar, the Ohio state intern who earlier this year mislaid 800,000 social security numbers.

Funny how cases like these always follow the same pattern:

Ageing media. Ohio trusted its data to tapes, HMCR burned its information onto disks. When there’s a need to move such sensitive data around, why put it onto storage media that can get lost in the post or stolen from the back of a car?

Encryption. Or rather, lack of it. If the UK’s tax authority doesn’t use data encryption, what are the chances that any other government department will be any more secure?

Access. How come junior employees and even interns in government agencies have access to vast troves of data, and the ability to move them around seemingly at will? It doesn’t seem enough to protest that this was unauthorised. It shouldn’t have been possible.

Lack of accountability. Both of these cases could very well have remained buried. Three weeks after sending (and losing) the first set of disks, the unnamed HMRC official simply sent another in its place. The Ohio intern was told to keep quiet about the theft of tapes from his car. How many other failures like this simply never come to light?

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Did Google just dodge a bullet in the Senate as it moves closer to acquiring DoubleClick? It depends on how you look at it.

A joint letter today from the Democratic chairman and the ranking Republican member of the Senate’s Anti-trust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights committee seems to find little fault with the acquisition. Addressed to the Federal Trade Commission, the letter urges the regulators to think long and hard about the implications of the deal - but it concludes that the politicians haven’t reached "any definitive conclusion" themselves on the matter. An open invitation for the FTC to issue the green light?

Not so fast, says Scott Cleland, one of the biggest Washington agitators against the deal. Cleland points us to what he says are signs that Google may not get a free pass. The letter is the first bi-partisan one of its kind this year, he says - so while the largely non-confrontational tone makes it look like there are few concerns, the joint position is itself unusual and significant. Also, according to Cleland, it is significant that the senators mention (more than once) Google’s "dominant market position." You and I may already have taken it as read that Google’s position in its market was pretty dominant, but Cleland claims the senators are giving the FTC a strong nudge to take a closer look at its spreading power.

Despite this, the odds must be on Google clearing the anti-trust hurdle in Washington with room to spare. The biggest risk still looks like it lies in Europe, where regulators are more inclined than their counterparts in Washington to attach conditions to merger approvals.

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Amazon’s new e-book reader has kindled a blaze of blogging reaction to the $399 device.

Reviews of Kindle have been mixed, to say the least. A selection:

PaidContent says that, despite Amazon’s claims “the screen isn’t like reading actual paper. It’s not as bright and there is glare if the light is too direct…this is very much a first-generation product. It’s not going to revolutionize the industry overnight.”

Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research analyst, praises its ubiquity, pricing and search function.

“The ability to access content from anywhere is important and the fact that there’s no PC involved makes the process a lot easier…the notion of $9.99 best-sellers appeals to me…the ability to find what I’m looking for is super important.”

Jupiter’s research (below) suggests only 23 per cent of online consumers are interested in reading fiction or non-fiction books on mobile devices.

Engadget says: “While the reader itself could be mistaken for a Handspring device from the 90s, the service itself certainly makes for a compelling proposition.”

In a poll on its rival Gizmodo’s blog, 51 per cent preferred Sony’s Reader compared to 15 per cent favouring Kindle, while 15.5 per cent voted “If it’s not made by Apple, who cares?”

Jeremy Toeman on his LIVEdigitally blog says Kindle “will fail, and fail terribly.”

“It’s pretty hard to argue that an electronic reader will vastly improve the book discovery, purchase, and consumption experience (unlike how much an MP3 player was able to do that exact thing). …How many people are really in a position where they need a mobile library of 200 books with them to choose from?”

Seth Godin is also highly skeptical:

“The beauty of real books is that they don’t require a reader, which means that millions of people are eligible members of the market. Even if you only have .0001% market share, you can still get your book read. The challenge that my hero Jeff Bezos has is that if he’s really really lucky, he’ll sell a million of these things in a year. And that means that at $10 a book, you need to have significant market share to make an impact. The Sony Reader has been out for months and it has sold, perhaps, a few thousand units.”

David Rothman of Publishers Weekly says Kindle is “like a prop from an old sci-fi horror flick… Maybe, as with the old VW Beetle, we’ll all learn to love the ugliness.”

Gadget freak Robert Scoble has already ordered his Kindle for overnight delivery but admits:

“Getting geeks like me excited by a new “shiny toy” is pretty easy. Getting a large market excited? That’s a LOT harder.”

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It seems that BEA Systems can juggle numbers just as much as Oracle can (see note below.)

Announcing earnings on Thursday, CEO Alfred Chuang wanted Wall Street to overlook his gigantic stock option backdating charge (which virtually wiped out reported profits for the past decade) and focus instead on the software company’s rebounding profit margins. And not just any profit margins but pro forma figures which, among other things, excluded the costs of hiring all those lawyers and bankers to keep the barbarians (in the form of Larry Ellison and Carl Icahn) from the gates.

Shouldn’t expenses like these be seen as a normal cost of doing business, one analyst wondered?

It isn’t normal to come under fire from a hostile bidder and a shareholder activist at the same time, retorted BEA executive Bill Klein. "We don’t believe that both of these circumstances can continue for the long run." Is that reasoned analysis or wishful thinking?

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