Next Steps for Google Books: More E-book Conversion and Retail?

On September 17, 2009

Next Steps for Google Books: More E-book Conversion and Retail?

Google has moved in two directions that will be critical for its bigger view of Google Books, and for book publishing in general. And the combination suggests that some deft strategy could leave the company as one of the most powerful players in the market.


On September 17, 2009

Fragile Regional Banks Turn to Investors in bid to Raise Capital

Beaten down regional banks badly need capital, and they think know where to find it: the public market. Zions, a $53 billion-asset banking company based in Utah, on Thursday affirmed its plan to raise $250 million in a secondary stock offering. Another large regional player, Synovus, earlier this week announced it would seek to raise up $350 million in a stock offering, part of a broader plan by the Georgia company to add $500 million in capital. Also this month, Ohio's Huntington Bancshares said it plans a stock offering expected to raise up to $150 million. Many midsize banks -- those with $1 billion to $100 billion in assets -- need capital to offset rising losses on residential mortgage and,...


On September 17, 2009

Google Captures reCAPTCHA to Boost Book Project

The headline on the Official Google Blog makes sure you know what a CAPTCHA is; "Google Acquires reCAPTCHA" is written in the now-familiar wavy, squiggly-style font that you are used to seeing when you want to log on to certain Web sites or post links on Facebook.


On September 17, 2009

Business-Class Rising? More Like Not Sinking Spectacularly

Today I was looking at a few articles, mainly stemming from the International Air Transport Association reporting its July numbers, which showed that first- and business-class travel showed an improvement. By improvement, that means that instead of falling 21.3 percent in June, it fell only 14.1 percent in July. That's kind of like saying -- an improvement is getting shot in the leg instead of the chest. Maybe it is, but most people probably wouldn't like to be shot. It's bad news. Let's try not to make it good news until it really is, OK, IATA? That said, the same IATA also projected that about $11 billion would be lost by airlines in 2009, but again came with the good news:...


On September 17, 2009

QUIZ: Do Execs Prefer Face-to-Face Selling?

A recent Sales Machine post and poll asked "Will 'Face-To-Face' Selling Be Obsolete?"  About half of the Sales Machine readers who voted in that poll insisted that face-to-face would remain "absolutely necessary."  So says the selling community.  But what about the BUYING community? A recent poll of B2B executive decision-makers determined exactly whether they prefer to be sold face-to-face, or through some other means (like telephone or online.)  Care to take a guess ?  Here's a poll: [poll id="455"] CLICK HERE for the correct answer »[poll id="455"] The correct answer is 90 percent! At the recent Sales 2.0 conference, a presentation by Gerhard Gschwandtner revealed the interesting fact that, according to a recent poll "87 percent of executives said that...


On September 17, 2009

Circuit City’s Demise Not Lifting Best Buy Yet

Many industry watchers expected Best Buy stores to get a major sales boost after the demise of competitor Circuit City early this year. That's not the case so far, though. Best Buy's second-quarter results were far from stellar. Same-store sales fell 3.9 percent during the period, while net earnings came in at $159 million, down from $202 million in last year's second quarter. The retailer didn't turn in a terrible quarter, however, and actually saw increases in the sales of flat-screen televisions, cell phones and computers. (Gaming, appliance and cameras all saw declines.) And Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn said during the company's earnings call that market share is on the rise. "So far this year we've gained more domestic...


On September 17, 2009

Google Acquisition Will Help Correct Errors in Scanned Works

One of the issues swirling around the Google Book Search (GBS) case is the relatively high rate of errors in the images of the millions of old books Google has scanned. Google's Engineering Director for GBS, Daniel Clancy, addressed this earlier this month when he told Bnet, “I liken our approach to scanning as similar to a progressive JPG.  If you consider the ‘image’ to be all the world’s books and you consider a ‘fully rendered image’ as each of these books being in a digital form at some desired quality level, then our approach is to be able to get all of the books scanned with the knowledge that there is some statistical likelihood that any individual book...
On September 17, 2009

Comparing Bing, Yahoo, Google: Get Beyond Search

A recent Nielsen comparison of search results for U.S. search engines again raised one of those periodic fascinations for the tech industry. This one is called Who's On Top In Search. But I wonder if the measures people are taking do justice to the question.
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