Will Nokia’s Windows Mobile Phone Deliver?

Mashable says the Nokia Lumia 800 could be the best Windows Phone yet. The Wall Street Journal is a little more sceptical of Nokia’s Windows Mobile phone launch though. Take a look

Cashmore on Technology’s Paradigm Shift

Here’s an interesting conversation about social media and Internet and technology companies’ adjustment to it

Microsoft: $8.4 Billion Down the Drain

Though, in the eyes of Microsoft executives, virtually any outcome might seem better than letting the company fall into the hands of Google, which still has no strong foothold in social or communication software – one of the few online areas where Microsoft still maintains a market share advantage. Unfortunately for shareholders, anything less than a stellar success might just look like billions more flushed down the drain in Microsoft’s thus far failed bids at online dominance. Even if the company can quadruple the size of Skype’s business, they will still be losing money online if nothing else changes and they will have only added a few percentage points to top line growth – neither of which is likely to move to stock price in any major way

When will large cap tech stocks start paying dividends?

I would argue that this is evidence that these companies are wasting shareholder capital by plunking down for splashy acquisitions and large new capital investments that are not paying off. Cisco and Microsoft have huge cash balances waiting to be deployed. This money can go to buying back shares at inflated prices or making acquisitions of dubious value to shareholders. The right thing for these companies to do is not necessarily just restructure but change their mindset and accept that the glory days of top line growth are over. First and foremost this means increasing the dividend payout to match other sectors of the economy.

Desperately Seeking Search

Internet search is broken.

Battered by spammers, content farms and black hat optimizers, the typical Internet search is a horrible mess. Try basic search terms like "washing machine". Or try a term relevant to this site like "Finance Blog". What you get is a bunch of tricksters who have gamed the search engines to bring their clearly less relevant sites to the top of the pile. You as the user have to wade through these sites, hoping to find something remotely relevant to your search. Many give up in frustration. And while this situation is most acute at Google because their large search market share makes them a target for these shenanigans, the situation is better at Bing/Yahoo, but pretty much the same.

How do we solve this problem?

Why Nokia and Microsoft are getting together

If you saw the last round of data for the burgeoning mobile market, you would understand exactly why Nokia and Microsoft are banding together. These two companies are also rans in a market that has shifted away from voice communication to data and internet as the driving factors. According to Gartner, Nokia’s Symbian operating system

What’s really happening with Bing ‘Cheating’ and Copying Google Search Results

[Updated with a view from a former Google search engineer below] Earlier this week Google disclosed that it had run a sting operation on its main search page which clearly ascertained that Bing, a competitor search engine by Microsoft, was using Google’s search results to tweak its own search results. The furore over this has