When Larry Page took over the CEO role at Google last year the company was doing well. Now it's doing better and so Investor's Business Daily has named him "CEO of the Year." The publication summed up its rationale as follows: [Page] reorganized the company's management structure, redesigned the face of the company's products and pushed forward with a multibillion dollar deal to acquire a cellphone manufacturing outfit. He also launched two other products aiming at Groupon, the leader of online coupons, and Facebook, the top social networking site. Google (GOOG) in the past two quarters [...]

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As is being widely reported Google has bought startup Clever Sense, which earlier this year launched the local-mobile recommendations app Alfred. Alfred is like "Pandora for the real world" and was dedicated to creating a comprehensive "interest graph." Clever Sense assigns or maps physical places to one another based on styles, characteristics and attributes in the same way that Pandora does for music. However this process is all done by "artificial intelligence." Here's how Clever Sense itself described the functionality behind Alfred: The Extraction Engine built into the Clever S [...]

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Finding it too much hassle to organize your friends and contacts into circles on Google+? Google may have a solution on the way, thanks to the company's acquisition of Katango. Katango launched this past summer with an iPhone app that automagically organizes Facebook friends through an algorithmic approach that looks at profile information, past interactions with friends and the interactions friends have with each other. Google+ Product VP Bradley Horowitz just confirmed the acquisition in a post on Google+, saying In the earliest days of Google+, I alluded to the fact that we had bi [...]

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Google has made what amounts to a promising downpayment on more ambitious travel search tools with its new Flight Search, debuting today. Launching initially for a select group of US cities Google users will have access to an expanded range of airline search options and a much more verticalized experience than has been available in the past on Google. This is the first product to emerge from Google's controversial acquisition of travel software company ITA, which closed in April and included concessions and guarantees to existing ITA customers such as Kayak, Microsoft, Orbitz, Hotwire and [...]

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Google is buying the venerable Zagat survey, which is the original local reviews provider and has been in business for more than 30 years. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Rumor had it that Zagat has been "on the block" for some time, as the company increasingly struggles to compete in a world that has moved away from print. This is huge news for Google (capital "H") and for local. Google is a content publisher now and the content that Zagat brings arguably closes the gap between Google Places and Yelp. We'll have to see the implementation. Zagat's subscription-based business model h [...]

Related Topics: Google: Acquisitions | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Top News