Alphabet (the company formerly known as Google) reported healthy earnings a few weeks ago. Its revenue reached $21.5 billion, which included $185mm in sales from moonshot projects – investments in everything from driverless cars and solar-powered drones to genomics. But as executives discussed these ventures with investors, a faint echo from an earlier age – […]

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Goldman Sachs released its quarterly results last week over Twitter, abandoning the news distribution services it had used since becoming a public company in 1999. It’s welcome news for Twitter, which could use the boost, but not for Businesswire and PRNewswire, the two giants in the news services industry. Silence from the SEC suggests more […]

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Facebook users were up in arms recently after the company replaced the email address that appears in their profiles with an “@facebook.com” address.   The response was swift and negative, with Facebook fielding a raft of harsh comments in the media and across the blogosphere.  Facebook responded with a brief statement distributed by email from an […]

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Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal that engulfed Barclays last week is the method by which the rate is set.  For more than four decades, the benchmark interest rate has been set by a group of banks, based on voluntary declarations of each bank’s borrowing cost, not actual trades. But […]

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No one is covering themselves in glory in the aftermath of the Facebook IPO. Lead underwriter Morgan Stanley is battling allegations that it priced the deal too richly. Facebook insiders are being called greedy for the last-minute increase in the number of shares they sold in the offering. Facebook’s management is being criticized for signaling […]

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