The US internet search company Google on Wednesday won the Prince of Asturias Prize, regarded as the Spanish equivalent of the Nobel, in the category of communication and humanities, the jury announced in the northern city of Oviedo.
The company co-founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page had made possible "a gigantic cultural revolution" in just a decade, favouring access to knowledge on the internet "beyond ideological, economic, linguistic or racial barriers," the jury said.
The Prince of Asturias Prize, which is worth 50,000 euros (77,000 dollars), is awarded annually in eight categories
Media multinational Bertelsmann said Friday it would close its chain of 36 bookshops in China, effective July 1, because the 21st Century retail chain had failed to turn a profit.
The company said at its German head office that it had announced the move the same day in Beijing to the 200 staff. The business had failed to achieve its targets, said Bertelsmann, which is both a book publisher and retailer as well as a major music and TV investor.
Bertelsmann said it would continue to invest in China as one of its most important markets.
Separately, its Random House subsidiary confirmed the acquisition of Prestel, a Munich-based firm that publishes books about art in English and German.
Prestel, founded in 1924, issues books for children and adult art-lovers about paintings, photography and design. The books are found in art-gallery shops in many parts of the world.
Austrian kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch is preparing for the launch of her own TV talkshow on June 1, but also expects criticism for her move from victim to TV personality.
The 20-year-old, who was kidnapped on her way to school in 1998 and kept in a dungeon prison for eight years, said Monday she was excited about launching the monthly show, which will be aired by Puls TV, a small local station.
"I am very curious about the reactions," she told the Austrian press agency APA.
The show is called: "Natascha Kampusch meets ...," and believed that there would "definitely" be criticism.
"So much has been written about me. So many people want to know how it feels to be on the other side," she explained her motivation to become a TV celebrity.
In her first show the former kidnap victim will interview Austrian racing legend Niki Lauda.
Kampusch's escape in summer 2006 put her immediately in the international media spotlight. Her abductor, 44-year-old technician Wolfgang Priklopil committed suicide hours after her escape.
Norwegian media group Schibsted said Monday it planned to buy 35 per cent of the free Swedish newspaper Metro for 350 million kronor (58 million dollars) and immediately cease publication of its own rival free newspaper Punkt SE.
The deal is subject to approval by Swedish competition authorities.
Punkt SE was one of three free newspapers available in the Swedish capital Stockholm but generated a loss in 2007 of 198 million kronor, and 44 million kronor in the first quarter of 2008.
The cost to shut down Punkt SE was estimated at 65 million kronor, Schibsted said in a statement.
Media analysts had anticipated the move by Schibsted, and rival free newspaper Stockholm City chief executive Anders Kvarby said he was not surprised, according to the online edition of the Resume weekly that specializes in covering the media market.
Schibsted-owned tabloid Aftonbladet and Metro Sweden were according to a statement to form a company which will collaborate on advertisement sales, which will also include Stockholm daily Svenska Dagbladet that is also owned by Schibsted.
The collaboration was estimated to reach 4.2 million readers.
The first Metro newspaper was published 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden. The group now publishes some 70 editions in 23 countries in Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia in 19 languages.
EBay Inc is considering selling its Skype internet telephone division unless it can be combined with other units, the company said.
EBay will review Skype this year to see if it is helping its online auction and PayPal systems, eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe told Britain's Financial Times on Friday.
If the results don't pan out, the company would take a new look at the situation. This could lead to selling Skype, the report said.
But Donahoe dismissed reports that eBay wanted to sell the internet payment system PayPal, which Donahoe said brings huge advantages to eBay and which the company wants to hold on to "for many years," Donahoe said.
EBay bought Skype, which processes phone calls over the internet at great savings compared to cell and land phone lines, for 2.6 billion dollars in 2005.
The online auction company had intended to put Skype to use in selling goods online, but EBay said last year already that the phone service was not measuring up to those expectations.
EBay wrote off 1.39 billion dollars for Skype in October, Bloomberg financial news service reported.
More than 309 users have registered with Skype, which generated revenues of 500 million dollars this year. Skype says it is also producing a profit.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written by volunteers, is to be published in Germany as a book for people who prefer turning pages to clicking links, publishing multinational Random House said Tuesday.
Editors will distil 50,000 of the most popular entries in the German version of Wikipedia into the 1,000-page volume to go on sale in September. When begun, Wikipedia was perceived as making books redundant, with no future for printed encyclopaedias.
The book will draw on the Wikipedia community's unconventional ideas of what knowledge people want, rather than prescriptions by scholars. There will be entries for Carla Bruni (the French first lady), Playstation 3 and Donald Duck's fellow characters.
Football stadiums or the US television series Dr House will rate as entries alongside the more usual nations and statesmen.
Random House, part of the Bertelsmann group of Germany, said the selection of 50,000 headwords would be based on the most common terms searched by the 15 million monthly users of Wikipedia in German.
"It's a document of the zeitgeist," said Beate Varnhorn, chief of the Bertelsmann Lexicography Institute, adding that professional editors would check the facts and edit out incongruous passages.
She said the volume would appeal to homes that had no permanent internet connection, since books were always available, but could also be bought by people who just like to browse for interesting facts.
Arne Klempert, a spokesman for Wikipedia Germany, said the definitions would only be short summaries of the Wikipedia articles and there was no breach of the rights of Wikipedia contributors.
Commercial republication was allowed under the Wikipedia rules accepted by the site's users. Those rules also applied to Random House, which would not be allowed to claim copyright over the book.
"They can't re-monopolize it," said Klempert, who said Random House had taken the initiative and proposed the idea to Wikipedia.
"This will demonstrate that open-source writing also offers publishing houses opportunities for commercial development."
The German Wikipedia is second in size to the English Wikipedia. It was once calculated that it would take at least 750 thick volumes to print all 2.3 million articles in the English-language version.
Swedish commercial broadcaster TV4 has been dropped as international distributor of the broadcasts from the Nobel award ceremony in Stockholm, Nobel Foundation director Michael Sohlman said Monday.
Sohlman said TV4 had "violated" terms of the contract with Nobel Foundation subsidiary Nobel Media that stated the December 10 award ceremony was to be broadcast live.
However, broadcasts in China were not broadcast live and remarks by Nobel Foundation chairman Marcus Storch were censored in 2007, according to the Nobel Foundation.
Storch's remarks alluded to an exhibition on freedom of expression at the Nobel Peace Museum in Oslo, Norway.
TV4 was awarded the contract last year to produce and broadcast the award ceremony in Stockholm, the Nobel banquet and the Nobel Prize Concert.
The choice of TV4 was seen as a setback for Swedish public broadcaster SVT that had for years broadcast the ceremony from the Stockholm Concert Hall and banquet held at Stockholm City Hall.
Sohlman said there were other television companies in Europe but declined to say if talks had been initiated with other groups.
The Nobel Foundation manages the assets of Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel who endowed the prizes for literature, medicine, physics, chemistry and peace.
Newspaper circulation fell 3.6 per cent in the six months ending in March as the transition from paper to online continued apace according to figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
At least one Wisconsin newspaper has taken the bull by the horns, stopping its nearly 100-year-old print edition and going entirely to online production.
The New York Times' circulation fall 3.85 per cent while its Sunday circulation dropped more than 9 per cent. The only major newspapers to buck the trend were USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, which both experienced gains of less than 1 percent.
The Los Angeles Times reported a drop of 5.13 per cent in weekday circulation.
Weekday print circulation at 530 newspapers fell to 41.1 million from 42.6 million a year earlier, while average Sunday print circulation for the six months through March fell 4.6 per cent.
"That decline is certainly worse than in the past few years," Rick Edmonds, of the Poynter Institute, a non-profit continuing education source for journalists, told Bloomberg News. Newspapers are cutting back on trial subscriptions in order to lower circulation costs, he said.
The figures underlined the crisis facing the US newspaper industry as readers increasingly get their news online, where advertising rates are not nearly enough to compensate for the drop in subscriptions.
The Capital Times, a 90-year-old publication in Madison, Wisconsin is not waiting for doom to strike. The newspaper has seen its circulation drop from a high of around 40,000 in the 1960's to 18,000. It stopped its presses after printing its Saturday edition and now publishes solely online.
The paper cut staff by about 20 through buyouts and now has a staff of 40 publishing a web-only product.
"We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not relevant," Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, said in an interview with The New York Times. "We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere."
Fake newscaster Stephen Colbert was named Webby Person of the Year Tuesday in the annual Webby Awards that are often touted as the "Oscars of the Internet."
Colbert's portrayal of a pompous right wing news anchor has made his Comedy Central show one of the most popular comedies on television. But the Webby judges said the close integration of the show with his web site, and the search engine manipulations that made him the "greatest living American" according to a Google search also made him the top web personality of the year.
A special achievement award also went to will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas frontman whose video for Barack Obama, Yes We Can, became a viral hit on the internet.
In the awards for websites, The New York Times' online unit won eight regular Webby Awards in such categories as news, mobile listings and animation. The Onion satire site won seven, while Web sites for Apple Inc. and National Geographic magazine along with a user-confession site, PostSecret, won four awards each.
The Webby Awards have been presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences since 1996, but users also play a part in picking the winners. For each of the categories a winner is chosen by both the Academy and the popular vote, which is cast online.
Photo-sharing site Flickr scooped both gongs in the best community category. In the social networking category Flock, a "social web browser," took the academy's prize while Facebook took the people's vote.
Both prizes in the movie and film category went to The Simpsons Movie website. Annie Lennox's official website won the Webby award for best celebrity and fan site. The BBC picked up three prizes including the popular vote for best news site.
Other awards included The Huffington Post for best political blog, Factcheck.org for best politics site and Wainy Days for best comedy. The prizes for the best weird sites went to Passive-Aggressive Notes (Academy), I Can Has Cheezburger? (Popular Vote).
Company's 'Tube' device would be touch-based and feature Java support
Nokia remains at work on its answer to the Apple iPhone, codenamed "Tube," a company official said on Monday.
Shown in a slide at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in Redwood City, Calif., Tube looks similar to the popular iPhone. The Nokia device showed graphical displays, such as a promotion for the movie Shrek the Third. Other capabilities will be featured, such as the ability to upload photos.
"It's our first touch device," said Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia. Interfacing with the system is done via touch similar to the iPhone. He said the company has not published the planned date of shipment for Tube.
Nokia believes it can compete with iPhone, and during his presentation, Libretto compared volume shipments of iPhone to Nokia's shipments of phones. Since the launch of iPhone in June, Apple has shipped 5 million to 6 million of the devices, paling in comparison to Nokia's device shipments, Libretto said. "We've done that [volume] since we've had dinner on Friday," he said.
San Francisco/New York (dpa) - In another possible sign of the challenges facing traditional US news media, CBS, the one time leader of television news, is negotiating to have CNN take over some of its news-gathering operations, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
CBS denied the report.
"CBS News has no plans to outsource any of its newsgathering operations to CNN," a CBS News spokesperson said. "We are extremely satisfied with and proud of our newsgathering operation. No outside arrangement is being negotiated."
Quoting executives briefed on the issue, the report said that the talks focused on reducing CBS's news-gathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network's news feeds.
Another possibility would be for CBS to keep its correspondents in certain regions but pair them with CNN crews, the story said.
Though a traditional leader of network news, CBS has been mired in last place in recent years, despite paying news star Katie Couric 15 million dollars a year to attract viewers back to its evening news show.
At the same time overall network viewer ratings have plummeted amid the challenge from hundreds of cable TV stations and the internet.
A hitch in the 22-billion-dollar takeover deal of the largest US radio network, Clear Channel, was partly resolved when a Texas court backed financing of the deal.
A district court judge in Texas ordered a reluctant group of banks to release the money they had pledged to help finance the deal, Clear Channel said Thursday on its website.
Judge John D Gabriel of Bexar County, Texas agreed late Wednesday with Clear Channel that "irreparable harm would result if the banks were not immediately enjoined from ... interfering with the merger agreement," the broadcast company said.
Clear Channel and the investment firms that want to buy it - Bain Capital and Thomas H Lee Partners - have asked various courts, including in New York, to rule on foot-dragging by the banks who pledged to finance the deal deal.
Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Schweizer Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Wachovia Corp are hesitating because they could lose at least 2.7 billion dollars after loan prices have fallen, Bloomberg financial news service reported.
The escalating credit crisis in the US finance sector, triggered by mortgage loans to un-creditworthy borrowers and the purchase of such risky mortgage securities by investment banks, has tightened the credit supplies for such takeover deals.
The deal is among the largest transactions floated during the flurry of credit-financed takeovers that preceded the current crisis.
Judge Gabriel issued a restraining order that that the banks must not "interfere with or thwart consummation of the merger agreement" by refusing to fund the transaction, insisting on terms inconsistent with their commitment or refusing to act in good faith in the drafting of loan documents.
Clear Channel said it was "pleased" that the banks and buyers will "now be able to move quickly to complete the loan documents and fund the merger."
Clear Channel, the largest US radio and billboard conglomerate, last year was also reported to be selling its television division with 56 local stations for 1.2 billion dollars to a private investment firm.
A Cairo court on Wednesday sentenced Egyptian newspaper editor to six months in prison for allegedly spreading false rumours about the health of Hosny Mubarak.
Ibrahim Eissa, the editor-in-chief of the opposition daily al- Dostur described the ruling against him as "purely political". The New York-based rights watchdog, Human Rights Watch, also criticized the court decision.
"An opposition journalist in Egypt is like a person walking on a minefield. It can explode anytime at him," Eissa told the al-Jazeera news channel.
He added that the ruling was a political decision and a message to the other opposition journalists in country not to oppose the Egyptian government.
Eissa stressed that the authorities look at his case as a personal enmity between him and the government.
Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that the court ruling is purely political and is considered a blow against freedom of expression in Egypt.
Eissa had been also accused with separate charges of "disrupting the public peace and harming the national economy."
He was questioned on September 5 in relation to accusations of spreading "dangerous" rumours about Mubarak's health.
Prosecutors also accused Eissa of having negatively affected the stock exchange and potential foreign investment with rumours.
Sources told dpa that Eissa plans to appeal the verdict.
Beijing (dpa) - Chinese authorities on Thursday expelled the last two foreign journalists in Tibet.
"A high-ranking functionary threatened us with the revocation of our Chinese visas," German Georg Blume said in a telephone interview from Lhasa before he and fellow German Kristin Kupfer were escorted to a train out of Tibet.
Blume, the China correspondent for the weekly German newspaper Die Zeit and the Berlin daily taz, said he and Kupfer, a correspondent for the Austrian magazine Profil, had resisted five days of police calls for them to leave the Himalayan region after demonstrations and violence broke out in Lhasa March 14.
"We were told today in an intimidating manner that if we did not go now, we would encounter large problems, namely over our visas," Blume said Thursday.
Earlier, James Miles, the correspondent for the British Economist magazine was ordered out of Tibet and several Hong Kong journalist were also expelled Monday.
Attempts by the German embassy and EU ambassador in Beijing to persuade Beijing to allow the journalists to remain were unsuccessful.
The violence involving Tibetan pro-independence demonstrators and Chinese forces was touched off by the 49th anniversary of the failed uprising in Tibet against Chinese rule on March 10.
The central government has confirmed 13 deaths during rioting Friday in Lhasa, and the Tibetan government in exile said it had confirmed the death of at least 80 people there. Exile groups have also reported deaths in violence in other parts of Tibet as well as outside the region.
New York (dpa) - Getty Images, the world's largest photo agency, is to be sold for 2.4 billion dollars to investor Hellman & Friedman, the agency said Monday.
The sale includes 400 million dollars in debt and its stockholders will receive 34 dollars in cash per share, Getty said.
Getty's stock value fell by half last year, and the sale price is 55 per cent of its value as of mid-January, when Getty announced its sale.
The sale to be completed in the second quarter must still be approved by stockholders.
The photo agency was founded in 1995 and grew quickly with clients including media and advertising agencies. The firm faces competition from news agencies and private photo firms, like Jupitermedia and Corbis.
Hamburg (dpa) - German media concern Gruner and Jahr announced Wednesday that it has taken full control of the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) newspaper from co-owner Pearson, publisher of the London-based Financial Times.
Gruner and Jahr (G+J) did not disclose how much it paid for the 50-per-cent stake owned by Pearson, but industry sources put the figure at around 15 million euros (22 million dollars), including licensing fees.
A statement said the two partners, which operated the salmon-coloured daily in a joint venture, had reached a long-term agreement covering use of the Financial Times name and editorial cooperation with the former parent newspaper in London.
"Today is a good day for G+J Deutschland and the business media. The takeover is a major opportunity to generate impulses for the other economic publications in our stable," G+J board member Bernd Buchholz told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
The FTD entered the German market in a format similar to its British namesake in 2000 and has seen circulation rise to 104,500 but has failed to break even. Turnover in 2007 was around 60 million euros.
A bid to sell the paper to Hamburg-based published Spiegel Verlag failed to materialize last year.
Gruner and Jahr holds a 25.5 per cent stake in Spiegel Verlag, which puts out the German Weekly news magazine Der Spiegel. Media concern Bertelsmann owns 75 per cent of Gruner and Jahr.
REDMOND, Wash. and OSLO, Norway -- Microsoft Corp (Nasdaq: MSFT - message board) today announced that it will make an offer to acquire Fast Search & Transfer ASA (OSE: "FAST"), a leading provider of enterprise search solutions, through a cash tender offer for 19.00 Norwegian kroner (NOK) per share. This offer represents a 42 per cent premium to the closing share price on 4 Jan 2008 (the last trading day prior to this announcement), and values the fully diluted equity of FAST at 6.6 billion NOK (or approximately $1.2 billion US). FAST's board of directors has unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept the offer. In addition, shareholders representing in aggregate 37 per cent of the outstanding shares, including FAST's two largest institutional shareholders, Orkla ASA and Hermes Focus Asset Management Europe, have irrevocably undertaken to accept the offer. The transaction is expected to be completed in the second quarter of calendar year 2008.
Berlin (dpa) - Sales of graphic advertising on the internet have doubled in the space of one year, German trade body Bitkom said in Berlin Monday.
A survey conducted by Thomson Media Control priced the year's sales of banners, pop-ups, special sponsored sites and video clips in Germany at 976 million euros (1.42 billion dollars). In 2006, the figure was 480 million euros.
The figures do not include text advertising such as the paid text links on a Google page. A spokesman said Bitkom did not have access to figures for that sort of advertising and he was not aware they had been published.
Key buyers of display-style graphic advertising on the web included telecommunications companies, followed by big general retailers, entertainment and media companies and banks, Bitkom said.
Murdoch buys into German media industry | Top |
Frankfurt (dpa) - Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch has made a move into the German media industry with his company announcing it had paid 287 million euros (421.6 million dollars) for a key stake in the pay-TV group Premiere.
Murdoch's News Corp purchased the 14.58-per-cent stake in Germany's biggest pay-TV company from German cable operator Unitymedia NRW GmbH.
Unitymedia received 16.4 million shares from Premiere last year as part of a deal on German Bundesliga soccer.
ROUNDUP: Murdoch buys stake in main German pay-TV company | Top |
Cologne, Germany (dpa) - A vehicle of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought just under one-sixth of the German world's principal pay-TV company for cash on Monday, sending shares in the company, Premiere, sharply higher.
Australian-born US tycoon Murdoch stalked a previous incarnation of Premiere in 2002, when he owned nearly one quarter of it and vainly tried to buy control from creditors after the collapse of Germany mogul Leo Kirch's media empire.
On Monday, his company gained its first stake in the new Premiere, paying 287 million euros (422 million dollars) for the 14.58-per-cent stake previously owned by German cable operator Unitymedia NRW GmbH, and stock markets were guessing Murdoch would not stop there.
News Corp, which owns Fox News, Sky Italia and Star TV in Asia, has few major investments in Germany and Austria although the two countries make up Europe's principal media market in value terms.
"We see major potential in the German pay-TV market," a Murdoch statement said, adding that the timing for the acquisition had been ideal. Premiere has more than 4 million subscribers in Germany and Austria.
Premiere shares gained 26 per cent after the news and traded by late afternoon at 15.66 euros, 23 per cent higher than Friday's close of 12.74 euros on Frankfurt's XETRA electronic market.
Unitymedia said in Cologne it had acquired the block of 16.4 million shares in February 2007 from a rival Arena as part of a deal on German Bundesliga football broadcasts. Murdoch's company paid 17.50 euros per share Monday.
Two years ago, Premiere appeared to be doomed after losing the rights to its cash cow, transmission of German football live. But in a lucky turnaround, it re-acquired the rights after its rival stumbled.
Its future remains uncertain, since it must once again win rights to broadcast Germany's Bundesliga games in the next TV rights auction this year.
In Munich a Premiere spokesman said Murdoch was right that there was a great deal of potential in pay-TV in Germany but declined more comment.
German politicians were hostile to Murdoch's efforts in 2006 to buy control of one of the country's four main television groups, ProSiebenSat.1.
News Corp. is active in book publishing and film production as well as news and television. Last year it bought US business news group Dow Jones which includes the newspaper Wall Street Journal.
Berlin (dpa) - Sales of graphic advertising on the internet have doubled in the space of one year, German trade body Bitkom said in Berlin Monday.
A survey conducted by Thomson Media Control priced the year's sales of banners, pop-ups, special sponsored sites and video clips in Germany at 976 million euros (1.42 billion dollars). In 2006, the figure was 480 million euros.
The figures do not include text advertising such as the paid text links on a Google page. A spokesman said Bitkom did not have access to figures for that sort of advertising and he was not aware they had been published.
Key buyers of display-style graphic advertising on the web included telecommunications companies, followed by big general retailers, entertainment and media companies and banks, Bitkom said.
Tokyo (dpa) - The ghost of recession is going round again in Japan. Dropping share values as a result of the rapid rise of the yen now reflects the growing unease over developments in the United States - Japan's most important export market - as well as over developments at home.
While analysts say that the credit crisis in the US has affected Japanese banks and companies only slightly so far, the world's second largest economy reacts with extreme sensitivity to any news from the US.
Japan remembers the 10-year financial crisis of the 1990s only too well. It lasted longer than expected and left a lasting impact on the Japanese economy. Concerns are that the situation in the US could become even worse.
The Japanese economy is growing further as analysts in Tokyo expect growth of around 2 percentage points this year. However, black clouds have been gathering over the last two quarters.
"The growth indicators show a cool-down," economists at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo say, although they had still hope at the beginning of the year that domestic demand would increase through falling unemployment and growing bonus payments. But that has not happened.
Private households in Japan continue to be careful and use their excess income - from increased bonus payments, not higher basic incomes - to restock their savings that have fallen sharply.
This restraint in spending affects, for instance, Japan's internationally very successful carmakers as demand at home is falling. Toyota and others therefore focus on foreign markets.
Like the car industry the whole Japanese economy still depends heavily on exports while at the same time moving their production increasingly abroad. This means that foreign trade risks, such as lowering demand in the US or even the fear of another potential worldwide financial crisis, cause even more worries.
Japan therefore is no longer as optimistic as it used to be with regard to developments of company profits, and even the word "recession" is back in the analyses by economists.
Japanese exports might still be doing well, "but if it comes to a long-lasting weakening of the dollar after the US credit crisis, then not just the euro will be rising in value but also the Japanese yen," warns Martin Schulz, an economist at the Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo.
He said he did not expect that Japan will fall back into recession, but the risk of an appreciating yen is currently particularly great.
Japanese investors have for years focused on the dollar-zone because the economy was only slowly recovering while interest rates in the so-called Carry Trades were low, the economist explains.
"A lasting weakness of the dollar however makes these investments seem increasingly risky," says Schulz, "which could lead to a large- scale return of Japanese capital."
The result would be a rapid rise of the yen with painful consequences for Japanese companies, he adds.
San Francisco (dpa) - With Google's share price climbing above 700 dollars, an eerily familiar debate raged Wednesday in the blogosphere, on Wall Street and across Silicon Valley: Was the latest internet wonder vastly overvalued?
Or is the Google phenomenon just beginning?
Google's stratospheric valuation ranked it as the fifth-most valuable company in the US by share value, with stock worth 219 billion dollars.
The dizzying price means that Google is worth more than eight times as much when it went public three years ago. It also means that Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both 34, who founded the company just 10 years ago, are now worth 20 billion dollars each.
The only companies worth more than Google are oil colossus ExxonMobil, conglomerate General Electric, software giant Microsoft and the telecom titan AT&T.
Google is worth more than consumer-products leader Procter & Gamble at 215 billion dollars, financial giants Bank of America and Citigroup at 213 billion dollars and 209 billion dollars respectively, and established "old economy" brands such as Coca-Cola at 142 billion dollars and McDonald's at 70 billion dollars.
If you put your trust in Wall Street analysts, the company is still just starting its growth spurt as it attracts the brightest technology minds from around the world and aggressively seeks to expand its core business of search-linked advertising to a myriad of markets across the world.
A Bloomberg News poll of 37 analysts found 33 of them rating the stock as a "buy," meaning they believe it will climb in value. The other four rated Google as a "hold," meaning it is likely to remain stable.
The recent run-up comes amid reports of Google aggressively moving into the mobile telephone market, which is seen as the great uncharted territory of internet advertising. The company is reportedly close to completing the so-called gPhone - a set of mobile phone technologies meant to make Google's standard features as accessible on cellphones as they are on PCs.
In another initiative announced this week, Google released a set of software standards for social networking sites that could see it take a central position in one of the internet's fastest-growing sectors.
Even without these initiatives, Google's profits seem on an unstoppable growth upswing. Its recent third-quarter earnings showed a 46-per-cent leap in net income to 1.07 billion dollars as revenue grew 57 per cent to 4.23 billion dollars.
But veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist Richard Hansen believes that Google has grown too fast, and that investors could get burned when it comes crashing down to earth.
"If there's anything the last tech crash taught us, it's that what goes up must come down," he said Thursday. "Google can't live up to the hype or the financial expectations."
There were certainly plenty of commentators in the blogosphere who seemed to agree.
"I can rattle off a long list of tech companies that grew faster than they could handle, and then started to implode," said "Googlefatigue" on a New York Times message board.
"Google is going to implode. It will go down as one of the most infamous falls from grace in American history," said George Riddick, chief executive of Imageline.
But there were even more people who believed that Google was at the centre of a media revolution and well placed to capitalize on a wealth of opportunities.
"Microsoft today is trading at approximately 30,000 per cent higher than its initial price," noted blogger Herb Sunderman. "Google at 700 dollars is just beginning its ascent."
