Sep 20
Ever since GoDaddy cooperated with Google by offering “Google Apps for your domain” there where rumours about Google acquiring Godaddy. And it’s been a while now that such rumours appear in articles and in blogs. Speculations could be read at Domainnamewire and eWeek (excellent article by the way) for instance. Now that Yahoo! Finance also throws some fuel on the fire, I’d like to summarize the speculated indicators for the “marriage”:
- The above mentioned cooperation
- Google recently became accredited registrar (according to them to “understand the domain system to improve Google Apps”)
- Bob Parsons is usually very outspoken about his plans. Remember when he had to withdraw the IPO in 2006? He refuses to comment on this one though. (When asked he only said “I have no comment on that, but I’d like to.”)
- Bob recently filed patent applications for search, VOIP, e-mail and domain technologies. This makes him very yummy for Google
Reasons for Google to take over GoDaddy:
- $$$
- More knowledge, know-how and information about Webmasters
- Incredible amount of information and know-how about domains
- Sell webspace AND domain
- GoDaddy patents
- Google would avoid that GoDaddy switches its huge parking pages pool over to Yahoo!
- GoDaddy’s applications would perfectly fit into Google’s applications offering
- Google could effectively clean its databases for instance when domains expire, are unused or have afterwards different content.
- POWER
- EVEN MORE DATA
One thing is for sure, Bob is a very appealing target for Google. An acquisition would make perfectly sense for Google and it would be very lucrative for Bob. But on the other hand, Bob “16 rules” Parsons, ex-Marine, dedicated 100% entrepreneur, selling his assets to Google? Selling his baby to a predator? I cannot imagine that he would accept loosing control over his business (which surely would happen).
Such a mega deal would be a real shake-up in the domain industry!
Bob Parsons 
domain parking Domains GoDaddy Google Hosting Search engines Share This
Sep 19
Stunning. Just one week after SWSoft announced the acquisition of Positive Software and its H-Sphere control panel software (2 million end-users), they now announced the acquisition of SaaS provider Sphera.com (customers: AT&T, Japan Telecom, Telecom Italia…) and its hosting control panel…
Sphera provides automation, provisioning, virtualization and management software for hosting companies, telecoms and enterprises.
“We’re building a broader solution set and customer base as a technology provider — using a standards-based approach — to enable the delivery of SaaS by application developers and service providers,” said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft. “Through our three recent acquisitions, we estimate that we will be able to reach nearly 1.5 million additional business customers through our ISV and service provider partners.”
Well this is correct, but standards established by them! 
If you’re into SaaS and/or value added services for hosting companies there are good chances that you will have to meet their standards. We’ll see how this will have an impact on software manufacturers.
From leading position they now definitely moved to a dominant position. Then you can establish standards. Kind of the Microsoft of Hosting and Virtualization.
Where will they stop, and above all when will the European Union intervene? 
Official press release acquisition Positive Software (H-Sphere)
Official press release acquisition Sphera
control panel H Sphere Hosting Provisioning SaaS Software Sphera SWsoft virtualization Share This
Sep 18
The beta phase from July is over and Google now announced the availability of AdSense for Mobile, a program that contextually targets ads to mobile website content. This makes absolutely sense! The ever growing mobile web has been ignored for too long.
AdSense for Mobile will be available in the following countries: US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China and Japan.
I wasn’t part of the invited beta testers but I hope that it’ll be well adapted to the mobile world: no scripts, no big towers/images, not increasing significally page size,…
And it seems that it is!
It supports Text Ad formats only and it doesn’t use any scripts (which would have really surprised me). Instead it generates server-side code.
The following server-side languages are supported:
- PHP Version 4.3.0 or higher
- CGI/Perl Version 5.8 or higher
- JSP Version 1.2 or higher
- ASP Version 3.0 or higher
And what about ColdFusion ?!
The mobile sites itself must be written in WML, XHTML or CHTML. You can find all requirements here.
See official press release here
Official blog entry
Adsense Adsense for mobile advertising dotMobi eBusiness Google mobile web Search engines Share This
