Clint Boulton

This fine piece in Wired about a “perpetual window into Gmail” caught my attention this weekend for two reasons. First, I live in Gmail. It’s my primary, personal email haven. Second, considering the data-sucking sounds Path made this month, the idea that Google has left open some potentially serious paths to users’ data is alarming. […]

Stung by two instances where Google Wallet was hacked, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) defended its mobile payment service and claimed it is safer than using credit cards to pay for goods. Google Wallet is a mobile payment app that communicates with smartphones equipped with near-field communication (NFC), a short-distance wireless technology. The app runs on Sprint Nexus […]

No one is going to confuse the fledgling Google+ social network with Facebook and its 845 million worldwide users. With what Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) CEO Larry Page claimed is 90 million users total, people won’t even confuse Google+ with Twitter, which reportedly has more than 200 million users. And yet, Google+ in December saw 20 million […]

The Wall Street Journal report that Google is building a home entertainment system to let users stream music throughout the home without wires has roiled the tech sector the last couple of days. The news comes several months after Google unveiled a streaming music server that let users tap a CD against a device to […]

Oracle’s (NASDAQ:ORCL) $1.9 billion acquisition bid for Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO) Feb. 9 was a matter of if and not when and comes in the wake of SAP’s (NYSE:SAP) $3.4 billion for SuccessFactors and Salesforce.com’s (NYSE:CRM) acquisition of Rypple. Taleo offers a “talent management cloud,” for human capital management (HCM) software, a jargon-laced way of saying the […]

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has paid more than $700,000 to researchers who have detected hundreds of bugs in its Chrome browser and is expanding its security rewards program, the company announced Feb. 9. Since launching its Chromium Security Rewards Program in January 2010, Google has paid out more than $300,000 of rewards for the detection of hundreds […]

Unlike my blogger peers, I’m not usually wont to skewer a so-called scoop. And I won’t start doing so, but I will point out that two intriguing pieces in the The Wall Street Journal came off as old news, warmed over instead of hot stuff. First is this piece about the Google cloud storage drive–something […]

Google, whose $12.5 billion deal to acquire Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) appears set for a Justice Department blessing, has pledged to uphold the phone maker’s existing practice to license patents under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms€”FRAND, in industry parlance. That includes supporting Motorola’s current practices for licensing patents at a cost of 2.25 percent of the […]

The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the Federal Trade Commission Feb. 8, compelling the agency to halt Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) privacy-policy changes before they go into effect March 1. EPIC argued that the privacy-policy changes, which include bringing 60 Web services under one umbrella policy and enable Google to share data between those services, violate the […]

Google Feb. 8 pushed Chrome 17 into the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux, paying out $10,500 to fix bugs and making the browser faster and more secure. Bug hunters squashed 20 bugs. Google paid for 11 of them, including $2,000 for the detections of “bad casts with column spans.” The Chrome maker paid […]