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Source:Valleywag

After persistent rumors of a Googlephone — Google’s supposed answer to Apple’s iPhone — failed to pan out in the U.S., the true Googlephone believers are looking abroad. Rediff, an Indian news and information portal, reports that Google will launch a “Gphone” in India in two weeks. Unlikely, unless, like Valleywag, you believe that Google’s strategy is to turn every phone into a Googlephone.

Source:Valleywag

It’s odd, sometimes, the contortions reporters will go through to make a story out of nothing — especially when they miss the real one. Take, for example, this report from IDG News about the planned departure of Intuit CEO Steve Bennett. The subhead of the article: “Intuit chief executive’s resignation is not tied to April tax database snafu.” The first sentence: “Four months after a database problem prevented thousands of U.S. users from paying their taxes on time, Intuit Inc.’s chief executive announced plans to step down.” Obsessed with an embarrassing, expensive, but ultimately meaningless, glitch in Intuit’s tax-prep software, IDG misses what’s interesting about Bennett stepping down in December to make way for Intuit SVP Brad Smith.

Intuit has long had unusually close links with Google. The company’s chairman, Bill Campbell, though not credited for it, has long been an important advisor to Google CEO Eric Schmidt and company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And the two companies share a campus in Mountain View.

Smith, currently in charge of the company’s QuickBooks accounting software and related small-business products, will become CEO in January 1. And if anything, you can expect relations between Intuit and Google to become tighter. Smith, after all, helped negotiate a deal between the companies to integrate QuickBooks and AdWords, Google’s text ads that have proved popular with small businesses.

If anything, in fact, Smith would be the logical architect of a merger between Google and Intuit. They share a common enemy in Microsoft. Google has demonstrated skills in Web-based software, while Intuit has an extremely loyal small-business customer base.

And best of all, buying Intuit would give Google much-needed real estate adjacent to its current headquarters. Even with plans to slow down out-of-control hiring, Google could use more room close to home. And that’s one thing only Intuit can offer.

Source:Valleywag

PodTech may finally have rid itself of founder John Furrier’s so-called leadership. But how will new CEO James McCormick fare? We’ve already pointed out that, despite 23 years of experience, he has never been the public face of a company. His past as an operations and finance executive is also littered with repeated failures: disgruntled employees, lawsuits, bad mergers, and other flameouts. McCormick may get by for a time simply by not being Furrier, but the failures linked to him through his resume do not bode well for the troubled videoblogging network.

Quiet Solution: Can’t hold onto employees and intellectual property. The maker of soundproofing materials couldn’t get its employees to keep its solution quiet. Quiet Solution recently filed suit against a competitor, Suppress, founded by a former employee for allegedly taking patents and other staff and along with him.

Perfect Commerce: Spiralling to nowhere. In the mundane business of “supplier relationship management,” Perfect Commerce was acquired by vendor/partner Cormine. An investor points to a confused strategy (partly due to “the company’s acquisition strategy” crafted by McCormick), a stalled product line, and $30 million in lost investments.

iPrint: Bubble fizzle. iPrint was a late Internet-boom IPO that fizzled ,leading to several shareholder lawsuits. PodTech claims that McCormick “was pivotal in the company’s successful initial public offering.”

General Magic: A product no one wants. General Magic, the longest-lived enterprise that McCormick helped lead, will aways be remembered for its quirky innovations, but it could never find a successful business plan. Not for lack of trying: It dabbled in graphical user interfaces, handheld OSes, Internet search tools, voice recognition, and navigation systems. The experiments ended with massive layoffs and financial losses.

UB Networks: Investment flop. A switch and hub provider that managed to be acquired for $96 million but was an admitted “flop” a year later.

Those all sound like fitting precedents for PodTech, if ominous ones for its investors. (Photo by Jeremiah Owyang)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 5:56 pm and is filed under online video, John Furrier, Podtech, Dossier, James McCormick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.