Google quarterly profit swells 46 percent  —  Web search leader Google reported on Thursday a 46 percent rise in profit that topped Wall Street expectations, fueled by accelerating market share gains and tighter cost controls.  —  Third-quarter net income rose to $1.07 billion …

Source:   Reuters
Link:   http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6214246.html

Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14  —  We’re not used to thinking of them this way.  But many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic — picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger.  Most of the time.

Source:   Danger Room
Author:   Noah Shachtman
Link:   http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/10/robot-cannon-ki…

Microsoft’s Ballmer: MSFT will acquire 20 companies a year  —  Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer just said at the Web 2.0 conference here in San Francisco that the software giant will acquire 20 companies a year for the next five years, ranging from $50 million to $1 billion.

Source:   VentureBeat
Author:   Matt Marshall
Link:   http://venturebeat.com/2007/10/18/microsofts-ballmer…

Exclusive: Techbloggers Have Sold Their Souls  —  On WebProNews, Robert Scoble demonstrates why the leading techblogs are becoming less critical and more susceptible to hype — they’re bargaining with PR flacks for exclusives: … One of the reasons mainstream tech magazines like PC Magazine …

Source:   Workbench
Author:   Rogers Cadenhead
Link:   http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3283…

The Web is the Platform  —  The platform wars are over.  Long live the Web.  That was the basic message delivered by Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, in a ten-minute presentation at Web 2.0 a few minutes ago.  His talk was nominally about widgets (which Google calls Gadgets).

Source:   TechCrunch
Author:   Erick Schonfeld
Link: […]

Firefox 3 to go native in appearance  —  What do you get when you cross a Firefox with a chameleon?  —  An open-source Web browser whose user interface is adapted to the look of the operating system it’s running on.  One change planned for the upcoming Firefox version 3, code-named Gran Paradiso, is this more […]

Google Says Its Health Platform Is Due In Early 2008  —  Google plans to bring its immense data storage and organization capacities to the field of medical care and patient records, Marissa Mayer, the company’s head of search, said at the Web 2.0 Summit.  —  Telling her audience to …

Source:   InformationWeek
Author:   Richard Martin
Link: […]

Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again?  —  Email providers are trying to steal some of social networking’s thunder as fast-growing services like Facebook Inc. begin to encroach on their turf.  —  The biggest Web email services — including Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit …

Source:   Wall Street Journal
Link:   […]

Microsoft Launches Drag-And-Drop App Builder Popfly  —  Microsoft just demoed on stage at the Web 2.0 conference a slick Silverlight application development service called Popfly, which just opened up in beta.  Popfly lets anyone, even non-coders, create web mashups without writing a single line of code.

Source:   TechCrunch
Author:   Erick Schonfeld
Link:   http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/18/microsoft…

Mind Your Step: “Cyberwar” with the Search Engines?  —  Is it just me, or did someone not get the facts totally right?  If a TechCrunch article is to be believed, search engines like Google and Yahoo! seem to be, once again, invisible in the nation of 1.3 billion.

Source:   blognation China
Author:   David Feng
Link:   […]