Google and Microsoft both released their Q4 financial results yesterday, and while both recorded financial gains from the same period in 2007, Google’s increase was significantly more impressive.

Google revenues were up 18% from Q4 2007 to total $5.7 billion, which was also an increase of 3% from Q3 2008. The revenue from Google-owned sites reached $3.81 billion, which is an increase of 22% from Q4 2007, as well as an increase of 4% from Q3 2008. Google UK generated $685 million, while the total revenue from all destinations outside of the US totalled $2.86 billion.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, was justly proud of the figures, saying, “Google performed well in the fourth quarter, despite an increasingly difficult economic environment. Search query growth was strong, revenues were up in most verticals, and we successfully contained costs.” He added that Google would continue to focus on the long-term and that they would continue to invest in core search and ads, as well as strategic growth areas, such as mobile.

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Brighthouse, the UK’s leading rent-to-own company, has appointed MediaVision to promote their PR activity online.

Brighthouse has significant media coverage in leading online portals such as FD and Retail Week, however, this content is not as visible online as it could be, especially within search.

It is MediaVision’s aim to promote this content to maximise visibility in search for all potential stakeholders, whether they be customers or potential investors.
MediaVision is excited at the prospect of working with Financial Dynamics on the Brighthouse project.

Louis Venter, CEO of MediaVision, commented, “Many of the UK’s leading brands have an enormous amount of positive content that will help build their brand online, yet most of the content distribution is limited to offline channels. MediaVision is looking forward to building the BrightHouse brand online with FD and getting them the positive coverage that they deserve.”

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Windows Azure, that’s the official name for Microsoft’s new cloud offering, which was launched on Monday 27th October 08. Azure, touted as ‘software plus services’, is supposed to allow developers to create applications on the with MS programming languages. It’s similar in theory to Google App Engine, but for once it seems that MS will be able to effectively compete with Google, at least according to Ray Valdes, a research vice-president at Gartner.

Valdes believes that Azure’s ability to offer hosting as well as application tools is vital to its success, as is the fact that many people are already familiar with MS tools, which will give them an advantage over Google, whose tools are still relatively new.

Hosting will be offered on MS data centres and will allow users to shift data between their servers and the data centres at will. The use of MS data centres provides a measure of security because, as Ray Ozzie, MS chief software architect, says, they will be able to handle sudden surges of use.

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Cloud computing has been the “next big thing” for some time now. Amazon has some pretty well developed SaaS (software as a Service) cloud computing applications, and Google Apps is a step in the cloud direction (especially with Chrome, and initiatives to make Google Apps available offline). Now Microsoft is celestially bound with a system their engineers are calling “Windows Cloud”, a name which even Steve Ballmer admits needs some plumping up.

According to Ballmer, people find it too difficult to write applications for the cloud, as the process can be complicated, not to mention time-consuming. Windows Cloud, is designed to take a lot of the rigmarole out of the operation, so that people can write an application and “push it into the cloud” with everything taken care of.

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Bill Gates is a busy man, he’s got his charitable Gates Foundation, his one day per week at Microsoft (although I’m not entirely sure why) and now he has founded a new company called bgC3 or bgC3 LLC, depending on the news articles you read.

Other than the fact that it has been registered as a ‘think-tank’ with avenues in ‘scientific and technological services, industrial analysis and research, and design and development of computer hardware and software’, very little is know about bgC3, which means that the virtual landscape is rife with rumours.

Apparently the company was established in March, about 3 months before he semi-retired from Microsoft. Insiders have said that bgC3 has been designed so that Gates can coordinate his charitable and business work, but that it will also enable him to continue to make forays into the fields of science and technology. Other rumours contend that it will serve as a ‘catalyst’ business so that Gates can pass on new ideas to either MS or his Gates Foundation.

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