cleantech
Scheduled to take the stage at Google's latest Zeitgeist gathering are CEO Eric Schmidt and General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt.
The plan is to announce a partnership which "is likely to focus on adding network intelligence to the electric grid and improving capacity," according to
Portfolio. The idea is to improve electricity-infrastructure efficiency through more advanced networking technology, presumably resulting in better service and lower carbon-dioxide pollution by reducing demand through conservation and therefore burning less coal. Of course, for now it just means more lobbyists in the Capitol and possibly more money for research and development. What does Google want in all this, besides good environmental press?
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smartphones
Forget HTC's Android-running Dream, expected out this October. General Electric has brought the Googlephone to life. GE's Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications, or DECT, version 6.0, has a handy built-in Goog-411 button, to spare users the burden of dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. It's already on store shelves for $60.
bubble 2.0
Could Google hit $2,000 a share? Henry Blodget
thinks so, but I'm not so sure. That would value GOOG at $750 billion — roughly the same as Microsoft ($279 billion), General Electric ($431 billion), and News Corp. ($70 billion) added together. And that's assuming that none of those companies grow at all — a highly unlikely proposition.
Could Google be the first company worth a trillion dollars? Maybe, but I'm not placing any bets in the "first-to-a-trillion" Valleywag office pool. Remember how well
predictions of a trillion-dollar market cap worked out for AOL Time Warner? (
Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)
Valleywag
Doddering General Electric and water-logged Carnival Cruises both outgrew Yahoo last year. GE did it despite selling "23 times as much stuff" as Yahoo last year, according to the Wall Street Journal's Dennis Berman. Despite this, Wall Street grants Yahoo a generous 37.43 price-to-earnings ratio. Berman thinks Yahoo's board should "strike as the iron is hot" and holds up the precipitous downfall of AOL — it's worth about half its 2005 $20 billion valuation — as an example of a path Yahoo should not follow. [WSJ]
