Google just added 1,001 destinations to Street View. That’s a huge number, especially when you think of all the transportation options Google Street View used to capture amazing pictures of the world.

In total they today have five different ways to digitize the world. Unfortunately, India is still missing in this puzzle but, however, you at least can find a man in a lamp and some other quirky scenes…

Continue reading 

Almost 10 months ago Google proposed to buy ITA for about $700 million. However, it took much time and many public battles with opponents of the acquisition such as Fairsearch until the DOJ made its decision and finally allowed the Google-ITA-Deal. Google has to comply with several restrictions though.

To ensure fair competition Google has to continue to license ITA’s QPX software to competitors, to fund research and development of ITA’s QPX software and to further develop and offer ITA’s next generation InstaSearch product to travel websites. Continue reading 

Much has happened in 2010: Airlines such as AA have started pulling their content off the GDSs to foster their own direct connections, Google has acquired ITA and mobile apps were omnipresent, just to mention a few things. Now, with less than two weeks left in this year, Tnooz has asked industry experts what they believe will be the major travel industry trends in 2011. And they made some very interesting predictions.

The following is a list of the most remarkable predictions and their implications: Continue reading 

Google for a long time seemed to be the undisputed champion when it comes to search on the internet. It successfully put rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft out of the market, becoming the leading search engine in the world. But search is not where Google makes its money; it’s advertising that accounts for the biggest part in Google’s overall revenues.

So even if they are the dominant search engine, the “real war” is about advertising revenues and it is not decided yet: Even though Google’s advertising revenues were about $7 billion in Q3 2010 which is much higher than Facebook’s estimated ad revenues of about $ 1.3 billion a year, with 23.1% in Q3 2010 Facebook has the biggest share in the market for display ad impressions. Continue reading 

As reported by wired.com, Google awarded all its employees with a 10% pay raise. In times of economic recession and a troubled world economy this is a very remarkable decision that comes with a huge price tag for Google.

What could be the reasons behind this bold decision? From a business point-of-view this move is interesting, because it shows that Google tries very hard to keep its talented workers and to prevent them from quitting their jobs at Google and start their own businesses or move to other, competing companies like Facebook, Twitter etc. Continue reading