Category: Tech news

Exclusive: Location-based mobile advertising company JiWire has raised $20 million in new funding led by Trident Capital with Comcast Interactive Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Panorama Capital, and Norwest Venture Partners also participated in the financing. With the current funding, JiWire’s total capital raised to date is $45 million.

JiWire offers a highly targeted, location-based advertising platform that runs across Wi-Fi and mobile for devices such as iPads, smartphones and laptops. Through partnerships with more than 40 public WiFi networks, 30,000 venues and 60 airports, its ads reach more than 40 million people a month. JiWire also has advertising relationships with more than 200 location-based mobile applications.

On the advertising side, the company has partnered with a number of companies to connect these brands with its massive consumer reach. For example, JiWire announced a deal with Groupon to offer location-based deals at a hyperlocal level. Other brands using JiWire include Hewlett-Packard, Ritz Camera and Clinique.

Last year, JiWire acquired location-based mobile shopping platform NearbyNow, which allows brands to show products within an app or an ad and confirm availability of the product in the actual store. The company then integrated this technology into its own ad platform.

JiWire’s CEO Dave Courtney tells us that the new funding will be used to towards development of new ad technology and products, acquisitions and international expansion (the company entered the U.K. last year).

Pittsburgh-based The Resumator, which aims to “take the hassle out of hiring”, has secured $700,000 in funding led by Rincon Venture Partners, with Paige Craig, ff Venture Capital and Christopher Muenchhoff participating.

The Resumator is a graduate of the May 2009 AlphaLab program, a startup accelerator program run by seed stage investor Innovation Works, which also participated in the round.

The company offers Web-based social recruiting and applicant tracking tools that allow employers to promote job openings and efficiently review incoming resumes. No more inboxes filling up with cover letters and attachments, but instead a centralized environment where multiple people within one company can collaborate to rank, track and discuss candidates.

Customers include well known tech startups like Evernote, Tumblr, Bump and Klout.

Competitors include Jobvite, Firefish, Sendouts and Taleo, among many others.

Founder and CEO Don Charlton says they built the service to support the needs of what he calls “deputized hiring managers”, employees in SMBs that often have no formal experience recruiting and not much free time, but are nonetheless tasked to manage the hiring effort.

Charlton tells me that The Resumator had been growing steadily from their small Pittsburgh office since its 2009 launch, and that there were having trouble making connections with investors on the West Coast. In an effort to solve that problem, the startup signed up for AngelList and says it was able to quickly secure the round thanks to that move.

The Resumator has now raised close to $900,000 in financing.

UK-based security software maker Sophos has acquired Astaro, a privately-held provider of network security solutions.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Astaro booked $56 million in billings last year, which makes it the fourth largest dedicated unified threat management (UTM) provider in the world.

Peixe Urbano, Brazil’s largest daily deal site (Groupon is a close second), has closed a “significant growth capital” investment from General Atlantic and Tiger Global Management, the company tells me. The size of the round isn’t being disclosed, but these firms only tend to get involved when at least tens of millions of dollars, and often hundreds of millions, are invested. This was a primary funding, nothing was taken off the table by founders or existing investors.

It was only a few months ago that the company announced that Benchmark Capital had invested. Why the new round?

Growth, apparently. Last October, says CEO Julio Vasconcellos, the company had about 1 million registered users. Today they have 9 million, and have sold 5 million “units,” or deals. The average deal price is currently in the $25-$30 range, so it’s not hard to take a guess at revenue. Nearly all of this is from Brazil, although the company did recently launch in Argentina as well, and will eventually spread throughout Latin America. Even Mexico is in their crosshairs.

That’s not bad for a startup that only launched a year ago. Today they have 600 employees, with about half in sales.

Another interesting factoid about Peixe Urbano: They’ve imported a dozen American engineers, product managers and designers. It’s not outsourcing, and it’s not insourcing. It’s something unique, and you don’t hear about Non-U.S. startups hiring and moving Americans to wherever they are very often. Perhaps we’ll see more of this over time. The company has hired people from Apple, Intuit, Tagged, Merchant Circle and other companies.

So if you’re an American techy and you want to get paid (including stock options) to go hang out in Brazil for a few years, you know where to send your resume.

Update: coincidentally, General Atlantic has also invested in Groupalia, a Spain-based daily deal site operator that is eying expansion in Latin America, Brazil and Mexico in particular.

See an earlier video interview we did with Vasoncellos here.

Disclosure: I’m a limited partner in Benchmark Capital’s newest fund, but not in the fund that invested in Peixe Urbano.

I thought I had Google’s PR and launch strategy all figured out a couple of months ago. There haven’t been, and won’t be, any big “this changes everything” announcements around social, I said. Because, well, no matter how great their products are, it’ll be hard to shine next to Facebook. All of my sources in and around Google have said that post was essentially correct and reflected Google’s thinking.

One thing I was probably wrong about, though. I thought that Google would be releasing something at least around their I/O developer conference next week. In particular there’s been chatter that their rumored social video conferencing service that MG Siegler wrote about in December would be announced very soon.

Apparently not. The biggest news at I/O next week may be that there will be absolutely no social product launches at the event, say our sources.

Make no mistake, stuff is coming. There’s a whole product group, led by Vic Gundotra, working on this stuff. Even though they haven’t officially announced any of it, they do keep us busy chasing easter eggs and other creatively controlled leaks that may or may not have something to do with their upcoming social products.

But for now, we have to keep waiting. They are clearly taking their own sweet time figuring all this out. We’ll wait patiently. For at least a little while longer.

Self-publishing content company Helium has raised another 10 million in debt financing according to a SEC filing from earlier today. Listed on the the filing are President Mark Renalli, and board members Ann Bushell and John Paloian from RR Donnelly, Joseph Farrelly of Interpublic Group, Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink, Steve Pogorzelski, David Weild IV and William Huff. There is no indication of who invested on the SEC form.

Sort of like a proto-content farm, Helium writers get paid to write “How to” guides on subjects ranging from “How to get physically ready for Marine Basic Training” to “How to change back to Yahoo! Mail Classic” (wow).

Helium launched in 2006 and since then has amassed a community of hundreds of thousands of writers, at least. Since no one from Helium has returned my calls, I have no more accurate or up to date traffic or engagement numbers. But I do have your brief moment of zen from the last time we wrote about Helium raising money, in a post entitled “Helium Raises $17 Million, Lays Off 30 Percent of Employees.”

“The bomb-shelter mentality among startups is now so severe that even companies raising money are announcing layoffs in response to diminished economic prospects. Boston-based Helium just closed a $17 million series A financing about ten days ago, and then cut 30 percent of the organization (18 people) last week.

CEO Mark Ranalli tells me: “We expect a deterioration of overall ad rates, and a slowing of the economy in general. Our approach was to take a third of every group across engineering, customer service, and sales.’”

While I have no idea if anyone got laid off this time, the severity of the above text, written in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis, is pretty jarring.

In the era of Color’s pre-launch $41 million and in light of Demand Media’s recent IPO (with favorable earnings released today) we often forget that not that long ago the collective startup mindset was one of a “bomb shelter mentality” … Times, they do change.

Cameras are like paintbrushes — they’re just creative tools with no inherent magical powers. No amount of megapixels or sexy German lenses will make you a better photographer.

But you can certainly make some pretty badass pictures with a $50,000 paintbrush.

Meet the IQ180, the new digital back from Phase One, a Danish company known for making high-end medium format camera systems for professional photographers. This most recent addition to the Phase One fleet boasts an 80-megapixel sensor, the highest resolution sensor the company has ever offered.

We got the chance to test it for a week. It’s remarkably easy to use, and it’s capable of capturing more image detail than you’ll likely ever need. Quite simply, it’s one of the sickest camera systems you can buy for any money — and we’re talking about some serious coin here. For $47,990, you get the back, the body, and a Schneider Kreuznach 80 mm LS f/2.8 lens.

What you’re left holding is the photographic equivalent of a Bentley-Ferrari pickup truck — it’s sexy and elegant and expensive and you’re kind of afraid you’re going to run it into a tree, but its virtually limitless utility makes it capable of handling almost any job.

The images produced by the 80-megapixel digital back are massive — upwards of 500MB each. If you were to pull a file straight out of the camera and print it out at full print resolution, your image would be about 34 inches wide. That amount of depth adds a level of clarity and definition to your images that’s truly stunning.

Like most camera systems in this price range, the Phase One IQ180 is made for professional commercial photographers, or any other lucky souls who can afford to buy one. But it’s not just some precious totem of exclusivity. It is most definitely a workhorse meant for long hours in the studio and on location.

You have to use Phase One’s Capture One Pro software to pull the images off this camera. If you’ve already got the software, the company is issuing an update to support the new IQ series hardware. The MacBook Pro I used during testing has a 2.53GHz Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM, and it could manage the files just fine. I wouldn’t want to open up more than four images simultaneously without more RAM, though.

The Phase One IQ180 uses a 645 format body, and if you’ve ever used a medium format 645 body, you’ll know your way around this camera. For our testing, Phase One also sent a couple of Schneider Kreuznach prime lenses (a 55mm and a 110mm) in addition to the 80mm that comes with the camera.

But the IQ180 digital back is the real star here. It’s one of the easiest-to-use pieces of photographic capture equipment that I’ve ever laid my hands on. It powers on quickly, and the 3.2-inch touch screen comes to life. Four giant buttons come up on the display: one to play back your images, one for your ISO adjustment, one to adjust white balance, and one for a menu screen, which leads you to other custom settings.

The responsiveness of the touchscreen is as fast as my iPhone 4, and it’s easy to see even outside in sunlight. Remarkably, the camera back only crashed once during a week of testing, and it wasn’t during a shoot — I had to reset it when it got hung up while I was formatting some CF cards.

I used it in the field on several editorial assignments for print and online, and I took it to my friend’s house for some casual shooting at an Easter brunch just for fun. Image capture was super fast, whether it was tethered to my laptop or sending files directly to a CF card. To tether it, all I had to do was turn on Capture One Pro, plug in a FireWire 800 cable to the camera and the images started popping up on my laptop’s screen as I shot. I thought for sure that setting up a tether was going to be more difficult than that.

Also, if you want to run it untethered, you can flip through your shots on the camera by swiping your finger. You can double tap to zoom in to a 100 percent view of the image where you can test for sharpness.

I shot more than 900 frames during the testing period, and I found the camera to be extremely reliable. The last thing you want to worry about while you’re working is whether your gear is going to behave properly, and in any every situation, I was able to concentrate on the creative task at hand and just forget about the tech. Never once did I have to stop and try to figure out some complicated technical issue, interrupting my work flow. Never once did I get the feeling that it was too much of a hassle to have taken outside of the studio (though I probably wouldn’t take it to the beach for fear it would get gunked up with sand).

I should note that it’s bulky, and that the motor drive isn’t as fast as my 35mm. But if you’re used to using 645 medium format systems, the bulk and speed won’t be a surprise. Plus, this guy isn’t supposed to be waterproof or shoot five frames per second — it’s supposed to be the easiest-to-use hi-definition still camera system you can get. And it does a pretty great job at that.

When the test kit first arrived at my desk at Wired, I posted a photo of it on Instagram to do a little bragging. I tried to be funny by captioning the picture, “But does it come with Instagram?”

One of my photographer friends posted an astute comment in rebuttal: “But does it come with a client base?”

That’s the thing — this camera is really only accessible to you if you’re a pro with enough assignments to cover the cost. The rest of us will just rent one to use for a few hours on an as-needed basis.

But, if you want to rule Instagram and you have 50 grand lying around, you certainly couldn’t do any better than this.

WIRED Huge, badass 80-megapixel files let you see skin pores from 20 paces. Big touch screen with a simple interface. Solid build. Remarkably easy to use — provided you understand the mechanics of photography, as is the case for any serious camera.

TIRED When shooting untethered, the batteries are sapped faster than Bukowski’s beer supply — you get two, but you’ll have to keep a backup charged and swap them often. Best to pre-format your cards before heading out on a shoot.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Boingo Wireless, a nationwide WiFi provider, has just issued a release stating that it is pricing its IPO tomorrow morning at $13.50 per share, which falls into the expected range. The shares will begin trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol “WIFI.”

Boingo is looking to raise $75 million in its public offering. Boingo claims that it is one of the largest commercial Wi-Fi networks in the world, with 211,000 Wi-Fi locations in over 100 countries. The company installs, manages and operates wireless networks in locations like airports and restaurant chains, which Boing says had more than 800 million visitors in 2009.

Boingo is offering 3,846,800 shares and selling stockholders are offering 1,923,200 shares. In addition, Boingo has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 865,500 shares, on the same terms and conditions.

According to the initial S-1 filing, Boingo had 1.3 million consumers who have purchased its mobile Internet services in the past year. The company’s primary source of revenue is from consumers who purchase month-to-month subscription plans or hotspot specific, single-use access to its network. Boingo also receives money from business partners that pay to allow their consumers to access the network. Other revenue channels include telecom operators and advertisers.

TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki launched its iPad app in the App Store a less than a week ago and after 11 days has hit the quarter of a million downloads milestone. This is notable for an iPad app, especially when compared to other highly publicized iOS app milestones; It took iPhone app Instagram six days to hit 100K, SoundTracking two weeks to hit 250K and FourSquare a whopping seven months to get to 60K users.

Qwiki PR rep CeCe Cheng tells me that Qwiki.com has “millions of users” but that the Qwiki app, which lets users see notable Qwikis around them in map format, has already eclipsed pageview traffic on the Qwiki site by 5x. She estimates that by the end of the day tomorrow that the app will hit 300K users after only two weeks. Individual user sessions on the app are averaging 24 minutes.

Says founder Doug Imbruce, “The Qwiki experience was made for the iPad – an intimate, entertaining, (sexy!) new media format. It’s amazing to see the popularity of the app reinforce our original vision of Qwiki as a multi-platform experience.” The app has 2,170 total ratings, with an average of 4.5 stars per rating. The current build has an average 5 star rating at 688 ratings.

Qwiki sees the future of its visual Wikipedia search product as resting on the mobile platform, and is currently focusing on releasing Qwiki for the Android and the iPhone. It also plans on eventually letting users create their own Qwikis about themselves and their businesses.

On April 21st, Facebook celebrated the 1st birthday of its now ubiquitous “Like” button, and promptly shared the news that 10,000 sites are, like, using the plugin every day. The social networking behemoth then continued its parade of social widgets last week, giving the Like button a new partner in crime with the “Send” button, which allows users to directly share content with their Facebook Groups, Facebook friends, or any standard email address. And gives site designers yet another widget to integrate into their code. Huzzah!

With the “Send” button, Facebook seems to be continuing its quest to eventually replace email with some sort of Facebook-related social service. The button is already available on over 50 sites including The Washington Post, last.fm, 1-800 Flowers, Gilt Groupe, The Huffington Post and Orbitz. With more to come, I’m sure.

So, to commemorate Facebook becoming the Big Brother of social widgets, JESS3, a creative interactive agency specializing in UX and data visualization, has created a nifty retrospective — timeline of Facebook’s social widgets, beginning with the launch of Facebook Connect back in 2008.

Warning: Infographics ahead. Oh, and by the way, you should totally “Like” us on Facebook. Sorry, I had to.

A few weeks ago, a video entered wide circulation in the tech press for two reasons: 1) it featured lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Apple employees talking about their difficulties growing up. And 2) it was very, very well made. But the truth is that the It Gets Better Project has been around since last September, when columnist and author Dan Savage kicked things off with his own YouTube video with his partner to talk about their experiences. The Apple video simply reinvigorated the project in our circles, helping to keep the message going.

And now Google is doing their part to continue the message as well. Yesterday the Chrome team uploaded a new, great It Gets Better video. Watch it above.

Google has actually participated in this project before. In October, several Google employees were featured in a video. This was immediately followed by President Obama creating a video as well. There are now thousands of these videos. Great, great stuff.

One upon a time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer interrupted a speech at a developer’s conference with a chant that would set the Internet ablaze. “Developers, developers, developers, developers” was quickly put on the web and just as quickly mixed, remixed, and placed on the mantle of pure Internet gold. But to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever crafted an actual song around it.

Until now.

Mobile developer Cory Smith shot us an email today pointing us to a song he wrote and recorded. “I’m contrasting developing music and developing software in a hardcore rap kinda way, pretty entertaining,” he notes in his post. “The Steve Ballmer sample is the icing on the cake,” he notes in his message to us. Indeed.

Listen to the song below. It’s awesome. And below that, find Smith’s lyrics.

If Microsoft is smart, they’ll use this to kick of Ballmer’s next speech much like Apple used an awesome song we posted to kick off the Antennagate presser. After all, the talk is that Microsoft is putting a heavy focus back on developers. The song is perfect.

Smixx – Developers (feat. Steve Ballmer) by Smixx

I’m a developer
in many senses of the word
cause I make these applications
but I also use these verbs
to make this music
I construct it line by line
just like when I’m coding
another software design
in both cases
its about design patterns
anyone can get the job done
its the execution that matters
I have many interests
sometimes they conflict
my creativity can usually be a benefit
but sometimes it keeps me
far too busy
but I can’t complain
because my life is hardly gritty
so I think i’ll sit back
and pen myself another ditty
why is it that Linus Torvalds
the only one that Gits me
did you get that reference I was using
or is the thought of source source control too confusing
may just lay myself down a Team Foundation
so I can test the objects of my creation

Chorus (Steve Ballmer)
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers

not a fan of jewelry
except for Ruby on Rails
I can use my skills
to increase my online sales
capitalize on the popularity of Facebook
or grill up some beats
so they declare me a great cook
never really been a big fan of insects
so I track down bugs
remove them when in test
make sure they never get pushed to production
but sometimes deadlines decide they get rushed in
I’m the same way
when it comes to my songs
perfection is the goal whenever the mic is on
I don’t want a bad verse to slip in the mix
cause it could look really bad
for Cory or smixx
only a fan of your behaviour
if its driven development
theres no sense of
adding features for the hell of it
complexity is irrelevant
whether its with music or software
your users have stories so you should be telling them

Chorus (Steve Ballmer)
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers
Developers Developers Developers Developers

seeing my creations
on others devices
after years of concentration
is nothing but priceless
whether its with software
or a song just like this
I put myself out there
so go on and hype this
Running 3 external monitors
off of my macbook
currently reviewer on a Windows Phone Pact book
now I got Steve Ballmer
and he’s bombing on this tracks hook
of course my QA’s on me
cause this app just crashed look
when I write my raps
never use a marker
constantly refactor
like I’m using Resharper
doing ad hoc deploys
and I’m always deliverin’
and I made that choice
regardless of dividends
creating all this noise
in some form
until the bitter end
stating with with my voice
theres no norm
that I can fit within
haven’t been sleeping
but using lots of REST
pass the mic back to who rocked it best

If you have even the slightest hint of a creative streak, you may be interested in COLOURlovers, a startup whose products let you easily express yourself using shapes and colors, even if you aren’t particularly good at it. The Y Combinator-backed company has built up a community around creating color palettes, a matching iPhone app, and even a tool for sprucing up your Twitter profile. And now the company has closed its first seed round.

COLOURlovers has raised $1 million from investors including Atlas Venture, Morado Ventures, Founder Collective, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups, Seraph Group & Zelkova Ventures, Matt Mullenweg, Alexis Ohanian, Don Hutchison, Dharmesh Shah, Jared Friedman, and Shawn Bercuson (the startup says it got in touch with many of them via Angel List).

Founder Darius A Monsef IV (aka Bubs) didn’t want to talk too much about the company’s future plans, but he did say that it would soon be releasing a more robust version of its vector shapes editor, Seamless. Seamless has been available as a web app until now, but the company will be selling what he describes as an advanced desktop version within the next few weeks. As for the company’s long term goals, he says they’re working “towards a much bigger vision that builds upon all of the great creative content our community has been generating.”

The company’s team now consists of three founders and two recently-hired full-time employees, with plans to hire an additional seven in the near future (if you’re interested they’re targeting hires in Portland — Monsef describes the hiring market in San Francisco as “pretty nutty”. The company was actually already profitable prior to the seed round, and on track to do over $500k in revenue this year.

Monsef says that Seamless has been used to create 65,000 patterns thus far, and that 1.5 million color variations have been created as well (users can re-color existing patterns to suit their taste). The Twitter profile designer, which is called Themeleon, is used to design 600,000 profiles per month — and that number will grow once the company launches its upcoming WordPress version and a Themeleon API.

Peer-to-peer education startup Skillshare, which just launched in April, raised a $550,000 angel round, according to an SEC filing. Investors in the New York City startup include Founder Collective, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, David Tisch, and Scott Heiferman.

Skillshare is a community where people can offer classes to other members. People sign up online, and meet in person for real classes for everything from how to bake cupcakes to how to get startup funding. People can charge for the classes and Skillshare takes a 15 percent cut. Co-founder Michael Karnjanaprakorn used to be head of product at Hot Potato (since acquired by Facebook), and co-founder Malcolm Ong was the product manager at OMGPOP.

The site is focussing on classes about tech startups, food and drink, and arts & crafts to start out.
Our business model is similar to Eventbrite. For instance, Chris Dixon of Founder Collective is going to teach a class on How To Raise Your First Round for $15 (with proceeds going to charity).

The founders are curating the classes to start out in order to attract the right kind of people and define the culture of the site. They are getting some advice from fellow New York startups. “The guys at Kickstarter have given a lot of advice on how to build our community, especially in the early days of the startup,” says Karnjanaprakorn. “Right now, we don’t allow private one-on-one classes, tutoring sessions, or test preparation services. While we think these classes are great, they don’t really fit into our community as we’re going after the ‘creative, unique, interesting and skill-based’ classes.”

The goal of Skillshare is to make education relevant and more current to what people need to learn. “While it’s great to learn multi-variable calculus or the economics of China during school,,” says Karnjanaprakorn. “What about the other 99% of skills that will never see the light of day? By the time a college starts teaching “Mastery in Online Community Management”, it will become so outdated and irrelevant. Traditional education will never catch up to the skills needed in the market today.”

Google has seven major product groups. Advertising, Commerce & Local, Mobile (Android), Social, Chrome, YouTube and Search. Search is, of course, Google’s first and most important product. But that group actually no longer exists internally. As of April, when Larry Page took over as CEO of the company, the search group was renamed the “knowledge group” internally.

Google confirms the change. And, they point out, it was actually publicly announced in an SEC filing made on April 11. Nobody seems to have noticed that someone was named the SVP of a Google product group that previously hadn’t existed.

Why the change? That’s a longer story.

Leadership of Google search, like most other Google products, was previously split between Marissa Mayer as product lead and Udi Manber as engineering lead. Late last year Mayer moved over to run Local. Alan Eustace now runs the group, and Manber reports to him. There’s a single leader of the group, and he reports to Page.

Page, say our sources, has for a long while been thinking of search as much more than Google’s original mission to “organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” His goal is about more than organizing that information, though. It’s also about enhancing people’s understanding and facilitating the creation of knowledge.

The problem is, “search” still means “search.” And as Google has expanded that product over the years, first bringing in results from Google’s vertical search engines via Universal Search in 2007, and later via Google Squared, which structures information on the Internet.

And there have been other experiments as well. Google Base, for example, as well as Google Knol.

In fact, look back at this 2007 Google blog post about Knol, where Manber says “The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.”

These product efforts have generally been led by Manber in the past. And they remain in the search/knowledge group today.

Here’s how Google currently views the group. Remember that previously they split it up between Mayer (product) and Manber (engineering). But today Eustace is the overall lead. Manber reports to Eustace and focuses on finding ways to improve the knowledge out there and to encourage more high quality content creation, whether it’s on Google’s servers (Knol) or not.

Amit Singhal, Manber’s peer, focuses on the more traditional goals of search, such as the recent algorithm changes called Panda targeting content farms.

One way of thinking of this, says a source with knowledge of the group, is this. Singhal does the weeding (removing and pushing down low quality content in search), and Manber is focused on the seeding (encouraging “good stuff” to grow).

This isn’t supposed to be information that helps outsiders understand how Google operates, which is probably why Google made the SEC statement in as few words as possible and didn’t publicize it at all. Instead, it’s to make sure that the team inside Google understands that they aren’t just working on search. It’s not just about organization, it’s about enhancement of knowledge.

Other than confirming the creation of the Knowledge group to supplant the Search group, Google won’t comment on the personnel changes or the subtle shifts in strategy. For now, says one source, all Google wants to do is align everyone internally. When, and if, Google talks about this more publicly is a mystery.