Hasta La Gadget!

According to an SEC filing, Google‘s Eric Schmidt will be selling about 42-percent of his stake in the company, for a total of 3.2 million Class A shares. The sale will take place throughout 2013 in order to avoid a large impact on the market. The former CEO is reported as having a total of about 7.6 million Class A and Class B common stock shares.

Per Google, this move will give the former CEO “individual asset diversification and liquidity.” The sum total of Schmidt’s shares account for 2.3-percent of Google’s stock, which closed high today at $785.37. This follows his previous sale of approximately 1.8 million shares in 2012, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Once the shares are sold, Schmidt will then own 1.3-percent of Google, a fall from 2012′s 2.3-percent, giving him 5-percent voting power in the company. These sales are following his departure from Google as CEO in early 2011, when he became executive chairman instead. The timing is good, market-wise, with the search engine giant’s shares having increased substantially last year.

Schmidt has been a big force in Google, responsible for quite a bit of its growth during his time there. No word has been given on why he is selling his shares, aside from the statement from Google regarding diversification and liquidity. A Google spokesperson has declined commenting on the situation, so all we know for now is what the filing shows.

[via Wall Street Journal]

Eric Schmidt to sell over 40% of his stake in Google is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week the folks at Microsoft have made it clear that they’re aiming for Google’s throat with a loving dose of all-out Valentine’s Day coverage straight from Bing – full of love, of course! This coverage comes in the form of not just Windows Phone-centered functionality for all your Valentine’s Day needs, but both the Bing mobile site and the Bing app as well. Once you’ve gone to m.bing.com or downloaded Bing from your smartphone or tablet’s own app store, you’ll be well on your way!

Bing is out to take on the masses of Valentine’s Day lovers with Local Scout on your Windows Phone 8 device first and foremost. Local Scout makes it simple to find all the best nearby food and drink locations right from the palm of your hand while m.bing.com does instant searches near you for similar results. Bing offers up their “snapshot” results for restaurant reviews from Yelp as well as restaurant booking straight from Open Table.

Bing Maps is ready and willing at this point in history to take you wherever you need to go with the GPS on your smartphone or through any mobile web browser with point to point directions that include traffic conditions on-the-go. Bing Shopping has you covered for gifts with millions of listings of products from every single corner of the consumer universe. Bing’s social sidebar also provides you help with gifts with expert reviews from all over the web – and your Facebook friends if they’re also connected to the network.

Let us know if you’re ready to use Bing this holiday or if you’re planning on using a competing search engine to make sure you’re stacked up and ready for the big love-bound day of heart-throbbing goodness. The heart you’re seeing above is not a direct result of Bing’s search engine results as the search bar implies – not directly, anyway – instead it’s a poll conducted by Bing that shows Trustworthiness as the most important quality a partner can have in general. Microsoft is showing that it’s not afraid to say that Google isn’t a partner they’d choose to go home with.

[via Bing]

Bing makes it’s case for your one-stop Valentine’s Day resource is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

As The Register learned, in part of an ongoing effort to turn Facebook into its own, closed little ecosystem, Zuck’s empire has closed off public events to, well, the public. Account-holding stalkers only, please. More »

This week we’re hearing a lot of talk about how the upcoming Graph Search inside Facebook will be un-privatizing us once again – let’s talk about why that’s not true. In a report in Ars Technica they note how once Graph Search is turned on for the masses, information you’d previously had hidden from search results will become public. There’s also a post on Quartz citing a segment in the Facebook Privacy Policy which interprets a “hiding from timeline” note as Facebook admitting it wont hide anything no matter how hard you try – that’s simply not true.

The note that this talk all comes from is in an update to the Facebook Privacy Policy made public on December 11h, 2012. This update notes some specifications and clarifications on how the Facebook Timeline works since basically everyone in the Facebook universe is now up and running with that interface. Have a peek and see what you make of it:

“When you hide things on your timeline, like posts or connections, it means those things will not appear on your timeline. But, remember, anyone in the audience of those posts or who can see a connection may still see it elsewhere, like on someone else’s timeline or in search results. You can also delete or change the audience of content you post.” – Facebook Privacy Policy as sited by Quartz

Both Ars and Quartz refer back to a phone interview done between Nick Bilton and Facebook’s Sam Lessin in which Lessin said that “one-single digit percentage of users” had worked with Facebook’s original ability to “hide themselves on Facebook’s search.” Because 1% of Facebook’s users is somewhere in the tens of millions of people, the one single fantasy “hide me” button’s disappearance became the main subject.

In fact, you are still able to hide yourself from Facebook search, and not just by deleting your account entirely (which is always an option, of course). What you’re able to do right this minute – aside from the collection of Privacy assurances and how-to demos given by Facebook earlier this week – is to go to your Privacy Settings and Tools tab and check it out: “Who can see my stuff?” and “Who can look me up?” the both of them.

You can change “Who can see your future posts” to “Only Me”, go to your Activity Log and cut out everyone on everything you’ve ever done, and “Limit The Audience for Old Posts on Your Timeline” with a single button – that’s limited to your Friends, mind you. You can update “Who can look be up” from “Everyone” to Friends only, and you can un-check “Let other search engines link to your timeline.” If you do all of these things (however inconvenient it is to do several tasks here instead of just one), your visibility will indeed be limited to those you’ve connected to as Friends on Facebook. Make it work!

Lack of Facebook “hide from search results” no reason to panic is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has blamed Google’s reactiveness to privacy concerns for negotiations between the two companies breaking down, pushing the social site into the arms of Microsoft’s rival Bing engine. “Microsoft was more willing to do things that were specific to Facebook” Zuckerberg said at the launch of Facebook Graph Search yesterday, the Guardian reports, citing the speed and willingness to remove personal content that had previously been public, but which Facebook users subsequently made private, as key to the deal.

“I think the main thing is about when people share something on Facebook, we want to give them not only the ability to broadcast something out but also change their privacy settings later and take the content down” Zuckerberg explained. “That requires incredibly quick updating … We need that content to be gone immediately … You need infrastructure that can support that and that takes a lot of commitment from the partner.”

Zuckerberg’s concern appears to be sudden changes – such as where people realize they want to alter the granular privacy settings on photos or other content – and the possibility that public searching could continue to turn up results that users might not want included. Facebook has been criticized in the past for confusing privacy controls as well as taking perceived liberties with user-data, and this reluctance to compromise on indexing accuracy appears to be a move by the social site to avoid any complaints further down the line that relate to speed of indexing.

“Google has a system that works really well for them about how they treat information across their company,” Zuckerberg said, “and I think that our system was different in ways that people share information and want to give them flexibility after the fact – that was the biggest stumbling block.”

Despite the Facebook CEO’s explanations, insiders within the company claim that there were no renewed negotiations between it and Google prior to Graph Search’s development. Instead, he is supposedly referring to earlier talks, which broke down when the two companies disagreed over exporting and ownership of personal data.

There’s more on Facebook Graph Search in our full run-down of the service.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg: Sluggish Google indexing drove us to Bing is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.