Google

Bob Moog's synthesizer helped change the sound of modern music. On what would have been his 78th birthday, Google is paying tribute to the man with a virtual version of his famous Moog on their homepage — and it's completely playable. The Moog doodle, a replica of the Minimoog Model D, may not be a highly complex synthesizer but it explores a lot of the realms of synthesis — the sculpting of sound mastered by a synthesizer. "To be able to put all those capabilities in the hands of hundreds of millions of people is just astounding," said Moog's daughter Michelle Moog-Koussa,...

One of my students, a graduating senior, was in my office the other day. She was calling a potential internship site using my office phone, as her cellphone wasn't staying charged. When she asked me if she should leave the cellphone number, knowing her phone was on the fritz, I suggested she give the internship site her home number. "But I don't know my home number," she said. "It's saved on my cell. " And I thought to myself, how could you not know your home number?

Even the hottest initial public stock offerings can lose steam after their first day of trading. Sure, company insiders will make money selling at the opening price. And investors who used connections or big bucks to score shares at the IPO price will profit if they sell after a first-day "pop. " For everyone else, the wildly mixed record of other ballyhooed IPOs beyond their first trading session offers a lesson. It's one that should remind us that buying Facebook stock Friday provides a chance to lose money.

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal jury ruled Wednesday that Google didn't infringe on Oracle's patents when the Internet search leader developed its popular Android software for mobile devices. Wednesday's verdict comes about two weeks after the same jury, with two additional members, failed to agree on a pivotal issue in Oracle's copyright-infringement case against Google. As a result, Google Inc. faced maximum damages of only $150,000 — not the hundreds of millions of dollars that Oracle Corp.

Facebook was supposed to soar. Instead, it plunged. After the social network's stock fizzled on Friday in its long-awaited debut, its stock fell 11 percent on Monday, even as the rest of the stock market rallied. The downward spiral has left some people sitting on big losses, and others scratching their heads. After all, nothing fundamental has changed at Facebook in the days since the much-hyped company came to the stock market — Facebook still has more than 900 million users, its 28-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg controls the company, and it is still one of the few...

The executive chairman of Google Inc. has told Boston University graduates they can compete for jobs and solve problems as the first generation to be fully connected. Eric Schmidt told more than 6,700 BU graduates on Sunday that they're part of the first fully connected generation the world has known. Schmidt, who ended a decade-long stint as CEO last year and turned the job over to Google co-founder Larry Page, acknowledged it's not a great economy to find a job. But he said young people have a competitive edge, which he...

When the head of JPMorgan Chase met with shareholders to answer for a trading loss of more than $2 billion Tuesday, it was against an evolving political backdrop: Donors from big banks are betting on Mitt Romney to defeat President Obama and repeal new restraints on risky, large-scale investments. "There's no doubt that there's been a big diminution of support for the president," said William M. Daley, Obama's former chief of staff and a former top JPMorgan Chase executive. "People in the financial services sector are saying, ‘The president has been too tough on us, both in policy and on...

Almost five years after leaving Channel 5, veteran Boston newscaster Natalie Jacobson is coming back to the screen - the computer screen - to help launch an Internet news service in Worcester next month. Jacobson will add her marquee name to GoLocalWorcester, the second local news website from Rhode Island start-up GoLocal24, which inaugurated a similar service in Providence in 2010. She will join the site as a senior editor, working on investigative journalism projects with a small group of reporters, and occasionally appearing in front of the camera to conduct interviews.

When most people hear the name Google, they think Internet searches, not affordable housing. But in Allston, the search-engine giant is investing $28 million to help construct 240 units at the Charlesview residences, one of the largest low-income housing developments in the country. On its face, the investment seems strange because it puts Google Inc., typically focused on the virtual world, in a corner of the affordable housing business dominated by big banks and investment companies.

Boston shoppers who looked online yesterday for local daily deals from discount websites had at least 84 to choose from, including 14 from restaurants, 5 from salons, and 2 from yoga studios. The 22 companies providing these deals ranged from Groupon, the online coupon service that invented the genre three years ago, to a new discount site from search giant Google Inc., which launched yesterday in Boston. Also new to the local online coupon market is RapidBuyr, a Concord company that debuted a Boston site in August that targets its deals to owners of small- and...

ONLINE PIRACY INSIGHTS: Google has released data detailing the volume of complaints that the company's search engine has received about websites hosting content that violates copyrights. BIGGEST TARGETS: There have been more than 2.5 million complaints sent to Google Inc. about websites believed to be infringing on Microsoft Corp.'s copyrights since July 2011, according to the report released Thursday. That's far more than any of the entertainment companies fighting for tougher laws against online piracy.

Google's Internet search engine receives more complaints about websites believed to be infringing on Microsoft's copyrights than it does about material produced by entertainment companies pushing for tougher online piracy laws. A snapshot of Microsoft's apparently chronic copyright headaches emerged in new data that Google released Thursday to provide a better understanding of the intellectual property abuses on the Internet. Google has a good vantage point on the issue because it operates the Internet's dominant search engine with the largest index of...

I don't want any trouble, and certainly not online. The trouble is, the Internet won't leave me alone. Websites are constantly tracking me with little files called cookies, criminals are trying to swipe my digital identity with spam, and online information brokers are selling the story of my life to anybody with a valid credit card. No wonder there's a ready market for online privacy protection tools. I've gone over four of the coolest, including browser plug-ins that block tracking cookies, a subscription service that helps conceal your possibly...

SAN FRANCISCO — Google has completed its $12.5 billion purchase of device maker Motorola Mobility in a deal that poses new challenges for the Internet's most powerful company as it tries to shape the future of mobile computing. The deal closed Tuesday, nine months after Google Inc. disclosed that it wanted to expand into the hardware business with the most expensive and riskiest acquisition in its 14-year history. The purchase pushes Google deeper into the cellphone business, a market it entered four years ago with the debut of its Android software, now the chief challenger to Apple...

Bob Moog's synthesizer helped change the sound of modern music. On what would have been his 78th birthday, Google is paying tribute to the man with a virtual version of his famous Moog on their homepage — and it's completely playable. The Moog doodle, a replica of the Minimoog Model D, may not be a highly complex synthesizer but it explores a lot of the realms of synthesis — the sculpting of sound mastered by a synthesizer. "To be able to put all those capabilities in the hands of hundreds of millions of people is just astounding," said Moog's daughter Michelle Moog-Koussa,...

On Tuesday, Google Inc. completed its $12.5 billion deal to take over Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. The deal is Google's largest ever — nearly four times larger than the previous high, the 2008 purchase of online advertising company DoubleClick for $3.2 billion. It's also more than the $10.2 billion that Google has spent combined to buy nearly 200 companies since Google went public in 2004. Those companies expanded or complemented the breadth of services that the search leader offers.

In one of the biggest settlements of its kind in US history, Google Inc. has agreed to pay $500 million to the Justice Department and admitted that the company's advertising service helped online pharmacies sell prescription drugs illegally. US attorney for Rhode Island Peter F. Neronha revealed the agreement with the Internet search giant at a press conference in Providence yesterday. Neronha's office led an investigation of Google's role in the online pharmacy ads that began in 2009 and involved the Food and Drug Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, as well as Rhode Island...

It wasn’t so long ago that all of Google fit into a two-car garage and a couple of spare rooms, with space enough for a few forlorn appliances and an unused ping-pong table. How did this tiny company with a quirky name become not only a verb but perhaps the most influential company on the planet in just a decade? Can it possibly achieve both its ambitious goals and its lofty ideals? These two questions frame “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It’’ by longtime New Yorker writer Ken Auletta.

BRUSSELS — The European Union has given Google ‘‘a matter of weeks" to propose remedies to antitrust concerns arising from its alleged dominant position in the online search market. European antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia said that after an 18-month investigation following complaints from Google's rivals, the EU had pinpointed four areas of concern centering on how the Internet giant deals with its search results, how content is used, how advertising is run on its search engine, and how advertisers are restricted from using rival search engines.