Linux vendor Linspire started giving away a dialer that allows Linux systems to access America Online's own network of local dial-in points of presence.

Google has an almost insurmountable lead over search engine rivals, but will face its stiffest competition from portals like Yahoo and MSN, and mega-online retailers such as Amazon.com.

Nearly 60 percent of Internet users are also IM users, they are getting older, and more of them are at work.

America Online Inc. is acknowledging an "issue" that allowed some of its members to gain access to online financial portfolios of other members. But the Internet service provider downplayed the incident, saying no personal identifying information such as usernames or credit card numbers was ever compromised.

Google is set to begin trading today at US$85 per share. This is a far cry from their initial targeted range of US$108-135.

Google lowers the estimates share price range. Did brokerages deliberately sabotage Google's IPO?

Google shares shoot up 18% in trading, helping it shake-off the humiliation of its cut-price float.

MSN has pulled the alpha version of its new MSN Search engine from public preview and is planning on incorporating user feedback before launching a new beta release later this year. At the same time, MSN has rolled out a bunch of new, free calendaring, note taking and task management and video services.

(This is also my column today in the San Jose Mercury News.) The most over-hyped initial public offering since Netscape is almost over. Google's stock is about to be in public hands, and a bucket of new cash is about to land in the company's bank account and the pockets of insiders. The Mountain View company must now justify the $85-a-share price that its new investors plunked down. It must become a great enterprise, not just a good one. To do that, Google's founders and executives must focus on how they run their company, in four main areas. More...

Reuters: Google Slashes IPO, SEC OK Expected Today. Google Inc. slashed the size of its closely watched initial public offering nearly in half to less than $2 billion on Wednesday, splashing cold water on what has been touted as the hottest Internet IPO in years.

Cold water, no. But definitely a well-deserved rebuke by the investor community that was being asked to pay way too much in the first place. There's been a significant whiff of greed in the Google IPO saga, combined with some unfortunate arrogance on the part of the company. I'm glad to see that investors didn't buy the hype beyond a fairly sensible point. Even $80 sounds a little high to me, but it's at least in the not-totally-insane range.

(This is also my column today in the San Jose Mercury News.) Early this year, back before Google Mania grew to bubble-era proportions, some optimists were speculating that the company's prospective initial public offering might produce an overall market value north of $20 billion. That sounded, in those days, like an amazing number for such a young outfit, and it was an affirmation of Silicon Valley's ability to reinvent itself. Yet today, having bettered that number by a considerable margin in its IPO, Google is beset by second-guessers -- including people with distinct axes to grind -- who are calling the exercise a failure. Google's management certainly did screw up in some ways. But overall, this IPO was a success. Don't let the naysayers, especially the Wall Street crowd, tell you otherwise. The most important element of the success was the auction, which Google forced down the throats of investment bankers. Under the cozy old system, the bankers would set the price of hot IPO stocks grossly low and make sure their friends and favored clients got shares at the offering price, which they could then unload for fat profits. This time, the company got the money, except for some relatively low fees to the banks. The stock had a modest surprising (to me, at least) first-day rise anyway, but the people profiting from that were those who bid in the public auction process, not insiders. Google's sale of shares to bidders for $85 each was considered low only because the company itself, in what will be noted in business-school case studies as a monumental mistake, set an outrageously high target price in late July. That was hubris, and it was just the wedge the Wall Street crowd needed to talk down the actual selling price. Political operatives might have given Google better advice: Set expectations low. Presidential candidates heading into the early caucuses and primaries know that if expectations are too high, they can lose even if they win the voting. Conversely, if expectations are low enough, they can win in public perception even if they lose a particular contest. Google created expectations that it could not possibly meet, especially after wider market conditions turned south and rational investors looked closely at the deal. Its hubris in other ways, including plans for substantial unloading of stock in the IPO by insiders and too little information about corporate strategy, added to potential bidders' unease. Had the company set a lower target price earlier -- a price that still would be impressive by any other standard -- it would have looked downright brilliant today. Wall Street's pique continues to fuel a retrograde spin on this story. The bankers, still sniping from the bushes, weren't vindicated by this IPO. Let's see more auctions.

Google had a fairly normal initial public offering--something the company's founders had sought to avoid with their unconventional approach of using an online auction.

After a bumpy ride toward becoming a publicly traded company, Google Inc. finally saw its stock start trading on the Nasdaq exchange at around noon Eastern Daylight Time Thursday and with a strong opening at $100.01, up from its $85 initial offering price. The stock, which trades under the GOOG ticker symbol, closed at $100.34, up 18 percent.

Shares of Google surged nearly 22 percent in their market debut Thursday, the culmination of a unique and bumpy initial stock offering for the search engine company.

Execs postponed their IPO after Google backed off previous estimates of how much it would charge for its own IPO.

No one in your company was voting, at least not at their desks, but Love.com members selected their own gold medalists.

Shares of Google Inc. were expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Thursday, the culmination of a unique and highly public initial stock offering for the 6-year-old dot-com dreamed up in a garage.

The government granted final approval for the stock offering; the company anticipates shares will be priced from $85 to $95 each.

In a sign that Google's initial public offering will not be as hot or big as expected, the Internet search giant slashed its estimated per-share price range and reduced the number of shares to be sold by insiders.

With all the negative press Google is getting, you gotta wonder if having a solid developer program might have helped their IPO just a little. If so, it's a shame, because it wouldn't have cost a dime, developers were and probably still are anxious to take a ride on the Google Wave.

Venture Wire, normally a bastion of "oatmeal" tasting reports has a rather risque bulletin today.

They write, "Looks like investors in Kleiner Perkins' underperforming Fund IX - and Sequoia's somewhat better performing Fund VIII - will have to wait a little bit longer to see the wild returns promised from the firms' investments in Google." Well by now you all know that Google this morning cut price talk to between $85 and $95 a share from aprevious range of $108 to $135 a share, and said only 19.6 million shares will be sold in the IPO, down from an originally intended 25.7 million shares. Notably, neither Kleiner Perkins nor Sequoia will sell any of their shares in the IPO. They had previously planned to sell 2.1 million and 2.4 million shares, respectively. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have also halved the amount of shares they planned to sell.

Meanwhile, read this brilliant piece by Tom Taulli on the Google IPO debacle.

 

BBC: "Google lowered the price range of its planned share sale to $85-$95, as it awaits approval from regulators."

Someone, a developer, at the dinner last night pointed out why he likes Google better than MSN. Turns out if you search Google for an API name, it almost always takes you to the correct page on MSDN. Here, try both engines for "DestroyWindow:"

Google, query for DestroyWindow.

MSN, query for DestroyWindow.

Translation: this developer doesn't believe that MSN is giving better results than Google is. So, he is still a Google fanatic. MSN's searches are getting better at a rapid rate. Just shows that I'll point out when a competitor of Microsoft does something better than we do.

This is the first level-headed thing I've read about the Google IPO in weeks ("The success of a traditional IPO is often counted by the size of the pop but that is ridiculous. A pop means the firm left money on the table -- money which was transferred to a handful of insiders who were allocated stock at the low IPO price.")

The Playboy interview with Sergey and Larry that might delay the Google IPO (Full text of the interview, taken from Google's S-1.)