What Google in China shows: It's never about shareholders

Investors (and Jack Welch) complain that Sergey Brin was acting from personal belief when he made the move. Of course he did. So does every CEO.

By Paul Smalera, contributor

Google watchers and investors are scrambling to make sense of the company's historic pullout from the Chinese market on Monday. The company's stake in technology, services and staff there likely ran into the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. But MORE

Face-off: Is Google motivated by self-interest or indignation?

Fortune contributing editor David A. Kaplan and senior editor Roger Parloff got into a spirited email debate Wednesday: When it came to pulling out of China, was Google doing no evil or simply doing what was best for business? David suspected long-term profit: "By taking the action it did ... Google enhances its standing in the American imagination." Roger didn't much care about motive: "It would be like asking if MORE

Smartphone traffic is up 193% in a year

Led by iPhone and the Androids. Traffic from the iPod touch is growing even faster.

Click to enlarge. Source: AdMob

Smartphone traffic is up. Feature phone share is down. And traffic from mobile Internet devices (like the iPod touch) that don't have built-in phones is booming -- even before Apple releases the iPad.

That's the thrust of the the latest report by AdMob, the mobile advertising network snapped up last fall by MORE

Jerry York: 'I wish I had resigned'

Apple nearly lost a director over Steve Jobs' lack of candor, according to the Journal

Photo: Apple Inc.

The biggest revelation in the Wall Street Journal story Thursday about the lack of independent voices on Apple's (AAPL) board of directors is what the late Jerry York told them -- presumably off the record -- about the way Steve Jobs handled the news about his health problems.

Jobs issued a statement last week MORE

Blogging for bankers

To take on their toughest critics, big banks are playing as visitors on social media's turf. Can they keep up, much less win?

By Nin-Hai Tseng, contributor

Five days a week, and sometimes weekends, Larry Rubinoff pounds away on his laptop with a mission: Expose what he believes to be the truth about the big banks' roles in the global financial meltdown.

For this semi-retired mortgage professional turned blogger, running Goldmansachs666.com isn't MORE

Profiting from Apple's war with Google

A trader who is long on AAPL and short on GOOG says Steve Jobs is taking Google down

It's been a busy couple of weeks for revelations about Steve Jobs' falling out with Google's Eric Schmidt.

On March 12, we had Brad Stone and Michael Helft's piece in the New York Times about the two CEO's long-running "spat." It included an account of a particularly "fierce" and "heated" meeting in 2008 in MORE

March madness: 7 AAPL record highs

With a hot phone, a new tablet and the lion's share of PC profits, Apple is on a tear

Apple (AAPL) closed at 228.36 Tuesday, up 3.61 points (1.61%) for the day to hit another record high -- its seventh since March 5.

While the whole market was up Tuesday -- and tech stocks in particular -- Apple has been enjoying a particular strong run. Its shares have climbed nearly 14% in MORE

13 ways of looking at an iPad

Wired taps a baker's dozen of the "brightest tech minds" to mark the rise of the tablet

Source: Wired magazine

"With the iPad," writes Steven Levy in How the Tablet Will Change the World, "Apple is making its play to become the center of a post-PC era."

Levy argues that the conventions underlying today's personal computers -- the graphical user interface, the shrink-wrapped boxes of software -- were forged 40 and MORE

NYC's new landmark: The Apple Store

It's the Big Apple's fifth most-photographed location, according to a Cornell study

Fifth Ave. Apple Store. Photo: yesthatkarim via Flickr

In a front-page story in Monday's Philadelphia Inquirer, the paper's architecture critic, Inga Saffron, leads with a scene in which a pair of Manhattan tourists dash out of a waiting taxi to snap photos of Apple's (AAPL) Fifth Avenue store. She tells the story to Peter Bohlin, the architect who originally MORE

Broken China

The burgeoning superpower keeps sabotaging its relationships with the outside world.

By Paul Smalera, writer

Google has long been embarrassed by having to restrict its search results in China and promised to stop the practice as soon as it could. The company agreed to self-censor in 2006 as a devil's bargain to gain access to the Chinese market. But after last year's successful and major hacking of its Chinese operations MORE