Google has put $3.9 million in 23andMe Inc, the pre-launch biotech start-up of Google co-founder Sergey Brin's new bride Anne Wojcicki, according to an SEC filing Tuesday. Some of the money was used to repaid the $2.6 million billionaire Brin advanced Anne. Google had an independent adviser assess the value of the start-up, whose purpose is to 'allow individuals to gain deeper insights into their ancestry, genealogy and inherited traits

The Real-World Java Seminar is a one-day event that's packed with technical presentations delivered by the Java industry experts. Attending this event will allow you to take a fresh look at the architecture of the projects you're working on now and can serve as a roadmap for your further development as a Java professional. The largest Java developer event on the East Coast, Real-World Java Seminar will offer sponsorship and exhibit opportunities to the leading Java technology companies. Additional information on sponsorship and exhibit opportunities can be obtained by e-mail at events(at) sys-con.com or by phone at 201 802-3021.

Those Wall Street whispers about an alliance between Google and Salesforce.com we told you about graduated to the Wall Street Journal, which is expecting some of Google's SaaS productivity tools like e-mail and instant messaging to be mated with Salesforce.com's CRM widgetry in a Microsoft offense.

One of the major features of upcoming Adobe Apollo is support disconnected Web applications, and Adobe's Kevin Lynch announced that Google Gears will be available in Apollo. Adobe Flex applications already use the space on the client's disk for storing instances of any objects (this is called local SharedObjects), and turning this disk space into a fully searchable RDBMS sounds pretty exciting to me. Last year Sun Microsystems have included a client database Java DB in Java 6, which would be more useful if Java offered a competitive Web client VM. This situation won't change for at least a year (we are expecting a small footprint Consumer JRE next year).

Google of course expressed confidence that the acquisition will go through and close by the end of the year, using Yahoo's proposed acquisition of Right Media, AOL's acquisition of a controlling interest in Adtech, WPP's acquisition of 24/7 Media and Microsoft's intended $6 billion acquisition of aQuantative, all deals made around its DoubleClick purchase, as proof that competition is alive and well in online advertising.

Microsoft also supposedly bid for DoubleClick and was reportedly willing to pay a billion dollars for 24/7, which London ad agency WPP took out last week for $649 million. Yahoo is buying Right Media for $680 million and is rumored to be interested in the British social networking site Bebo, a miniature MySpace. The pundits haven't given up on the idea that Microsoft could still buy Yahoo. Goldman Sachs, for one, thinks the aQuantive deal increases the odds of such a thing happening because Yahoo is the missing piece of the puzzle that Microsoft needs to go up against Google. The alternative, they say, would mean picking up a cluster of smaller companies - and if you listen to Microsoft right now that's what'll happen.

Christina Bashark has joined Edith Roman Associates as Vice President of New Business. Prior to Edith Roman Associates she was Senior Director of Business Development at Worldata responsible for the acquisition of list management accounts and the successful development of strategic marketing initiatives for publishers and various businesses nationwide. She also worked at List Technology Systems in New York City.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, worth an estimated $16 billion, has quietly gotten married in the Bahamas to Anne Wojcicki, the sister of the lady and early Google employee who rented her Menlo Park garage to the proto-Google in 1998 and introduced the couple to each other.

The report that Microsoft is buying local digital marketing shop Aquantive for six BILLION dollars shows that if we're not in a new bubble, we're in something that sure looks and feels like the real thing. Redmond seems bent on regaining consumer computing supremacy as it competes with Yahoo and Google for the lion's share of the 21st century media marketing business.

Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, announces a new white paper from The Gilbane Group that explains how marketers benefit from utilizing a Web CMS-driven eMarketing platform to deliver tangible ROI on marketing investments.

According to the press Microsoft and Yahoo are supposed to be trying to figure out a configuration that would let them fight Google together. The notion of Yahoo's acquisition by Microsoft for, oh, $50 billion advanced by the New York Post last Friday, the Murdoch tabloid, that set reporters to sharpening their pencils has since been, well, sharpened to a 'creative partnership' by the New York Times. The Times says that the negotiations have been going for over a year, meaning that the pair never completely retired from the conference table months ago when such talks were first reported, but they haven't been getting anywhere either.

Novell has lost the chief architect of its Linux desktop effort Robert Love to Google and its Open Source Program Office. Many would like to ascribe it to the Microsoft-Novell relationship but Love denied it on Slashdot. It's simply the thrill of working for Google.

Evidently Nina Reiser had exquisitely bad taste in men. Her estranged husband stands accused of her murder, his trial was to have started this past Monday, but not before prosecutors were reportedly forced to tell the court that an ex-lover of hers had confessed to eight murders - and said he left a ninth victim for dead but it wasn't her.

This was a virtual story with a virtual death. The story itself was never affirmed nor denied, and it flickered out before it had any traction. This was not a rumor, but it was also not a real story. There is a continuous stream of communications among technology companies large and small about who could potentially buy whom, what 'synergies' may ensue, how strategies can be aligned, etc. Many restaurants in Silicon Valley and 100 other places would go out of business if they didn't serve as places for potential dealmakers to sit around, look important, and say important sounding stuff.

Well, Google hasn't put Microsoft out of business yet. Redmond is still a money machine. It posted record profits up 65% to $4.93 billion, or 50 cents a share, Thursday on revenues up 32% to $14 billion for the March quarter, its might-as-well-call-it Vista quarter when the software finally came out. Microsoft's operating profits came to a staggering $6.59 billion. The numbers beat the Street.

Where would YOU go to get your news? Google News? MSN News? Or Yahoo! News? I think the answer is clear (it's Google), and this reflects the success and failure of these three players. And I don't want to hear from the MSN News people that they almost got it right, but they lost Dr. Kai-Fu Lee to Google in the last minute. You guys can certainly do better than that!

Security software developer Exploit Prevention Labs (http://www.explabs.com/) today released a video at http://explabs.blogspot.c om/2007/04/video.html documenting how cyber criminals are using Google's popular AdWords advertising system to infect unsuspecting users with malware. The video is also posted to YouTube at http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=iD0wdzQb8XY

CFDynamics, a ColdFusion Web hosting company, has announced their Spring Server Spectacular. The Spring Server Spectacular is an opportunity for the company to offer top-of-the-line dedicated servers at a discounted cost to encourage customers to expand their services. The Spring Server Spectacular officially begins on May 1 and will run through the end of May. Those who sign up for a dedicated server in that time period can expect to see significant savings and no long term contracts.

When exactly Eric didn't say - a Google blog says this summer - and he didn't claim it would replace PowerPoint. 'It does not have all the functionality nor is it intended to have all the functionality of Microsoft,' he said, but 'it seems to be a better fit to how people use the web.' Yeah, and according to him he isn't building a Microsoft competitor either. People with a free Google account should be able to create, share, edit and display presentations and slide shows.

The so-called 'Deep Web' search arena is really heating up, according to Fetch. Several business are already using the company's technology to turn the Web into a usable database, the company says. One example deploying its technology to provide detailed personal background information from a variety of public and private information resources for the largest background search companies in the country.

Spending money like a sailor on shore leave, Google has agreed to pay $3.1 billion cash for DoubleClick, the $150 million-a-year display ad-targeting cookie-carrying activity-tracking Silicon Alley firm that was also being pursued by Microsoft. It's the most money Google has been prepared to pay for an acquisition so far, twice what it paid six months ago for YouTube which only merited stock and is obviously both strategic and defensive.

A couple of weeks ago I stopped by at our publisher's offices (SYS-CON Media) and they showed me our Flex book with the correct cover, but all pages were blank. Yesterday, I've got an email from them with the words, 'Yakov your book is ready, stop by and pick it up'. The guys from production department are really nice, so they've attached this video just to show me that the book is really really finally super-duper ready. Check this out (the video file is large though).

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today a definitive agreement to acquire DoubleClick Inc., a global leader in digital marketing technology and services, for US$3.1 billion in cash from San Francisco-based private equity firm Hellman & Friedman along with JMI Equity and management. The acquisition will combine DoubleClick's expertise in ad management technology for media buyers and sellers with Google's leading advertising platform and publisher monetization services.

SYS-CON's original story reported: 'Google, which is reportedly building its own DoubleClick-like ad-serving mechanism, is now supposed to be trying to buy DoubleClick since Microsoft was reported to be in talks with the online media buyer. The competition is supposed to make any deal more expensive. Last week they were already talking about the price for the $100 million-$150 million business being an exorbitant $2 billion. The Wall Street Journal, which originally broke the story, says Yahoo and AOL, one of DoubleClick's biggest accounts, have also kicked the tires. DoubleClick's alternative to a sale is to IPO.'

Google, which is reportedly building its own DoubleClick-like ad-serving mechanism, is now supposed to be trying to buy DoubleClick since Microsoft was reported to be in talks with the online media buyer. The competition is supposed to make any deal more expensive. Last week they were already talking about the price for the $100 million-$150 million business being an exorbitant $2 billion. The Wall Street Journal, which originally broke the story, says Yahoo and AOL, one of DoubleClick's biggest accounts, have also kicked the tires. DoubleClick's alternative to a sale is to IPO.

For a while there it looked like there was something Google couldn't find, namely its own three-foot pet python Kaiser, which it managed lose somewhere in its 300,000-square-foot New York City offices. The maintenance staff finally found the little guy safe and sound and he was sent home with his pet engineer. The mice and rats of New York can breath a sigh of relief.

A secret server farm project being sponsored by Google in India will require an enormous investment, according to a report filed earlier in the week at industry commentator's John C. Dvorak's blogsite. The server farm will reportedly deliver an entire googlebyte of storage when completed in 2010.

Microsoft has combined its search and AdCenter online advertising operations, units that are supposed to compete against Google, and named the head of its Dynamics CRM line Satya Nadella to run it, reporting to Kevin Johnson. This after Microsoft reduced its guidance for revenue growth in online services and after the head of Microsoft's search Chris Payne was reported leaving to start his own company and online ad chief Blake Irving said he would retire. Nadella takes over April 19.

The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that Comcast, the largest American cable company and the second-largest provider of high-speed Internet access, is unhappy with its search deal with Google and is talking to Microsoft about substituting. The paper says Comcast, which should earn about $70 million this year off its ad arrangement with Google, thinks it should get at least $100 million. It is one of the biggest non-Google sources of search queries that Google handles and the paper says Comcast think Google could do more to up that number. And it would also like to know exactly how Google is using the data it collects about Comcast.net users. Comcast's contract with Google expires at the end of the year.

Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales has commercial designs and that three-year-old for-profit ad-based Wikia Inc venture of his is aiming to build an open source search engine to take on Google. He wants 5% of the market according to reports out of Tokyo following a speech he gave. Wales apparently thinks that search is an essential facility and shouldn't be a 'secretive black box.' He's also unimpressed with Google's 'super-duper rocket scientists' legend and reckons it's only trading on its name.

You've of course heard that Viacom, which owns MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, among others, has sued Google and its unprofitable but pricey $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition for damages of upwards of a billion dollars and an injunction. It charges them with 'massive intentional copyright infringement.' If it's intentional we're really talking $3 billion here. Viacom's complaint, filed in federal court in New York after distribution negotiations failed and after Viacom demanded YouTube remove all Viacom content from its site, claims YouTube poached almost 160,000 of its clips - citing first-run movies and cable TV shows that appear as they are aired - and says they've been viewed more than 1.5 billion times 'destroying enormous value in the process.'

dtSearch announced Version 7.4 of the dtSearch product line. dtSearch products instantly search terabytes of text across a desktop, network, Internet or Intranet. The dtSearch product line also lets developers add dtSearch?s terabyte indexer search functionality and file format support to Web-based and other applications. The new version expands support to new Microsoft formats.

Rumor has it that Google is interested in ThinkFree, the HaanSoft-owned, ad-supported, Java-based, very Microsoft-like, Microsoft-compatible online office suite. It sent its YouTube acquisition folks in to talk to the Korean concern lately. At least that's what HaanSoft's CEO has been telling the Korea Times.

Google Thursday planted its flag on the shores of Microsoft's Fortress Office, finally opening up shop to sell the anticipated commercial version of its comparatively rudimentary web-based productivity software, aiming it at the big enterprise, the source of much of Microsoft's power and revenue. It's calling the stuff Google Apps Premier Edition and put an annual price tag of $50 per user account on it, undercutting - but not by ridiculous amounts - what large accounts wind up paying Microsoft for Office. However, Google claims it is so cheap it's a 'no-brainer to try it out.' It's expecting large deals. We'll spare you Goggle saying it's not competing with Microsoft. Office is estimated to have about 450 million users and with Google in the picture Microsoft may have to do some more discounting.

SYS-CON Events (www.sys-con.com) announced today that AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West (www.ajaxworld.com) willtake place on September 24-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Centerin Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to attract over 2,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of everystripe who will be converging in Silicon Valley to attend the most comprehensive meeting on the West Coast, covering the most significant technology subjects of recent times: AJAX, Rich Internet Apps & Web 2.0.

Google's threat to Office is supposed to be unleashed 'soon' according to a story in Monday's Boston Globe. Google VP and general manager of the enterprise David Girouard in town giving a speech to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council said that Google's packaging up a suite of web-based software products to sell to businesses that includes e-mail, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet, instant messaging and voice-over-IP.

Imagine a completely deconstructed operating system that the user, or service provider, glues together out of just the pieces he needs and pays for it à la carte. Okay, now imagine Microsoft - which has repeatedly told antitrust authorities the world over for years that it can't possibly pull so much as a hair out of Window for fear it will crash to smithereens around their feet - fielding one. Well, Microsoft has filed for a US patent on such a beast, leading some folks to speculate that it might be Microsoft's parry to Google's thrust into its platform space. It also might be Microsoft rejigging the whole economics of computers to get a bigger tax.

IBM is going to offer free, downloadable, entry-level search software that looks like Yahoo to businesses so they can find information on the web or stored internally. It's called IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition and it can riffle through a maximum of 500,000 documents in 30 language and 200 file types per server while being integrated with Yahoo's web search.

Microsoft today announced the official release to Web of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. This tool provides Web developers with the essential tools to simplify building next-generation, AJAX-style Web applications through what it calls 'seamless integration with the .NET Framework and Microsoft platform.'

In yesterday's 'i-Technology Viewpoint' Ashok Sudani wrote that '... the search engine will never run your AJAX. To the search engine, huge areas of your website content are now hidden, never to be spidered, indexed, or found. This really limits the usefulness of AJAX in many applications.' Well, that 'fact' is, in fact, not a fact.