IT Buoy

Nilofer Merchant is CEO and Chief Strategist of Rubicon Consulting . She’s also the author of ” The New How .” This post was originally published on her blog , and is republished with permission. Graft some Google to your Company Culture? Here in the Valley, there’s a weird awe of Google. It reminds me of the awe that Apple once had when I was there — as a place where the best and brightest go to work. I’ve heard that Intel had that cachet before Apple and some people are now suggesting that Twitter is the “new Google”. The awe is often evident in specific stories about Google’s gourmet cafeterias.

If you’re in the market for a netbook — the gimpy kittens of the laptop jungle — know this first: on the inside, they’re all basically the same. Making the little differences all the more important! And yes, they do add up. For our Battlemodo, we decided to look only at netbooks powered by Intel’s Pine Trail (Atom N450) processor. Netbooks sporting older processors are a bit cheaper, but they’re also a little slower and don’t achieve the same impressive battery life as Pine Trail. And they’ve been reviewed to death elsewhere. Read the rest of this story

Microsoft bigwig Bill Gates got hip-checked off the top perch as the richest man in the world by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim (pictured here), on the annual Forbes list of the world’s Richie Riches. Slim came to the rescue of the New York Times (NYT) a year ago, forking over $250 million to help the cash-strapped media company. Often in the No. 1 spot, Gates actually got shoved off in 2008 by megainvestor Warren Buffett (now No. 3), with whom he is good friends. Gates returned to the top rank in 2009, and now Slim–a telecom-and-more tycoon–has surpassed Gates’s net worth of $53 billion slightly with a $53.5 billion kitty. Here are some of the other U.S. tech dudes–mostly based in Silicon Valley–on the list, in the Top 100: No.

A new site that maps users of Chatroulette is taking a little of the anonymity out of the random video-chat service. The Laughing Squid blog points us to the site, Chatroulettemap.com , which puts users — and their images — on a Google map, based on their IP address. The site doesn’t map everyone on Chatroulette (right now it lists only about 2,500 people), and it doesn’t mean that anyone who logs onto Chatroulette will be mapped. But it does provide an interesting glimpse of Chatroulette for those who don’t want to try the service. The still pictures are about what you’d expect — which means some of them aren’t safe for work. But more importantly, they make the point that anonymity on the Web isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. The mapping site says it is able to get the IP address of users because Chatroulette connections are peer-to-peer links, and “Chatroulette mearly handles the behind the scenes handshakes.” The Chatroulette map also suggests an increase in efforts to make Chatroulette a little cleaner. Chatroulette’s 17-year-old founder has said he is against offensive uses of the site, and the map’s creators write that they “plan to attempt to flag all of the offensive images, or allow for community flagging.” It’s too early in Chatroulette’s life, though, to know whether such efforts will work — or even whether Chatroulette itself is going to last

Two recent reports show Microsoft’s Bing advancing slightly in search rankings — but the surveys differ on who is losing out. Data from Hitwise today show Bing rising a bit to 9.7% of searches in February from 9.37% in January, while Google’s giant share fell from 71.49% to 70.95%. Yesterday’s report from ComScore also showed a boost for Bing — to 11.5% from 11.3% in January. But ComScore’s data showed that Bing was taking search business not from Google, but from Yahoo, which fell to 16.8% from 17% in January. Microsoft has been spending heavily for Bing. Jefferies & Company analyst Youssef Squali writes that Bing’s gains are “aided by the company’s aggressive marketing” but writes that its rise “is an indicator of sustainable traction.” He also writes that, with the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership this year, “Bing should become a viable competitor to Google.” But Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider has another take, writing that “We think Bing is buying these share gains, which means that they won’t be building a profitable search business anytime soon.”