The scale of this potential match-up would make it one of the worlds largest Banks. BARCLAYS has approached Dutch bank ABN Amro with an ambitious merger plan that would create a global banking powerhouse worth £80 billion. The informal approach occurred after ABN Amro became embroiled in a bitter battle last month with activist hedge fund, The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI). Barclays and ABN combined would create one of the world’s biggest banking groups Source: Barclays in £80bn offer to ABN Amro-Business-Industry Sectors-Banking & Finance-TimesOnline There would be nearly 50 million customers in the potentially combined entity. A deal would … Continue reading Barclays in £80bn offer to ABN Amro

 Seth does a nice job of laying out the evolution of advertising until today.  Where he loses me, is in the assessment of today, and Google AdSense. The most effective online ad buy is AdSense, where you bid for traffic and pay by the click. This is permission-based, because your ad shows up next to a Google search or on a relevant page. So the people who are seeing it are the right people. And the click demonstrates that they want to see your page. Source: Seth’s Blog: SquidOffers Google AdSense is not permission based IMHO.  Why? …. because no-one asked me … Continue reading Whats beyond AdSense?

 This is a remarkable set of comments from the leader of a company that is itself in serious strategic difficulty. Ballmer suggested that Google was growing too fast, and had failed to make a success of efforts to diversify beyond search with ads. He dismissed Google’s various other projects as “cute” to chortles from the assembled business students, and commented that “a random collection of people doing their own thing” might not add value. This was taken by many as a jab at Google’s well-known practice of allowing its engineers to spend 20 per cent of their working hours on … Continue reading Ballmer characterises Google as both cute, and insane