Google has acquired the domain name g.co that will only link to official Google products and services. The domain name acquisition in itself is not much news, but it is further evidence that premium domain names are very important in a company’s branding. “The shorter a URL, the easier it is to share and remember,” writes Gary Briggs, Google VP of Consumer Marketing . “The downside is, you often can’t tell what website you’re going to be redirected to. We’ll only use g.co to send you to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts. That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.” It is likely Google paid well into seven figures for the domain name with Domain Incite reporting that they believe the starting price for single character domains believed to be $1.5 million. Other high profile .CO acquisitions include Overstock paying $350,000 for o.co, which it uses to rebrand the company internationally, while Amazon bought a.co, z.co, k.co and cloud.co. Additionally, Twitter acquired t.co for its URL shortening service. Google will continue to use goo.gl as their public URL shortener that anyone will still be able to shorten URLs across the web. The acquisition is also a coup for the .CO ccTLD and will help boost awareness of .CO that now has over one million registrations in less than a year.

Timmons speaks at a Port of Quincy event relating to data center tax breaks (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In a move that has been referred to alternately as “poaching,” “stealing” and “snagging,” Apple reportedly hired Microsoft’s data center general manager Kevin Timmons yesterday, to an unspecified position, though one generally expected to closely related to the company’s near-complete 500,000 square-foot data center in Maiden, North Carolina. In a post on his Green Data Center Blog, breaking the news that Timmons was leaving Microsoft for Apple , Dave Ohara observed that perhaps the most interesting point was the fact that the most scarce resource in the data center business was not power or cooling, but talent at the executive level. “It is such a small world in data centers and especially smaller for the executive rank,” wrote Ohara, “information flows as recruiters call and others want opinions on various candidates and companies to work for.  Besides the executives, senior data center design engineers are heavily recruited.” Timmons leaves the same post at Microsoft that Data Center GM Mike Manos left several years ago to work at Digital Realty Trust

Posted on: Monday, 4 April 2011, 00:00 CDT HostUCan announce the release of their first context-based search engine for web hosting industry, with which people could find an ideal web hosting easily by describing the basic information of their sites. San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) April 3, 2011 HostUCan, a next generation web hosting search and review platform, announce its first release today.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) April 3, 2011 HostUCan, a next generation web hosting search and review platform, announce its first release today. They have developed a powerful context-based search engine to help people find the best hosting option based on their hosting needs

Hosting Reviews – ORLANDO, FL – First Data Corporation, a global leader in electronic commerce and payment processing, today introduced mobile vouchers (mVoucher) for merchants looking to extend their brand and commerce services to their ever-more-mobile customers. First Data mVoucher enables merchants to deliver offers to consumers through e-mail or their mobile device. Sometimes referred to as coupons, mVouchers store a prepaid value funded by the merchant or consumer product goods company

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — One of the morning keynote session on Wednesday was delivered by John Fruehe of AMD, who addressed “core scalability in a cloud environment.” He says AMD processors are involved in a tremendous number of cloud deployments, partly because the company was first to focus on power efficiency.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — One of the morning keynote session on Wednesday was delivered by John Fruehe of AMD, who addressed “core scalability in a cloud environment.” He says AMD processors are involved in a tremendous number of cloud deployments, partly because the company was first to focus on power efficiency.