While most folks who attended or followed Apple's iPad 2 event March 2 were hungrily lapping up Apple CEO Steve Jobs highlight reel of new features and stats , I was looking for different info: price. How much would the iPad 2 cost? Because with all of the hand-wringing over the Motorola Xoom's $599 price point with Verizon contract, $799 without contract, I was curious to see what Apple would do to hedge against the Xoom. And boy did it ever.

You're going to have to excuse me on this post because it underscores how much I feel the little guys who suck from the Google teat doth protest too much but... I read a bunch of coverage about how Yelp feels Google gave it an ultimatum with regard to its placement on the not-quite-excellent )but getting there( Google Places local search Website.

The last day of February 2011 could be known as Google Ad Evangelism Day, as key company executives touted the might of the mobile and display ad markets at two separate events. Google CEO Eric Schmidt continued his mission to tout Google's mobile cloud computing services at the Internet Advertising Bureau meeting in Palm Springs, Calif.

If you're a Google Watcher, you remember how the company tried to throw a wrench into Verizon Wireless plans by bidding for 700 MHz wireless spectrum three years ago. Verizon ultimately won the auction, paying $4.7 billion for spectrum it would use to construct its 4G LTE wireless network, which is launched in December. As I wrote in March 2008,

The Motorola Xoom launch Feb. 24 was exciting enough, but Apple helped work us media types up into a lather by announcing it was holding an iPad 2 event one day before the Xoom hit Verizon Wireless and Best Buy stores. It was a strategic stroke of genius. The public was already somewhat put off by the $599 price tag, plus two-year deal of the Xoom , which will push cost-of-ownership over $1,000 over the life of the contract.

Google has added Recipe View, a neat new refinement for its search engine that helps users find food recipes on the Web. Previously, users who wanted to do recipe searches had to type text searches for dishes, such as beef bourguigon , in the search box on Google.com. The new Recipe View feature, accessible via the "Recipes" link on the left-hand rail on Google.com, lets users narrow their search results to show only recipes,

Listen up, all you die-hard Google fans: Google tweeted last night that Android 2.3.3 would be zipping over-the-air to the Nexus One and as an incremental upgrade to the Samsung Nexus S, which launched with the Gingerbread build in December. I could go on and on and make up some reason why this is a big deal, but it's not. Google's Nexus phones, which are developed sans carrier input, are essentially the company's test units to see if new Android builds work. Oh,

Google isn't jettisoning the Omnibox, the URL address bar/search box combination the company introduced at the product's inception in 2008. At least, the Omnibox isn't going anywhere soon sources in the know told Google Watch . What Google is experimenting with are a few variants where the Omnibox has been removed to add more space in the browser window. These are simply "explorations.

It's hard to find too many supporters of Google's $700 million bid for travel software company ITA Software these days. The FairSearch.org coalition of online travel specialists such as Expedia and search providers such as Microsoft Bing, have a new ally in their effort to get the Justice Department to strike down the deal.

Oh what I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall at this meeting of the President Barack Obama and high-tech heavyweights at Google board member and KPCB rock start investor John Doerr's home Feb. 17. President Obama was joined by Doerr and other Silicon Valley superstars, according to the San Francisco Chronicle : Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO, Google Steve Jobs, chairman and CEO, Apple Carol Bartz, president and CEO, Yahoo Mark Zuckerberg, founder, president and CEO,

What is it about Google that attorney generals with no technology background smell blood in the water and decide they want to use the search giant as their political springboard? The short answer would be Google's growing size. The longer answer is the AG's political ambitions are commensurate with Google's desire to feed every facet of the Web. Greed is good, and if you can't find another way to lift yourself up,

Software Advice analyst Lauren Carlson rekindled an oldie but a goodie topic in a blog post last week: Will Google Enter the CRM Market? That was one of several questions I posed to Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard in his office at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., in December 2007. Girouard replied : I think we're smart enough to realize we're not the guys to build everything. The things that have consumer analogs make a lot of sense for us.

I was perturbed recently to learn that I'd been left off of the first batch of Motorola Atrix 4G review units. To my peers: please send your demo units back so I can take a crack! For now, I'll settle for and share with readers some YouTube hands-on demos from the likes of Chris Fleck, vice president of community and solutions development at Citrix. Quick background: the Atrix 4G, which goes on sale March 6, is an Android 2.

Check out the great New York Times expose on how J.C. Penney gamed Google's search engine to push up its Website in search rankings, racking up solid sales for the holiday season. The Times takes awhile to get into the meat, but Search Engine Land nutshells it best: The investigation found that thousands of seemingly unrelated web sites )many that seemed to contain only links( were linking to the J.C. Penney web site. And most of those links had really descriptive anchor text.

So I was reading AllThingsDigital reporter Ina Fried's live blog notes of Nokia's blockbuster, bet-the-company play to put all of its chips on Microsoft Windows Phone 7. We knew this was coming, especially after Google telegraphed it with Vic Gundotra's "two turkeys don't make an eagle: smackdown. My BS detector was set to high alert because I was scanning to see why Nokia CEO Stephen Elop chose Phone 7,

Rumors have been swirling about what measures Nokia CEO Stephen Elop will undertake to douse his so-called " burning platform ," which is how he alleged characterized Symbian and the app ecosystem in a memo to his soldiers. Tech watchers have been speculating since Elop left Microsoft for Nokia that he could pick Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 or Google's Android operating systems as a new platform on which to run Nokia's vaunted hardware. Symbian just isn't cutting it anymore,

For Google, something just went rotten in the State of the Federal Trade Commission. The Wall Street Journal said Tim Wu, a well-regarded Columbia University Professor known for coining the term "network neutrality, is joining the FTC as a "senior advisor" in the agency's Office of Policy Planning beginning Feb. 14. That's Valentine's Day, but there should be no feeling of amore for Google about this move.

Google has come up with another one its super-cool Doodles for its Web search home page . The latest one honors classic science fiction author Jules Verne , whose 183rd birthday is Feb. 8. Google honored Verne, whose A Journey to the Center of the Earth )1864( and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea )1870( captured many people's imaginations since they were published more than a century ago. Check out the Doodle here: Using CSS3,

So as I was writing this piece about the new developments in Google's local search strategy last week, it occurred to me that while Google has a veritable gold mine of mobile, local and social technology, what it lacks is the marketing oomph to make others aware of it. For example, while it's my job to learn about, grok and report the fact that Google's Honeypot recommendation engine is now available in almost 40 languages )ie, gone global(,

There is a delicious piece of FUD being circulated that I can't ignore from Eric Raymond in his blog last week. Seizing on an Associated Press article in which AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson company will start "very aggressively" marketing smart phones based on Google Android operating system, Raymond claims the "iPhone brand is in worse shape than I thought was even possible." He directs us to the AP's detail that AT&T signed up only 400,