It hasn’t even been officially announced yet, but Google’s rumored purchase of Groupon for $5-6 billion is already coming under fire from observers. It raises questions about Google’s relationship with Facebook and can add fuel to the fire as the search engine giant faces a growing number of anti-trust investigations.
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Facebook is getting big, very big, and its current digs in Palo Alto may be a little too small for it. So Facebook is looking for a new home, and it may not be in Palo Alto, or even Santa Clara County for that matter. One possible new home is the Oracle campus in Menlo Park.
Congress’s failure to extend unemployment benefits is already putting a strain on local food banks, with Christmas right around the corner. The demand for services has shot up 70 percent in the last year alone, and it is expected to get much higher as more people lose their unemployment benefits this month.
Santa Clara County is handing out Get Out of Jail Free cards this month to anyone with a misdemeanor warrant for a nonviolent offense or a traffic violation. Until the end of the year, people with warrants against them for nonviolent crimes can simply walk into the local police station, get their citation, and schedule a new court date.
Responding to public demands, the SJPD has agreed to provide crime prevention specialists to neighborhoods in West San Jose.Crime specialists were cut back from certain neighborhood, even though crime was on the rise. Part of the problem that the residents face is that so many of the crimes go unreported. A recent survey found that two-thirds of the residents did not report crimes that they knew about.
Netflix is fighting back after Comcast attempted to charge extra fees for overuse of bandwidth for the streaming of movies. Netflix says that such a fee would “threatens the open Internet,” and lead to the imposition of fees on content, depending on who the provider is. They plan to appeal to federal regulators, arguing that this is a breach of net neutrality.
As someone who spends a great deal of time thinking, reading and talking about food, limiting my reviews to just a chef’s skills and a restaurant’s décor and service isn’t enough anymore. Isn’t the fact a restaurant serves low-grade, factory-farmed ground beef made of a composite of ammonia-treated meat scraps from different processing plants as relevant as whether the kitchen overcooked my burger or the waiter refilled my water?
Search giant Google is rumored to have reached an agreement to acquire the web coupon site Groupon for $2.5 billion. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since purchasing the ad company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2008. The report, reportedly from a Google insider, has not been confirmed by Google.
Three local teens were arrested after going on a vandalism spree in Los Gatos last week. They had been causing havoc in the town, egging cars and smashing their windows. According to police eyewitness, the teens went on to shatter landscaping lighting outside local residences. Altogether, seven kids were involved in the vandalism, causing over $1,000 in damages.
For most teens, getting a job in water means a stint as a lifeguard at a local pool. The Santa Clara Valley Water District Board wants to change all that. They’re hoping to appoint some youths to several of its Advisory Boards. The Water District says that the decision is an extension of its Youth Stewardship Commission program.
