2007 Roundup: Google marches forward

You know your company is having a good year when its first-quarter profits top $1bn. And that's exactly how Google kicked off 2007, by pulling in revenues of $3.66bn for the quarter ending in March.

While we may have joked back in April 2006 that Google could afford to pay $1bn to advertise on the lunar surface, in 2007 that was definitely true.

And in a way the company is doing something similar by putting up a total of $30m towards the Google Lunar X Prize to encourage international teams to land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon. Well, the company has already mapped the stars.

While Google can obviously afford a few frivolous activities, it didn't take its business eye off the ball in 2007. Its most audacious move came at the expense of its biggest rival: Microsoft.

Microsoft was known to be in talks to buy ad tracking firm DoubleClick, valuing the company at $2bn.

The buyout would have given Microsoft access to DoubleClick's Dart technology, which monitors how internet adverts perform, boosting Redmond's ability to fight Google for online advertising market share.

A brilliant plan, except for the part where Google sneaked in and bought DoubleClick for itself.

The deal is naturally being i nvestigated by the Federal Trade Commission over competition worries following complaints from Microsoft.

Germany is also questioning the buyout over user privacy fears, putting the $3.1bn deal under threat.

Even if the DoubleClick deal does eventually come unstuck, Google has plenty of irons in plenty of other fires.

For starters there's the rumoured Google phone, a device that became much more likely when the company applied for a patent.

What Google eventually released was a mobile software platform called 'Android' that should have applications running on it by the second half of 2008.

Google claims that Android, which is still generally referred to as the Google Phone, will use its open mobile platform to end fragmentation in the industry.

It doesn't stop at phones, though, and in June Google created a version of its Desktop software for Linux and in November brought its Gadgets to Mac OS X.

The company also entered the social networking space by releasing a set of open APIs that lets developers simultaneously craft applications for multiple social networks.

MySpace, Bebo and Xing, which are all under fire from 2007's big grower Facebook, backed the Google OpenSocial technology.

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