Business

As if you needed another reminder that puppies rule and cats are Satan’s children. I kid, of course…kind of. After a blaze took hold of a house in Santa Rosa de Temuco, Chile, a German Shepherd mix named Amanda scrambled to transfer all five of her newborn puppies from the torching residence to a fire truck. Upon bringing each of them over to the vehicle with her mouth, she leaned into her young as firefighters tried to put out the flames. This story might seem like a totally happy one, but I hate to say that it’s not. One of the critters died at the vet from major burns. Luckily the other four are all right, but Mama Bear Amanda was reportedly defensive when people tried to take her little ones away for medical treatment. Needless to say, this is further proof that dogs have the greatest souls of anyone on earth, including humans, as someone took numerous pictures of Amanda transferring her offspring to the car rather than give her a hand. I mean, she doesn’t even have one, guys. Ge...

On the heels of Google buying Wildfire and Salesforce nabbing Buddy Media, we have heard from two very reliable sources, plus a third anonymous source, that Gannett Co., the media giant that owns USA Today and other properties, is buying BLiNQ Media. The price for the Facebook advertising software and service is up to $92 million over a period of three to four years, with a quarter of that amount, $23 million, coming up front. We hear the purchase agreement has been signed and the pair are now marching towards a close at the end of this month. The rationale behind the deal is clear: when brands buy ad placements on Gannett properties, it could use BLiNQ to also sell them ads on social sites and collect a solid margin. Gannett is looking to BLiNQ, which has built up a profitable Facebook ads API business, to become G’s equivalent of the Washington Post Company’s SocialCode, its social media marketing and analytics agency (which picked up 15 Digg engineers in May). Gannett and BLiNQ, T...

Google just announced yet another batch of services it plans to discontinue in the near future. Most of these are relatively obscure products that probably didn’t have a large amount of traction. In this round, Google is shutting down three products, as well as a number of company blogs that had become redundant or just weren’t updated very frequently. The products include Google Apps for Teams, Google Listen and Google Video For Business. This round of shutdowns comes just a few weeks after Google also closed relatively popular services like iGoogle and Google Video. Google launched Google Apps for teams in 2008 and the tool allowed businesses and schools to use non-email services like Google Docs without having to sign up for a Google email address. This service, Google said today, was not as useful for people as [it] originally anticipated” and starting September 4, Google Apps for Teams accounts will be turned into personal Google Accounts. Google Listen started as a Google Labs ...