Matt Dickman has put together a good overview of how Google touches him from the minute he wakes up until the minute he goes to bed. Matt begins by noting that his post the year prior about the same topic was one of his popular ever. Our post about "My Life Without Google" is one of our most popular of all time as well.

From mobile to YouTube to online purchases to billboards on the highway, Matt’s day touches nearly all of the aspects of what Google offers. Here are a few of the good bits:

• 5:15am: Ugh. The day starts to my blaring clock radio. There is an ad running that Google has sold through ClearChannel.
• 9:00am: I surf my favorite blogs, most of them have Google AdWords placed on them even in the feeds. I am reading those feeds with Google Reader.
• 10:00am: Finally! I am free from…damn…it’s another Google SMS alert on my phone. No peace.  (from the toilet!)
• 3:45pm: Just in surfing the web I come across 2 or 3 major sites that run Google for searching site content. MySpace is one of those.

Though Matt misses a whole bunch of Google services… here are a few:

• Did any of his phone calls come in from GrandCentral?
• What about feeds - how many aren’t served by FeedBurner?
• And probably the one he overlooked the most - Google Analytics - how many sites that he visited during the day aren’t running Google Analytics?

What other ways does Google touch us behind-the-scenes that Matt may have missed? Leave them in the comments.

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Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Microsoft Raises Yahoo Offer To $32-$33 Through WSJ; YHOO Wants $37*  —  Microsoft (MSFT) leaks news that it is willing to pay $32-$33 for Yahoo—in a last attempt to get Yahoo (YHOO) shareholders to pressure the board to sell.  It adds that Yahoo’s dope-smoking board wants “upper $30s.”

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While the AOL/Time Warner merger has gone down in the record books as one of the worst mergers ever, I still contend that it could have gone much better if stronger management had been in place. Most specifically, there were obvious synergies between aspects of Time Warner and AOL — but petty squabbles and turf wars kept most of those synergies from being realized. The most glaring and obvious of these was Time Warner Cable (or RoadRunner) and AOL. Both offered internet access, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to merge the two properties, and use RoadRunner to upgrade all those dialup users onto broadband, and then keep them engaged with all the Time Warner content. Of course, the Time Warner content people freaked out about content on the internet of course, so that would never have worked — but the failure to link up RoadRunner and AOL never made any sense.

In fact, the two services began aggressively competing with each other. Then, after three years, someone finally realized that maybe the two should work together and made an announcement saying so. Of course… an announcement without action is worthless. So, another year goes by and another exec trots out with an announcement that the two divisions will work closely again. And again… nothing. Give it almost another year… and yet another announcement. Sense a pattern? In the end, the two groups never actually did combine, and with today’s announcement that Time Warner is selling off the cable business entirely, it just puts an exclamation point on all these years of keeping the two businesses separate. Of course, in selling off Time Warner Cable, it will also likely lead to speculation that the company will sell off AOL (or merge it with Yahoo — remember that plan?) as well — though, as an entirely separate entity.

While I tend to be skeptical of mergers based on vague “synergies,” it’s still rather amazing that in all this time, no one at Time Warner ever got these two divisions together — and now the company may end up selling each off separately. In the end, this was a deal that only worked out for the investment bankers. Remember, they love to convince companies to consolidate one year and diversify the next — because they make money on both transactions.

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New Relic is looking to capitalize on the growing number of Ruby on Rails application deployments, having recently raised $3.5M from Benchmark Capital for their Rails Performance Management (RPM) product.RPM is a combination of installed software and cloud services that helps developers understand performance problems in their RoR applications. A Rails developer first installs […]

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Meebo, which continues to roll out new Web-based instant message and chat applications, is announcing tonight that it has closed a $25 million funding round led by Jafco Ventures. Jafco’s investment portfolio includes other online communications plays, such as classifieds utility Oodle, Exchange competitor PostPath, and Web content tracker Attributor. It looks like a good club for Meebo to join.

Also participating in the funding is Time Warner Investments, and KTB Ventures. Time Warner Investments is a strategic investing arm for Time Warner; this investment will give Meebo hooks into major media properties. KTB’s portfolio has a Far East bias, with more than half its portfolio companies based in China and Korea.

Meebo’s previous investors, Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, also participated in this round.

Meebo has a competitor nipping at its heels: Soashable (review) has the mission of creating an “open-source Meebo clone;”it offers about the same core features as Meebo did when it launched in 2005. Trillian, which also makes a multi-network IM client, has not kept up with Meebo on the Web front.

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eBay published a legal filing that finally sheds some light on its mysterious Craigslist lawsuit. As the WSJ tells it, here’s the story:

• eBay management went crazy watching Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster sitting on the Craigslist goldmine and refusing to capitalize on it. So eventually they decided to capitalize on it themselves–by founding Kijiji.
• Craigslist, understandably, saw Kijiji as a sign that eBay was trying to compete with it. Craigslist, understandably, therefore told eBay it was no longer comfortable having eBay as a shareholder.
• eBay’s Meg Whitman offered to buy the rest of Craigslist.
• Jim and Craig decided to dilute eBay’s stake below 25%, which would eliminate the ability for eBay to elect a board member.To do this, they entereed into a series of board transactions that diluted eBay’s stake by 13%.

Craigslist will respond to eBay’s filing in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, it has this to say:

“As those who know us best will recognize, every measure we have takenhas been for the sake of protecting the long term well-being of theCraigslist community. Sadly, we have an uncomfortably conflictedshareholder in our midst, one that is obsessed with dominating onlineclassifieds for the purpose of maximizing its own profits.”

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Arn / MacRumors:
AT&T Providing Free Wi-Fi Access to iPhone Users [Updated]  —  A couple of readers have reported that AT&T hotspots are now offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users.  Barnes and Noble, Starbucks and presumably AT&T’s 71,000 other Wi-fi hotspot locations are now offering iPhone users a custom portal to access free Wi-Fi.

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As a natural progression from Google Earth and Google Sky, the Mountain View monolith now plans to create 3D maps of the Earth’s oceans and seas and make it available via Google Ocean. The software will allow users to navigate the aquatic bottom and see the topography that exists down there. Google also plans to include interactive data about various subjects such as weather patterns, coral reefs, shipwrecks, and currents. The goal for Google ocean is to use as much high resolution photography of the underwater terrain as possible, offering more than just a map. But researchers say such a process could take upwards of 100 years. And Google, if you’re going to include an easter egg similar to Google Earth’s flight sim, could we get a guided tour with a virtual Team Zissou? [CNet News]

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I have to admit, when Jules sent through the URL to a new little project he was working on, I didn’t quite get it. We’ve both had a taste for fiddling around with phone-based apps long before they were hip — or even vaguely practical for that matter — so when he devised this […]

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This fine piece of flip phone is Blackberry’s very first clamshell, codenamed Kickstart. It’s not very attractive—it’s got a smugly RAZR-esque silhouette. The inside is Pearly, with a trackball and SureType keyboard. Boy Genius says that the internal LCD is “decent looking,” but the shot of the external has a weird sheen over it, so it’s hard to tell there. Sort of an odd choice from RIM, I think—was there an untapped demand for a flip Blackberry? No other specs, but expect it by the end of the year. Profile shot after the jump or hit BGR for the full five. [BGR]

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Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Kongregate Gets $3 Million From Bezos: Growing Fast and About To Unleash Its Games on Facebook  —  Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has invested $3 million into user-generated casual gaming site Kongregate through Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment vehicle.

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Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops

There’s a ton of upcoming laptops and devices based around Intel’s Atom processor, and it looks like all the early interest is causing that best of all possible problems for the chipmaker: it’s gotten too many orders. Intel told the WSJ that it’s planning on producing “millions” of Atom chips this year, but that it’s “seeing better-than-expected demand” as production begins and that it’s “we are working quickly to address it.” Still, it looks like manufacturers are expecting a shortage to last for a while — ASUS predicted that supply would be constrained until the third quarter during its quarterly conference call, for example — and various Chinese trade publications have reported the same. That’s definitely not encouraging news, and with AMD’s Puma and VIA’s Isaiah nipping at Atom’s heels, Intel might want to kick things into a higher gear.

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Filed under: Cellphones

Ready to have your brain blown out through the top of your head? Look above — you’re staring at the heretofore unseen BlackBerry clamshell, the Kickstart. The Boy Genius snagged a handful of photos of the device (which apparently he’s known about for “a while”), and has decided to share his good fortune with the rest of the world. The phone sports a Pearl-esque keyboard, typical trackball navigation, and apparently utilizes both an internal and external LCD screen. No word on specs, carriers, or a release date, but BGR is saying this puppy is due before the end of the year. You’ll know more when we know more!

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Chinese social networking site Xiaonei has raised $430 million in funding from Softbank, according to a report from VentureBeat.Xiaonei was founded in December 2005 by Qinghua University graduates Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang and Jacky, then was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive in 2006 for an undisclosed sum. As of November 2007, the site […]

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As part of the “indie” movement, Kongregate has been trying to do for user-generated video games what YouTube did for user-created videos.The company is announcing today that it will launch seven new games within a couple of weeks on Facebook, a move that represents its first expansion beyond its current web site, which currently gets […]

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