Forget the 800-lb gorilla. Google has billions of dollars more to worry about now that its shares have surpassed the $800 mark for the first time. According to Mercury News: The milestone comes more than five years after Google’s shares initially hit $700. Not long after breaking that barrier in October 2007, the economy collapsed into the worst recession since World War II and Google’s stock tumbled into a prolonged malaise that eventually led to a change in leadership. Things have changed lately. Google is hot. Their mobile is booming despite having challenges with Motorola. Their search…

Google is trying to limit the damage done from the news that their former CEO and current Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt after they submitted a plan to the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell off around 42% of his stake in the search giant. At today’s current price of $785.37 per share, the 3.2 million shares he plans on selling over the next year would be worth around $2.5 billion. According to Reuters: The plan, which Google said would give Schmidt “individual asset diversification and liquidity,” allows Schmidt to spread trades out over a period of one year to reduce the market impact….

The human rights atrocities in North Korea are no laughing matter and Google is doing their part with a different sort of activism, exposing many of the known concentration camps on Google maps and even calling them “gulags” in some cases. As CNN reported, they are showing more than just the monuments now. They’re putting nuclear facilities and buildings known for torture on their service. According to Buzzfeed: The purpose is obvious: to make the existence of these camps known; to point out that North Korea is secretive, and would never release this data on its own; to emphasize that the country…

We’ve been very critical of Groupon and its founding CEO Andrew Mason. The enigmatic Silicon Valley guy has famously shunned Google’s $6 billion bid for his company and seen his stocks fall to levels that make the shunning itself look downright ludicrous. We were critical when the shares were falling to $15. They’re hovering over $5 today. Still, should he be fired? A year and a quarter since going public, the company is in big trouble. Mason is fighting to keep his job, but just as Larry Page turned to Eric Schmidt to lead his company through the crucial years, should Groupon do the same? Investors…

When is the best time to change CEOs if you’re a major company? How about shortly after announcing fourth-quarter earnings of $8.75 a share on revenue of $6.37 billion, numbers that shattered analysts’ expectations. Today, Google announced that CEO Eric Schmidt would be going into a new role and co-founder Larry Page would be ascending to the top position that he held in the beginning of the company a decade ago. Schmidt wrote about it in a blog post. “As Google has grown, managing the business has become more complicated. So Larry, Sergey, and I have been talking for a long time about how best to simplify…

‘Don’t be evil’ may be the old Google mantra, but it looks as if that still leaves space for a string of affairs and some business double-dealing on the part of the company CEO, Eric Schmidt. An incisive Valleywag report looks at the breakdown of Schmidt’s relationship with Apple CEO Steve Jobs and the way things came to a head in 2007, while the Google boss was attending Burning Man with one of his mistresses….