My Obsessions

Big tech companies like Google and Facebook have made their fortunes by putting the power of the Internet in the hands of ordinary people. But when it comes to empowering their own shareholders, these companies are a lot less willing to relinquish control.

When these firms went public in 2004 and 2012 respectively, they each issued two different classes of stocks: One class to be held by the founders and another by ordinary shareholders. In both cases, the voting rights of these share classes enabled the founders to retain complete control of the company. And on Monday, Google reached a settlement in a class action lawsuit that will allow it to issue a third class of shares with no voting rights at all, which will presumably give the firm ammunition for future acquisitions.

Google wants you to spend more time with Google Plus, and to get you to do so, it is going to put your photos in a better light, literally.

In the long list of improvements rolled out during Google’s developer conference last week were many improvements to its photo editing and sharing tools.

Most notable is Auto Enhance, which lets an algorithm evaluate your photos and touch them up automatically.

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The walls around Barnes & Noble‘s Nook walled garden are tumbling down.

The company’s Nook HD and Nook HD are credible content-consumption tablets — remarkably credible, actually, considering that they come from a 127-year-old bookseller. But they sold so poorly over the holiday season that it raised questions about whether B&N would end up being forced to de-emphasize its hardware business in favor of selling content on other platforms.

The Nooks use Barnes & Noble’s own custom version of Android and provide its own stores for books, magazines, newspapers and apps. And therein lies an oft-raised argument against buying a Nook: the Barnes & Noble application store has had only 10,000 pieces of software — mostly for-pay ones — vs. the hundreds of thousands of choices in Google’s Google Play.

The free extension for Google’s Chrome browser lets you send e-mail attachments directly to online storage services such as  Google Drive, Dropbox and Box. It also lets you attach files directly from these services without downloading them to your computer first. Although Kloudless only works with Gmail for now, support for Microsoft Outlook is on the way.