300 Analysts Talk To Google, Remember Nothing

Google's standard rule of not telling anybody anything until its too late has caused worldwide speculation as to what on Earth they plan to do with all that new money. A recent New York invitation-only meeting with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin did little to change that silent trend. In fact, the information coming out of that meeting isn't exactly flowing, leading some to speculation that Schmidt and Brin exercised some version of the Jedi mind trick. "There was a lot of talk about China," cloudily recalls Howard Ward, a fund manager at Gabelli Funds LLC who attended the meeting among 300 other analysts and investors. But apparently that talk of China wasn't exactly explicit enough to yield any concrete answers. "They're pretty opaque. They don't give a lot of information," said (Benjamin Segal of Winchester Capital Group?). But it does appear to most that a portion of the proceeds from the sale of over $4 billion in stock will be spent establishing a stronger presence in the potential money well that is China. David Schiller, a portfolio manager at JP Morgan Chase & Co., who also attended the meeting but appears to have little to say, reveals his guess for Google's next move. "Best-case scenario is they want to buy a bunch of search companies or online gaming companies in China," he said. Equally as speculative about Google's next move in China, is Google's next move in the United States, which involves lofty notions of a free nation-wide ad-supported BusinessTimes.Asia, out of Singapore,indirectly perhaps from Bloomberg, which was vague, cryptic, and quotes only "Winchester's Mr. Segal."