News digest for July 25, 2006

SEC Names Hewitt Chief Accountant
Conrad Hewitt, former chief financial regulator for the State of California, was named chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. He will oversee accounting interpretations, international accounting matters, and professional practice issues, for the SEC.

Google makes nice with Wall Street
“When a company first goes public, it kind of stumbles a few times before getting it right,” Rohan said. “By the time it’s a $120 billion (market cap) company, it has a responsibility to investors to become more transparent, and Google is responding to that.”

Investor Optimism Reaches New Low for Year
The last time investors were pessimistic about the economic outlook was in November 2005, also with a -2 reading, as the economy was working through the negative impact of last year’s hurricanes.

Hedge Funds To The Rescue
Only a spark was needed to ignite the new “power to the shareholders” zeitgeist. Enter the hedge funds. With their growing economic clout (an estimated $1 trillion in assets under management worldwide), they’ve become the catalyst for the new world order of M&A and proxy fights. Unlike their more inhibited counterparts, the so-called vanilla asset managers, hedge funds are anything but wallflowers.

Google Accessible Search: helpful or not?
Google have just announced Accessible Search; what is it and will it really help the visually impaired access usable information?

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