Apple responds to FCC enquiry about rejection of Google Voice

The Apple iPhone is such a popular device that it has encouraged a huge number of 3rd party developers to write applications for the iPhone, and Apple makes a large number of them available on the iTunes store (Apple claims that around 20% of the 500 apps that it receives per week are not approved - either directly rejected, or they need some modifications). However, it is apparent that one area where Apple is most concerned about is apps that either affect Apple's or AT&T's data plans or the money they make from voice calls. There was a lot of controversy in the month of July when Apple rejected the Google Voice (learn more) application, a software that could enable people to save money in making calls (even if Google Voice is not a VOIP application). The FCC was concerned about this apparent rejection, since it would seem that customers were being denied an alternative, and asked Apple for an explanation.
Apple has finally replied to the FCC, giving multiple reasons for the rejection, including privacy issues, and an apparent change of the basic call making flow inside the app (link to article):

"The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone's distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone's core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail," Apple said in a statement posted on its Web site. Apple also said Google Voice's importation of the Contacts database represented a privacy concern. "[T]he iPhone user's entire Contacts database is transferred to Google's servers, and we have yet to obtain any assurances from Google that this data will only be used in appropriate ways," Apple said.
Separately, Apple acknowledged that its agreement with AT&T obligates it "not to include functionality in any Apple phone that enables a customer to use AT&T's cellular network service to originate or terminate a VoIP session without obtaining AT&T's permission.

However, Apple is stating that the application is still under review, and not rejected; an apparent subterfuge to ensure more time, and maybe hope that back-channel contacts ensure that the issue goes away.
At some time in the future however, Apple will find that the platform that it has built in the form of the iPhone and the app store will be broken open, that Apple will find that the rights it has to deny an application will need more openness. This could happen through a mix of consumer reaction and pressure from regulators.

Yahoo's Yang steps down as CEO

As a previous post on this blog had mentioned, the Yahoo-Google-Microsoft drama will not end so easily. The number of twists and turns this story has been taking are pretty dramatic, and forms a soap opera worthy of spinning into a hard-balled corporate story. For a matter of many months now, it has seemed clear that Yahoo does not have what it takes to challenger Google and Microsoft in the online space; the only logical path forward was to tie up with another party and then make a pitch to fight for the top. However, when Microsoft made its bids for Yahoo in order to form a much stronger team to challenge Google, it was the Yahoo Board led by Yang which played hardball, pitching for more money.
This was a traumatic situation for shareholders, since the Yahoo stock was around half the offer price, and here was this company offering a pretty good deal for shareholders. And then you have the Yahoo management refusing this deal, or finally holding out for a higher offer that never came. And then, the collapse. The Yahoo share, which was quoting close to $20 during this offer period, is now quoting around $10. Yang made promises during this period, and they have not come true, probably the reason why he is stepping down now:

Shares of Yahoo Inc soared nearly 15 percent on Tuesday on hopes that the departure of Jerry Yang, its embattled chief executive, would clear the way for a deal with Microsoft Corp. Yahoo announced late on Monday that Yang, whose leadership had come under growing criticism from shareholders after he failed to agree to a deal with Microsoft, would step down from his role as soon as the board finds a replacement.
Analysts said Yang's decision to step down is a sign that the board was frustrated with his efforts to turn around the company, which he co-founded. Yang took on the CEO role in June 2007. "Jerry's resignation as CEO reflects failed promises he made while fighting off Microsoft's offers, and the board's displeasure with his go-it-alone strategy," wrote Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali in a research note.

Yahoo's board must be hoping that this new management decision may lead to re-starting of discussions with Microsoft, even though Microsoft is not likely to offer above $30 now. And given the collapsed deal with Google (due to anti-trust), Yahoo would most likely die down rather than reach a top position on its own.

Google launches Adsense for Games

Google is always on the lookout for how to keep on increasing its ad portfolio. Getting ads into more and more platforms, into different devices, and accordingly getting a higher amount of revenue is what Google has always been interested in. Its corporate acquisition program has also been geared towards this effort, buying more and more companies that it believes can help it in its ad serving platform.
The popularity of online Flash based games has been soaring over the last few years, with usage figures soaring. For a long time, there was a feeling that Google will jump into this space, and the acquisition of Adscape Media in 2007 increased this feeling into a near certainty. The ongoing Beta by Google in this space, involving some of the Game developers since earlier this year made the intention clear:

More than a year in the works, Google finally launched its in-game advertising platform Wednesday. Called AdSense for Games, the platform will offer advertisers access to millions of Web-based Flash games. The in-game advertising market is small. The games industry scored only $1 billion from advertising and subscriptions in 2007, according to research firm Parks Associates. Google's entry is expected to make it explode.
Google's new ad platform, which grew out of its 2007 acquisition of Adscape Media, has operated in beta since early 2008. Game developers like Konami, Playfish and Zynga participated in the beta, but now other developers and publishers will also be able to apply to the program. The most prevalent ads throughout the company's beta test were short video spots from Esurance, but the network will also provide contextual and text ads.

Some of the success stories from developers using Adsense for Games has made the likely success of Adsense for Games more of a certainty, and is likely to increase the space between Google and its competitors in the Ad space.

Google's chrome - shaking the browser market

Just a few years ago, Microsoft would have thought that it had sewn up the browser market; then came Firefox (backed by Google as well). Firefox won a lot of converts, and seemed like the open source alternative to a market that Microsoft had almost totally won, and it won a significant minority of the browser market. For the first time after Netscape, there seemed like an open source alternative in the form of Firefox; and now, Google seems suddenly to buck all the open source support and launch its own browser called Chrome - in the process, it seems to have withdrawn support from Firefox.
Chrome however promises much more to people everywhere, an open source software that can actually serve as the backbone for an alternative to the standard desktop - no longer will applications have to choose between the desktop and the internet:

Far from a betrayal, Chrome represents the best possible future for open source developers everywhere. What Google has delivered is a giant-slayer, a self-contained WebOS that could one day supplant Microsoft's desktop hegemony. Chrome is the ultimate end-run -- around Windows, Win32/.Net, the whole entrenched ecosystem.
This is the future of FOSS, a future where Chrome becomes the OS and Linux is relegated to its rightful place as a glorified boot loader. You know that's where they're headed. You know that's Google's master plan. The wunderkinds envision a world where the OS is irrelevant, where everything revolves around their pumped-up browser and advertising-laced SaaS offerings.

Right now Chrome only exists for the Windows platform, but versions for other operating systems will be available; and one can bet that pretty soon we will start seeing applications that are made for Chrome, that showcase this platform and live up to all its promises.

The importance of news in today's world

Computers have been blamed for a number of problems that occur in today's world, but the malfunction of news reporting (causing an older page to appear and seem as current news) and the impact on a company's stock price is not something that we hear too often; neither would the investors who lost money on such a thing happening have imagined that they were watching a computer glitch. They did not bother to check elsewhere, and sold at panic levels, such is the dependency that people have on news items. Read on:

Information can live in cyberspace forever. And that cost some investors in United Airlines parent UAL Corp. a load of money Monday. Shares of UAL briefly plummeted as low as $3 early in the day -- from $12.30 on Friday -- after a 6-year-old story on the company's 2002 bankruptcy filing resurfaced on the Web and was reported as news by an investment letter.
But investors who sold at the day's lows are stuck: The Nasdaq Stock Market, where UAL stock is listed, said trades triggered by the erroneous report wouldn't be rescinded. What's more, shares of other carriers, including Continental Airlines Inc. and AMR Corp., the parent of American Airlines, also briefly dived with UAL before rebounding.

All this was caused by a series of events in which an old story got posted on the home page of a newspaper, and then got included in Google's automatic story picker (because the story had appeared as a top item on the newspaper site), which was then forwarded as part of an investment bulletin (where the researcher saw it on both the company page and on Google news and concluded it was authentic). By the time that UAL saw the news posted on Bloomberg and issued a retraction, the share had nose-dived and people had sold in panic.
People are too much in a hurry nowadays to be the first with the news, and traditional methods of confirming news and such data no longer seem to be in vogue.

Google's future besides search

Google is a company that has a lot going for it. It has a reputation of being a great place to work, the leader in the area of search (a field that it essentially took over and made it the big size that it currently is), and has some solid public relations going for it (the fact that it continues to vanquish Microsoft means that more people see it in a positive light). The stock of the company continues to remain high. But all good things have to come to an end. Slowly, the sheen is starting to wear off and there are more critical analysis of the company that are starting to emerge. One major area for critical analysis is about the success of the company in fields other than search:

Google has been the world's hottest technology company for almost six years now. The Mountain View company not only completely dominates the search engine business, but it's had an absolute lock on Silicon Valley's psychology. Every new beta product that debuts generates enormous attention and seems to promise to revolutionize one more slice of the Web and communications. Just this week came the latest numbers from comScore indicating that Google increased its search market share over Microsoft and Yahoo. And the takeover squabble between those two has just reinforced the perception that Google has an almost unassailable position as the leading technology company.
"Name me anything they've been successful in beside search," Chowdhry said. "I think the board and management of Google need a total overhaul." OK, that's harsh. On the other hand, according to Google's own securities filings, the company expects its margins on advertising to continue to shrink and its revenue growth in this area to continue to slow. In addition, all those high-profile ventures the company has launched, and the acquisitions it's made, have yet to contribute much to the bottom line. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company noted that revenue from services such as YouTube, Google Checkout and a host of others "were not material."

Youtube in particular was much mocked (especially among the online community), since a purchase of $1.6 billion is not a small amount and a lot of analysts were unable to figure out as to how Google will make money on this transaction. It's other purchases such as Picassa, and initiatives like Google Earth, are seen as cool, and fitting into the ad space in the long term theme of things, but are a very long way away from making money. No one of its stockholders would grudge the purchase of something like Doubleclick, but stuff such as Picassa do not seem to make sense.

Yahoo shareholder meet ends tamely

With the recent agreement between the Yahoo board and the shareholder challenge of Carl Icahn which gave Carl 3 seats on the board, the issues confronting Yahoo in terms of shareholder challenge seem to have died down. Otherwise why would the proceedings from the Yahoo board meeting end like this ?

It's almost as if the past six months never happened. Yahoo's much anticipated annual meeting on Aug. 1 left its current board and co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang intact, in control, and still insisting they can return to contention with runaway rival Google. Despite rampant shareholder anger that the Internet icon couldn't close any of a series of deals with Microsoft since the software giant's unsolicited $45 billion buyout bid Feb. 1, the long-delayed annual meeting was remarkable mostly for how little happened.
Nonetheless, the vote still indicates that a significant portion of shareholders remain dissatisfied with Yahoo's direction. The most pointed criticisms during the meeting came from Eric Jackson, who runs a Florida-based firm called Ironfire Capital He called for Bostock and two other directors to step down and for Yang to give up the CEO seat to a more experienced executive. "They're basically saying, 'Believe in us,'" Jackson said after the meeting. "There are too many people who have been there too long and we need new management from outside."

I don't think that this is the last anyone has heard of this entire issue. Yahoo is not likely to be able to outwit Google, and shareholders will remain dissatisfied with the performance and the share prices. Future revolts cannot be ruled out.

Yahoo proxy fight comes closer to resolution

It's almost like a soap opera in the financial sense. The fight between a Microsoft looking for ammunition in its battle against Google, and a Yahoo that is fighting a losing battle in front of a rampaging Google and a fighting Microsoft seems to be approaching a point where Yahoo is still struggling to stay afloat as an independent entity. In the end, it comes down to a point where the shareholders of Yahoo (institutional shareholders) have to decide whether to stay independent or to join up with Microsoft in order to get a better price for their shares:

It looks like the bar room tete-a-tete in Sun Valley, Idaho last week may have helped one of Yahoo Inc.'s biggest institutional shareholders make up his mind.
Friday's news from Bill Miller, chairman and chief investment officer of Legg Mason, that he intends to support Yahoo management in its proxy fight with activist investor Carl Icahn was a big coup for embattled Jerry Yang & Co.
Now that Miller has indicated which way he is voting Legg Mason's 4.4% stake in Yahoo, all eyes will be on other institutions with large holdings in the Internet portal. Perhaps one of the most influential is Gordon Crawford, a portfolio manager at Capital Research Global Investors. Its parent company, Capital Group Cos. has at least three funds with a combined stake of nearly 17% in Yahoo, making it the largest institutional holder. Some pundits have speculated large institutional shareholders do not typically lead activist campaigns. But Miller coming out with a statement in support of Yahoo management two weeks ahead of the much-anticipated shareholder meeting scheduled for August 1 could inspire other funds to try and persuade other investors to take their side.

If it comes to a resolution where the shareholders back Yahoo, then the issue does not get resolved. It is a fact that Yahoo is losing in the fight, and unless this gets resolved, shareholders of Yahoo will not be able to see the value of their shares rising.

Impending News: Microsoft to increase offer for Yahoo

There is a lot of buzz in the press that Microsoft may increase its offer for Yahoo so that a deal becomes much closer. The press reports claim that Microsoft is very close to increasing its bid so that the impasse can get over and Yahoo becomes amenable to a negotiated deal rather than a hostile offer. From Bloomberg.com:

May 3 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp., closing in on the biggest acquisition in its 33-year history, may seek to end an impasse with Yahoo! Inc.'s board by raising its takeover offer, a person familiar with the matter said. Talks intensified this week after Yahoo spent three months hunting for alternatives to the deal.
A higher offer may win over Yahoo's board, eliminating the need for Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer to go to shareholders with a hostile offer, which might have spurred an employee exodus. A deal also may halt Yahoo's efforts to forge an online advertising partnership with rival Google Inc.

The deal remains important for both Microsoft and Yahoo. The more that the deal remains out of touch, the more likely is that Yahoo and Google will come to sort of agreement that will pass regulatory approval, and leave Microsoft way behind Google. For Yahoo, it is a now a diminishing third player and no longer seems to have the ability to move to second position.
Ultimately, from all the discussion, it would seem that the entire issue now resolves around the price to be paid. Yahoo claims that the offer under-values the value of Yahoo, and many of the prime shareholders seem to agree. So if Microsoft increased the offer, it may break the impasse and convince the board.

Microsoft not going to increase offer for Yahoo

A typical takeover effort typically starts with a negotiating bid, that is normally not exceptional, and then over a period of time, there is pressure for the bid to go up. What typically happens at this time is that more contenders will jump into the fray, putting pressure for increasing the bid; also, what may happen is that the board of the company being acquired pushes for a higher bid as a condition of accepting the bid; and in some cases, influential shareholders holding significant shares may agree to tender shares if the price being paid is increased.
However, the saga of Microsoft's takeover of Yahoo is not following any of these trends. The refusal of Yahoo's management to accept this offer was not a surprise, but everything else is. The value of Yahoo's bid is overall so high, that no white knight could be found who would be willing to fork out that kind of money. Not much of relief to Yahoo in this regard. Microsoft has also steadily refused to increase its bid so far, maybe in the expectation that eventually the pressure of investors and employee morale decrease will force Yahoo to accept, and there are signs that this may be happening:

Microsoft Corp is evaluating its bid for Yahoo Inc because the Internet company may have lost value since Microsoft made its offer, people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The news, first reported by Reuters, sent Yahoo shares down more than 5 percent in extended trade.
After weeks of silence, recent comments from various sources to journalists suggest the software maker is hardening its stance and pushing Yahoo for action. The sources told Reuters that Yahoo has lost key personnel, making the company less valuable, while generous severance packages it handed out to executives and full-time employees in the case of a takeover have made it more expensive.

Of course, if Yahoo starts to lose key personnel and the industry sees much lower growth, then any hint of Microsoft lowering its bid may have a very strong impact on Yahoo. To some extent, analysts have made this deal a done deal in the end, that is, no matter the discussions, the deal will be made (in order to give the 2 companies a fighting chance against Google).

What will Google do against Microsoft and Yahoo ?

Microsoft really threw a major push when it announced an offer for Yahoo. For some time now, Microsoft has been smarting at being beaten by Google fair and square in the world of online search and advertising. This was a field that was essentially (not completely true, but approximately) invented by Google, and they have a commanding lead over both Microsoft and Google. Google has essentially been a seach / advertising company that is now trying to do other things, while Microsoft has been a major desktop company that is struggling to replicate its success in the online world (through a spate of new technologies and purchases), while Yahoo has tried to be a massive directory (and seeing the success of Google, tried to also focus on the advertising world). Google has had the benefit of some focused approach on the advertising world, and has reaped the benefits.
Yahoo has been seen as a company on the downward path, and all its efforts have not been able to push it up; it has been seen as having been outplayed by Google, and recently suffered the fate of having to layoff people (not a good sign for a company trying to be the best). It makes tremendous sense for Microsoft to suddenly gain a massive catch up by getting all of Yahoo's business.

According to a Reuters report, Yahoo said it would consider joining forces with Google in order to prevent Microsoft from acquiring it. What sort of partnership could it strike with Google that would hold Microsoft at bay while not triggering antitrust issues? Oh, and Yahoo says $31 per share isn't good enough.
Yahoo's managers have a lot of thinking to do. Microsoft's offer of $44.6 billion was not exactly a low-ball first bid. That represented a 61% premium over Yahoo's stock price on Thursday (Yahoo's stock has since gone up). Yahoo feels that the $31 per share offered undervalues the company. It didn't say that it had requested a higher number from Microsoft, which has indicated it will use cash and loans to buy Yahoo. Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay suggested that Yahoo's real worth is closer to $39-$45 a share.

The fact remains that the final decision rests with shareholders, who may feel that unless a white knight comes into the picture (who can afford to pay more than $50 billion), Microsoft represents the best bet in terms of growing the business and taking on Google.
Google is not likely to take this lying down. A good first bet would be to appeal to Yahoo's management who would be apprehensive (or rather sure) about their diminished status in a Microsoft pecking line; in addition, there is the entire history of Microsoft's uncompetitive behavior to be thrown up, another good approach is to talk about the obvious problems of pairing the market leaders in online email and messenger. Microsoft would have likely prepared for all this, and one can be sure that there will be a lot more focus on making the Yahoo shareholder see this as a good step forward.

Ask.com allows erasing of past searches

Once, there was the thought that all the searches that you made were not anything to be worried about; that thought did not last very long as it became clear that search engines were storing searches along with information. Fine, but even then a person does not know who are you - after all, your name and address are not revealed. And then there was research done on the basis of using the various searches conducted by the same computer, and enough information was able to be extracted that the actual address and person could be found. During this time, the question of privacy came to be raised more and more, and there was increasing pressure on search engines to modify their search archival to address privacy concerns.
And now search provider Ask.com has thrown the gauntlet much further. It has announced a feature called AskEraser that seeks to project an image of handling customer-privacy concerns by allowing users to set that their searches on Ask.com be deleted from the company's servers:

When enabled by the user, the feature will completely delete search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers -- including IP addresses, user IDs, session IDs and the text of queries made, according to the company. In most cases, the deletion will take place within a few hours of the time a search is completed, the company said.
But there are important caveats to keep in mind, Chester said, Ask.com, for instance, will still collect and store user search data by default, unless the user specifically enables AskEraser, Chester said. And enabling AskEraser does nothing to prevent third parties with whom Ask.com has relationships from collecting and storing search data.

There are some exceptions, but this is a further movement in the area of search engines being more concerned about privacy. One wonders as to whether Google will react to this move in some way, after all, Google is seen as the market leader in search, and it needs to not be concerned about the privacy of its users. At the same time, Google has made change only after some amount of pressure in the past through privacy experts and through the media.

Get to the moon, win $20 million as a prize

The X Prize foundation is a way to use money an as attraction to get people to use their talents and ingenuity to come up with solutions to intractable problems. So, for example, the first such prize, the Ansari X prize had an open prize to the first group that would send a spacecraft to sub-orbital flight twice within a period of 2 weeks; the prize, $ 10 million. Enough to invite a dedicated group of people who believed that they could do it, and if they did it, then they would not only walk away with fame, and a certain promise of further riches. Then they have open prizes for an effort in human genomes and another prize for the first group to have a vehicle that can go 100 miles per gallon. All these are creditable efforts. But now they are approaching a new frontier, with the moon offer (bankrolled by Google):

Google GOOG will sponsor the newest contest by the X Prize Foundation, which three years ago handed $10 million to a team that sent SpaceShipOne into suborbit and back twice over a two-week period. The nonprofit foundation seeks to promote scientific breakthroughs that benefit humanity. In the new contest, which officials referred to as Moon 2.0, teams will compete to land a privately funded robotic rover on the moon. It will have to roam at least 500 meters of the lunar surface and complete several missions, such as transmitting photos and videos back to Earth.
The idea for the Lunar X Prize emerged from a meeting in March between Google co-founder Larry Page and X Prize Foundation founder Dr. Peter Diamandis. Page is on the foundation's board. Google is the exclusive sponsor. Google already has a Google Moon site, with photos and data focused on the Apollo moon missions. People thought Google Moon was just for fun, "but now you know we are serious about this," said Page, who helped make the Lunar X Prize announcement. "Science and engineering, if you ask an economist, are the only ways that we have to increase our economics and productivity. We believe that these kinds of contests, in setting an ambitious goal like going to the moon, are really a good way to improve the state of humanity."

The Moon is a strange episode in human space history. The US sent a number of missions to the Moon, and then curtailed them; after all, would anybody in the early 70's have believed that a few more flights would have the last people walking on the moon; they would have instead believed that the 80's and 90's would have seen moon bases.
Governments have their own agendas and impulses regarding why this needs to be done, but to get private foundations to do this is a new direction. Any such effort has many positive spinoffs, and if it can succeed, it will be a superb new effort.

YouTube returns to Thailand after it agrees to censorship

So the web is not as all-powerful as we thought it would be. After Google and Yahoo changed their policies to agree to censorship in China, and then Second Life buckled down to US pressure and removed gambling from the online game, YouTube agreed to some amount of censorship and remove some videos that were critical of the country's highly regarded king. This agreement related to existing videos and new ones as well, which means extra overhead for YouTube as they will to review all videos referred to them by Thailand and remove the ones deemed insulting to the King:

Thai censors lifted their ban Friday after five months of blocking the online video site because it had carried material seen as insulting to the country's highly venerated king. The site's management has agreed to block any future clips that are deemed offensive to Thai culture or that violate Thai law, said Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, the minister of information and communications technology.
Sitthichai said the agreement with YouTube — a site that allows people to post and share video clips — had been reached some time ago, but that there had been technical problems in implementing it. "Any clip that we think is illegal, we will inform YouTube and YouTube will have a look independently," he said. "If YouTube agrees that it is illegal for Thailand or against Thai culture, they will block it from viewers in Thailand."

Thailand has laws that prohibit any disrespect of the King, and people have been penalized in the past. However, there is no difference now if Iranian and Saudi Arabians censors prohibit a lot of videos that are either disrespectful of the Prophet or show too much skin. In addition, since China has an unstated law that any mention of democracy or openness is equivalent to sedition and must be punished, they must be justified in their attempts to censor what all people can read.

Google Earth now adds Google sky

If you are an avid watcher of Google Earth, use it regularly, and visit or create sites that create mash-ups from Google Earth, then you are going to love this. Google Earth, earth bound for so long (forget the parts about showing maps from Mars), has now turned to the skies, and is showing a new service called Google Sky, literally aiming for the skies. The service will allow users to view images taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, the space based telescope:

"The basic idea is to take Google Earth and turn it on its head," Ed Parsons, Geospatial technologist at Google told the BBC News website. "So rather than using it to view imagery of the Earth, use it to view imagery of space."
Dr John Mason of the British Astronomical Association, Britain's largest body for amateur astronomers said: "Light pollution and air pollution is now so bad in many areas that all you can see when you look up is a few dozen stars. "If this helps people to realise just what they are missing, it is a jolly good thing."

Users will still need to have Google Earth, and need to select a geographic region from which to view the sky. The clarity will be good, and this could be an excellent tool to impart knowledge as well. Just imagine a scenario where students are given assignments for scientific research and that entails using Google sky.

Tech Titans challenge copyright claims in the media

Sounds a bit long-winded, but is a simple thing. When you watch a baseball match or a football match, you will get bombarded with warnings that tell you what you can or cannot do with the thing that you are watching on TV. They never tell you what you can do, instead it is all about not reproducing nor transmitting it any form, coupling this with an official warning and with logos of the league. This practice is now being challenged by a tech association, Computer & Communications Industry Association (comprising such titans such as Google and Microsoft) who contend that these warnings do represent the whole truth, and hence are essentially misleading customers about their rights.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission Latest News about Federal Trade Commission stating that such organizations as Major League Baseball, the National Football League and NBC/Universal, to name just a few, have been misleading consumers for years about their rights under the fair use doctrine in copyright law.
"Every time an American consumer opens a book, plays a DVD or watches a wide range of broadcast programs, he or she is confronted by strong language warning of what they are not allowed to do with that product," the executive summary of the complaint reads. "By design or effect, many of these warnings are misleading and harmful to millions of American consumers, customers and businesses," it continues. In fact, these statements grossly misrepresent federal law, which allows use of this material in certain circumstances, the CCIA contends.
"Uses of copyrighted works unauthorized by the copyright holder are not only permitted by federal law," reads the complaint, "they are actively encouraged by it. Section 107 of the Copyright Act, for example, encourages the unauthorized use of copyrighted works for various purposes, including criticism, commentary and news reporting. Under some circumstances, fair use permits the reproduction of an entire work by consumers."
Further, it goes on to say, MLB's claim that news accounts or "descriptions" of the game cannot be "disseminated" is, no pun intended, completely off base. "No author may copyright facts or ideas. Copyright serves to promote the dissemination of information by ensuring that every idea, theory and fact in a copyrighted work becomes instantly available for public exploitation at the moment of publication.

This seems an important issue. For years now, viewers have been essentially threatened that even if they take a section of the recording for doing a critical commentary, it is illegal; and how many users are so aware of that their rights that they don't get dispirited by such challenges.
The concept of fair use is subject to a fair amount of interpretations, and with the rapid advance of technology, legislation and legal compliance is typically falling behind. And for fundamental issues affecting the First Amendment Rights of a citizen, it is even more difficult for a court to refer to the Constitution and interpret it in such cases. Not to talk about how this complaint may even be biased, since many of the complainant companies are running searches, user to user networks, on which many of these clippings get posted.

Gphone: Google Phone ?

There have been rumours of a Google phone (short form 'Gphone') for some time now. Now Google is a search company, or rather it is a company that is trying to do a lot of things, but which makes most of its money from search. It has tried to enter the mobile world through a tie-up with carriers about placing Google search in the mobile space. Now carriers are typically very hard creatures to work with; they don't allow much freedom.
And there was this revolution that happened. Apple released the iPhone in a tie up with AT & T, but shockingly for the telecom industry, it was Apple that called the shots. This was a new type of device with a lot of hype, and hence AT & T would have allowed this. But any such move does set a precedent that Google could easily try and copy:

The company, which has made billions of dollars in Web advertising on computers, is courting wireless operators to carry handsets customized to Google products, including its search engine, email and a new mobile Web browser, say people familiar with the plans. It wants to capture a big chunk of the fast-growing market for ads on cellphones.
Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the cellphone project, say people who have been briefed on it. It has developed prototype handsets, made overtures to operators such as T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless, and talked over technical specifications with phone manufacturers. It hopes multiple manufacturers will make devices based on its specs and multiple carriers will offer them.

For Google, the mobile market is the hottest new emerging market, and must be the focus of a lot of strategy sessions at Google headquarters. Carriers have been not so easy to convince, but Google's might and the precedent of the iPhone could change things. If Google does come out with a cellphone, then one would expect more Wi-Fi integration and other methods of browsing, something uncomfortable to carriers since that is outside of their data plans.
The further advantage of having ads on cell phones is that they can be targeted better, and hence Google can ask for and earn more revenue per ad. One thing is sure, Google will do all they can to get an entry into this business, even if it means buying up spectrum and launching itself as a carrier.

Sprint network to use Google Search

Google is already a leader in the Internet Search market, is competing with Microsoft in the desktop search, and now has made an entry in the mobile search market. It has announced a tie-up with Sprint Nextel Corp that will add the Google search and mapping services to Sprint's high-speed wireless network. This is a good deal for Sprint in the sense that Google is a world-leader in the area of search and has an excellent brand name.
Sprint's plan is to create a high speed WiMax network that will be 5 times faster than today's networks, and will cover a city wide area. It can be used by devices other than mobile phones, given that it is actually a wireless network accessible by all devices that support this kind of connection. Once this network is rolled out, it is a service that Sprint will charge for, and Google will be available on the home page of this network.

The agreement gives Reston, Va.-based Sprint the prestige of working with the most popular search engine, along with a source of revenue, West said. For Google, the deal brings a way to extend its search engine into the mobile-device market.
West said Google will pay Sprint as part of the agreement, declining to be specific. Sprint and Craig McCaw's Clearwire Corp. said last week they would use a technology called WiMax to build a wireless network that's more than five times faster than today's standard.

This deal is a big deal for Google. Given the speed with which the mobile platform is proliferating and the increased tendency to build devices that allow for internet access, it is important for Google to be available on this platform. In addition, given that there is a class of devices that use Microsoft's Mobile platform, one can be sure that Google will not be the default search on those devices, so Google needs to network with all other providers and platforms.

Ask.com goes for anonymous search

Google has faced some rough times over the past few years due to its policies on privacy getting thoroughly questioned by privacy experts. It has had to reduce the amount of time that it carries information about users, and is now down to 18 months, from the previous years and years that it used to carry such information. Well, Ask.com has thrown down the gauntlet significantly, and if another search engine were to implement such a policy, the pressure on Google would grow significantly.

Ask.com took a major step toward protecting protecting the privacy of its users when it announced yesterday that it would be launching a new tool that would allow users to use its search engine anonymously. The tool, called AskEraser, will ensure that users' search records will not be retained by the company in any form for any period of time. Users will be able to set AskEraser settings in their privacy preferences, and the company says that the settings will be clearly displayed on results pages so that users will always be aware of the privacy status of their Ask.com searches.
The move comes after Google's recent attempts to placate privacy advocates by shortening the lifespan of its search preference cookie (as long as users never return) and anonymizing its server logs after 18 months. Ask.com also decided that it will anonymize server logs after 18 months, ensuring that even users who don't make use of AskEraser will be able to rest easy knowing that their search histories won't be kept around forever.

This is currently a voluntary measure on Ask.com, and users will have to change their settings for this to work. However, one is always curious about this major fight regarding privacy, since all such time limits such as 18 months is based on the fact that a user does not return to Google, and it is hard to find people who have used Google once and not used again for 18 months, at which time the user's information will be wiped off from the servers.

Google buys Postini for $625 million

Continuing in its quest for trying to beat Microsoft in the office category, Google made another big buy, buying a 'communications security' firm, Postini, for $625 million. What does Positini do ? Well, it lets corporations set security rules for all communication happening inside the company, such as e-mail, instant messenger and browsing activities. Such policies are necessary for companies, be it to maintain a track of communications for legal purposes, to filter e-mail for spam and viruses, or to prevent employees from accessing certain type of information.

When corporations adopt Postini's software, they can access, filter and impose restrictions on their employees' e-mail, instant messaging and Web habits. And because Google's moving into corporations -- it's fighting Microsoft for the right to rule over our cubicles -- helping firms keep an eye on their workers is an important goal.
There's a useful purpose to these corporate lockdowns, of course. Google notes that companies are under regulations to preserve all their data; the SEC is going to want to know if you discussed setting up Cayman Island shell corporations over AIM. So companies that are itching to use Google's office apps -- Gmail, Google documents, Google Talk, etc. -- can't switch over until the software can be made to obey such archiving rules. Companies are also targets of espionage, they're subject to leaks, and they suffer losses due to viruses and other network attacks. By keeping workers' computers pinned down and monitored, Postini can mitigate all these risks, it says.

Postini is not meant for the employee, it is meant for the corporations to better enforce policies. This acquisition by Google will help make Google's apps (such as Google Pack, Google Talk, etc) be more usable in an office context, and give them a realistic chance of competing with Microsoft's products, Google's prime goal.