In the latest turn in Viacom’s copyright infringement suit against YouTube and parent company Google, a federal judge ruled that Google must hand over YouTube users’ IP addresses and user names, plus a history of videos they’ve viewed. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation stills sees the ruling as a blow to user privacy.

Viacom, owner of movie studio Paramount and MTV Networks, requested the information as part of its $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against the popular online video service and its deep-pocketed parent, Google.

Still, the judge’s order, which was made public late Wednesday, renewed concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or fall unexpectedly into the hands of third parties.

Civil rights groups were quick to give their opinion on the case. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a release that the Judge’s decision will violate user privacy and violate the federal Video Privacy Protection Act.

“The Court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube,” said the EFF.

“We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.”

Source: The New York Times

Microsoft Corp. made an announcement to buy San Francisco search company Powerset on Tuesday. Redmond-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) didn’t give a price, but media reports it is around $100 million. Powerset focuses on “natural-language search,” a form of artificial intelligence that seeks to understand the meaning of both user queries and Web pages.

Semantic or natural-language search relies on sentence structure, syntax, dictionaries, and thesauri to extract meaning from text, rather than relying on how heavily Web pages are linked to one another to determine the relevance of search results.

Barney Pell, one of Powerset’s co-founders, said joining Microsoft would give Powerset the scale it needs to extend its technology to the entire Web. Powerset’s approach to search requires enormous computing power.

“We know today that roughly a third of searches don’t get answered on the first search and first click.  The reason is that today’s search engines don’t understand when similar concepts, like “shrub” and “tree,” are expressed in different words or phrases. In addition, some results can appear to be more relevant to computers than they actually are to humans. Powerset will help us address all of those problems and opportunities,”  Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice president for search, product and advertising, wrote in a blog post today.

Still, it’s mostly an huge battle for Microsoft. The latest worldwide market share numbers from Web statistics firm Net Applications have Google with 78.35 percent of searchers in June, followed by Yahoo at 11.78 percent. In comparison, the combined share of Microsoft’s MSN Search and Live Search in the same time period totaled a mere 5.22 percent.

Source: Bizjournals

Yahoo said Thursday that under the new Google pact, it will display some ads sold by its rival in a deal Yahoo estimated would generate $800 million in annual revenue.

A Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, said in an interview that the company was happy to have Yahoo as an advertising partner but refused to discuss Google’s expected financial gain from the deal.

Yahoo will control how Google’s ads are displayed alongside its own advertising. The pact is sure to face regulatory scrutiny. The companies agreed to delay its implementation for up to three-and-a-half months to allow a Justice Department review.

“This is not a merger. Rather, we are merely providing access to our advertising technology to Yahoo! through our AdSense program.– This does not remove a competitor from the playing field. Yahoo! will remain in the business of search and content advertising, which gives the company a continued incentive to keep improving and innovating,” said Omid Kordestani, Google’s SVP of Global Sales and Business Development in a blog post.

Under the agreement, Yahoo can run ads supplied by Google alongside its own search results and on some of its websites in the United States and Canada. Each placement will be a mini-auction run by Yahoo in which Yahoo and Google bid to sell the ad.

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay said that could add as much as $5 per share to Yahoo’s value, which he currently pegs at $25 per share.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Google-owned FeedBurner is set to launch AdSense for RSS next week according to a post on the company’s blog. Much like the AdSense for Web sites, AdSense for RSS will show contextual text advertising in publisher’s RSS feeds.

The company explains how AdSense for RSS will work.

“Publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory. That means you get the best of both worlds: a dedicated Google sales force that knows how and why to sell onto your content, with the added revenue that full back-fill coverage provides.”

While there are already a few ways to place ads in an RSS feed, a huge number of blogs and web sites use Feedburner to publish their feeds. Being able to place ads in their feeds with just a few clicks of a button almost certainly means that many of those content publishers will be flipping the switch as soon as they can. Up until now, most web publishers viewed RSS feeds as a loss leader. You give away some of your content, ad-free, in the hopes of gaining loyal readers who will tell their friends about the site.

To get into the Adsense for Feedburner, publishers must already have an adsense account. It will be integrated into individual publisher’s account management setup in Adsense. Adsense members who want to run ads on their Feedburner feeds must set up their Adsense channels for “placement targeting” to ensure that advertisers can target their specific syndicated content.

Source: Mashable

As per IDC report, Internet advertising will grow about 3.5 times as fast as advertising overall over the next five years. IDC also said the Internet in US will go from the No. 5 advertising medium all the way to No. 2 in just five years, making it bigger than newspapers, cable TV and broadcast TV, and second only to direct marketing.

From now until 2012, Internet advertising will grow about three-and-a-half times as fast as advertising at large, and IDC said it thinks overall Internet advertising revenue will double from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012.

Search advertising will continue to generate the most revenue over the forecast period in the United States, IDC said. This means that for any media company, search must remain a key part of its strategy for attracting ad dollars, despite Google’s current dominance of the market, the analyst firm said. Google has about a 70% share of the search advertising market.

“What will also drive this trend is that consumers are starting to realize that, as opposed to TV, Internet video lets them watch what they want, when they want, and increasingly also where they want,” Karsten Weide, IDC’s program director for digital media and entertainment, said in a statement.

With highly optimistic reports like these about the expected continued growth in online ad spending, the sense of urgency likely grows among companies like Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo, all of which have so far failed to capitalize as much their investors and executives have expected on online advertising’s growth in recent years.

Source: InformationWeek

Based on the popular Web 2.0 infrastructure, Paglo’s software-as-a-service (Saas) was first introduced to the public in November, but today marks the first day it is available for public use. The service will be available for free until the fall, when Paglo says it will implement a paid model.

Paglo’s relevance within an organization can be as simple as telling users whether their business IT system complies with Microsoft licensing policies to whether their individual machines have the latest security patches for installed software such as Microsoft Office. Paglo creates indexes of businesses’ information and keeps these data hidden from within the members of the organization.

Paglo users download a crawler application that traverses their IT environments and collects performance-related data and other information. The results then get pushed up to Paglo’s server, where they are stored in a separate index for each customer. Users can set how often they want the crawler to canvass the network or a particular asset in order to get the most up-to-date information into the index.

Users conduct searches through a Web-based interface. Results can come back in traditional, Google-like form, or as tables and chart visualizations, such as for the traffic patterns on a particular server over a length of time.

In addition, Paglo has created an API (application programming interface) that enables users to create connections to additional network assets.

“Imagine you have an old mainframe that has an old ERP (enterprise resource planning) system on it. We want to make it really easy for an IT administrator to have that information available in their [search] index,” said Paglo Chief Technology Officer Chris Waters.

The customizable Paglo Dashboard allows users to implement widgets and other technologies to make the Dashboard as user friendly as possible.

Source: BetaNews

Microsoft plans to shut down the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic Web sites and stop scanning library and copyright books. Microsoft entered the book-scanning business in 2005 by contributing material to the Open Content Alliance, an industry group conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo. In 2006, it unveiled its competing MSN book search site.

“Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries,” Satya Nadella, senior vice president of search, portal and advertising for Microsoft, wrote in a blog post .

Microsoft has scanned 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles during the life of the projects, he said. That material will still be available in Live search results, but not through separate indexes. Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the company said.

Microsoft’s decision also leaves the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital archive that was paid by Microsoft to scan books, looking for new sources of support. Several major libraries said that they had chosen to work with the Internet Archive rather than with Google, because of restrictions Google placed on the use of the new digital files.

Some search experts said Microsoft’s decision to end its book-scanning effort suggested that the company, whose search engine has lagged far behind those of Google and Yahoo, was giving up on efforts to be comprehensive.

Source: Infoworld

Google’s Larry Page, a member of the coalition technology group, lobbied in Congress on Thursday to promote the company’s proposal for next-gen unused airwaves, dubbed “white space spectrum” to be used for wireless devices. The group also includes Microsoft Corp, Dell Inc, Intel Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and the north American unit of Philips Electronics.

This unused spectrum, known as white spaces, is provided to broadcasters to create interference buffer zones. Google, Microsoft and other tech companies want the spectrum to deliver broadband and other advanced wireless services, setting up a war of words and intensive lobbying on Capitol Hill.

The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) is adamant in its opposition to the operation of unlicensed devices in the buffer zones. The FCC is currently testing white spaces devices and is expected to issue a decision later in 2008.

Proponents of the new class of Wi-Fi devices say the airwaves could eventually offer data transmission speeds of billions of bits per second — far faster than the millions of bits per second available on most current broadband networks. Consumers could watch movies on wireless devices and do other things that are currently difficult on slower networks.

Specifically, Page wants the winners of the 700 MHz auction to be able to auction off the white spaces between usable frequencies, reports PCWorld.

That idea could be expanded to the federal government, with agencies that sell spectrum on a temporary basis potentially raising billions of dollars, Page said during a speech at the New America Foundation, an independent think tank.

If government agencies could conduct real-time auctions on their spectrum, the unused spectrum “doesn’t stay wasted,” said Page, now Google’s president of products. “It’s unclear how much demand you’d have. I think you’ll have a lot of demand as you free up more spectrum.”

Source: eWeek

Verizon Wireless confirmed its support for mobile Linux. It becomes the first U.S. operator to join the LiMo Foundation, a group developing mobile Linux technology. Key members include Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung, and LG.

Kyle Malady, Verizon’s VP-network, said in a conference call this morning that Linux will be added to the platforms Verizon already supports, including Windows Mobile, Palm (NSDQ: PALM) and Brew. It does not mention the No. 2 carrier from joining Google’s (NSDQ: GOOG) Android platform in the future, Malady said.

“We anticipate that as we move down the path of Linux, we’ll be looking at it as the OS of choice in handset lineup moving forward,” he said.

The LiMo platform includes a wide range of infrastructure components and high-level application reference implementations and is designed so that individual parts can be easily modified or replaced. The application user interface framework is built on top of GTK+, the widget toolkit used by the GNOME desktop environment. In addition to supporting native application development, LiMo will also offer a Java SDK and support for building widget-like applications in HTML and JavaScript on top of the WebKit HTML renderer. The first LiMo-based handsets will be available later this year.

Google’s Android platform offers a higher level of consistency and interoperability because its application stack is built with a single cohesive API on top of a managed code system, but it doesn’t support native applications, which means that it is less flexible.

Regardless of the platform choice, Verizon’s adoption of Linux sends a clear message about the viability of the open source operating system in the mobile space. Carriers and handset makers seem to recognize that open source software provides them with better value and more flexibility than proprietary alternatives.

Courtesy: Ars Technica

The new search engine company, Powerset, has released a public beta version of its search engine. Right now, Powerset can only search Wikipedia. In the new version, people can search using simple phrases, short questions and keywords. The product launch comes just a day after reports that the company is being shopped to potential buyers by investment bank Allen & Co.

The way that Powerset returns queries means that answers are often found in the result snips. They are also structuring a lot of the Wikipedia and (and already structured Freebase) data and inserting it into results. So a search for “Bill Clinton” shows results, but also shows Freebase structured data along with additional query refinements to get to more information. The important thing below isn’t the structured data in the results, its the fact that you can click on the action words and drill down into very specific queries (to find, for example, what bills he signed, or which Supreme Court justices he nominated).

Powerset is indexing web pages much differently than normal search engines, which generally just record content to match against keyword queries. Instead, Powerset is trying to understand the content on the page so that it can be matched meaningfully to queries later. Even queries that don’t use matching words.

Powerset definitely has an interesting search product on its hands. Its approach of pulling third-party content into its own UI and providing tools to better analyze it is undeniably useful. On the other hand, Google and Yahoo will be watching to see if Powerset’s semantic search proves popular.

Source: Washington Post