传奇

• Google is advertising in China, just like they did in Russia. Google rarely takes out ads, but apparently in countries like China and Russia, where Baidu and Yandex, respectively, are more widely used than Google, the company is willing to think differently.

Here’s a roundup of recent juicy Google tidbits:

• Google said it extended its YouTube Partner Program to Germany and France. That means popular members in those countries can make ad money from their videos through the revenue-sharing program.

• Ever wonder what the limits on Gmail activity are? Well, here’s the answer, according to a Google Apps posting: “500 messages per day (i.e., you can hit ‘Send’ a maximum of 500 times); 500 unique recipients; 2,000 total e-mails (for example, you could send one message to a group of 500 people four times).”

• Miss the Google I/O conference? All the Google I/O videos are online now on YouTube.

• Amid general praise for Steve McQueen’s famed
car chase in the 1968 movie Bullitt, there are jeers about the recurring green VW Beetle and the geographic hash it makes of San Francisco. You might be amused to see this side-by-side view of the Bullitt chase and a Google map that shows just how much they jump from one patch of the city to another. (Via Google Maps Mania.)

Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

• Google is trying to build up discussions at a newly launched Google Mobile Community. “We envision this community as being a place where you can discuss the world of mobile in general…We also want the community to be a place where you can tell us what you think about our very own products,” said Bret Luboyeski, a Google mobile product specialist, on the Google Mobile blog.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

The U.S. Court of Appeals on Thursday issued a ruling Thursday that kicks one of Alcatel-Lucent’s claims back down to the lower courts for further review. This particular allegation centers on a communications protocol (Ackerman, or 131) patent designed to allow a host computer to communicate with a “terminal device.”

The software giant noted it expects to be only a minor player in that dispute.

“We are very pleased with the court’s decision on the Ackerman patent and respect its decision on the Atal patent. And we appreciate the careful attention the court paid to our appeal,” said Mary Lou Ambrus, an Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman.

A federal appeals court issued a split ruling on Alcatel-Lucent’s patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and Dell.

The appeals court, however, sided with the lower court’s ruling on Alcatel-Lucent’s digital speech compression (Atal, or 954) patent. The technology is designed to produce natural sounding speech at lower bit rates.

According to the ruling, the appeals court found the lower court was correct in its construction of the phrase “each successive iteration including the steps of.”

“We are gratified that the Federal Circuit affirmed the lower court’s ruling that speech coding technology in Microsoft’s products did not infringe the ‘954 patent,” said David Bowermaster, a Microsoft spokesman. “We look forward to demonstrating at the district court level that Microsoft did not infringe the ‘131 patent and that the patent is invalid.”

Microsoft, meanwhile, also considers the court ruling a victory.

The appeals court, in remanding the case back to the lower courts, said the lower court erred in its construction of the term “terminal device.”

Alcatel-Lucent is still awaiting for its appeal to be scheduled with the court.

The appeals court decision has no bearing on Alcatel-Lucent’s appeal in another Microsoft lawsuit, in which a a lower court nixed a $1.5 billion jury award to the telecommunications giant in an MP3 case.

Zuckerberg offered up that the Beacon advertising program was a big mistake, but it reinforced the point that Facebook needs to give people complete control of their information. In other words, Facebook takes privacy seriously.

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

D6 co-host Kara Swisher and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.

Sandberg talked about value in Facebook applications, including those that are whimsical and fun, such as Slide’s SuperPoke. Kara asked how Facebook will change the advertising paradigm in the context of those applications. “The larger part of advertising is in demand creation and traditional brand advertising. Facebook has a really unique opportunity to fulfill that message. Users tell us what they like and what they do, and it provides us an opportunity to work with advertisers to provide things that are great for users. We think we can offer real users engagement.”

Zuckerberg talked about changes to the Facebook platform, especially getting rid of the box mentality–user pages littered with applications in boxes on pages. The net effect of the new Facebook platform is that the more engaging applications and those that users trust more will get more distribution, through feeds instead of boxes, he said.

Sandberg, who recently made her first visit to Microsoft, said the two companies had a good partnership. “No company can go it alone. We are a small company with 550 people, four years old and not very big,” she said.

Zuckerberg thinks of Facebook as a technology company, while Sandberg described Facebook as a media company that connects people and advertisers. The ended up connecting their viewpoints. “Technology can speed up the interaction between advertisers and users, and that’s really good for users,” Sandberg said. Making privacy and advertising work harmoniously will be a major challenge for the CEO and COO.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his new COO Sheryl Sandberg fielded questions from Kara Swisher at the D6 conference. The pair stayed on message. Zuckerberg has learned to simply state the company goals in answer to almost any question. It shows focus and the savvy of a budding politician. Sandberg brought serious chops to the monetization and marketing discussion.

Kara saved the Microsoft question for last. She asked Zuckerberg if he would sell Facebook to Microsoft for $15 billion. “The goal of the company is to execute on the things we talked about before, become more open, and share more information. The end goal isn’t to sell the company or IPO. We evaluate how it will help us along the way,” Zuckerberg said. Can they sell company without you?, Kara asked. “I don’t think so,” Zuckerberg responded. Facebook’s VCs may have a different view on Zuckerberg’s view on exit strategies, but it is refreshing to talk about building value.

Regarding the controversy with Google’s Open Social initiative, Zuckerberg said that Facebook is watching how it evolves. “It’s really just getting started,” he said.

“They do a lot of interesting things. It would be good to work with them on something. The thing is Google is such a big company and doing so many things. They are also working social stuff. It would be good to talk to them about some stuff.” In other words, we aren’t really working with them. However, with all the Google refugees at Facebook, that could change.

Kara asked Zuckerberg why he chose to be the CEO, even as the company has grown to 550 people. He sidestepped the question and talked about the company goals–helping people share information, building products, and creating teams.

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg

Zuckerberg told of Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt coming to his apartment for dinner. He didn’t have the proper things to make dinner or enough chairs for his guests to sit. Kara asked him about working with Google. He danced around this question.

Several sites are already using the technology behind TinEye. Digg uses it to help search for duplicate story submissions on any post that contains an image. Adobe also uses it in PhotoShop Elements to look up related images that match the colors found in your photos.

Moving forward, the company intends to add video to its repertoire, letting you see where a video has been posted regardless of what service it’s hosted on. This is something I’m far more interested in seeing than photos, as the viral spread of video clips across blogs and other pages is fairly rampant. When mixed with some sort of timeline, this service could yield some great metrics for video creators and a tracking system to follow when videos have been remixed and re-edited.

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Wondering where else an image has appeared? TinEye will let you know. In this case it's a shot from the Fail Blog (click to enlarge).

In the real world, this isn’t always the case, which is why the creators of a new image search tool called TinEye have approached image search the other way around–letting you search for sites using image files you’ve stored locally.

One of the more interesting uses for this technology is tracking down stolen intellectual property. We often find our posts put up on small blogs that cut out the bylines and take credit. If the blogs reused whatever screenshots we’ve added, a tool like TinEye would track them down even if they’re using slightly altered text.

While we probably wouldn’t go to such lengths to hound down a screenshot, there are photographers and other content creators who would. The company has already spun its technology off as a product called PixID, but it’s geared more toward larger content rights holders than small-scale bloggers.

Traditionally, Web search has relied on words or queries to scan massive indexes of pages for results. Searching for images can be a little trickier though. You’re often relying on the competence of whoever uploaded the shot to provide the proper file name–and in a very small percentage of cases extra hints in the metadata to help the search tool get its hooks in.

For users who want to spend a little less time (and bandwidth) using TinEye, there’s a
Firefox plug-in that will add a “search for image on TinEye” option when you right-click on any picture you come across on the Web. Users can also just grab the URL and enter it, which can be helpful if you don’t feel like ferrying image files back and forth.

Sure this seems a little backward, but the idea is to find content related to whatever pictures you’ve got stored on your computer, or simply discover variations of that same shot around the Web.

The tool works best with popular or otherwise well-known images. Nearly everything else I tried didn’t produce much. Some of the searches with the most results have been compiled in a “cool searches” section, but typically feature well-known art or photography. The company expects to have a better set of results as its index increases in size.

The service is currently in private beta, but we’ve got 100 invites for Webware readers who want to give it a spin. To get yours, fill out the Wufoo form after the break.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

So what is the cell stage? Well, I could explain it. Or, I could let Maxis give you the goods: “Cell stage is your introduction to the fundamentals of Spore. You play a simple organism which is dropped onto your planet by way of meteor. The stage takes place in a top-down 2-D environment and you can play as an herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore. You earn DNA and collect parts to improve your creature’s abilities…Avoid larger, carnivorous organisms while feeding on smaller organisms or algae–all while being tossed around in strong ocean currents. Eventually you will grow large enough to sprout legs and crawl out of the water and up onto land.”

The game, as you may already know, is an evolution game: It tasks players with growing their characters from little spore-level creatures step-by-step up the ladder to the tribe level and then on to cities, whole civilizations, and eventually on to the galactic level.

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I’ll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South’s most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I’m doing on Twitter.

For those of us eagerly awaiting the release of Spore, from The Sims creator Will Wright and his Maxis studio, Tuesday was a day for whetting the appetite.

How cool is that?

That’s because Maxis, an Electronic Arts studio, released a little crumb for us, a video from the cell-stage of Spore.

One of the other cool things coming down the pike in the Spore-osphere is the June 17 release of the creature creator. This will be a piece of free software that will allow people to create creatures for the game, even before they own Spore. And that’s really smart because, having played with this tool before, I know that it is a lot of fun. And people will be able to save their creatures, share them with others, and then use them when the game comes out.

In the cell stage of Spore, players can try to evolve from simple little spore-like creatures into more significant, larger and stronger beings.

(Credit:
Electronic Arts/Maxis)

Now, with the cell-level video, Maxis is letting the public see a little bit more detail about the game, which is slated for a September 7 release.

With Spore, the innovators at Maxis have created what they’re calling a massively single-player game. This is a way of explaining that though the game is for one player only, it allows people to create all kinds of content–creatures, spaceships, odd buildings, and so forth–and then upload that content into the larger Spore universe. And that means that everyone gets to share in the entire community’s content creation, even if you can only play the game by yourself.

And it’s clear that one of the reasons people like myself are so excited about Spore is because, one, how often do you get to play a brand-new game from Wright? And two, how many games do you get to play that let you work your way all the way up the evolutionary chain from nearly meaningless microscopic ooze to galaxy-conquering demi-god?

Not so many. In fact, just this one.

Antivirus provider AVG Technologies on Tuesday announced that it is acquiring Sana Security, which sells identity fraud prevention software.

Under the deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, the Redwood City, Calif., headquarters of Sana will serve as Amsterdam-based AVG’s first office in Silicon Valley.

Sana’s products use behavioral technology to block attackers from stealing sensitive information. The software analyzes normal application behavior and recognizes abnormal behavior caused by malware infections, user configuration errors, and software bugs.

Developers and businesses can sign up to take part in the initial beta service now.

CloudFS will be accessible via the REST Web services API, and language-specific APIs such as those supported by .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby and Python, the company said.

The core concept behind Mosso’s Hosting Cloud is that many Web-based applications or sites are built up using largely common stacks of technologies such as PHP and MySQL databases. Mosso takes advantage of this fact by providing the means to provision applications running on one of these common stacks. Mosso is effectively offering cloud computing at a level of abstraction more akin to that of a Web hosting provider.

The storage service, called CloudFS, is available to a limited number of customers in a closed beta test and will enter more a more widespread public beta test sometime later this year, the company said.

(Credit:
Mosso)

Mosso in February launched an online service called The Hosted Cloud that so far offers e-mail hosting and managed hosting services.

CloudFS gives developers access to almost unlimited amounts of storage for 15 cents per gigabyte, including replicated copies of backed-up data.

As Gordon Haff wrote at the time, Mosso takes a slightly different approach than other online service providers:

Haff notes that “Mosso takes care of patching and updating the operating system and other software stack components…it’s a bit different than what’s generally discussed in the context of cloud computing.”

Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, plans to add online storage to its menu of services later this year.

commentary

It’s called great code. Weak developers write code that limps on anything but Windows. Great developers write code that ports well to diverse platforms.

As an aside, I continue to be impressed at how Zimbra treats non-Microsoft platforms as first-class citizens (along with Microsoft). Firefox is the same way. Both allow you to run on the
Mac, for example, without losing any functionality that you’d find in Windows/IE.

Which is the world’s fastest browser? According to Zimbra,
Safari runs fastest, though it didn’t beat out
Firefox by much. Both Safari and Firefox were roughly twice as fast as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7.

Of course, Zimbra was testing for how these browsers perform with the Zimbra Web application. Your mileage may vary with other applications. In fact, I’d love to see a wide range of tests for different sites and applications. Who’s next?

AppleInsider reports that Apple could be using a chipset from a different company–or even an internally developed one–in the next iteration of the MacBook, expected to arrive in the next six or eight weeks. Like other notebook vendors, Apple had been using Intel’s mobile Centrino chipsets in its MacBook line ever since 2006 but it’s going to pass on the Montevina version of those chipsets this time around, according to the report.

Most notebooks use integrated graphics chipsets over discrete graphics chips to cut down on power consumption, but the graphics performance of Intel’s chipsets leave a lot to be desired. Microsoft was less-than-thrilled about the performance of the chipsets that were scheduled to arrive with
Windows Vista, and Intel has had problems getting other chipsets to live up to their promise.

Apple might have decided its partnership with Intel doesn’t mean it has to use all of Intel’s products.

(Credit:
Apple)

In other pending MacBook news, Computerworld reports that the new systems will arrive in September with glass touchpads, which seems a bit curious. Glass might allow for all kinds of trackpad-oriented multitouch goodness, but it seems like a warranty nightmare to me.

AppleInsider thinks Apple might have contracted with Advanced Micro Devices or Via for the new chipsets, but offers no details on what might actually be inside the new systems. Given Nvidia’s huge mobile chipset problem this summer, it is probably not in the running if Apple’s looking at other suppliers.

If it’s an internally designed chipset that Apple has in place for the new systems, history would be repeating itself at the company, which used to design much of the internal hardware that went along with IBM’s PowerPC chips back in the day. Apple recently acquired a passel of chip designers from P.A. Semi, but Steve Jobs has said those folks are working on future chips for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The new notebooks are expected to borrow design cues from the MacBook Air and bring the aluminum casing on the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air to the MacBook.

Intel has done an excellent job reinventing the company around mobile processors, starting with the original Pentium M design back in 2004 and carrying forward to today’s Core 2 Duo. But it has done a much less stellar job with the integrated graphics chipsets that connect those processors to the rest of the system, such as the memory chips and hard drives.

The MacBook might be getting changes inside and out in the next several weeks.

Well, skipping the file-naming and storage location-choosing steps, for one thing. And having access to the notes from any Internet-connected computer, for another.

Use the Writer online word processor for instant–and universal-access to your notes.

Faster is almost always better, at least when it comes to computers. So what’s the fastest way to open a word processor?

Unfortunately, if you’re not already logged in, you’ll have to enter your username and password before you can open the blank file. You can avoid the login step by creating the shortcut to the Writer online word processor that mimics the look of old DOS-based text editors running on a green-phosphor display. (The service’s bare-bones look is itself modeled after the free Dark Room word processor, which, in turn, is the Windows version of the WriteRoom word processor for
Mac OS X.)

Writer remembers your files by leaving a cookie with the identifying information. If you delete the cookie, you lose access to the files, unless you sign up for a free account. The account has the added benefit of providing access to your files from any Internet-connected PC.

Now press the keystroke combination to open the program, and start typing (or navigate to an existing file you want to open). When you’re done working in the file, press Ctrl-S, give the file a name (if it doesn’t have one already), choose a location to store it (or accept the program’s default storage folder), and press Enter. What could be simpler?

You can create a keyboard shortcut to open Notepad, WordPad, Word, or any other word processor on your PC by right-clicking the program’s shortcut on the Start menu, choosing Properties > Shortcut > Shortcut key, entering your keystroke combination of choice (be sure not to overwrite one that’s already in use), and pressing Enter. I described how to get fast access to all your keyboard shortcuts in a post from last week.

Web word processors auto-save files
You can create a keyboard shortcut that opens Google Docs or any other Web word processor. Start by opening a new document in the service. Select the URL in the Address bar, and type Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard. Now open Windows Explorer to the Desktop or any other folder, right-click anywhere in the folder, choose New > Shortcut, paste the URL of the service into the location field, press Enter, give the shortcut a name, and press Enter again.

Since Writer doesn’t require you to log in–or even to create an account–you need not give your files a name. Just stick with the default, and when you want to reopen the file, select it from your list of documents, which appears just below the text window.

Monday: get more use out of Windows’ taskbar.

Should you find Writer to your liking, be sure to make a donation to its creator to help keep the great services coming.

Next, right-click the shortcut you just created, click Properties > Shortcut > Shortcut key, type your preferred keystroke combination for opening the service, and press Enter. Now you can open the service ready to create a new file by pressing that keyboard shortcut.

(Credit:
John Watson/BigHugeLabs.com)