Pogoplug: A new device for new lifestyles?

The new Pogoplug. Credit: Cloud Engines.

One way to score a big hit in technology is to come up with not just a new gadget, but a new category. Of course, that is also a recipe for failure, because there's a risk that consumers don't think they need what you're selling.

That's the risk for Cloud Engines, a San Francisco company that makes something called the Pogoplug. They're calling it a "multimedia sharing device," in the hopes that people are looking for an easier way to share all the videos, photos and music that are now defining their digital lives.

The Pogoplug sells for $129. You plug it into your router, and then you plug a storage device -- like an external hard drive or a flash drive -- into it. You have then created what company Chief Executive Daniel Putterman calls "your personal cloud." Given the way the "cloud computing" buzzword reached the stratosphere this year, he may be onto something.

The sharing part comes in letting you give anyone access to your stuff without your ever having to upload it or e-mail it.

Engadget liked an earlier version of the product but wished it had Wi-Fi and ports for extra devices. Today the company announces the extra ports, but still no Wi-Fi.

And I can report that photos and material shared with me from a Pogoplug device worked seamlessly, like looking at any website.

-- Dan Fost

City committee declines to recommend Google e-mail contract

Budget and Finance Committee Chairman Bernard C. Parks.
Credit: David Sarno / Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles City Council's Budget and Finance Committee agreed Monday evening to abstain from voting on a proposed contract with Google Inc. to replace the city's e-mail system, passing the decision on to the full City Council amid unresolved concerns about the cost and necessity of the contract.

The budget committee, chaired by Councilman Bernard C. Parks, adjourned after nearly two hours of testimony in which the merits of upgrading the current system were hotly debated by an array of city officials, as well as Google, Microsoft Corp, Novell Inc. and consumer advocates.

The full council is tentatively scheduled to vote on the contract Oct. 27.

At the heart of the deliberations is whether the city should go to the expense of replacing its longstanding e-mail system -- considered slow and clunky by many employees -- with a system wholly owned and operated by Google.

The Mountain View, Calif., Web giant would use its own far-flung network of computer servers to store and secure e-mail for many of the city's 30,000 employees.  That would likely include city law enforcement agencies, such as the Los Angeles Police Department, where sensitive data is often exchanged over e-mail.

Though critics of the $7.25-million contract have pointed to security concerns of Google's storing city data in its so-called cloud of servers, the main focus of attention Monday was the extent to which the agreement with Google would deliver budgetary savings to the city.

Indeed, Google's main selling point for its e-mail and document software is that it is a "dramatically lower cost solution," as a Google executive recently described it to The Times.  Officials in the city's Information Technology Agency, which selected Google's bid from among 15 submitted to the city (seven of them were from Microsoft), have also said that the Google system would save the city millions of dollars.

But a recent city analysis found that, instead of offering clear budgetary savings, installing and  running Google Apps would actually exceed the cost of the current Novell system by $1.5 million over the five-year life of the contract. 

"It didn't give me a warm feeling in my stomach that we should jump off this cliff together," Parks said of the disputed savings.  "It looks like we're going on a promise -- and it just doesn't look like, substantively, it's being supported."

Google argues that if the city were to hire the company to handle all of its email, L.A. technology officials could free up many resources now tied to the operation and upkeep of their current system.  Moreover, moving to a next-generation cloud system could offer a variety of other benefits, including the ability to more quickly rebound from a disaster, and stronger security than the city's current offering.

Even so, Parks said with a clear note of skepticism, "the urgency case hasn't been made."

Council members Jose Huizar and Bill Rosendahl agreed to abstain from voting on the contract, saying that more due diligence needed to be performed on the costs and risks involved.

When asked whether he thought the committee's decision to skip voting on the issue was a good or bad sign for the contract, Dave Girouard, the President of Google's Enterprise division, said, "I really don't know -- I've never been in a process like that."

According to the terms of the contract negotiation, the City Council has until Dec. 1 to approve or reject the plan.  If no action is taken by that date, the contract is automatically approved.

-- David Sarno

Google's Gmail hit in phishing scheme

Google Inc. said today that its Gmail e-mail service has been attacked in an industrywide phishing scheme in which hackers obtained user names and passwords to gather personal information such as credit card and bank account numbers.

"This was not a Gmail security breach," said Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs. "As soon as we became aware of the issue, we reset the passwords on the small number of affected accounts."

He did not say how many e-mail accounts were compromised. He advised customers to enter their e-mail credentials only to web addresses starting with https://www.google.com/accounts and to examine carefully certificate warnings.

In all, about 30,000 people using Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and other e-mail service providers have been victims of recent phishing schemes, according to BBC News.

-- Melissa Rohlin

Google's Gmail goes down for at least half an hour; Twitter lights up

Google's Gmail electronic mail platform went down about 1 p.m. PST for at least some fraction of the Web audience, and it didn't take long for tens of thousands of Twitter users to note that the service was offline.

While the extent of the outage was not immediately clear, for at least a vocal swath of Twitter users, Gmail was offline for more than 30 minutes, qualifying it for Google's technical definition of a "downtime period," rather than simply intermittent spottiness.

Many of Google's services essentially exist in "the cloud" -- that is, users interact with programs on Google's servers via the Web, rather than running them from their own computers. That means the  company's business -- and reputation -- depends on its being available to consumers and business customers without interruption.

For paying customers of Google Apps, the company guarantees that the service will be available at least 99.9% of the time.  Any less, and Google starts to lose money back to businesses, which are credited with free service days based on the extent of the outage.

In a 31-day month, there are 44,640 minutes, meaning that the cutoff -- 0.1% -- means a maximum of about 45 minutes of downtime.  As of this writing, the Gmail outage has lasted about 30 minutes.  Consumers who use the free service, of course, don't get any freebies when Google goes down.

Gmail went down for about two hours in August of last year as well.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a spokesperson left the following comment on this post after publication:

On behalf of Google I wanted to let everyone know that we're really sorry for the inconvenience and working to fix the problem as fast as we can. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. You can find the latest information on the Apps Status Dashboard at www.google.com/appsstatus.

Update, 2:47p.m.: According to the above-mentioned status page, Gmail was until a few moments ago listed as currently having had an "outage," but now reflects only a "service disruption."  The page indicates that Gmail had a service disruption yesterday as well.

-- David Sarno

Will Google Wave be ready for prime time in two months?

Google Wave inbox.

Google presented a private demonstration of its much-anticipated collaboration tool, Google Wave, this morning. Even after watching all of the videos and talking to the developers, the first thing that struck us is how rough it is around the edges.

To be fair, Google calls it a developer preview, meaning it's not meant for the prying eyes of the average user or critical journalist. Yet, the Times got an invitation anyway.

First, the good news: Wave has a lot going for it. Its function for letting users watch as you type each letter is punchy, just like it was in the demo, and works surprisingly well. At first, it feels sort of strange exposing your own typing habits and witnessing others'. But it really speeds conversations along.

Brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the engineers behind Wave (and Google Maps) who walked us through the demo over the phone, say you'll eventually be able to turn off live editing. But that function probably won't be ready for the September release, Lars said.

We fumbled through the software for an hour while the Google lead engineers figuratively held our hands, and afterward spent many hours adapting to its many nuances. While some of the aspects are ...

Google Wave is a hodgepodge of e-mail, photo sharing, chat

Google Wave combines e-mail, documents, photo sharing and chat in one Web app. Credit: Google

Ever feel like you have information overload?

You start Gmail to find a few dozen new messages, thousands of spams and a bunch of friends shouting at you via instant message the moment you sign-in.

Then, you hop over to Picasa, Google's photo-sharing software, to find your family and friends have just uploaded hundreds of snapshots of their trip to Aruba or of your baby cousin.

Finally, you make a pit stop in Google Docs to see that your co-worker has added a few new documents that need your approval.

Could Google Wave, the new product that the company announced today at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, help us cut through the noise?

Probably not. The app just dumps everything onto one page.

The interface should be familiar to Gmail users -- just with a lot more stuff. If you've checked out the iGoogle custom home page, that should give you a better idea of the hyper-integration that Google is going for.

Wave displays your e-mail in one column and your incoming photos in another. Folders sit on the left side-bar followed by contacts, which you can access to start new communications, called "waves." And with ...

Twitter creator reflects on how the service can evolve [UPDATED]

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey at a Washington cafe. Credit: Mark Milian

Keep it down! It's not easy for Twitter creator and Chairman Jack Dorsey to focus on ways to improve the product when everyone won't stop chirping about it.

Every celebrity from Ashton to Zac Efron (though, this may not be his real account -- thanks, readers) is Twittering, and it was even the subject on Oprah last month. Dorsey and his co-founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have been featured in countless profiles in practically every major publication. And now there's talk of a Twitter TV show.

Will the hype ever die down?

"I hope so," Dorsey said over lunch at a sidewalk cafe in Washington this month.  "I think Twitter succeeds when people don't talk about it as much and just use it."

Don't get Dorsey wrong; he's flattered by all the excitement over his brainchild. But the publicity could be a wolf in sheep's clothing.

"The buzz is definitely good right now, but it's also potentially dangerous," Dorsey said. "It may put us into a fad."

He's hoping Twitter can transition from this really cool thing that everyone feels pressured into trying to that thing you need to use in order to stay in the loop and be successful.

"It should just become second nature," Dorsey said. "It becomes something like an e-mail, where it's just used on a daily basis because it's just the most efficient way to communicate."

However, almost since Twitter's conception about three years ago, its efficiency has been hindered by its reliability.

"We had a terrible first year and a half," Williams told Charlie Rose in February, referring to stability issues (or the "fail whale," as early adopters called it). "That almost killed us."

But after feverish work on keeping the service accessible and a recent redesign that puts search at the forefront, Twitter, the service, could soon transform in ...

Spammers use swine flu panic to peddle products

Spammers are taking advantage of the panic about swine flu. Credit: zugaldia via Flickr.

Security experts are warning today that computer viruses may be the next part of the swine flu outbreak. Spammers, it seems, have taken advantage of the worldwide panic over the disease to send out e-mails mentioning swine flu to try to trick people into opening them, according to McAfee Avert Labs.

The spammers advertise drugs and online pharmacies, McAfee said, and the lab "predicts more nefarious scams are coming," including links to malware-laden websites. McAfee has also seen an increase in domain names that refer to swine flu.

At least the spammers are creative. Some of the subject lines include: "Salma Hayek caught swine flu!" and "Madonna caught swine flu!" and "Swine flu in Hollywood!" Less exclamation point-heavy messages include "U.S. swine flu statistics" and "Swine flu in USA."

Ironically, McAfee's e-mail about this flood of spam also contained a subject line referring to swine flu.

-- Alana Semuels

Google remedies Gmail phishing scam

The Google Chat phishing scam at ViddyHo.com.

It was a rough day for Gmail.

First, Google's e-mail service experienced an outage that lasted several hours in the early morning. Then, a phishing scam made its way around Google Talk, the chat protocol embedded within the Gmail Web interface.

For the former, Google issued an apology and an explanation via its Gmail Blog. For the latter, Google added the apparent perpetrator of the the phishing attack, a website called ViddyHo.com, to its blacklist.

The users transmitting the links have been blocked, the website marked as malicious in Google search results and the domain indicated as a phishing website to people using the Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers, a Google spokesperson said in an e-mail. Basically, the action meant that if the ViddyHo.com domain was ever worth anything to anyone, it's not anymore. The website also appears to have been taken offline.

People targeted by the scam received a message from what appeared to be a friend's user name. The message contained a link, which led to a Web page asking for the user's Google log-in name and password. Those who did that had their accounts used to send similar messages to their online contacts.

Google is urging those scammed to change their passwords immediately. The company hasn't received any reports of suspicious activity on targeted accounts, aside from using them to spread the scam, the spokesperson said, adding that the outage and the phishing outbreak were unrelated.

-- Mark Milian

Googler goodbye e-mail: 'So long, suckers! I'm out!'

When he left Google for Imeem, Jason Shugars' goodbye e-mail started, "So long, suckers." Credit: Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times.

It was not the most eloquent subject line for a farewell e-mail to 5,000 co-workers: "So long, suckers! I'm out!"

But Jason Shugars worked at Google, whose off-center corporate culture is more forgiving than that of your average buttoned-down investment bank. In the rest of his goodbye, Shugars, a senior sales compliance specialist, reminisced about workplace moments that included putting cake down his pants at a sales conference, stealing a boss' $8,000 leather couch and singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time" in a miniskirt and braids.

"It took me a long time to write it," said Shugars, 34, who left Google to become director of ad operations for the music streaming website Imeem. "I didn't want to send out a stale 'good working with you, please reach me here' e-mail. Who wants that?"

That's a good question these days, now that thousands of people are finding themselves with pink slips and the need to let colleagues and contacts know they are moving on and -- perhaps more important for job seekers -- how they can be reached.

The farewell e-mail has suddenly become commonplace, a new art form in the electronic age. Yet like so many aspects of the Internet era -- how to unfriend on Facebook, how much to reveal on a personal blog -- the technology has gotten ahead of the etiquette. There are, quite simply, no rules.

Read the full story for more examples of how the universality of e-mail and the confessional spirit of the times are spicing up goodbye messages.

-- Robin Abcarian