In Los Angeles, it's the attack of the Twittering food trucks!

The Kogi BBQ truck started the Twitterin' truck trend. Credit: joshuaheller / flickr.

Take a walk down Main Street during one of downtown L.A.'s Art Walk nights (the second Thursday of every month), and you will see an element that does not at first blend in with all the paintings, sculptures, high heels and hipsters.

Lining the curbs from 4th Street on down are a caravan of parked food trucks, part of L.A.'s growing army of Twitterized mobile eateries, originated by the now-famous Kogi Korean BBQ truck.

But now the roving bands have expanded to such variously named rolling restaurants as Nom Nom Truck, Let's Be Frank, and the upcoming FrySmith, a "truck with fries that eat as a meal." 

There are sushi trucks, ice cream and shave ice trucks, Indian food trucks, Philadelphia cheese steak trucks (couldn't find the Twitter address but I saw it with my own eyes), coffee and sweets trucks, and even a food truck for vegans!

No doubt I have omitted a few trucks from this list, but the L.A. Metblog listed more of them a few months ago, and there's even a page that tracks tweetin' trucks.

-- David Sarno

Google bets big on mobile advertising in $750-million acquisition of AdMob

Google Inc. has shown which way it believes the winds are blowing by forking over $750 million for mobile advertising firm AdMob, one of the Web giant's largest acquisitions to date. 

As AdMob itself has described, the volume and effectiveness of mobile advertising has been skyrocketing over the last several years as more advanced smartphones have caught on, making it easier to deliver more kinds of graphical and text-based advertising to phone-toting consumers.

In a recent report, AdMob said that the number of mobile ads it served had increased nearly 540% from September 2007, to 10.2 billion per month from 1.6 billion.  

As mobile phones morph further into pocket Internet devices, and consumers grow accustomed to performing online functions like search, gaming and instant messaging on their handsets, opportunities for advertising companies like Google will grow rapidly, analysts expect. 

Google says the number of searches performed by smartphone users has increased by a factor of five over the last two years, led primarily by iPhone users and owners of Google Android phones. At least a dozen new Google-powered phones, such as last week's launch of Verizon's Droid, are expected to be released in the coming year.  

Google also says that marketer spending on mobile advertising is growing at 30% annually.

AdMob was founded in 2006 by Omar Hamoui, a Web entrepreneur looking to generate traffic for his mobile-based website. The company has taken funding from venture firms such as Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Northgate, and the company's clients have included Ford, Coca-Cola, Electronic Arts and Paramount Pictures.

Google, which already owns a major stake in mobile advertising with its DoubleClick Mobile unit, said it expects regulatory scrutiny of the AdMob deal but hopes the pact will be approved within a matter a months.

-- David Sarno

Google's 'Dashboard' allows users some insight into which data the company stores

Google has unveiled its 'Google Dashboard' service, a page where users can get a sense of the data the company stores about them in any of 23 different Google-run services. 

As questions about how the company uses consumer data continue to mount, Google has tried to answer those concerns by allowing users a clearer view into how their data is stored and used by programs like Gmail, YouTube and Google Docs.

"We think of this as a great step towards giving people transparency and control over their data, and we hope this helps shape the way the industry thinks about these issues," Alma Whitten, a Google  engineer who works on Privacy and Security, said in a statement.

The Dashboard is essentially a page listing each service that stores data, along with which types of data it stores. Rather than allowing users to control and edit their data directly from the page, however, Dashboard refers users to other pre-existing settings pages. In that sense, the Dashboard is a consolidation of existing functions, not a new set of tools by which users can control their data.

And though much of the concern about Google's data storage revolves around precisely how and what the company does to analyze and profit from user information, the Dashboard offers little insight into those domains. It does not specify which services keep user data, or for how long. Neither does it alert users that, for instance, their Web search histories and e-mails are constantly scanned for the purposes of selling products to them and others.

But users should expect that most or all of their data could be used for advertising, Google said. "To most folks, I think that there is a general expectation that even when we launch a product that doesn't have a clear business model associated with it, there's a possibility that advertising could be associated in some way," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's business product manager for Trust & Safety.

Google said it would continue to add features to the Dashboard, and that services that were not included in the first iteration -- Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, and Book Search among others -- would be added in later versions.

-- David Sarno

Los Angeles adopts Google e-mail system for 30,000 city employees

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously today to outsource its e-mail system to Google Inc., making it the largest city in the nation to make the move and handing the Web search giant a major victory in its quest to become a software provider to the world's cities and businesses.

After more than two hours of debate, council members voted 12-0 to approve the $7.25-million contract that would move all 30,000 city employees to Google's so-called cloud over the coming year.

"The City of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the nation, made a world-class decision today to support a state-of-the art e-mail system," said Councilman Tony Cardenas, who made the motion to approve the Google system.

Before the vote, several council members had voiced objections to the contract, including whether the city would see any real cost savings, as Google had contended, and when the new system would be ready to store data from law enforcement, where security standards are more rigorous.

Because Los Angeles will be among the earliest adopters of the Google system, council members expressed concern that the city might be signing on before Google's cloud system was fully proven.

"It's unclear if this is cutting edge, or the edge of a cliff and we're about to step off," said Councilman Paul Koretz.

The contract was approved pending an amendment that would require Google to compensate the city in the event that the Google system was breached and city data exposed or stolen. No such clause existed in the contract.

The vote today ended a nearly year-long process during which Google competed furiously with other software vendors, including rival Microsoft Corp., to secure the city's valuable stamp of approval. Parties on all sides believe that if smaller cities see Los Angeles successfully transition to Google's cloud system, they may be more likely to follow suit.

It is that type of cascade effect that Microsoft lobbied hard to prevent, sending executives and paid advocates to Los Angeles to make the case against Google.

The city plans to complete implementation of the Google system by June and will begin with a pilot period during which a limited number of employees will test the system. City law enforcement agencies including the Los Angeles Police Department will migrate to the new system once they are satisfied with the security and functioning of the system.

Update:  Several readers have asked about the $7.25 million cost of the contract.  That price covers five years of e-mail for the city.

-- David Sarno [follow]

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 beats analysts' expectations, sending stock up in after-hours trading

Google Inc. reported a 27% increase in profits during the third quarter, signaling renewed strength for the Internet search giant and increasing hopes that the online technology sector might be trending toward recovery.

The company's gross revenue increased 7% to $5.94 billion from $5.54 billion during the same period last year.

Following the announcement of the quarterly performance, which beat analysts' expectations, the company's stock rose as much as $15 a share -- or almost 3% -- in after-hours trading

“Google had a strong quarter,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement. “While there is a lot of uncertainty about the pace of economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and now feel confident about investing heavily in our future.”

Schmidt praised his executive staff, saying the relative health of the company through the nation's recession "has proven the worth of this team," which focused on cost-cutting measures while the company waited for the economy to improve.

Google said it had resumed hiring, after paring its payroll last quarter -- a rarity for the fast-growing company.

-- David Sarno

Microsoft says lost Sidekick data will be restored to users

A 2007 Microsoft/T-Mobile Sidekick. Credit: Krisopher Avila / Flickr

The unusual case of the missing Sidekick data may be nearing its conclusion.

Microsoft Corp. announced this morning that most or all users of its Sidekick mobile device might indeed see their lost data again. The announcement came after a week of worry that users' contacts, notes, photos and other virtual property may have been lost for good when company servers failed.

"We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible," wrote Roz Ho, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Premium Mobile Experiences, adding that the company now believed the outage affected a minority of Sidekick users.

"We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the backup," Ho explained in a statement. "We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data."

Ho said Microsoft would offer another update on the data restoration by Saturday.

If indeed the data are restored, Microsoft may dull the negative echoes of the episode, which initially looked to be one of the worst incidents of online data loss in memory, with many of the device's reported 1 million users suffering a complete wipe of many months of irreplaceable information. At least two lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft and Sidekick carrier T-Mobile.

In an e-mail Wednesday evening, Microsoft sought to show that the problem was isolated to servers run by its Danger Inc. subsidiary, which it said was not part of its main "cloud" infrastructure. "Other and future Microsoft mobile products and services are entirely based on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft’s cloud service platform," the company said.

-- David Sarno

On Sidekick troubles, Microsoft points finger at Danger, its own subsidiary

Credit: psd / Flickr.

Microsoft Corp. is now putting space between itself and Danger Inc. -- the now-ironically named subsidiary that created the Sidekick and was responsible a computer network that failed, causing many of the device's loyal users to lose substantial amounts of personal data.

Microsoft is now emphasizing that the data loss, and the problems that led to it, were limited to a segment of the company's network that is separate from its core cloud infrastructure. 

“The Danger Service platform, which experienced the outage, is a standalone service operating on non-Microsoft technologies, and is not related to Microsoft’s cloud services platform or Windows Live," Microsoft spokesperson Tonya Klause wrote in an e-mail. “Other and future Microsoft mobile products and services are entirely based on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft’s cloud service platform and software."

The Sidekick outage was severe enough that users were warned that their data might not be recovered, an unusual outcome in a technology environment where users are increasingly entrusting their data to large Web firms -- who in turn invest heavily in keeping the data backed up in case of problems.

This was apparently not the case with the Danger Service platform. 

Microsoft drew a further distinction between Danger and its other data assets, saying that "it’s important to note that for native Microsoft services such as Windows Live, Hotmail, Azure, etc., we write multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices so that the data is available in a situation where a single or multiple physical nodes may fail," Klause wrote.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a question about why Danger would have been subject to different standards for data integrity and redundancy, unlike other parts of the company's worldwide network of servers.

The Sidekick appears to have been taken off the market by Microsoft and its carrier, T-Mobile, on whose site the device is marked "temporarily out of stock."

-- David Sarno

Microsoft's Sidekick debacle brings much-hyped 'cloud' back to Earth

Credit: ZeroOne/ Flickr.

Over the last year, the technology sector has become enamored with the possibilities of the "cloud."

That's the computing paradigm that allows consumers to forget about storing their software and data on local hard drives -- where it can be vulnerable to electrical surges and soft-drink spillage -- and let  companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft worry about keeping it safe.

But last week, a hole was poked in the cloud's massive hype bubble. Microsoft Corp. and T-Mobile Inc., the respective maker and carrier of the Sidekick mobile device, acknowledged a "service disruption" that cut off most users of the device from large amounts of personal data -- contacts, calendars, personal notes and more -- that were stored in Microsoft's cloud.

Initially pessimistic about their data recovery efforts, the companies on Monday released a more sanguine forecast, saying that "the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible." (For close readers, note the number of conditional nouns and verbs in that sentence -- not very confidence-inspiring.) 

But the larger questions may be how this incident will affect attitudes about the dependability of cloud computing, or if it should affect them at all.

In places where the cloud is now on trial -- in Los Angeles City Hall, for one -- decision makers may have one more reason to be suspicious of its many promises. Google Inc., a major proponent of cloud software, is quick to offer a laundry list of advantages -- lower cost, ubiquitous access, no hassle.  But the company spends less time warning of its potential pitfalls.

Though absent in Google's promotional literature, those pitfalls are enumerated at length in the company's regulatory filings, where it must legally disclose risks and liabilities to its shareholders. In a letter last week to City Councilman Bernard C. Parks, John Simpson of advocacy group Consumer Watchdog noted the stark language Google uses to describe the many things that could go wrong with its cloud-based systems:

"Our systems are vulnerable to damage or interruption from earthquakes, terrorist attacks, floods, fires, power loss, telecommunications failures, computer viruses, computer denial of service attacks, or other attempts to harm our systems. Some of our data centers are located in areas with a high risk of major earthquakes. Our data centers are also subject to break-ins, sabotage, and intentional acts of vandalism, and to potential disruptions if the operators of these facilities have financial difficulties. Some of our systems are not fully redundant, and our disaster recovery planning cannot account for all eventualities. The occurrence of a natural disaster, a decision to close a facility we are using without adequate notice for financial reasons, or other unanticipated problems at our data centers could result in lengthy interruptions in our service.”

Of course, if a company is compelled to enumerate every possible risk to its bottom line, it may read like the above parade of nightmares -- when in reality each individual disaster may be exceedingly unlikely. So far, Google is not known for weak security. 

Still, with the Sidekick situation, Microsoft has proved that data disasters do -- and will -- happen.  (Notably, the Redmond, Wash., software maker is vying with Google for the Los Angeles computing contract).  What's less clear is how frequent this type of incident will occur and whether cloud users ought to be actively worried. As with plane crashes, disease outbreaks and shark attacks, a handful of sensational instances may not reflect the risk to the population at large. Moreover, some businesses can learn from errors and reduce the likelihood of a repeat occurrence.

People are willing to tolerate a certain amount of risk -- otherwise they wouldn't be flying, driving, eating spinach or surfing in Malibu. 

But the cloud is new and fragile, kept levitating largely by the trust of its users. To date, serious problems have been relatively rare. But if consumers begin to believe their data is not safe in the hands of certain companies, they'll just pull it out -- and poof!

-- David Sarno

LG's solar-powered e-book may leave Washington and Alaska readers in the dark

It's always sunny is Seoul. Credit: LG.

Pleasing vacation readers everywhere, South Korea's LG Display Co. on Tuesday announced a new e-book reader that comes complete with a 10" solar cell, so that you never again need run out of batteries while reading on the beach in Hawaii. 

Unless, that is, you're in Hilo. That's the gorgeous coastal town on the Big Island that, counterintuitively, is one of the cloudiest cities in the United States. It joins Juneau, Alaska, and Quillayute, Wash., on NOAA's short list of places where the sun shines as little as 30% of the year. 

When you consider cities like Yuma, Ariz., (90% sunlight), Redding, Calif., (88%) and even Los Angeles (73%), it's only fair to wonder if linking the availability of sunlight to literacy might be unfair to those relegated to less sunny climes.   

A cool four to five hours of direct sunlight would improve the device's run-time by about a day, meaning you could go a whole week without plugging it in if all you did on your tropical vacation was sit outside and read.

Sadly, the solar e-book won't be available until at least 2012.  That's because LG considers the 9.6% solar energy conversion rate inadequate and is holding out for something higher, like 14%.

As seen in the photo above, the cell is actually a completely separate panel from the screen -- a configuration that leaves the reader to stare at a rather unexciting black square at all times. But the point here is the potential:  E-books consume so little energy in the first place that a well-placed, efficient solar cell could make a reading device completely self-powered. 

You're on notice, print books:  Soon the only people that will read you will live in Alaska, Hawaii and outside of Seattle.

-- David Sarno