Technology

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

David Sarno — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:16:05 -0800

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

David Sarno — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:08:05 -0800

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

David Sarno — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:00:00 -0800

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

David Sarno — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:18:24 -0700

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

David Sarno — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:00:00 -0700

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

David Sarno — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:00:46 -0700

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

David Sarno — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:32:21 -0700

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

David Sarno — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:36:25 -0700

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

David Sarno — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:10:00 -0700

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

David Sarno — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:49:04 -0700

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

Judge sets November deadline for revised Google book deal

David Sarno — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:59:37 -0700

A New York judge overseeing the long-running case in which a group of authors and publishers sued Google over the company's attempt to obtain digital rights to millions of books ruled that the parties must submit a revised settlement agreement to the court by Nov. 9.

The previous agreement was scuttled last month when federal regulators notified the court that the pact may have been vulnerable to antitrust and copyright concerns. The Department of Justice filed an amicus brief after a wave of critics -- including authors, libraries and watchdog groups -- complained that the agreement was unfair.

A plaintiffs lawyer said the sides had been working "around the clock," and that the amended agreement would address the issues raised by the Justice Department, according to the Associated Press.

-- David Sarno

Google teams with Verizon and promises a family of Android mobile devices

David Sarno — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:01:44 -0700

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, left, and Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam. Credit: Verizon

In the face of the iPhone's popularity, Verizon Wireless and Google Inc. said they are forming a partnership to create new smart phones using Google's Android operating system and the Internet firm's applications.

Verizon said it expects to unveil two new Google phones this month, but said those initial entries would be just the first part of a "multiyear roadmap."

The partnership of the two technology heavyweights -- the nation's largest wireless network and the online search leader -- comes as the fight for dominance in the mobile smart phone market grows increasingly contentious.

A spat between Google and technology rival Apple Inc. has escalated in recent weeks over Apple's refusal to allow customers to use Google Voice, the company's telephone application, on the popular iPhone. Google told the Federal Communications Commission that Apple rejected the app for competitive reasons, but Apple denied that, saying it is still studying Google's application.

AT&T, the sole wireless carrier for the iPhone, added fuel to the fire last month when it complained to the FCC that Google Voice blocked calls to certain areas, raising the possibility that Google could be in violation of FCC rules.

Verizon Wireless Chief Executive Lowell McAdam told analysts today that the company would support Google Voice. "You either have an open device or not, and this will be open," he said, adding that Google Voice would be available when Verizon's first Google devices come out.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gave plaudits to Verizon for its willingness to adopt Android, which, unlike Apple's system, is an open development platform over which Verizon would have less control. That decision, Schmidt said, was "enormously surprising given the history and the old-line nature of telcos.

"At Verizon, somehow the leadership has decided to embrace a different philosophy which works very well with the Internet," he said.

-- David Sarno

CNN's new iPhone app takes mobile news to the next level

David Sarno — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:00:00 -0700

An exception among the generally innovation-averse old-media crowd, CNN has often shown that it is not afraid to embrace new technologies or, when necessary, to invent some its own.

Continuing that trend, the network and its market-leading website, CNN.com, have released a new iPhone app, a kind of fully loaded Swiss Army knife for news.

The app's features include old-school written articles, live streaming video, localized traffic and weather, and -- coolest -- the ability for users to upload cellphone photos or video to iReport, the network's online haven for amateur reporting.

That will be the first time CNN has created a direct uplink from a mobile device to its iReport platform, an enhancement that could make it easier for users to transmit the kind of on-the-ground citizen reports that have grown common during high-profile events.

CNN says its video upload and download features will work fine on the open cellular network, where video features are typically pokey.

The application, available for $1.99 and initially hosting in-app advertising from Chevron and Lexus, is definitely testing the bounds of app simplicity, nearly mimicking a full website with the number of features and multimedia options.

But CNN, with rather unabashed bravado, believes that its users want all that heavy firepower. The new app "is one of the best user experiences around," said Louis Gump, vice president of CNN Mobile, in a statement, "and will quickly become an essential daily news source for many iPhone and iPod Touch users."

Some of that confidence is earned, of course. CNN.com is still the highest-trafficked news site, and it also owns one of the most followed Twitter accounts.

The current king of iPhone news apps is, arguably, NPR, which gives unfettered access to archived content from a huge list of radio stations. But CNN's bold move, bringing TV news to the iPhone, could mean a duel for media app dominance is afoot.

-- David Sarno

iPhone screen shots: CNN

Twitter said to be near a deal for $100 million in venture funding

David Sarno — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:10:41 -0700

Twitter may be close to locking up a deal for $100 million in new venture funding, a sum that would nearly triple the total venture capital poured into the 3-year-old messaging start-up.

The new investment round, which would include investment firm T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, would value Twitter at close to $1 billion.

Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Among the most familiar refrains in the social media business is that companies do best to build value and audiences before they focus too heavily on generating revenue. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone reinforced the features-first, money-later approach this week when he said "it'll be awhile" before users see any advertising on Twitter.

Twitter has also said that it will support what it calls "commercial accounts" for businesses, which would offer paying customers more tools for analyzing their Twitter traffic. That feature may arrive by the end of the year.

Twitter's last round of funding came in mid-February, when it collected $35 million from the likes of Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital. Spark Capital and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions participated in the round before that.

In recent days, Twitter has been adding to the slate of sites and services that are allowing users to tweet, including MySpace and AOL's Lifestream platform.

-- David Sarno

Timberlake signs on to co-star in Facebook movie, "The Social Network"

David Sarno — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:04:09 -0700

Justin Timberlake. Credit: Chris Pizzello / AP

Did Facebook just get somewhat cooler?

Variety is reporting that the latest addition to "The Social Network," the early-stage Hollywood movie project that will tell Facebook's origin story, has signed Justin Timberlake to play a principal character.

The actor-singer-Emmy winner is slated to play Sean Parker, a co-founder of Napster (not to be confused with Sean Fanning, the music site's creator) and Facebook's first president. Timberlake will play alongside Jesse Eisenberg ("Adventureland", "The Squid and the Whale"), who will portray Facebook's founding father Mark Zuckerberg, who was 19 when he famously created "The Facebook" in his Harvard dorm room.

The film will apparently concentrate on the vicissitudes of fame and fortune encountered by the young founders, whose meteoric ascent into wealth and pop culture was not always without its hitches.

The script was written by Aaron Sorkin, a specialist in spinning drama out of often prosaic reality. Facebook's origin story comes with its share of Hollywood's classic elements involved -- money, power, and even betrayal -- but Sorkin and director David Fincher may have to take some liberties with the sex.

-- David Sarno

Google News goes down; company working to fix

David Sarno — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:01:12 -0700

Google has acknowledged an outage of Google News, its highly popular news aggregation site. The company said the following about the outage:

Today, starting at about 12:45 p.m. PDT, many users began experiencing difficulties accessing Google News. We are aware of the issue and working to fix it. We know how important Google News is to our users, and we take issues like this very seriously.

The outage comes on the heels of another Google outage earlier this month, when Gmail went down for more than an hour after a system upgrade went awry. The Internet search company operates almost completely via the Web, so down time of any sort creates immediate problems for it because clients and consumers are unable to access affected Google sites and services.

Google News aggregates headlines from hundreds of online news sources, and the company says it said its drives huge numbers of viewers back to those sites. An outage, then, means a major artery to online news sites has been temporarily clogged.

Updated, 2:28 p.m.: The site is back up. The outage appears to have lasted around 30 minutes or less.

Updated, 3:20 p.m.: Google said the issue has been resolved. According to the company, the outage lasted a little less than two hours, beginning at 12:25 p.m. and ending at 2:20 p.m. PDT.

-- David Sarno

Facebook retires once-embarrassing Beacon advertising system

David Sarno — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:39:57 -0700

Facebook is closing the book on Beacon, an early advertising experiment that got the upstart social network in big trouble with users in 2007.

Back then, Facebook quietly launched the service, which recorded user activities on non-Facebook sites and then reported them to users' friends.

In the most famous instance, a Facebook user complained that he had ordered a diamond ring for his wife from Overstock.com and that Facebook had ruined the surprise by reporting the purchase to all his friends -- and his wife, too.

The endeavor quickly turned into what "60 Minutes" called "a full-blown PR disaster ... including petitions and bloggers writing obituaries" for the company.

In that same "60 Minutes" segment from early 2008, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Beacon and the company's advertising plans "might take some work for us to get this exactly right" and that "this is something we think is going to be a really good thing."

But the company is no longer maintaining that position. Beacon, it says, will be shut down as part of a class-action settlement. The suit was filed against Blockbuster and Facebook last year, accusing the video rental company of violating user privacy by disseminating customer rental information to users' Facebook friends -- via Beacon.

In addition to decommissioning Beacon, Facebook will also donate $9.5 million to establish a foundation that will focus on online privacy and safety concerns.

-- David Sarno

Netflix awards $1-million prize to recommendation wizards, announces 2nd contest

David Sarno — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:56:32 -0700

It took three years and 40,000 teams from 186 countries, but the $1-million Netflix prize has finally been awarded.

The competition, first launched in October 2006, asked engineers and scientists around the world to solve what might have seemed like a simple problem: improve Netflix's ability to predict what movies users would like by a modest 10%.

Credit: Paul Sakuma / Associated Press

As it turned out, it took an international brain trust led by a pair of AT&T Labs researchers nearly 36 months to reach that milestone. The team -- called "BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos" and made up of researchers and computer scientists from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel -- turned in the winning algorithm less than 30 minutes before the contest's deadline in July. The submission improved Netflix's existing system by 10.06%, just enough to secure the prize.

An explanation of the algorithm by AT&T said their researchers had won the contest by making advances in two technical fields of taste prediction. With "neighborhood modeling," the scientists, including Robert Bell and Chris Volinsky, improved methods for finding films that share certain characteristics. For example, the neighbors of "X2", (The sequel to "X-Men") might be "Spiderman 2" -- another comic book sequel -- or "Wolverine," which also starred Hugh Jackman; or even "Valkyrie," the latest feature film from "X2" director Bryan Singer.

The team's second approach dealt with what the researchers called "latent factors." These are movie characteristics that are identified mathematically rather than by human evaluation. In an article in IEEE Spectrum magazine explaining their entry, the team described latent factors this way:

Because the factors are determined automatically by algorithms, they may correspond to hard-to-describe concepts such as quirkiness, or they may not be interpretable by humans at all. ... The model may use 20 to 40 such factors to locate each movie and viewer in a multidimensional space. It then predicts a viewer’s rating of a movie according to the movie’s score on the dimensions that person cares about most.

The capacity to guess user preferences has been a major theme of both artificial intelligence and online retailing for most of this decade. In addition to Netflix, sites such as Amazon.com, Digg.com and the music site Pandora feature oft-used "recommendation engines," and heaps of other sites are in the taste-guessing business as well.

“Right now, we’re driving the Model T version of what is possible," in recommendations, said Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings in 2006, when the prize was launched. "We want to build a Ferrari and establishing the Netflix Prize is a first step.”

Knowing that it would take more than a 10% improvement to make a Model T into a Ferrari, Netflix has already launched a second contest. This time entrants have been asked to predict the tastes of customers who have not taken the time to actually rate movies. Instead, the predictions will be based on demographic information -- age, gender, ZIP Code -- as well as the movies users have rented in the past. Netflix will award $500,000 to the team that has built the best algorithm after six months, and another $500,000 after 18 months.

-- David Sarno

Facebook hits 300 million users, says it's cash-flow positive

David Sarno — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:09:47 -0700

Photo: Palo Alto., Calif.-based Facebook is the nation's and the world's No. 1 social networking website. Credit: Tony Avelar / Bloomberg.

It took Facebook five years to get to 150 million active users, a lightning-fast growth rate by any measure. But like track phenom Usain Bolt, the world's No. 1 social networking website atomized its own speed record this year by going from 150 million users to 300 million users in a little over nine months.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said today that the company had become cash-flow positive ahead of schedule (he had originally guessed "sometime in 2010") and called the milestone important "because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term."

Facebook makes its money from sponsored advertising as well as from an auction system in which marketers and small businesses pay to target their ads to users of a certain age or geographic region. The private Palo Alto, Calif., company does not disclose its revenues.

Facebook has had a tumultuous childhood, frequently getting in hot water over the way it shares, stores and uses the private information of its large user base. Last month, the company said it was starting a year-long project to clarify and tighten its privacy controls after a Canadian government agency complained about the site's policies.

But Facebook's growth is perhaps the best evidence of its utility and its general appeal to users worldwide. The company says its fastest-growing demographic is now people 35 and older, and in the U.S., the site's nearly 90 million visitors made it the fourth most-trafficked Web property in July. Facebook had 70 million U.S. visitors when it surpassed rival MySpace in May to become the nation's most popular social network.

The company was valued at $10 billion in a transaction earlier this year in which the Russian venture firm Digital Sky Technologies bought $200 million worth of stock in the company. Facebook, which now has close to 1,000 employees, has taken about $600 million in financing.

-- David Sarno

AOL taps Garlinghouse for revamp of mobile and e-mail segments

David Sarno — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:07:57 -0700

Brad Garlinghouse. Credit: AOL.

As AOL prepares to blast off from parent company Time Warner Inc. in the coming months, the Internet company and its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, are working to fill up the tanks with rocket fuel.

Late Monday, AOL announced it had hired former Yahoo Inc. executive Brad Garlinghouse as president of Internet and Mobile Communications -- a position that will oversee some of AOL's best-known properties, including its instant messaging software and its e-mail system ("You've Got Mail"), as the company tries to set a course towards prosperity in an overcrowded digital cosmos.

At Yahoo, Garlinghouse made headlines when he demonstrated a quality that AOL sorely needs -- a disdain for corporate complacency. In a memo circulated to Yahoo employees in 2006, later known as the "Peanut Butter Manifesto," Garlinghouse called the company's management out in dramatic terms, recommending that Yahoo undergo a "radical reorganization," "blow up the matrix" and "kill redundancies."

Aggressive thinking is the order of the day for AOL, which has suffered brand and user attrition since its days as a dial-up service, and which is now reinventing itself as a social communications hub.

"There's no doubt there are challenges ahead," Garlinghouse said by phone Monday. But that's "one of the reasons I'm excited about it."

Though Garlinghouse and Armstrong -- also on the call -- spoke mostly in the abstract about what AOL might look like in 2010, the general idea is for AOL to focus and monetize the many communications streams people are now using.

"When you think about the future of messaging -- where you have phone, text, e-mail -- content floats on those same surfaces," said Armstrong, a former senior advertising executive at Google.

And where users and content commingle, advertising wants to follow. "There's a tremendous amount of information and data that gets kicked off of our products and services which allow us to make all of our systems smarter," Armstrong added.

Garlinghouse will also be the West Coast point man for AOL Ventures, the company's business incubation arm that will be increasingly looking to acquire start-ups that would fit AOL's growth strategy.

"I think with Tim's heritage at Google and my heritage at Yahoo, we both see tremendous networks of people and companies to tap into," Garlinghouse said.

-- David Sarno