Internet
Angry Birds now invade Facebook
Feb 16th
Seattle: Those having a Facebook account can play the world famous Angry Birds game on the social networking site.
The game has been downloaded about 500 million times and has just been launched as a free version on the site.
In the game, players use catapults to fire infuriated birds at pigs hiding inside buildings made of planks.
The Facebook game, however, allows users to pay for extra birds and other in-game extras.
According to reports, the website game is similar to the iPhone app. The only difference is players have to use a mouse to sling birds across the game’s landscapes rather than a finger.
Peter Vesterbacka, chief marketing officer of game-making company Rovio, said he hoped up to 40 percent of Facebook users would pay for in-game extras.
Rovio has never spent any money on advertising or marketing Angry Birds, the report said.
It had made 50 failed games before Angry Birds. The company also sells a million Angry Birds toys and a same number of T-shirts every month.
Source : http://www.pardaphash.com/news/angry-birds-now-invade-facebook/688481.html
A new domain name, but concerns remain the same
Feb 6th
It seemed like an innocuous enough change — from this week, all visitors from India to blogs hosted on Google’s Blogger saw the URLs read [blogname].blogspot.in rather than the .blogspot.com they were used to.
Besides, while your mum reading your latest musings would see the post with the URL ending with .in, an aunt in Australia would read the same post with .au. Google now redirects individual blogs to ‘country-code Top Level Domains’ (or ccTLD), such as .in for India or .au for Australia.
The move, which means that the same content is seen across multiple domains, has raised concerns about censorship, Internet ownership, as well as questions about the effect on search ranking and search engine optimisation (SEO).
SEO concerns
According to those who work with SEO here, search engines traditionally penalise sites with extensive “duplicate” content.
In an entry in its help and support FAQs dated January 9, Google addressed SEO concerns. While admitting that the change would have some implications on search ranking, the Internet giant claimed it was “making every effort to minimise any negative consequences of hosting Blogspot content on multiple domains”. Crawlers would index the main .com site only, it said.
However, it is unclear about how analytics, Facebook ‘likes’ and other stat counters, some of which are domain specific, will change with the redirects.
The change does not affect custom domains.
Internet boundaries
According to Google, the move is mainly to enable it to selectively block content in a particular country, in accordance with country-specific laws, while allowing it to be available to other users around the world.
“Migrating to localised domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law,” it said.
This is similar to what Twitter announced on January 26 on its official blog, when it gave itself “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country, while keeping it available to the rest of the world”.
Media commentators say the decisions strike against one of the earliest notions of the Internet — that it works without the constraints of nationality — and attempt to govern the Web by local laws.
“The rhetoric is that the Internet is global, but we’ve been seeing [governments say] how this information has to be regulated,” says Nishant Shah, director-research at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).
He sees the decisions as “symptomatic of a much larger change”, at a time when questions of whether governments or companies should regulate the Internet are raised. “We are examining who creates, controls and disseminates information.”
The offer to enable “country-specific censorship” comes at a time when Internet companies operating in India are locked in a legal battle with the centre over dealing with problematic material online, and the Government’s demand that the companies regulate/filter content before it is published.
Accountability
However, while the Internet companies may seem willing to follow the law of the land, questions have been raised about how transparent the process will be, especially in protecting the rights of users, in the face of government pressure.
Twitter insists that it will act only on “what we believe to be a valid and applicable legal request”.
“Filtering is neither desirable nor realistic,” the company has said, and promises to notify users of any requests to censor.
The notices will also be displayed on Chilling Effects (chillingeffects.org), a collaboration among law school clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that helps users understand their rights and deal with legal threats to online activity.
Google already reports legal notices it receives for contentious blogs and content to Chilling Effects.
Significantly, a study by the CIS last year suggested that online intermediaries tended to err on the side of caution when faced with take down requests under the Information Technology (Intermediaries guidelines) Rules, 2011.
Both Twitter and Google have pointed out workarounds for the country-specific censorship.
Google search and Facebook already have technology to selectively prevent people from seeing items deemed illegal in a country.
Source : http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/karnataka/article2860799.ece
Google tightens security in Android’s Market
Feb 3rd
San Fransisco: Google Inc has been quietly policing its online store for months now in an acknowledgement of malware’s growing threat to its increasingly popular Android mobile software.
The new sheriff in town is Bouncer: a security service Google put in place to scan new apps as developers load them onto Market, its applications store.
Bouncer sweeps apps for potentially malicious behavior and also analyzes new developer accounts to prevent “repeat-offenders” from distributing their wares, Google says. Those heightened efforts are paying off, it added.
“While it’s not possible to prevent bad people from building malware, the most important measurement is whether those bad applications are being installed from Android Market – and we know the rate is declining significantly,” Hiroshi Lockheimer, a vice president of engineering at Google’s Android unit, wrote in a blog post Thursday.
With the implementation of Bouncer, Google noticed a 40 percent drop in the number of “potentially malicious downloads” from Android Market at a time when the proliferation of malware was beginning to become a problem, according to Lockheimer.
Lookout, a security research firm, published a report in December estimating that more than $1 million had been stolen from Android users in 2011 as a result of malicious software downloads, and said that figure could rise dramatically.
Lookout’s cofounder, Kevin Mahaffey, lauded Google’s moves.
“It is great that Google is working with the Android community to provide an alternative to a manual curation process, allowing developers to innovate quickly while also increasing the baseline level of security for Android users,” Mahaffey said.
Bouncer marks a new direction for Google, which until now has trumpeted its laissez-faire approach to managing the apps market – as opposed to Apple Inc, which famously subjects apps to a rigorous evaluation process before they can be downloaded.
The freedom of the Android market – and developers’ preference for its openness – has helped boost the platform’s swift growth and sharpen its competition with Apple’s iOS mobile platform. In December, less than three years after it was launched, Android Market reached 10 billion total downloads.
“The reason that Android is kind of cool is you can do anything you want and there’s no overlord,” said Charlie Miller, a security consultant with Accuvant who made news last year when he smuggled malware onto Apple’s App Store to demonstrate its vulnerability.
“But Google is doing the smart thing,” Miller said, “Malware was getting to be a bit of a problem and it’s better to take care of it now instead of letting get out of control.”
Source : http://www.firstpost.com/tech/google-tightens-security-in-androids-market-201987.html
Bangalore based company launches tablet Tabplus Rio at Rs 11,990
Jan 25th
BANGALORE: A Bangalore based company has launched a new tablet, named Tabplus Rio, at Rupees 11,990. Launched by Digital Waves, the Android 2.3 tablet comes with a 1 GHz Cortex A9 processor, 7 inch screen with storage up to 32GB via Micro SD.
In the recent years, India’s tablet market has witnessed increasing competition, with several local manufacturers rolling out devices at affordable rates. According to the Manufacturer’s Association of IT Industry, the industry expects to sell around 3 lakh tablets in the current financial year.
Tabplus Rio Specifications
| CPU | AMLogic AML8726-M, ARM CORTEX A9 |
| 1GHz, Embedded Mali 400 GPU | |
| Operation System | Android 2.3 (Support Flash 11) |
| Memory | 512MB DDR2 |
| Built-in Storage | 4GB Nand Flash built-in |
| Storage | Upto 32GB via Micro SD |
| Gravity | 4-Dimensional G-sensor |
| Display | 7″ Capacitive, 800 x 480 pixels LCD, |
| Five point touch | |
| Wi-Fi | IEEE 802.11 a/b/g wireless network |
| 3G* | External 3G* USB data card |
| Buttons | Menu, Back, Power on/off, Vol +/-, Reset |
| I/O Port | Micro USB x1, USB x1, HDMI output x1, |
| 3.5mm Earphone jack x 1, TF card reader | |
| Audio / Speaker | 3.5mm headphone jack, Built-in mic & speaker |
| Camera | Built-in camera 300K (Front) |
| Audio file formats | MP2, MP3, WAV, AAC, WMA |
| Video file formats | MPEG1/2/4, H.264, H.263, VC1(WMV9), |
| Photo file formats | RMVB, RM, 3GP, AVI, MKV, MOV |
| Battery capacity | JPG, JPEG, BMP, PNG |
| Power adapter | 3000mAh |
| Size (L*W*H) / Wt. | AC 100～240V，DC 9V/2A |
| Accessories | 203 x 120 x 13 mm / ~350g |
| USB Cable, Power Adapter |
Source: Indiatimes & Digitalwaves
Delhi High Court to hear Google, Facebook’s petitions today
Jan 24th
The Delhi High Court will hear petitions filed by Facebook and Google on Monday in the objectionable content case. The companies had challenged a trial court summons for allegedly webcasting objectionable material.
Google and Facebook, along with 16 other websites are facing criminal proceedings. Google and Facebook had argued that it is impossible for them to prescreen content with billions of users accessing websites every day and that ultimately it was a question of the users’ freedom of expression.
The Delhi High Court on January 19 adjourned the case against Google and Facebook till February 2. The social networking sites had filed petitions challenging the notices for allowing objectionable content on their websites.
Google and Facebook had earlier told the court not to allow the suppression of the right to freedom of speech as democratic India was not totalitarian China. Google had earlier told the Court that blocking was not an option in a democracy.
“The issue relates to a constitutional issue of freedom of speech and expression and suppressing it was not possible as the right to freedom of speech in democratic India separates us from a totalitarian regime like China,” advocate NK Kaul, appearing for Google India, said in court.
Facebook too had noted that it already has rules of blocking and removing content, whenever specific matters are brought to its notice. Both websites are challenging a trial court’s order to prosecute them.
Google search changes are bad for the internet, says Twitter
Jan 12th
Google has angered Twitter and faces accusations of “warping” its search results and breaking antitrust rules by boosting posts from its Google+ social network in its standard search results.
The changes, which are presently only being implemented in the US via google.com, mean that when people search for information, particularly about individuals, while logged in to Google+, results from the social network will be prominently displayed on the first page of results along with other results from the wider web.
That is likely to have the effect of making existing Google+ users more likely to use the network, because they will see fewer results from outside it when they search for information; the first page of search results leads to about 90% of clickthroughs on PCs.
Twitter’s lead lawyer, Alex Macgillivray, called it a “bad day for the internet”, and suggested – as a former Google employee – that there would have been dissent internally “at search being warped this way”.
The company later followed it up with a statement, saying: “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet.
“As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter, as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results. We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users.”
However, Amit Singhai of Google, introducing the changes in a blogpost, said: “We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.” He pointed out that Google is introducing a “toggle” that will let people see the results with and without personalisation.
Google is keen to break into the social networking space, having tried before with its Orkut and Buzz products, but seen both fall behind Facebook and Twitter. Its importance is seen as so great internally that Larry Page, the co-founder who took over as chief executive a year ago, has made staff bonuses dependent on the success of Google+.
The Guardian’s own tests on google.com when not signed in to any Google account found that links to people in Google+ appeared prominently in suggested searches, and in most cases also in results, when searching for names including the blogger Robert Scoble, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and search expert John Battelle.
The alteration is not yet being extended to mobile phones using Google’s Android operating system, which has more than 50% of smartphone sales worldwide.
Having a Google account is almost essential when using an Android phone, because many of the Google services built into the phone require it. A Google spokesperson gave no indication of when or whether the search changes would be extended to Android phones.
The change has come in for criticism from a number of search experts. “Search engines are supposed to send you away to the best information, even if they don’t have their own in stock,” noted Danny Sullivan, who added that Google has previously been excellent at providing links to the most suitable information. “Today’s change is one of the few times where I’m thinking ‘What the hell are you doing, Google?’ ”
He thinks that Google’s move, which clearly promotes its own nascent service – which was only launched last year, but which Google said had 40m users last October – could attract antitrust scrutiny, because it is only listing information from Google+ posts, and because it is offering suggestions of users to follow on Google+.
In the US, it is illegal for a company which is dominant in one field to use that dominance to gain competitive advantage in another.
Microsoft fell foul of the Sherman Antitrust act in the late 1990s after it used the PC dominance of Windows to force out Netscape’s web browser in favour of its own Internet Explorer, and was found guilty of “tying” the two after being prosecuted by the US Department of Justice.
Google’s decision to favour Google+ posts which would not rank highly by its normal criteria – generally, the number of “authoritative” pages on the web linking to it – could suggest that it is favouring its own product in order to grow it more quickly. That in turn could breach antitrust laws.
Twitter and Facebook content does not generally appear in Google search results because neither site provides Google with unlimited access to their content.
Twitter formerly had an agreement which in which Google paid for access to index its database directly, but Twitter chose not to renew the agreement, according to a statement placed on Google+ by an official Google account, which said it was “a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments” because “they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer”.
Battelle commented that the integration “is clearly ‘tying’ in the sense of what Microsoft got slapped for in its DOJ antitrust case, but the context is different – Google doesn’t have a clear monopoly in search, just a pretty darn big one”.
Google’s share of search in the US is about 65%, whereas in Europe it is far more dominant, with more than 90% of share – comparable with Microsoft’s in PC operating systems.
Shivaun Raff, the co-founder of the shopping comparison site Foundem – which has filed a complaint in Europe alleging that Google favours its own products in shopping and travel and downplays rivals when serving results – told the Guardian: “In my opinion, this is the second time that Google has found a way to leverage its dominance of search to give Google+ an advantage.
“First, Google announced that Google +1 recommendations were a ranking factor, which immediately placed sites under pressure to add +1 buttons, giving Google+ a kick-start independent of its popularity or merits.
“Where making +1 links a ranking factor encouraged sites to add +1 buttons, starting to feature Google+ content in search results will inevitably encourage people and businesses to start using Google+ and creating content. Is this more fuel for an antitrust investigation? Any new technique Google introduces to leverage its dominance of horizontal search to unnatural advantage in adjacent markets or industry sectors is likely to be of interest to antitrust regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.”
If Google extends the promotion of Google+ results to European countries where it has a greater share of search, and also if it extends it to results on Android phones, then it may face more urgent calls for antitrust investigation.
In Europe, the antitrust commissioner Joaquin Almunia is already considering whether to outline a “statement of objections” to the search giant’s business practices relating to content produced by sites such as Foundem and Ciao, and newspaper publishers and advertisers.
Yahoo Leaves Investors in Limbo
Jan 5th
The company’s choice for its new chief executive, Scott Thompson, looks uninspired. It suggests either that the company had a tough time finding a new leader or that the board hasn’t learned from its poor decision to hire Carol Bartz. In either case, it may be time for shareholders to take a more active role in the company.
Ms. Bartz’s tenure was a disaster. Having come from software company Autodesk, she proved unqualified to run one of the Web’s largest content companies. Rivals Google and Facebook raced ahead. Mr. Thompson has a background in the online-payments industry, where he successfully ran eBay’s PayPal business. But he hasn’t run a public company.
He sounded some of the right notes on a conference call with analysts, referring to Yahoo as an industry icon whose future depends on creating great products. But with a background in technology, Mr. Thompson will need to convince shareholders that he is, finally, the person to put Yahoo back on track.
Yahoo not only needs to reinvigorate its content offering, as Facebook, Google and others continue to leave it looking flat-footed. It also needs someone who can control costs. Though Yahoo has reduced its work force somewhat, its employee count is still up 20% to 13,700 since 2006, though net revenue is flat over the period. Facebook generates roughly the same revenue as Yahoo, by eMarketer estimates, with a quarter as many employees.
And it increasingly looks like long-suffering Yahoo investors will have to believe in a turnaround rather than a takeover to put them out of their misery. A bid for the entire company now looks very unlikely. And the alternative of selling a minority stake to private-equity firms looks even tougher to justify than before, now that a new leader is in place. Yahoo doesn’t need cash, and private-equity investors would now lack any say in the appointment of a new Yahoo chief executive—making a deal less attractive.
The wild card is the sale of Yahoo’s valuable stakes in Alibaba Group Holding and Yahoo Japan. Negotiations are set to continue with Mr. Thompson’s appointment. If Yahoo can get attractive prices—even though there is only a single logical buyer for each asset—and can structure deals tax-efficiently, it could move the share price.
But a deal to sell the Asian assets isn’t guaranteed, even though it has long made sense. Meanwhile, the key issue remains Yahoo’s core business.
The questionable CEO appointment again shines a light on the dysfunctional board, which needs a revamp. With Mr. Thompson unlikely to force change on that front, the onus falls on shareholders to do so.
Source : http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204331304577140951850162574.html
Indian cities dominate sex search online, Pak leads list but 7 Indian cities in top 10
Dec 31st
NEW DELHI: Given the size of our population, one would have thought Indians get enough sex.
But that still doesn’t stop us searching for more. Data collected by Google through its search engine shows that in 2011, seven Indian cities featured in the list of top 10 cities worldwide where the “sex” query was particularly popular.
The rankings might come as a bit of a surprise. Lucknow and Kolkata – cities which pride themselves on their high cultural values — came in at No. 2 and 3, respectively. Pune was at No. 5, New Delhi at 6, Bangalore at 7, Chennai at 8 and Mumbai at 9. The only non-Indian cities in the list were Colombo, which topped the chart, Lahore at No. 4 and Hanoi at 10. In short, every single city in the top 10 was from Asia. Expect the demographic dividend to last for a while. The famed Indo-Pak rivalry spilled over to this sphere as well, with Pakistan emerging as the country from where Google received the maximum number of search queries for “sex” in 2011. Pakistan had topped the list in 2010 as well.
The data, which is part of Google’s Trends application, also reveals that Pakistan tops the all-time list – which maps the period ever since the search engine started collecting the data – while India comes in third behind Vietnam.
Though Google says “Trends provides insights into broad search patterns” and “several approximations are used when computing these results,” the data mirrors the volume of actual search queries. To rank regions and cities, the web firm “calculates the ratio of searches for the term coming from each city, divided by total Google searches coming from the same city.”
The Trends data is not the only indication that people in India and Pakistan have sex on their mind. A few weeks ago Google had released its Zeitgeist report, which takes a look at the top search queries of the year.
In India, “How to kiss” topped the list of the most popular “how to…” searches. The same query topped the list in 2010 as well. “How to flirt” and “how to love” were the 10th and 11th most popular queries. The “how to kiss” query was equally popular in Pakistan in 2011. India and Pakistan share some basic intincts – which could add a whole new dimension to the phrase, “Make love, not war”.
