kiica-shanghai.com

In addition, Street View face-blurring technology that first was tried with Manhattan imagery now is deployed all over, Google said.

• Journalism on YouTube: The Google video-sharing site now is able to call specific attention to journalistic efforts by creating a new “reporter” channel, according to the YouTube blog.

(Credit:
Google)

• WordPress snafu: Google blocked e-mail sent to Gmail from WordPress.com on Wednesday, including notifications that blogs at the site had been updated. “A handful of third-party sites had problems sending email to Gmail users. We resolved the issue within a half hour of discovering it,” Google said in a statement.

It’s tough to stay on top of Google, but I thought I’d draw some attention to some developments involving the search powerhouse.

• Updated Trends. Google added two new abilities to make its Google Trends service more useful as a tool to monitor what’s popular in searches and the chatter of news and blogs. First is a quantitative element that more precisely compares different search terms–for example Windows XP vs. Windows Vista; the chart is now calibrated so the relative popularity can be judged. Second is the ability to export Trends results as a data file.

• PDF support in Docs: The Google Operating System blog has uncovered some evidence that points to support of Portable Document Format within Google Docs, the online applications suite. That makes sense given how widely used it is and that it’s an openly documented and now standard format.

• Bypass Flash. On search results, Google now lets users bypass Web pages’ Flash introductions–the kind of whiz-bang animations that rarely are worth watching more than once. Google search results now can let users, in effect, click the “skip intro” button on such sites if they want, Google Blogoscoped reported.

Google Street View now blurs all over, not just in Manhattan.

• More Street View with more privacy: One year into Google’s launch of the Google Maps feature to show a driver’s-eye view of the world, Google added 37 new cities, including Atlanta, Buffalo, N.Y., Ann Arbor, Mich., Fresno, Calif., and Cincinnati. It effectively doubles the coverage of Street View, engineer Jiajun Zhu said in a Google LatLong blog posting.

• Members of Google’s mobile device team discuss how its Google Maps for Mobile service (think GPS Lite) works. The technology lets some phones figure out their rough location based on proximity to cell phone towers. It’s available through Gears for Windows Mobile, and Google is adding support for geolocation in general to the new 0.4 version of Gears under development now.

Nexon is a leading provider of free-to-play games with revenue over $230 million in 2005. Nexon America’s vp of Marketing, Min Kim, spoke at the Austin Game Developer Conference and outlined the trends that are driving the market and why FTP games must remain free to keep users engaged.

Trend 1: Demand for Online Entertainment is Growing
–Kids are already hooked on computers and will only further embrace online games

In the past I have compared gaming to open-source software, and there definitely are some similarities. However, unlike recent open-source models, where vendors try to monetize users based on “upgrades” to additional features, Kim argues that free-to-play must remain totally free. According to Kim:

Open-source projects that don’t have differentiation between community (free) and enterprise (paid) versions have had difficult times generating revenue. Maybe there is something to be learned from gaming?

Players shouldn’t be locked out of major features or areas of the game. If a player can’t experience the full game without paying, they’re going to feel pressured by friends to put up money. Don’t bombard players to upgrade; ultimately you want the player to want to pay you. Spending money should feel like a positive experience!

Trend 2: Imports are Big Business
–Asia is driving many of the business models and opportunities for gaming in the U.S.

Trend 4: The Battle Between Publishing vs. Self-Publishing
–I’m not sure I understand this one, but basically Kim seems to say that investors are driving developers to publish themselves rather than as part of a bigger studio.

Free to play doesn’t imply the concept of shareware. If you’re entering the market, you should be offering the full experience to all players. Additionally, expansions and additional content added to the game should be free. These components are just not where free-to-play games make their money.

Trend 3: Free to Play is Misunderstood
–There are more ways to make money than just virtual goods.

Yahoo described the change on its Flickr blog–which, by the way, is now featured on the new home page to spotlight news regarding the site.

It doesn’t change another core part of Flickr, though, the pages that house each photograph. That will be changed in a future update, she added.

Flickr's home page now features a 'recent activity' tab that lets people interact more quickly with others on the photo-sharing site.

The redesigned page displays more photos, both from the Flickr member and from his or her contacts. And it adds photos from Flickr groups to which the member belongs, said Matthew Rothenberg, director of product management.

Many people just use Flickr to store and share their own photos, but the site also has social features including groups where like-minded people can share photos, a contacts list to share with particular friends, and comments that can lead to a discussion thread. Much of the redesign aims to spotlight these social features, making them more visible and easier to use, said Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s new general manager.

“What we wanted to be able to do is make the home page more engaging, useful, and efficient for advanced users who have hundreds and sometimes thousands of contacts and who upload and log into Flickr several times a day (and for) our newest members who are trying to figure out how to engage with Flickr,” Srivastava said. The change also is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, which is geared in part to “light up” Yahoo users’ online social activity.

Yahoo on Wednesday started offering Flickr users a new home page for the photo-sharing site that’s designed to show off more images and make it easier for people to use the site’s social features.

Flickr currently has more than 30 million registered users, 3 billion page views per month, and 60 million unique users per month, she said.

The change is available now to people who opt for it, but it will become standard for all users in coming weeks, Srivastava said.

“This is not about adding new features, it’s about reducing the number of clicks of many of our most important core features,” she said. As long as a user has a fast network, the new pages load faster, though those with a slow dial-up connection might be constrained since more photos show on the home page, she added.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

The redesigned Flickr shows more photos and, through a 'recent activity' tab, more social interactions. (Click to enlarge.)

“It’s definitely on our roadmap to improve that page,” she said.

Update 4:30 p.m. PDT: Yahoo has gradually added various features to Flickr, including video. But this change is about improving basic parts of Flickr that haven’t been changed in a much longer time, Srivastava said.

Another big change is a “recent activity” tab that displays new comments on a member’s photos, notices that others have made the member a contact, and other social events.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Digital video recorder TiVo is set to release a software upgrade that will let users access YouTube videos on their televisions, the company announced Thursday. The deal with the Google video-sharing site, originally announced in March, is scheduled to start rolling out in a few weeks.

TiVo owners will need a Series 3 or TiVo HD box to be eligible for the software upgrade, which will be further extended in the near future to allow them to log into their own YouTube accounts to access playlists and the like.

It’s not terribly revolutionary. The Apple TV box has given owners access to YouTube for over a year now. TiVo already lets viewers watch select online videos and podcasts–but in downloadable form, not streaming form.

And as my colleague John Falcone has put it: now, where’s my Hulu box?

Microsoft and Novell on Thursday said they are going to try to make things a little easier. The pair announced that they will jointly support a virtualization scenario in which Suse Linux is running as a guest operating system under Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization.

One of the nice advantages of server virtualization is the ability to run Linux and Windows on the same server. One of the headaches, though, is getting help when something goes wrong.

The companies said partners such as Dell will test the setup at the joint lab the two companies have in Cambridge, Mass. It’s the latest fruit of a nearly 2-year-old alliance between the two companies.

“The collaboration between Microsoft and Novell has been built by our desire to meet our customers’ and partners’ IT needs, and to deliver solutions that support customers’ mixed-source environments,” Microsoft Vice President Bob Kelly said in a statement. “For customers standardizing on Microsoft’s hypervisor who also have a mixed-source IT environment, this virtualization solution gives that choice. For channel partners who need a cross-platform hypervisor offering, our work with Novell gives them an easy starting point.”

Denon AVR-1909–why pay more?

The receiver manufacturers have so loaded up their midprice receivers they killed the market for the upper-end models. I think that’s great. Before they wise up, take advantage of their stupidity.

Are high-end A/V receivers, which for the purpose of this blog is any receiver with a MSRP over $1,500, worth it? True, they’re loaded with features, stuff like all of the latest surround formats like Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio. But wait a sec–Denon’s soon to be released $649 AVR-1909 receiver has them, too. It’s got three HDMI inputs and all of the latest Audyssey auto speaker set up and equalization doodads.

Thing is, I just reviewed three high-end receivers for a magazine, and I do think they sound a wee bit better than the lower-price alternatives. We’re not talking day and night differences here, so I’ll pretty much guarantee adding an extra $1,000 to your speaker budget will deliver much better sound. So instead of buying a $1,700 A/V receiver–and (for example) a $1,500 sat/sub package–get a $700 receiver and a $2,500 sat/sub package. Total cost will be the same, but the sound will be way better with better speakers and/or sub.

Let’s take a look at Sony’s $1,699 STR-DA5300ES. What does the extra $1,000 buy you? Not so much. Faroudja DCDi Cinema Technology, great. Video sources connected via composite, S-video and component cables get bumped up to a 1080p over HDMI. The Sony is rated to deliver 120 watts per channel versus the Denon’s 90 per. Oh, and it boasts six HDMI inputs. That’s cool, and I’m probably overlooking some details, but does that sound like it’s worth an extra $1,000-plus?

It happened with client server computing. It happened with the Internet. And it’s starting to happen with cloud computing, what with the ever-increasing roster of Web-based products and Cloud-based resources.

The funny thing about technology transitions is that one day, we suddenly wake up and decide, “Oh yeah, that’s pretty obvious, wasn’t it?”

Amen to that. Another big uncertainty: whether this field is fated to become dominated by big companies. They are the ones that can afford to pay for the heavy-duty computing storage requirements. Won’t that mean that they get to set the rules by which everyone else plays? Something to think about.

AT&T announces its entry into cloud computing.

Invariably, you have to wonder whether the inevitable hype surrounding a new computing style will result in selling users a bill of goods. In a recent post about cloud computing, Webware’s Rafe Needleman makes a great point:

Amazon.com makes its second investment in less than a month in a cloud-computing company.

It seems that there’s no shortage of companies eager to jump on the cloud-computing bandwagon. Consider the latest–all within the space of a single week:

In fact, cloud computing has been around for quite a while. We’ve been using Web-hosted applications such as e-mail since the mid-1990s. Remember the application service providers, or ASPs? During the dot-com era, they were the forerunners of the concept Marc Benioff successfully implemented with Salesforce.com after the bubble burst.

One of the reasons Web 2.0 apps can work well today is because today’s browsers have deep user interface and graphics capabilities, and because they run on powerful local PCs. Many popular Web applications–such as Google Docs and Microsoft Live Search Maps–rely on capabilities that were simply not present in PCs only a few years ago.

Dell reportedly issued a press release in which it tries to trademark the cloud-computing name.

The Internet can be used to deliver apps and updates, for storage and backup, for social networking and person-to-person communications, and other functions. But for the moment and the near future, you need local processing to maintain speed and robustness of applications, and native graphics capability to present the interface.

Verizon intends to get into the business by the first half of 2009.

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CNET News)

At its most basic, cloud computing extends computer networking and storage services to business customers. This isn’t a tough sell. As long as the provider can deliver (mostly) uninterrupted service, it’s a good arrangement for all concerned. What’s amusing is the latest media stir around cloud computing, which has all the trappings of the proverbial Broadway overnight success years in the making.

And then, of course, there is the rest of the familiar cloud-computing crowd, led by the likes of Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Salesforce.com.

Of course, there is always the suspicion that some tech companies are jumping into cloud computing because they’ve spotted a good marketing opportunity. Check out my conversation about the state of cloud computing with Dan Farber, where I tongue-in-cheek suggested that it sometimes seems as if we’re talking about the IT world’s “new black.”

Acer officially unveiled its entry into the low-cost mini-laptop market, the Aspire One, on Tuesday. It will come in both Linux and Windows XP flavors.

In an interview with VNUNet.com, Acer Vice President of Marketing Gianpiero Morbello said his Taiwanese PC maker has big plans to develop the market for Linux, not only on its low-cost ultraportable, but on the company’s laptops as well.

The Acer Aspire One is just the beginning of Acer's foray into the Linux world, according to a company exec.

But will mainstream PC shoppers go for Linux when they’re used to buying a Windows notebook? It’s unclear if Acer, currently the No. 2 notebook seller in the world, will be foisting Linux on reluctant consumers or just looking harder for places and markets that have yet to fully embrace Windows.

The reason is because of the cost and operation of Microsoft’s operating system over open-source Linux.

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Acer)

Yahoo and Microsoft used the press to negotiate for several months regarding a potential merger. Now it appears Acer and Microsoft are having a public spat. Or, if they aren’t yet, Acer’s comments Wednesday will likely start one.

It makes sense to try to cut as much cost as possible out of building a device like the Aspire One, which will start at $379. The attraction to such a device is mainly price, and expectations of a full set of features can be relatively low. Plus, as Acer points out, Linux has a quicker boot time and can extend the battery life of tiny Netbooks like the Aspire One.

“We have shifted towards Linux because of Microsoft,” said Morbello. “Microsoft has a lot of power and it is going to be difficult, but we will be working hard to develop the Linux market.”

Supporters of Farhan had set up a Free Fouad site, which included a petition appealing for his release. According to site, Farhan is the “godfather” of Saudi blogging. “He was among the first Saudis to blog under his real name and has been an outspoken voice for nonviolent reform,” the site states.

Farhan told the Post on Saturday that he is happy to be free and was “fairly treated” in detention. He would not comment on anything specifically.

The Saudi government had warned Fouad al-Farhan, who is 33, about his activist blogs before his arrest in mid-December. The government said at the time of his arrest that it was unrelated to state security, according to a Washington Post report. The next month, CNN reported, a ministry representative said Farhan had been arrested “because he violated the regulations of the kingdom.”

The Saudi government, which had no comment on the release, blocked Farhan’s Web site earlier this month, according to Reuters.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that restricts freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly.

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FreeFouad.com)

“I will be blogging soon,” he told the Post.

A Saudi blogger was released Saturday after spending four months in prison without being charged, several news outlets reported.

Farhan’s online support of a group of 10 men arrested last year apparently contributed to his arrest. The government says the men are terrorists, the Post reported, while their attorney says they are political activists who wanted to form a civil rights group.

The vulnerability can be exploited with little or no user interaction if the Windows Indexing Service processes a malicious PDF file stored on the system or Windows Explorer displays a folder containing a malicious PDF file, the CERT advisory said.

Adobe alerted users about the vulnerability more than two weeks ago and promised to have a security update for it by March 11.

“Having the patch early is a huge benefit, but releasing it on the same day as Microsoft’s planned March patch spells disaster for enterprise resource planning, and it still leaves Adobe with a black eye for lack of communication,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle, a network and compliance automation firm.

Adobe Systems on Tuesday issued a security update to fix a critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 that could allow an attacker to take complete control of a computer and for which exploits had been reportedly found in the wild for nearly two months.

Meanwhile, US-CERT said on Tuesday it is aware of public reports of two new attack vectors for the vulnerability involving the Windows Indexing Service that indexes PDF files and the Windows Explorer Shell Extension.

In its advisory, Adobe said it plans to provide security updates for Adobe Reader 7 and 8 and Acrobat 7 and 8 by March 18 and for Adobe Reader 9.1 for Unix by March 25.

Basically, attackers can take advantage of a hole on unpatched systems to overwrite memory with a buffer overflow and install a backdoor through which to control the system remotely.

(Credit:
Adobe)

One security expert complained that Adobe was late to acknowledge the vulnerability and uncommunicative about the issue since it arose.

Adobe representatives did not immediately respond Tuesday to phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Earlier in the day, Microsoft issued updates for a number of critical and important vulnerabilities in Windows as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday.