Google Places Launched

Google knows things. Specifically Places as they launched their new product, Google Places.

Google knows 50 million places, and when you search for say "museums new york," it now shows you a new kind of search result that replaces a list of links with a list of mini-pages for museums in the Big Apple with a map on the right. Each mini-page has links to reviews around the Web on sites like Citisearch and Yelp, as well as the address and phone number. The mini-profile also has a photo and a algorithmically chosen snippet from a typical review.

Google will automatically choose the so-called Place search, rather than a general web search, if it thinks your query is about a place -- something Place Search product manager Jackie Bavaro says accounts for about 20 percent of Google searches.

More ambiguous queries such as "soccer field" will use the main search, since the user could be trying to learn the official FIFA regulations for a soccer field, not find one to scrimmage on. But Place Search remains an option for all searches, joining the left navigation on Google's search results, alongside Images, Shopping, News and Video.

"We are now organizing the world's information around places," Bavaro said. "Each place is really its own results page, dynamically connecting Web pages."

The feature will be slowly rolled out to users around the world starting Wednesday. For now, Place Search is for the desktop only, but a mobile version is in development and should be available soon -- a no-brainer, since searching to learn about or find a place is one of the most common searches on mobile devices.

The feature is yet another step by the net's major search engines to use the interface to improve search, rather than tweaking the ranking algorithms or building a bigger index. Bing and Yahoo are already making moves to build pages for "entities." See, for instance, what Yahoo does for musical artists and Bing creates for entities such as colleges.

Google Place Search does not rely on human editors to curate pages (neither do Yahoo and Bing's), and instead relies on algorithms to determine what pages on the net are about a given place. One can expect that Google and others will keep building on this idea, so more and more of your searches about things -- whether that be the San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum or the Samsung Galaxy S or Osgood-Schlatters disease -- will be mini-pages curated by an algorithm of information from the Web.

Verizon Cloud Goes Global

Verizon cloud-based IT services goes global. Verizon business said it will expand its Infrastructure-as-a-Service to wholesale customers worldwide. The IaaS product, introduced in the U.S. last June, has previously been available to select customers in Europe and the Asia/Pacific region on a one-off basis.

A full suite of cloud-based on-demand IT infrastructure services, Verizon’s IaaS is designed to compete with similar cloud offerings from major tech companies including IBM, Amazon and others. It’s designed to allow service provider and large enterprises to quickly scale up or throttle back computing and network resources as changing business needs dictate, to monitor the performance and reliability of those resources, and to pay for them on an as-you-go basis.

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service product is offered by Verizon’s Global Wholesale unit. Research firm Ovum said in a report released in August that big carriers will become major forces in the cloud computing market as customer demand increases rapidly over the next two to three years. AT&T, Verizon, Orange Business Services and BT have all made significant strides in cloud services in the lasts year, report author Peter Hall wrote, and in terms of services, can now compete with established players from the IT industry.

“The major telcos have a long heritage in providing managed data center services and hosting," said Hall, “and have combined this with their networking and security expertise to meet the needs of customers for cloud computing services."

Amazon Web Services Free Cloud Offering For 1 Year

Do you want to try Amazon cloud for free before you decide to buy? I bet you would. Well good news because Amazon Web Services announced Thursday that it will offer a free tier beginning Nov. 1 so new customers can try the cloud before they buy into it.

Amazon’s approach boils down to try before you buy. Under the arrangement, a new developer or business can use a free EC2 instance and its associated services for a year at no charge. Services include S3, Elastic Block Store, Elastic Load Balancing and data transfer.

Amazon’s bet is simple: Get new customers in the door and then convert them to paying customers. Amazon portrayed the move was a way for potential customers to launch applications, get hands-on knowledge and get new developers in the AWS ecosystem.

Under the Amazon Web Services free tier, new customers get:

• 750 hours a month of a micro Linux Amazon EC2 instance;
• 750 hours a month of load balancing;
• 10 GB a month of elastic block storage;
• 5 GB a month of S3 storage;
• 30 GB a month of data transfer (15 GB in and out);
• 25 machine hours of SimpleDB;
• 100,000 requests a month each of Amazon’s simple queue service, requests and notifications over HTTP.

LimeWire Shuts Down

Popular file-sharing site LimeWire was ordered by a New York Judge to shutdown. The judge agreed with the plaintiffs that LimeWire's service is used "overwhelmingly for infringement."

Judge Wood of U.S. District Court in Manhattan said that LimeWire "intentionally encouraged direct infringement" by users of its site, and also "marketed itself to Napster users, who were known copyright infringers "

LimeWire shut down its service Wednesday displaying only a legal notice announcing that that company "is under a court-ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software."

Nonetheless, the company insisted that it has not been permanently put out of business.

"While this is not our ideal path, we hope to work with the music industry in moving forward," LimeWire said in a prepared statement. "We look forward to embracing necessary changes and collaborating with the entire music industry in the future."

LimeWire CEO George Searle went further in a message posted on LimeWire's corporate site.

"The injunction applies only to the LimeWire product. Our company remains open for business," he wrote. "Our team of technologists and music enthusiasts is creating a completely new music service that puts you back at the center of your digital music experience. We'll be sharing more details about our new service and look forward to bringing it to you in the future."

LimeWire has been skirmishing for years with the music industry over its laissez faire approach to policing the copyright violations its peer-to-peer software enabled. More than a dozen plaintiffs pursued the case against LimeWire, which began four years ago. Sony (SNE) Music Entertainment, Virgin Records America, Inc., Arista Records, Capitol Records and Warner Brothers Records Inc. (CNNMoney.com is part of Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500).)

While the court order has halted further distribution of LimeWire's software, the networks that software tapped into -- Gnutella and BitTorrent -- remain active, and can be reached through other software applications.

Google Collecting Emails and Passwords?

News are spreading like fire and is grabbing headlines that everyone’s favorite search engine, Google, is collecting emails and passwords. Google Inc admitted for the first time its "Street View" cars around the world accidentally collected more personal data than previously disclosed, including complete emails and passwords, potentially breathing new life into probes in various countries.

The disclosure comes just days after Canada's privacy watchdog said Google had collected complete emails and accused Google of violating the rights of thousands of Canadians. Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington DC-based privacy advocacy group said:

"If in fact laws were broken...then there's some serious question of culpability and Google may need to face significant fines."

Regulators in France, Germany and Spain, among others, have opened investigations into the matter. A coalition of more than 30 state attorneys general in the United States also have launched a joint probe.

However, it remains unclear how many people may have been affected by the privacy breach.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who is leading the multi-state investigation, said in a statement on Friday that Google's disclosure about the types of data it collected "validates and heightens our significant concerns," and noted that the investigation is continuing.

Google's Street View cars, which are well known for crisscrossing the globe and taking panoramic pictures of the city's streets, accidentally collected data from unsecured wireless networks used by residents in more than 30 countries, Google disclosed in May.

At the time, Google said the information was typically limited to "fragments" of unencrypted data because the cars were always moving and because the cars' wireless equipment automatically changed channels about five times a second.

A Google spokesperson said the company had not examined the roughly 600 GB of data captured by the cars in any detail to avoid violating privacy. The latest disclosure comes from information from regulators in various countries, who have examined the data collected by Google. Google Vice President of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace said in a post on Google's blog on Friday:

"It's clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords."

Google also said in the blog post that it hoped to delete the data as soon as possible. Google had deleted the data in countries where regulators had given it permission to do so, a spokeswoman said. Investigations in six countries including New Zealand and the Netherlands, were closed, the spokeswoman said. There were investigations ongoing in other countries, but Google could not delete the data until the investigations were closed.

TOUGHER PRIVACY PROTECTION

Google appointed Alma Whitten as director of privacy for engineering and product management as part of a campaign to bolster its privacy protections, including adding new internal procedures requiring engineering product managers to maintain a privacy design document that records how user data is handled.

Google also said it was enhancing its privacy training for engineers and other important groups within the company.

"We're acutely aware that we failed badly here," Eustace said in the blog post.

Google's cars collected the WiFi data in more than 30 countries between 2006 and mid-2010 so that Google could amass data on WiFi hotspots that could help provide location-based services -- a project unrelated to taking photos for Google Maps.
But Google apparently thought it was only collecting a limited type of WiFi data relating to the WiFi network's name and router numbers.

The collection of the additional, so-called payload data was a simple mistake resulting from a piece of computer code that was accidentally included from an experimental project, Google said.

Google has said that its Street View cars no longer collect any type of wireless information.

The admission that emails and other types of data were collected means that the problem is much more serious than Google initially suggested, Rotenberg said.

More Digg Layoffs Announced!

Following a report in AllThingsD that publisher and Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards was bailing for a start-up, Pixazza, Digg CEO Matt Williams e-mailed staffers to announce that "the burn rate is too high" at the company and that it would be laying off 25 of its 67 staffers, a total of 37 percent. Williams wrote in the e-mail:

"We must significantly cut our expenses to achieve profitability in 2011."
"We've considered all of the possible options for reduction, from salaries to fixed costs."

Williams, a former Amazon executive, joined Digg as chief executive fewer than two months ago, following a major executive shake-up in which CEO Jay Adelson departed and was replaced temporarily by Rose. In the meantime, other prominent Digg employees started moving out the door with a few heading to AOL and some to start-ups like SimpleGeo (co-founded by former employee Joe Stump) and Path. A month later, Digg laid off about 10 percent of its staff.

A product refocus is also imminent. At the time of the executive shake-up, Digg had also just rolled out "Version 4," a long-anticipated redesign that attempted to bring the service from fanboy favorite to potential mainstream hit. Suffice it to say that it hasn't been a smooth transition; to add insult to injury, rival Reddit, which sold to Wired Digital a few years ago, has experienced a renaissance of influence as its tech- and politics-savvy user base has moseyed its way into issues as varied as the medical marijuana legislation debate and hatching the initial idea for comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to host mock political protests in Washington, D.C., before Election Day. (They're holding their joint rallies on Saturday.)

Of course, in the tech industry, it ain't over till it's over--just look at Apple, and rival PC-maker Michael Dell's now-infamous comment in 1997 that newly reinstated CEO Steve Jobs should "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." But it increasingly appears as though Digg won't follow that path, and that it's become a latter-day cautionary tale about too much faith in media hype.

In mid-2006, a BusinessWeek cover story featuring a grinning Kevin Rose pointed out that Digg was the 24th-most-trafficked Web site in the U.S., ahead of Fox News and approaching The New York Times. AOL and Yahoo were scrambling to copy its social-news model, the breathless article recounted. Over the next year and a half, the rumors began to show up. Al Gore's Current Media had wanted Digg and was willing to pay $100 million; Rose turned the offer down. News Corp. was a reported suitor as well. A deal with Google was reportedly almost completed before talks fell apart.

But the BusinessWeek article from 2006 concluded, almost prophetically:

"Wannabes be warned: As nearly everyone found out six years ago (in the dot-com bust), the fall from rock star to pariah can be just as quick--and not nearly as much fun."

Rose is now an active angel investor, and industry recognition of Digg employee talent is evident in the number of companies that have been eager to scoop them up. So they're hardly pariahs--but at this point few can deny that the company was badly mismanaged over the years, and that one attempt after another has been unable to get it back on its feet.