New partner aside from DoubleClick, Google INC

Google Inc is looking to more advertising technology partnerships outside of its proposed purchase of DoubleClick Ltd as it expands beyond Internet search advertising, a top executive said on Tuesday.

"DoubleClick is one piece of it," said Tim Armstrong, Google's president of advertising and commerce in North America. "We think the deal should close. We think our competitors have been able to close their deals."

"Outside of that deal, there are also other opportunities for us to work in that space with other companies," Armstrong said at a UBS media conference in New York.

TiVo to offer Google and Photobucket Photo Services

The enhancement reflects TiVo's ongoing plan to make its DVR an Internet hub for the home, as well as a device for playing and recording cable TV and satellite television programming. People with TiVo's high-end Series 3 box will be able to see their photos in high definition.

TiVo subscribers can access the photo-sharing applications through the "Music, Photos, Products & More" screen on their Internet-connected DVRs. Using the DVR's remote control, people can search community photos on the site by keyword and create custom slide shows of photos.

The latest enhancements, which are available to subscribers at no additional charge, represent an evolution in TiVo's DVR, as the company continues to try to differentiate its device from rivals through better integration with online services. Not the largest photo-sharing sites on the Web, Picasa and Photobucket are outranked by sites like Yahoo's Flickr.

Tying a DVR to the Internet makes sense, as people in growing numbers move to flat-screen digital televisions, which have sufficient resolution to view Web pages. Other services accessible through a TiVo box include RealNetworks' music service and Amazon.com's movie download service.

For TiVo, integration with Web services offers a way to better compete with cable and satellite companies offering DVRs from rivals such as Cisco Systems, Motorola, and Scientific-Atlanta. TiVo has been losing market share to rivals who have gained the advantage of wider distribution through TV service providers.

TiVo has also been working at boosting revenue by entering into other markets. Late last month, the company announced that its DVR software and program guide would be available for PCs equipped with TV tuners, under a partnership with Nero, a maker of DVD-burning software. No timetable for availability was released.

TiVo has also launched a research service in which advertisers can subscribe to TiVo-collected data that's based on its subscribers' viewing habits. The information is offered as a way for TV advertisers to track commercials to determine which are most effective on particular demographics, such as age or ethnicity of TiVo subscribers.

Where am I? in Google Maps

My Location approximates your location by using the surrounding cellular towers instead of GPS data, which is often associated with such features.

“It’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average),” said Google. “We’re still in beta, but we’re excited to launch this feature and are constantly working to improve our coverage and accuracy.”

To find your location, you simply press the “0” button while in Google Maps. Your approximate location is shown with a blue dot on the map.

Google said the My Location feature is available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Nokia/Symbian devices.

User interest in the discussion area for an iPhone version seems high, but the feature is not compatible with the iPhone.

Google acquire Jaiku

Google Inc has acquired the Finnish company Jaiku, one of a new class of start-ups that offer instant-messaging tools for Web and cell phone users to keep track of their friends' daily activities.

Writing on Goggle's official blog, Tony Hsieh, a Google product manager, said his company had acquired Helsinki-based Jaiku Ltd. Google confirmed in a separate statement that the deal had closed but did not reveal financial terms.

"Although we don't have definite plans to announce at this time, we're excited about helping drive the next round of developments in Web and mobile technology," Silicon Valley-based Google said in a statement on Jaiku's Web site.

The small acquisition coincides with mounting speculation that Google is pushing to expand into mobile Internet services by going beyond its existing smattering of one-off services to create mobile operating system software that could run phones.

Lehman Brothers analyst Douglas Anmuth said in a note on Tuesday that Google could potentially launch its own cell phone device as early as February 2008. He described the phone as a simple, low-cost handset featuring a variety of Google Web applications and supported by online advertising.

WHATCHA DOIN'?

Jaiku encourages users to send frequent short messages about themselves to the company's Web site where friends or other online contacts can keep track of the user's comings and goings. It is one of a new category of services popular with heavy Web users that include rivals Twitter and Pownce.

Such virtual voyeurism turns conventional notions of personal privacy on its head by encouraging users to share tidbits of their lives with people they invite to watch.

Privacy settings give users control over who sees what: The appeal is the unprecedented sense of intimacy such technologies give to trusted friends while moving about their daily lives.

The service also pipes these messages out to other Web sites, blogs, or to the cell phones of friends who wish to read instant updates of a user's activities.

The system also can send messages to popular instant message services from AIM, Yahoo, MSN or Google Talk, among other services.

Jaiku was set up in February of this year by co-founders Jyri Engestrom and Petteri Koponen, who released their first service in July of 2006.

The company's handful of employees will join Google, which plans to expand Jaiku's technology in coming months, it said. Current Jaiku users can continue to use the service. New users can sign up to join Jaiku once Google releases a new version.

Jaiku has targeted its services at cell phone users on the go. Currently its software is available for smartphones in the series 60 class from Finland's Nokia, the world's largest makers of cell phones.

Google, which acquired a dozen small start-ups this year, had acquired mobile social networking company Dodgeball two years ago. That company's founders quit Google earlier this year.

Google Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. VS Microsoft?

Two years after announcing a somewhat vague software-distribution partnership, Google Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have clarified their tactics for jointly attacking Microsoft Corp. and its ubiquitous Office software.

Over the weekend, Google quietly began including Sun's StarOffice suite of word processing, spreadsheets and other workplace-oriented programs for free as part of the Google Pack download.

The download package is part of Google's efforts to expand beyond Web search and control more of users' computing experience online and offline. It already includes Firefox, the No. 2 Web browser behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and RealNetworks Inc.'s RealPlayer, a key rival to Microsoft's own media player.

By adding Sun's software, Google is giving a valuable endorsement to a server and software maker that saw demand for its products collapse after the dot-com bust and has struggled to return to sustained profitability ever since.

StarOffice is Sun's commercial version of the freely distributed OpenOffice suite, which also was developed by Sun and has been downloaded about 100 million times.

StarOffice typically costs $70 to download but is being distributed by Google for free. It has more features than OpenOffice and typically includes technical support from Sun, though the free Google version won't.

Both companies declined to comment on their financial arrangement.

Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software, said Wednesday that Sun has also added Internet search capabilities to all of its StarOffice products. That will allow users, for example, to highlight terms in a word processing document and search immediately for those terms online — through Google, of course.

"It's a paradigm shift," Green said in an interview. "It brings together office productivity, networking and search into one offering."

The partnership announced in October 2005 between Mountain View-based Google and Santa-Clara based Sun had been light on details.

The companies only said then that users who download Sun's Java software, which is needed to run a variety of Web applications, would also have the option of downloading Google's search toolbar, and that they would work closely in the future to promote and distribute each other's software.

Google said in a statement Wednesday that the company believes "users will benefit from access to a free, full-featured office suite for the desktop. And we've also always believed that users should have choice in their online and PC experience."

Google Adsense on mobile

Google has begun inviting mobile Web site developers to display Google ads on their sites as part of a limited beta test.

The offer extends to the mobile environment Google's AdSense program, which lets Web developers earn revenue by placing advertisements on their sites. Google runs the back-end network that places ads on the sites relevant to content. Site owners earn revenue when visitors click on the ads.

Sites must be written in one of three mobile markup languages: WML, XHTML, and cHTML (compact HTML) in order to use AdSense for mobile, according to a Google AdSense for mobile help page. That's because Google's crawlers must be able to read the page in those languages to determine page content and serve up relevant ads.

A blogger at Self Made Minds said that he received an e-mail invitation from Google on Thursday night to test AdSense for mobile.

In a statement, Google confirmed that it is conducting a limited beta to test AdSense for mobile. The company plans to evaluate the beta and refine the product based on feedback from users, it said.

Late last year, Google began delivering advertisements along with its mobile search results.

Online giants such as Google are increasingly interested in the potential revenue stream from mobile users. "Mobile advertising is a huge opportunity for us, starting with the basic premise that there are something like 3 billion or so handsets in the world," said Dilip Venkatachari, director of product management responsible for mobile monetization efforts at Google, in a recent interview. That compares to just around 1 billion PC users on the planet, making for an even larger target market.

Google to acquire e-mail security specialist, Postini Inc

Google Inc. is buying e-mail security specialist Postini Inc. for $625 million, fortifying the Internet search leader's effort to sell online software services to corporate customers seeking alternatives to Microsoft Corp.'s long-dominant products.

The all-cash deal announced Monday is aimed at reassuring large businesses that have had qualms about entrusting Google to oversee their e-mail systems and other vital applications because of security concerns.

Google began selling companies a low-cost suite of online software that includes e-mail, calendaring and word processing in February, hoping to diversify its revenue beyond Internet advertising and perhaps siphon money away from Microsoft — one of its biggest rivals.

Microsoft is trying to challenge Google in the rapidly growing Internet ad market by drawing upon the cash that it has amassed from its market-leading Office suite of software applications and Windows operating system that controls most personal computers.

Google and other Internet companies are threatening Microsoft's stronghold by offering free or low-cost software applications that are hosted online so they don't have to be installed on the hard drives of individual computers.

Although Google says an average of about 1,000 small businesses sign up to use its software applications each day, security worries had become a "road block" to even wider acceptance, said Dave Girouard, the executive in charge of the company's push into the corporate market.

Google believes it will offer potential customers more peace of mind with Postini's added expertise. Formed in 1999, San Carlos-based Postini provides e-mail and instant messaging protection to about 35,000 customers with more than 10 million users. The list of Postini's customers include retailers Circuit City Stores Inc. and Dillard's Inc. as well as natural gas supplier Sempra Energy and Pulte Homes Inc.

Postini and Google formed a partnership in April, paving the way for the negotiations that culminated in the deal announced Monday. Postini executives said the privately held company has been profitable since 2004.

The sale represents a windfall for Postini's early investors, a list that includes Sun Microsystems Inc. and venture capital firms August Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mobius Venture Capital and Summit Partners.

Only a small number of Postini's customers are among the more than 100,000 businesses already using Google's applications, Girouard said, creating a sales opportunity.

Although Postini will continue to be offered on a standalone basis, Google hopes to persuade Postini's customers to "test drive" the Google applications, Girouard said.

"This is a clear statement that we are very committed to this business," Girouard said.

It's unclear how many businesses are anteing up the $50-per-user annual fee that Google charges for the premium version of its online applications because management doesn't disclose the number. The company also offers a more basic version that is subsidized by ads instead of subscriptions.

Software licensing accounted for $36.5 million, or less than 1 percent, of Google's $3.66 billion in revenue during the first three months of this year.

Backed with nearly $12 billion in cash and a high-flying stock, Google has been on a bit of an acquisition spree during the past nine months as management tries to build upon the company's already considerable clout.

Postini represents Google's third largest purchase, ranking behind the company's $1.76 billion acquisition of online video pioneer YouTube late last year and an April agreement to buy online advertising service DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion. The company also agreed in June to pay an undisclosed amount for FeedBurner Inc., a major channel for distributing information from blogs and podcasts.

The DoubleClick deal still must be approved by federal antitrust regulators who are examining whether Google's ownership would hinder competition in the rapidly growing Internet ad market.

The Postini acquisition isn't expected to face the same level of regulatory scrutiny. Google anticipates closing the deal before October.

Google shares rose to a new high of $548.74 Monday before falling back to end at $542.56, up $3.16.

Monday's stock gains appeared to have more do with optimism about Google's opportunity to expand upon its leadership in online advertising rather than enthusiasm about the Postini deal. Google's positioning prompted ThinkEquity Partners analyst Stewart Barry to raise his 12-month projection for the company's stock price to $700, up from $625 previously.

Google with iGoogle

Google Inc. is stepping up efforts to allow its users to personalize how they search the Web, moving beyond the one-size-fits-all approach to search it already offers.

Officials told reporters at Google's Silicon Valley headquarters on Monday of moves to allow users to share their own writings, photos, lists and other creative efforts, as well as to give consumers personalized views of the Web through use of their geographical location and search history.

The world's top provider of Web search services is bringing together the more idiosyncratic approach to finding information on the Internet under the umbrella term "iGoogle", the new name for its enhanced personalized home page services.

"We want to personalize the traditional notion of search," Sep Kamvar, lead engineer for the personalization push, told reporters. "I am an eclectic person. But everyone is. We can't go about designing products for the average person."

Reinventing the classic Google.com home page -- with its simple, uncluttered design -- the company is introducing features that range from colorful new Web page designs to helping users publish their own creative content.

Google is borrowing or reinventing ideas that have already become popular features on many social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Bebo and Photobucket, where users are encouraged to share their own creative work with friends.

To help users create personalized features on iGoogle, the company introduced "Gadget Maker", which allows any user who knows how to upload a photo and fill out a simple Web form to publish their content without knowing computer coding.

Google introduced seven templates for creating personalized "gadgets" -- publishing features -- that include tools for publishing photos, sending virtual greeting cards or creating personal profiles or lists of favorite songs or films.

"I look at personalized search and I think it is one of the biggest advances we have had in the last couple of years," Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president in charge of search and user experience, told a news briefing.

Google's personalized home page, introduced two years ago, offers users the ability to choose from thousands of regularly updating Web features on one page. Tens of millions of users have signed up so far for the personalized approach to search and they are some of Google's most active users, Mayer said.

KNOW THYSELF

Last week, Google introduced the ability for users to refer back to their personal Web search history over the past several years. The history feature is optional and only for users who give permission to Google to store their Web surfing activity.

Google officials were asked whether users might be shocked to see how much information Google stores on searches.

"Web history tells the user what we (Google) know about you," Mayer replied. "You actually have full insight into what we know," she said, adding that users can delete any personal information they do not want to be recorded from searches.

Google is moving cautiously to avoid the mistakes of a decade ago, when the first wave of Web portals used personalization features on their sites to help marketers target ads rather than giving the user greater control.

"At some point we will turn our attention to advertising," Mayer said, but stressed that iGoogle will remain non-commercial for the foreseeable future.

Google is also introducing a geographic aspect to search results based on the location that users select as their home location on Google Maps.

Users who accept this option will see Google search results that are tailored to their location, so a search for "pizza" will return links to nearby pizza restaurants, not just the most heavily visited pizza sites across the Web.

The company is also expanding the number of countries and languages in which it will offer personalized search services.

This week, iGoogle personalized Web search will be available in 40 countries and 26 languages, up from 22 nations and 15 languages where personalization is now offered, said Jessica Ewing, the product manager for iGoogle.

MySpace to test news service to boost ad revenue

News Corp.'s MySpace social network plans to test a service on Thursday that scours the Web for news stories and lets users rate them, aiming to attract more advertisers to the Rupert Murdoch-controlled company.

The service, called MySpace News, resembles a mix of Google Inc.'s Google News, which collects stories and arranges them based on thematic similarities and Digg.com, which displays stories suggested by its readers and displays them according to their popularity ranking, executives said.

MySpace News is an attempt by the company to keep its more than 100 million unique visitors, according to comScore Network's March figures, on the popular social network site longer.

The service adds a social element to traditional news consumption by giving readers the ability to determine what becomes the top news on MySpace.

The launch is also part of News Corp.'s efforts to aggressively court entertainment and other types of content from other media sources as it seeks to bolster a leading position on the Internet, executives have said. News Corp. expects to generate over $500 million in revenue from its digital businesses this fiscal year.

Before the launch, MySpace users would have to leave the service to read news on the Internet. MySpace users on average spend about 10 minutes per visit in the United States and visit the site about 19 times per month, according to comScore.

The news service, long rumored, will have 25 main topics and about 300 sub-categories ranging from celebrities and gossip to autos and fashion.

"Many advertisers have expressed interest in the service, which allows them to target the MySpace community in a more direct way," Brian Norgard, co-founder of Newroo, a company purchased by News Corp. last year, which created MySpace News' technology, said in an interview.

Executives also said its service would draw from a wider collection of news sources than Google News. Google News draws from about 4,500 sources, according to its site. News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media executives declined to specify the news outlets.

The technology scans thousands of news sources and displays them on the site based on how popular the stories are to its readers who can vote on them.

But services such as Google News, which displays brief excerpts of stories and photos from other companies on its site, has angered some news organizations seeking to build their own Internet businesses. Google recently settled a closely watched copyright dispute with Agence France-Presse.

The deal now clears the way for Google to continue displaying text excerpts and photos from the agency.

News publishers can ask to have their news feed removed from the MySpace service.

Google-branded mobile phone

After accurately predicting Apple's iPhone development, the wireless rumor mill is churning once again. This time, it's prophesying a Google-branded mobile phone.

According to industry reports and analyst leaks, Google is investigating a low-cost, Internet-connected phone with a wide, full-color screen. Google could not immediately be reached for comment, but the search giant has publicly insisted that it has "nothing further to announce" beyond its focus on creating applications forging strategic partnerships with industry leaders.

However, newspapers, Wall Street analysts, and others contradict Google's tightlipped response to far-reaching conjecture backed by sources familiar with the company's plans. Much of the speculation is coming from overseas.

Google's Mobile Secret

The Observer of London is reporting that Google might be working with HTC and telecom giant Orange to develop a Google mobile phone. Some reason that the phone could come equipped with Google software that would open the door to the Web. The article hints that the Google device would become available in 2008.

Richard Windsor, a phone analyst with Nomura, a brokerage in London, claimed that at the CeBIT conference in Germany, Google spokespeople confirmed the company's intentions to develop a mobile phone. "This is not going to be a high-end device but a mass-market device aimed at bringing Google to users who don't have a PC," Windsor said in a note entitled "Google Phone: From myth to reality."

And Simeon Simeonov, a technology partner in the Boston office of Polaris Ventures, wrote in his blog that a team of 100 people at Google are working on "the Google Phone." He pointed to two of Google's 2005 acquisitions as pieces of the mobile-device puzzle: mobile application company Reqwireless and device software firm Skia.

"Apparently, Google is planning to build distribution relationships with multiple carriers by allowing them to minimize subscription and marketing costs. In other words, Google will market the phone online and carriers will fulfill," he wrote on March 4.

Optimizing Mobile Search

Because Google is the market leader in search, the concept of ensuring a good mobile-search experience by optimizing a Google-branded phone is a positive one for consumers, according to Shiv Bakhshi, director of mobility research at IDC. He said the mobile market is in a state of flux, with business models still being negotiated and explored. The timing of Google's foray into mobile, then, could make sense.

"The functionality of search in the mobile environment is fundamentally different than the functionality of search in the PC environment," Bakhshi noted. Searchers in a PC environment might take the time to explore multiple pages of results, he offered, while mobile searchers want to achieve a quick result. That quick result seems to demand optimization for a mobile environment.

"To ensure a good experience you have to make sure that the search works flawlessly. You have to optimize to make sure the front end works, the display works, the retrieval process works, and so forth," Bakhshi said. "If a device is not optimized and it doesn't work, you will try it a few times and be turned off."

If the rumors are true, Google could be attempting to avoid that scenario while boosting its position in the upcoming deluge of mobile advertising that many analysts are predicting.

Serious Flaw in Google's free email service

A serious flaw is discovered in Google's free email service allowing hackers to steal users' entire contact lists.

To exploit the flaw, the hacker would add a piece of code to their website server, which in turn gave them access to the Gmail contacts of passing browsers, so long as they were also signed in to their Gmail account in another window.

The hacker could then add the stolen contacts to an email spam database, or sell them to other spammers.

Gmail, the third most popular free web-based email service, has been embraced by both personal and business users alike, largely because it allows for easy access to messages from any computer worldwide.

Google's security team appeared to have fixed the flaw within hours, but various subsequent reports suggested the fix didn't address the full extent of the issue.

Further, it is understood that spammers were exploiting the security hole for quite some time before it was discovered.

The simplest way to avoid being exposed is to sign out of Gmail when it is not in use.

News of the flaw came just days after another, separate Gmail security issue was revealed. From late December, some Gmail users - 60, according to Google - logged in to their accounts to find all of their emails and contacts had been automatically deleted.

User complaints soon flooded Google's Gmail support discussion board, but some of the lost data could not be retrieved.

Google was then forced to work with each affected user to help them restore their messages from any personal backups they may have made.

But it is not just Gmail security flaws that have been detrimental to Google's goodwill leading into 2007. It has also been accused of monopolistic behaviour, through listing its own products at the very top of search results for terms such as "calendar", "blog" and "photo sharing".

This practice is shared with other internet search providers such as Yahoo and Ask, but Google's actions in particular have caught the ire of internet users who expect the company to live up to its idealistic corporate motto - "Don't be evil".

Most notably, Blake Ross, a co-founder of the Firefox web browser, last week criticised Google in his blog, suggesting it had lost its moral compass.

Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team, responded to Mr Ross' claims on his own blog. Surprisingly, he agreed with many of Mr Ross' conclusions.

"I'd remove these tips or scale them way back by making sure that they are very relevant and targeted," Mr Cutts wrote.

Google also came under fire last month when it was accused of manipulating the results of its top 10 search term list, published yearly.

Google later clarified that the list was compiled based on changes in the most popular searches on a year-to-year basis. Generic and offensive terms were not included.

Technology industry commentators have suggested that, when combined, the relatively minor issues could have a profound effect on Google's public perception, which has remained largely untainted since the company's inception.

"This subtle shift in public attitude could signal a tidal wave of negativity down the road," said Michael Arrington, author of the popular TechCrunch blog.