Google Self-Driving Cars Looking Good

Story first appeared in The Detroit News.
Search engine giant Google Inc. thinks self-driving cars can be on U.S. roads in the next few years and is in talks with automakers to roll out the technology. The most important thing computers can do in the next 10 years is drive a car.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google could make an announcement as early as next year on when it might offer the self-driving technology, he said.

The company is currently attempting to show that their driverless vehicle is much safer than a human driver. Google needs to prove mathematically that the self-driving cars are safer — and make fewer mistakes — than human drivers. Google says that its self-driving cars on average complete a test course a couple of seconds faster than human drivers.

Google's self-driving vehicles are retrofitted Toyota Prius sedans with added sensors and cameras. Google could partner with one automaker to offer the technology or it could retrofit a small fleet of vehicles.

Google is also talking to suppliers to find partners that want to work with us. All options are open. From giving the technology away to licensing it to working with Tier 1s, Tier 2s, working with the OEMs, building a car with them, everything is open and we're trying to figure out which paths make the most sense.

Automakers understand it is happening and they want to play a role in that. Not everyone is excited to be first. Some of them are and we want to work with the ones that want to be first.

The company is moving ahead, meeting with insurance companies as part of a multi-pronged effort to make computer-driven cars a reality.

Google says it is not clear if the search engine would have to provide some insurance to early drivers using the system.

He said that Google wouldn't wait for a recall requested by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to make fixes. Google would have the power to deactivate its self-driving system remotely — something it could do if any safety issue arose.

The company has logged more than 250,000 miles in a fleet of about 10 self-driving cars — but wants to log at least 1 million miles before it offers the technology to the general public.

Many people have raised liability concerns about what happens if a driverless car caused a crash.

Google plans to expand its testing fleet to several dozen — and initially to a small fleet similar to the size of General Motors Corp.'s EV1 program. Google doesn't want to eliminate driving by people — but make it safer.

Even when semi-autonomous driving capability is available on vehicles, the system will have operational limitations based on external factors such as weather and visibility of lane markings. When reliable data is unavailable, the driver will need to steer.


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Yahoo Japan in Talks for Buybacks

Story first appeared on Yahoo News.

Yahoo Japan Corp's talks with key shareholder Yahoo Inc for a share buyback have ended with no agreement, but the companies left open the possibility of further negotiations, Yahoo Japan's chief financial officer said on Tuesday.  They stated that they want to positively consider resuming negotiations if the conditions are right.

Yahoo Inc's chief executive said last week the plan to sell its stake in Yahoo Japan has been plagued by a "valuation gap" that the parties have failed to bridge.

Yahoo Inc, under pressure to free up cash for shareholders and simplify its ownership structure, has been looking for more than a year to monetize its stake in Yahoo Japan, which was formed as a joint venture between the U.S. Internet pioneer and Japan's Softbank Corp in 1996.


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Google Ex-CEO Gets $101M Pay Package

Story first appeared in USA Today.

Shifting from Google's CEO to executive chairman proved to be lucrative career move.

Google awarded the executive chairman a compensation package valued at $101 million last year, according to a Friday regulatory filing. The amount is 322 times higher than the $313,219 package that he received in 2010 during his final full year as the Internet search leader's CEO.

The new executive chairman recently ended a decade-long stint as Google's CEO last April and turned over the job to the Google co-founder.

Shortly before the change in command, Google gave him stock and stock options valued at nearly $94 million, according to the company's proxy statement. Google had designed the stock and stock option package to be worth $100 million, but the compensation formula spelled out by securities regulators arrived at a slightly different calculation.

To top it off, Google raised his salary from $1 annually as CEO to $1.25 million as executive chairman. His 2011 salary ended up being $937,500 because he spent the first three months of the year in the lower-paying job as CEO.

The rest of the executive chairman's 2011 compensation consisted of a $6 million bonus and perks worth nearly $264,000. He deposited half of his bonus last year in a company plan that can defer payment for up to five years.

The current CEO compensation package totaled $1 last year, consisting solely of a nominal salary. He has maintained a $1 salary since 2005, although in some years he has accepted the Google's companywide holiday bonus. That's what happened in 2010 when his pay package totaled $1,723.

Weekly paychecks, annual bonuses and stock options haven't been essential to the executives since Google's initial public offering of stock in August 2004. That IPO turned them, along with the other Google co-founder, into multibillionaires who are perennials on Forbes' list of the world's richest people.

Forbes' latest rankings estimate show that the Google co-founders are each worth nearly $19 billion. The magazine pegs the executive chairman's wealth at nearly $7 billion.

Since Google's IPO, the executive chairman's total compensation package as CEO had never exceeded $560,000, based on an analysis of Google's past regulatory filings. From 2004 through 2010, his combined compensation totaled $2.2 million.

The executive chairman serves as a company ambassador who meets with government regulators, explores potential acquisitions and makes public appearances.

In its proxy statement, Google described the provided big stock and stock option package as a way to recognize the new executive chairman's accomplishments as CEO. When Schmidt took in job in 2002, Google had annual revenue of $86 million and fewer than 300 employees. In Schmidt's final full year as CEO, Google had grown to a company with $29 billion in revenue and more than 24,000 employees.

Even after last year's big windfall, the executive chairman is still raising cash. In February, he filed plans to sell up to 2.4 million shares of stock currently worth about $1.4 billion.

The co-founders are in the process of selling 5 million Google shares apiece under a program scheduled to be completed in 2015.
The co-founders and the executive chairman have been Google's controlling shareholders since the IPO, thanks to a special class of stock that gives them 10 times the voting power of other shareholders. To ensure they remain in power as Google doles out more stock to pay employees and finance acquisitions, Brin and Page are pursuing a 2-for-1 stock split that will create new class of shares with zero voting power.

The unusual stock split announced last week has been derided by corporate governance experts who oppose disenfranchising other shareholders.

But the proposal is almost certain to be approved at Google's June 21 annual meeting because the executives support it.

Friday's regulatory filing disclosed that the idea for the stock split was first broached in June 2010. Google's board then formed a special committee to analyze the pros and cons.


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Infected PCs May Lose Internet In July

Story first appeared in USA Today.

For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.

This image provided by The DNS Changer Working Group (DCWG) shows the checkup webpage. It will only take a few clicks of the mouse. But for hundreds of thousands of computer users, those clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing their connections this July.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.

The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org, that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.

Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.

The FBI started to realize that there might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because if they just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service. The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get 'page not found' and think the Internet is broken.

On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in the chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using. Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers. But it wasn't enough time. A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.

Now, the full court press is on to get people to address this problem. And it's up to computer users to check their PCs.

Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system.

The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address — such as www.ap.org — into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.

The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.

When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.

The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.

Most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.  Many corporations utilize Managed IT Services that provide quality control and Security Solutions to avoid situations such as these.

FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won't be the last.

Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, the FBI will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations.

Now, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, they get to the point where they say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system" without creating a bigger mess than before.


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Microsoft Doing Better Than Expected

Story first appeared in The Washington Post.

Microsoft produced a surprisingly strong quarter to start the year, pleasing investors looking forward to even bigger things from the software maker’s much-anticipated overhaul of Windows operating system next fall.

The performance announced Thursday defied the conventional thinking that Microsoft would have trouble selling more Windows licenses as more people snapped up tablet computers, such as Apple Inc.’s trendsetting iPad, while other prospective personal computer buyers delayed making their purchases until the next version of Microsoft’s operating system hits the market.

That didn’t turn out to be the case during the three months ending in March as revenue at Microsoft’s Windows division edged up by 4 percent from last year to $4.6 billion. Microsoft attributed the gain to an uptick in businesses who bought licenses for Windows 7. It marked only the second time in the past six quarters that Microsoft has registered a year-over-year gain in the Windows division.

High hopes are riding on the revamped system, Windows 8, because Microsoft designed it to run on devices that can be controlled by touch, as well as keyboards and computer mice. That means Windows 8 can serve a dual purpose: it could help spur the development of sleeker PCs that spur more sales and also give Microsoft a chance to grab a piece of the rapidly growing tablet computer market.

Although Microsoft hasn’t announced a target date yet, most analysts believe Windows 8 will go on sale in September or October.

Microsoft Corp. earned $5.1 billion, or 60 cents per share, during the period marking first three months of the year — the Redmond, Wash company’s fiscal third quarter. That was a 2 percent decline from net income of $5.2 billion, or 61 cents per share, a year ago.

Last year’s results were boosted by a tax benefit of $461 million, or 5 cents per share.

Revenue rose 6 percent from last year to $17.4 billion

Analysts had anticipated earnings of 58 cents per share on revenue of $17.2 billion, according to a FactSet survey.

Microsoft’s shares gained 87 cents, or nearly 3 percent, to $31.88 in Thursday’s extended trading.

While the Windows division held up better than expected, one of Microsoft’s recent strongholds weakened. The deterioration occurred in the entertainment division as Microsoft’s shipments of its Xbox 360 video game console plunged by nearly 50 percent to 1.4 million units. The sagging demand occurred as more people are playing games on phones and tablet computers. Revenue in the entertainment division declined 16 percent from last year to $1.6 billion.

Microsoft’s long-suffering online division, which has struggled for years to compete against Internet search leader Google Inc., managed to narrow its losses in the latest quarter. The division, which includes its Bing search engine, posted an operating loss of $479 million compared to a loss of $776 million at the same time last year. Microsoft’s online revenue totaled $707 million, a 6 percent increase. By comparison, Google’s revenue during the same period surged by 24 percent.


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