Ask.com Continues to Fall

Latest Redesign Aims for More-Efficient Web Searches in Bid to Raise User Numbers

Internet search engine Ask.com, the flagship of Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, plans to launch its third redesign in as many years Monday as the company continues to seek a firmer foothold in the search market.

The revamp undoes a heralded but largely ineffective overhaul last year that presented images, audio clips and other Ask search results in separate panels. The new Ask looks more like other search engines, but aims to dig up search responses more efficiently.

For example, a search for "What's the biggest state in the U.S.," won't just pull up links that a user has to click through to find the answer. Instead, culling from community-generated and other resources across the Web, Ask aims to dig up the answer -- Alaska -- in the main page of search results.

Ask hopes that making search listings more useful will persuade increasing numbers of people to use Ask, and will push loyal users to return more often.

"To call it an all-new Ask is wrong; it's an evolution of Ask," Mr. Diller said in an interview. "I think it's going to help us primarily in retention and frequency. That is really its goal."

Boosting Ask is more important now for Mr. Diller, who broke IAC into five pieces in August. The split leaves Ask as IAC's biggest business.

Already, IAC has shifted the search engine's direction twice since 2005, when IAC bought the business -- then known as Ask Jeeves -- for nearly $2 billion.

IAC first shifted away from the hallmarks of Ask Jeeves, which was known for answering search queries posed as questions. Then last year Ask tried again with the tech-savvy redesign, Ask3D.

Prior efforts haven't lifted Ask above a minor competitor in the internet search business. Traffic on Ask.com and other Web sites that use its search technology accounted for 4.8% of Internet searches in August, according to comScore Inc.

Google and sites that use its technology had a 63% share.

Jim Safka, who took over as Ask's chief executive in January, is taking a cautious approach to the search engine's latest iteration. Ask3D was trumpeted with $100 million of television commercials, billboards and other marketing. Mr. Diller said Ask will spend $5 million on marketing this time around to test consumer response.

IAC executives defend Ask by pointing to small gains in market share.

Executives also say Ask is a financial success even if it doesn't budge its search position significantly, thanks to a deal under which Google Inc. sells most of the ads on Ask. The recently renewed deal has improved the average revenue Ask receives for each search.

"Search revenue for us is very profitable and it's certainly growing," Mr. Diller said. "Does it matter whether or not we take big chunks of...market share? No. Would we like and hope to? Yes."

IAC and News Corp.'s Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal, jointly own a personal-finance Web site.

By: Shira Ovide
Wall Street Journal; October 6, 2008

Cull Web Content With Alerts

It can be hard to find just what you want in the 24-hour news cycle that constantly churns content out online.

One way to find the information you want is by setting up computer-generated alerts. These electronic notifications are relatively simple to use and offer a range of helpful services, from a virtual heads-up when your name is mentioned online to messages about a product's price suddenly dropping.

For years, I've used Google Alerts as a way of keeping track of myself online. If my name is mentioned in a blog or if this column appears on the Web, such as on the site of a newspaper that syndicates it, a Google Alert sends me an email about it. Google Alerts can work for you to find a variety of things, such as telling you if a video of a favorite band popped up online or that a blogger posted something about last night's episode of "Mad Men."

In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails. Google certainly isn't alone in the alerts arena, as Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are also players. This week I tried two small companies that recently joined the mission to help users find the Web content using alerts.
Pinpointing Searches

I tried Alerts.com and Yotify.com, and found worthwhile features in both. While Google Alerts does a good job of finding search terms in news, blogs and videos, Alerts.com and Yotify use forms that are a cinch to fill out and let you pinpoint your searches.

Alerts.com offers to notify users via email, SMS text messages or even voice calls to a cellphone or landline. The site organizes your alerts on a personalized Web page and uses a desktop application called Elertz to tell you when an alert has generated results. I liked this site's flexibility: It not only gave me different ways to receive notifications, but also enabled a variety of options for time-specific deliveries of alerts.

But Yotify has advantages of its own, including the ability to integrate with FriendFeed and Facebook so friends can offer their recommendations or opinions. It also lets users search for event tickets or items auctioned on eBay. And a smart preview panel gives you an idea of the type of results your search will return before you submit the request for an alert.
Viewing Results

For now, Google Alerts and Yotify will send alert notifications only via email, though all three services will let you view your alert results online. All three are free, but SMS alerts sent to a cellphone via Alerts.com may not be, depending on your plan.

All in all, I found there were certain things each service was good at doing. For example, Alerts.com lets me know college football scores when I want them: only after the final score; at the end of each quarter and after the final score; or at the end of each quarter, after the final score and after each time a team scores points. Yotify gave me detailed options in a Craigslist search for furniture, including showing only listings with photos or just those that included the word "sofa" in a title; it will even hunt for a specific price range.

For the person who wants to spend minimal time creating basic alerts, Google Alerts will do the trick. These can be narrowed down to show results that fall into the News, Web, Blogs, Video or Groups categories, or you can perform more-blanketed searches using a Comprehensive category.

Alerts.com offers plenty of simple alerts that require only a bit of scheduling to set up. Each alert appears as a widget that can be expanded, edited or deleted with a simple click, and this page has a clean look with attractive, cohesive graphics.

I didn't care much for Elertz, the desktop component of Alerts.com, because once installed, it notified me of new Alerts data using an irksome star that glowed red until I checked my notifications. Elertz didn't work properly on my Windows XP machine until Alerts.com fixed a bug.

But Alerts.com's price watch and price protection alerts are incredibly useful. Price watch looks to see if an item's price drops into a lower price range, at which point users are notified. Price protection watches to see if products you bought are now on sale so you can get a refund. I tried both, and I'm hoping I'll hear soon that a specific pair of Anthropologie boots is on sale.

Yotify uses the idea of virtual scouts that scour the Web for specific information. Scout findings can be condensed or expanded in one click, and results can be filtered for more specific findings or shared with friends via Facebook or FriendFeed.
Scout Work

But some scouts took too much work to set up. When I tried to set up a scout for college football scores, I didn't see a sports category (Alerts.com had a colorful NCAA icon right on its home page). Instead, I had to choose News, then select ESPN, then NCAAF and finally enter "Penn State" in a key word box for my scout. And after all that, the scout offered results only daily or hourly via email.

I would also prefer if I could better organize my scout lists. As it was, all of my results appeared in one list: The NCAA scout was right above the scout that found Obama mentions on Huffington Post, and below that were results for YouTube's most-watched videos. Yotify says it will add ways to more neatly arrange data in the next month or so.

On average, Yotify returned more results instantly, such as 10 instant Craigslist sofa results compared with Alerts.com's two in the first few hours.

Overall, these sites are worth trying so you can find which alert system works best for you and stop wasting time searching the Web the old-fashioned way.

By: Katherine Boehret
Wall Street Journal; October 1, 2008

Semantic Guardians for our computers?



If your computer has never crashed, it’s because it has been built on another planet. The microprocessors we use are faster and more complex year after year, increasing the risks of being hit by ‘functional bugs.’ This is why University of Michigan (U-M) researchers have started to develop a system that lets chips work around all functional bugs, even those that haven’t been detected. Their ’semantic guardians’ will continuously monitor what your computer processor is asked to do — and by which piece of software. Right now, the researchers have developed a software-based chip simulator, but they want to create a real programmable chip to control our computers.

















The figure above describes how this trusted hardware design flow. “The safe mode is verified thoroughly with formal tools, while the normal mode is validated with focus on the most common functionality. A semantic guardian is then automatically generated and manufactured with the design. The guardian, together with a recovery controller switches the design into the safe mode when any non-validated scenario is observed at runtime.” (Credit: Bertacco and Wagner, U-M)
This research work has been led by Valeria Bertacco, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of U-M, with the help of Ilya Wagner, a doctoral student working in the same department. Both belong to the Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory (ACAL) and have been working on these Latent Sematic Indexing or LSI guardians during the last two years.
How will these guardians work? “The U-M researchers’ system would eliminate this risk by building a virtual fence that prevents a chip from operating in untested configurations. The approach keeps track of all the configurations the firm did test, and loads that information onto a miniscule monitor that would be added to each processor. The monitor, called a semantic guardian, keeps the chip operating within its virtual fence. It works by switching the processor into a slower, bare-bones, safe mode when the chip encounters a configuration that has not been validated. In this way, the monitor would treat all untested configurations as potential threats.”
Here are some quotes from Bertacco about this system. “If you consider all the possible configurations of the processor, only a tiny fraction of them is verified. But that tiny portion accounts for the configurations that occur 99.9 percent of the time. Users wouldn’t even notice when their processor switched to safe mode. It would happen infrequently, and it would only last momentarily, to get the computer through the uncharted territory. Then the chip would flip back to its regular mode.”
Will these monitors affect the performance of our computers? The answer is a clear no according to the researchers. “The guardian would take only a small fraction of the microprocessor’s area with a imperceptible performance impact, which the researchers assert is a small price to pay to eliminate the risks of buggy hardware.” According to IDG News Service (see below), “In their current design, the monitor takes up about 3 percent of the chip’s real estate, but they expect that it would be much smaller if ever developed commercially. ‘If any commercial company decides to do this it would be much less than 1 percent,’ Bertacco said.”
Early results of this project have been presented at the Design Automation and Test in Europe Conference in April 2007 in a paper called “Engineering Trust with Semantic Guardians” (PDF format, 6 pages, 597 KB). The above illustration has been extracted from this document. You’ll have to read this article by yourself, because even the abstract and the conclusions are too long to post here.
Let’s finish by an article from Robert McMillan, “Researchers develop bug-blocking chip monitor” (IDG News Service, September 29, 2008). McMillan looks at last year delays of AMD Barcelona chip because of flaws discovered after launch. “Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood is unconvinced that a semantic guardian would have helped AMD with its Barcelona problem. According to him, there are at least two big problems with this approach: First, it would be hard to keep track of all the tested states on a commercial processor. ‘There are a very large number of legitimate states, so I really question whether this is anything that could ever be made to be a practical solution,’ he said.”
According to McMillan, “security concerns may soon cause chip makers to take a close look at the University of Michigan work. That’s because some security experts think that microprocessor bugs may enable a new wave of hacking attacks. [And] Bertacco believes that security concerns could make her semantic guardian more attractive to chip makers. ‘The general public is much more sensitive to security,’ she said.”

Cybercriminals syndicating Google Trends keywords to serve malware

In an underground ecosystem that is anything but old fashioned when it comes to abusing legitimate web services, cybecriminals have started exploiting the traffic momentum, and by monitoring the peak traffic for popular search queries using Google’s Trends, are syndicating the keywords in order to acquire the traffic and direct it to malware serving blogs primarily hosted at Windows Live’s Spaces.
According to a recent advisory issued by Webroot:
“For the first time, hackers are capitalizing on the top news stories from Google Trends Labs, which lists the day’s most frequently searched topics, which can include news of the Wall St. bail out or the presidential campaign,” said Paul Piccard, director of Threat Research, Webroot. “These highly relevant news stories and videos are being posted to the hackers’ fake blogs to increase the site’s Google search rankings.
These fraudulent blogs contain several video links about the news story for which the users were originally searching. Once a user clicks on one of the video links, they are prompted to download a video codec that downloads a rogue antispyware program designed to goad the user into purchasing an illegitimate program that may put their personal information and data at even greater risk. “
Let’s take a sample, and confirm the ongoing syndication of popular keywords in order to attract traffic to the several hundred malware serving blogs.
A random keyword “on fire” like Gwen Ifill wheelchair indicates that 55 minutes ago a malware serving blog has been successfully crawled and is now appearing within the first 10 results thanks to the high page rank of Windows Live Spaces. Upon clicking the link, the user is exposed to the typical ActiveX Object Error message that is attempting to trick them into installing Trojan Downloader: Win32/Zlob.AMV with 10 out of 36 AV scanners currently detecting it (27.78%).
Moreover, in order to ensure that their fake blogs will get crawled in the shortest time frame possible so that they can better abuse the momentum peak of the search query, they’re naturally taking advantage of the pre-registered blogs at popular blogging platforms which Google is crawling literally in real-time. Syndicating this particular keyword in order to serve malware is not an isolated event, with several hundred currently active blogs doing exactly the same as soon as Google Trends refreshes its hourly feed.
Malware campaigns have been taking advantage of pure SEO (search engine optimization), and mostly blackhat SEO techniques, during the entire 2008. The difference between the ongoing campaign and previous ones, is that the current approach has a higher probability of attracting generic search traffic since it’s relying on the world’s most popular search engine to tip them on what has the world been searching for during the past hour.
Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, malware and E-crime incident response. Dancho is also involved in business development, marketing research and competitive intelligence as an independent contractor. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and maintains a popular security blog sharing real-time threats intelligence data with the rest of the community on a daily basis.

We Know Where You Are

Tracking IP Address With Geolocation Software Presents Many Benefits But Also Many Unique Issues for Organic Search...

With new software, Web sites can tell what city a visitor is coming from. That can be useful information.

The freewheeling, borderless Internet has long allowed businesses to think globally. Now a growing number of companies are using Web technology to help them act locally.

Companies increasingly want to know where visitors to their Web sites are located so they can better serve them -- by, for example, ushering them to pages in their native language or offering them information, promotions or products pertinent to the local area. Other firms need to comply with laws or contracts that require they steer clear of customers in certain states or countries, while still others are seeking to thwart online criminals trying to impersonate clients.

To accomplish these goals, companies are erecting virtual borders with geolocation software, which analyzes a visiting computer's numerical Internet Protocol address to get a read on that Web user's city location. Armed with this information, businesses can usher people to appropriate Web pages or stop them from accessing an account or service.

Privacy-rights advocates consider IP addresses personally identifiable information, and they are concerned about systems that retain this data because of the potential for unwelcome scrutiny of people's Web-use habits. But the major geolocation companies say they don't track Web usage by IP address; rather, they simply maintain databases of IP addresses and their associated geographic locations.

Creating Connections

The technology isn't perfect -- some companies and Internet-service providers, including Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, use IP addresses that correspond to their headquarters' locations, not those of their end users. And some people mask their IP addresses for privacy reasons. But with accuracy rates in the low-to-high-90% range, geolocation technology is bringing a new level of maturity to the Internet -- delivering more sophistication and function to Web sites, enabling new businesses to operate online and enhancing Internet security.

With 1.2 billion people around the globe now connected, "the Internet is starting to reflect the world," with its many languages, competing interests and rules and regulations, says John Yunker, president and chief analyst at San Diego consulting firm Byte Level Research LLC. "Those boundaries are coming back," he says, and geolocation is the "air-traffic control" that lets companies route travelers.

Consider Ace Hardware, a cooperative of more than 4,600 dealer-owned hardware stores that overhauled its Web site in February 2007. Using geolocation software from Digital Element, a unit of Norcross, Va.-based Digital Envoy Inc., Ace now gives Web-site visitors a list of stores within a 30-mile radius of their location. A click takes visitors to a page showing the stores plotted on a Google map, and from there, they can drill down to the various stores' Web sites for information such as hours of operation and driving directions.

Dana Kevish, Ace's e-commerce marketing manager, says geolocation is important to Ace because some 75% of online sales go through local stores -- where Ace will ship products free -- and 30% of customers who pick up an online order make an additional purchase in the store. Having geolocation capabilities "helped us create a connection between the consumers and the local store," she says.

Ace plans to expand its use of the technology this winter by directing Web visitors to one of five or six different home pages, depending on their location. People in cold climates will see a home page featuring snowblowers, for example, while Floridians might see patio furniture.

Denver-based news site Examiner.com, meanwhile, uses software from Quova Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., to display geographically targeted news and advertising to more than two million monthly visitors from 57 local U.S. markets. A Web user's IP address determines the edition that is displayed, and advertisers can pick the editions in which they want their ads to appear.

Other companies are using geolocation to gauge the impact of ad campaigns, even offline ones. For instance, a spike in Web-site visits from New Yorkers following a series of ads in New York newspapers would suggest a successful campaign.

Still, geolocation technology won't pinpoint Web visitors' locations beyond the city level, which won't satisfy advertisers seeking to target potential customers by neighborhood or street. "That might be the next forefront people might try to push toward," says Dane Walther, director of custom engineering at Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai Technologies Inc., which has a geolocation product. "There's certainly interest from marketers, who always want to get as detailed, as local as they can."

For Some, a Lifeline

Geolocation technology allows companies to use the Internet as a distribution channel when contracts or laws restrict them from doing business in certain geographic locations.

Major League Baseball's Internet arm, MLB Advanced Media LP, has used software from Quova to build a $160 million paid-subscription business streaming live baseball games to fans.

Because each team has sold the broadcast rights to games in its local markets, MLB.com is permitted to stream games only to people living outside of the local markets of the teams playing. To confirm customers' locations, MLB.com uses Quova software in addition to information such as shipping addresses from past product purchases and addresses tied to credit cards.

MLB.com says it errs on the side of caution, denying about 15% of streaming requests it gets. While that means it sometimes blocks legitimate users, the error rate is perhaps 1% or 2%, and those people can call to request access, says MLB Advanced Media's chief executive, Bob Bowman.

"Fortunately for us, there are lots of fans that don't live in the town of the club they cheer," says Mr. Bowman, who estimates they amount to about half of each team's fans.

Ultimate Blackjack Tour LLC of Las Vegas is another company that uses geolocation software from Quova to help weed out certain would-be customers. The company runs a subscription-based business in which people compete for prizes by playing blackjack and poker online. It can sell the service only to people in the 38 states that allow sweepstakes; visitors from the other 12 states must get a version of the product without prizes.

The accuracy of the information is vital to Ultimate Blackjack Tour because mistakes could mean fines by state governments and black eyes for business partners. Although looking at IP addresses is "not the end-all solution," it is an automated and cost-effective first line of defense, says Brett Calapp, Ultimate Blackjack Tour's president. To improve accuracy, the company also examines the type of Internet connections its customers are using and whether they have been routed through a proxy server that might be masking their location.

Thwarting Fraud

For financial-services and e-commerce companies, geolocation has proved to be a valuable tool in their 24-hour battle against fraud. The technology allows them to flag activity if someone in, say, Russia tries to access an account or use a credit card of a customer who lives in Ohio. They can block the transaction or ask a security question to give the Ohioan access in case he is visiting Moscow.

For e-commerce sites, the goal is threefold: to reduce fraud, reject as few legitimate orders as possible and minimize costly manual reviews of transactions.

Marie Alexander, Quova's chief executive, says one manufacturer told her that it has found a transaction to be fraudulent in 73% of cases where the state in the credit-card billing address doesn't match the state associated with the IP address. "It's a huge savings to pull those [transactions] out," she says.

By: Riva Richmond
Wall Street Journal; September 29, 2008

Ballmer's quest to compete with Google

Microsoft's CEO discusses search strategy



At a Churchill Club event in Santa Clara, Calif., Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talks to Ann Winblad, a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, on its long-term strategy to battle Google in the search market. Ballmer says that to succeed, the company will have to find a way to change the experience and the economics of search, redefining the category.

Radio Executives Singing The Blues

Radio Losing Audience, Advertisers, and Relevance.

Can Anyone Explain Why Google Wanted to Break Into The Radio Market by Rolling Out Google Radio ?

Here's The Latest on The Media Dinosaur: Radio !


Radio Execs: Advertisers Just Don’t Get It

Radio company execs whined about advertisers and their perception of radio at an Advertising Week event yesterday.

The seemingly widespread belief that radio is dated or has “lost its fastball” means radio doesn’t have much leverage, said John Hogan, president-CEO of Clear Channel. Jeff Smulyan, pres-CEO of Emmis Communications, agreed, saying (via MediaPost), “We have a perception problem, not a consumption problem.”

Farid Suleman, CEO of Citadel, said that advertisers don’t appreciate radio’s potential beyond retail spots.

So, with radio revenue in August, what do executives plan to do about the sorry state of affairs? The industry needs to offer advertisers more unusual marketing opportunities, they believe. These could include streaming on the internet and mobile devices. The radio industry is also running a Radio Heard Here image campaign that it hopes will address the perception problem.
Arbitron’s Radar 98 radio listening estimates found that 93 percent of all adults age 18-34 tune in to radio.

Icahn Agenda in Focus As Yahoo Board Meets

Yahoo Inc.'s revamped board will meet for the first time next week, giving investor Carl Icahn his first chance to push his agenda for the Internet company from the inside.

The new board, which includes Mr. Icahn and two new directors Yahoo chose and Mr. Icahn supported, Frank Biondi and John Chapple, will hold a board dinner Monday night followed by a meeting Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter.

It isn't clear whether Mr. Icahn will show up, according to someone close to the situation. What changes he intends to push for -- and how vigorously -- also remains unclear. He couldn't be reached for comment.

Mr. Icahn, Mr. Biondi and Mr. Chapple joined Yahoo's board this summer as part of the activist investor's agreement to drop his campaign to oust Yahoo's directors. Mr. Icahn attacked the Yahoo board for rebuffing multiple offers from Microsoft Corp. to buy all or parts of Yahoo.

Mr. Biondi is former chief executive of Viacom Inc. and former chairman and CEO of Universal Studios. Mr. Chapple is former CEO of Nextel Partners, a small wireless company that Sprint Nextel Corp. bought.

During Tuesday's board meeting, Yahoo executives will offer an update about ongoing talks with Time Warner Inc., said one knowledgeable person. The two sides continue to discuss a possible combination of Yahoo with AOL, according to people familiar with the matter, although talks haven't progressed significantly in recent weeks.

Another likely topic at that meeting: potential regulatory opposition to Yahoo's search-advertising partnership with Google Inc. Any unraveling of that agreement would be a big blow for Yahoo and could accelerate the board's consideration of other options. The board struck the search-ad pact in June as an alternative to selling its search business to Microsoft.

Some Yahoo investors are impatient. Shareholders withheld more than 30% of their votes cast for four of nine Yahoo directors at the company's Aug. 1 shareholder meeting. Yahoo's stock price fell to a five-year low of $17.58 earlier this month but has since made a small rebound. As of Aug. 1, Mr. Icahn controlled 68.8 million shares, roughly 5% of Yahoo.

By: Jessica E. Vascellaro and Joann S. Lublin
Wall Street Journal; September 20, 2008

Adobe Systems to Unveil Design Software for Evolving Web Sites

Adobe Systems Inc. plans to unveil the latest version of its flagship Web-publishing software Tuesday.

The new software, called Creative Suite 4, is intended to make it easier to design Web sites that combine different types of media, such as animation and live video. These features are becoming increasingly important as Web sites evolve from the text-filled pages and static images that dominated the Internet's early days.

Adobe Systems is set to unveil a new version of its flagship Web-publishing software.

"It used to be that video on the Web was enough to make you say 'Wow,' " says Johnny Loiacono, senior vice president of the Adobe business unit responsible for the software. "But now it takes richer and richer experiences to keep our attention."

Creative Suite 4 is made up of 13 individual software products, including the San Jose, Calif., company's Photoshop for photo editing, Dreamweaver for Web-site design, and InDesign for desktop publishing. The new software runs 20% to 50% faster than its predecessor, says Mr. Loiacono. The different products are also more integrated with one another so a designer can now work with a video made with Adobe's Flash technology while using InDesign, a task that previously required separate software.

The new software will cost $1,699 to $2,499.

Businesses are increasingly buying or developing visually compelling software that employees or customers can access over the Web, says Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research. As the line between Web design and software development blurs, Adobe faces increased competition from technology giants like Microsoft Corp., whose Silverlight video software competes with Flash.

Adobe last week reported profit of $191.6 million on revenue of $887.3 million for its third quarter ended Aug. 29. The creative solutions group, which includes Creative Suite, accounted for $493.6 million, or 56% of the quarterly revenue.

By: Ben Worthen
Wall Street Journal; September 23, 2008

Overuse of the Term 'Cloud Computing' Clouds Meaning of the Tech Buzz Phrase

'Cloud computing" is the latest buzz term sweeping through the information-technology industry, but it's losing whatever meaning it once had as an increasing number of companies apply the label to their wares.

The word "cloud" has been a go-to metaphor for the Internet for almost as long as the network has existed. It never made much sense -- clouds are billowing masses of condensed water vapor while the Internet is a host of connected computers -- but the Power Point set needed a graphic for their slides and clouds conveyed the sense that the Internet was intangible and bigger than the sum of its parts.

The term "cloud computing" surfaced earlier this decade, but didn't really catch on until August 2006 when Amazon.com Inc. introduced a service called Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, which allows people to run Web sites and online applications on servers that Amazon operates.

Cutting-edge technology is notoriously difficult to explain, but the term "cloud computing" has a whimsy about it that makes it instantly accessible. More importantly, the term makes one feel that it's OK not to fully understand the details: The computer processing takes place in this thing called the cloud, and as long as it works, no one really needs to know any more about what goes on there.

Soon, International Business Machines Corp., Google Inc. and others started to use the term to describe their efforts to turn vast farms of personal computers into supercomputers that academics could use to process data-intensive calculations. While slightly different from what Amazon.com offers, these services also use the Internet to access processing power on someone else's computer.

The term could have been helpful if it stayed in that niche of the IT world. But in late 2007, Salesforce.com Inc. Chief Executive Marc Benioff read a BusinessWeek article about cloud computing. Not wanting to miss out, he says he put two slides that called Salesforce.com's online sales-automation software "cloud computing" into his next presentation. When Google and Salesforce.com announced in April that it was possible to share information between online software from the two companies, the press release mentioned cloud computing nine times.

With the term's meaning broadening, no one in the tech industry wanted to be left behind. These days it's hard to find a tech company that isn't pushing its own brand of cloud computing. Online software? That's cloud computing, as are services that let people store data on the Internet. Virtualization software that lets multiple applications run on a single server? That's cloud computing, too, because it makes leasing server space possible. Oracle Corp. on Monday announced a version of its database software for cloud computing. Dell Inc. recently tried to trademark the term because, the company argued, none of this would be possible without the servers it makes.

So the term has become almost meaningless, though companies continue to use it. "We're in that nutty stage," says Billy Marshall, CEO of rPath Inc., which says it makes technology that enables, you guessed it, cloud computing. "It's absolutely too broad right now."

What Employees Really Do Online

Businesses are increasingly turning to the Internet to run software. Workers are increasingly using the Internet to do, well, whatever they want.

Those are the two key findings in a study of traffic on corporate networks by Palo Alto Networks Inc. Caveat Emptor: The company's technology helps businesses identify what Internet-based applications are running on their networks, so it has a vested interest in making the Internet seem like the Wild West. The study is based on an analysis of network traffic at 60 large businesses.

Palo Alto discovered 424 different applications in use by these companies. About half of these are applications that are accessed through a Web browser but communicate with servers that a company operates, such as Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint collaboration tool or some email and instant-messaging programs. The rest are either Web-based applications or Web sites, including searching for new vendors and using Google for B2B Discovery and B2B SEO.

The most common was online video. In fact, about 10% of all network bandwidth at the businesses Palo Alto studied came from sites like YouTube, Hulu, and even Slingbox, a program that lets people watch television from their computers.

"Employees are staying entertained," says Steve Mullaney, Palo Alto's vice president of marketing. And often they're doing it without the IT department's knowledge. For example, most businesses say they have a policy against using peer-to-peer networks, which allow people to exchange files directly with one another. But the study showed that peer-to-peer software was used by employees at almost all of the companies.

IBM May Quit Technology Standards Bodies

International Business Machines Corp. will review its membership in the bodies that set common standards for the technology industry and may withdraw from some, potentially undermining the system that makes electronic equipment and software interoperable world-wide.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer maker is expected to announce the review Tuesday, according to company officials. IBM has become frustrated by what it considers opaque processes and poor decision-making at some of the hundreds of bodies that set technical standards for everything from data-storage systems to programming languages, those officials said.

A recent battle over the selection as an international standard of the file format used in Microsoft Corp.'s Office software suite appears to have influenced IBM's decision. Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., won that contest in April when its Open XML format was approved by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization, or ISO.

Standards are key to the tech industry, where they provide a common foundation for products from different manufacturers. Internet standards and SEO best practices allow millions of computers to display a Web page the same way. IBM controls a vast cache of intellectual property in the high-tech field. As a result, its contributions and agreement are often critical to forming a standard.

IBM and open-source groups that support collaborative software development said Microsoft had stacked the national committees that make up the ISO with employees and sympathetic voters. They also said Open XML is so complicated and obscure that only Microsoft could fully exploit it, cementing the software company's already-considerable lead in office-document software. IBM backed a rival format called Open Document that was already certified as an ISO standard.

A Microsoft spokesman said standards bodies are "invaluable" because they provide "an even and predictable playing field" to the industry. Their decisions reflect the views of a preponderance of members, "not the interests of any single party," he said.

"There are lots of issues" with standards groups beyond the office-documents arena, said Bob Sutor, an IBM vice president who is the company's top standards official. He cited high membership fees that deter small players, complicated intellectual-property policies and opaque procedures.

In an interview, Mr. Sutor singled out for particular criticism Ecma International, a Geneva-based group of which IBM was a founding member more than 45 years ago. Ecma certified the Open XML standard over IBM's objection and submitted it to ISO for broader approval.

Getting a company-backed product approved as a standard can be a boon: In Microsoft's case, Open XML's certification eased hesitations by some government purchasing agents, who were reluctant to buy nonstandard software.

Istvan Sebestyen, Ecma's secretary-general, said he was "really amazed" at Mr. Sutor's contention that Ecma certification can be bought, and added he hadn't heard formally from IBM about any intention to withdraw. "Ecma didn't get one single dime more" from the Open XML approval, he said.

By: Charles Forelle

Google Phone to Cost $179, Go on Sale Oct. 22

Internet giant Google took a step toward transforming the way people receive information with the long-awaited debut Tuesday of the first phone based on its mobile phone software known as Android.

The phone, which will go on sale at T-Mobile on Oct. 22 for $179 — $20 less than the iPhone — closely resembles a T-Mobile's Sidekick, with a big-screen and a keyboard that slides out from underneath and contains an extra key dedicated to Internet search. The device also has WiFi capability and GPS built in.

But what is special about the device is that it is designed to function as a full-fledged personal computer running any kind of application a developer can dream up.

The G1 comes with maps, e-mail and instant messaging, a music player and a camera. Users can also download applications that measure their carbon footprint or scan barcodes in a store so they can comparison shop on the Internet.

IBM calls standards bodies system flawed: International Business Machines, the world's biggest computer-services company, may stop participating in worldwide groups that set standards for the technology industry, saying the system is flawed.

The bodies that set the standards for everything from software to wireless-Internet equipment can be exploited by individual companies, Ari Fishkind, a spokesman for Armonk, New York-based IBM, said in a phone interview Tuesday. The groups also lack input from emerging economies, he said.

IBM may be seeking to reform current standards processes or come up with a competing regime, said Andy Updegrove, a Boston- based attorney who works with standards groups. In April, IBM criticized a decision by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization that made Microsoft's Office Open XML file format a worldwide standard. IBM in April said the XML approval will stifle innovation and hinder interoperability.

Netflix reaches pact on CBS, Disney TV shows: Netflix, the largest U.S. mail-order movie service, reached agreements with CBS and Walt Disney to add current episodes of television series including "CSI" and "Hannah Montana" to its library of shows that can be seen instantly.

"CSI: Miami" and "CSI: NY" episodes that can be watched on computers and televisions will be available this week, the Los Gatos company said Tuesday in a statement. Streaming video of "Hannah Montana," staring Miley Cyrus, will be available in November.

The agreements mean Netflix is able to show instantly about 12,000 of the more than 100,000 titles it has available. Blockbuster, Apple and Amazon.com offer competing services as the companies seek to attract customers who want the convenience of watching movies on demand.

Netflix charges monthly subscription fees for its service, many of which offer unlimited video streaming.
Genentech's cancer drug linked to risks, deaths: Genentech's cancer drug Tarceva was linked to liver failure and deaths in patients who already have damaged livers, U.S. regulators said.

Genentech and partner OSI Pharmaceuticals warned doctors to monitor patients with liver trouble in a notice posted today on the Food and Drug Administration's Web site. Tarceva's prescribing information has also been updated to include new information about liver risk.

Mercurynews.com; September 23, 2008

Yahoo Adopts Tougher Email Guidelines to Block More Spam

The New Yahoo Blocklists Powered by Spamhaus

We have just confirmed that blocklists used by Spamhaus, one of the most stringent anti-spam organizations active today, have recently been adopted by Yahoo.

What it Means

ISPs are free to filter email as they see fit and they've traditionally relied on their internal lists and tools to do so. By using Spamhaus, Yahoo has now added an "outsourced" filtering solution in addition to their internal mechanisms. Compliance guidelines at Spamhaus are very strict and they may require emailers to follow certain procedures, such as implementation of double opt-in registration.

Are You Affected?

As you may know, a "spam trap" is an email address specifically set up to attract and identify unsolicited commercial email. Any emailer who has a spam trap address in their database may trigger the Spamhaus blocklist, which will now affect delivery to Yahoo.com and Yahoo.biz addresses.

What To Do?

Request a BlueHornet Demo.

Maintaining good list hygiene can help ensure that spam traps do not contaminate your house list. BlueHornet has led the industry in double opt-in email programs that keep your lists clean. And, only BlueHornet offers the SureSend(TM) deliverability enhancement platform, which includes integrated tools that can tell you whether you are experiencing delivery issues at Yahoo and 19 other top ISPs. SureSend also includes services that include identification of any known spam traps or bad addresses. For more information, request a BlueHornet demo today.

Search for Tomorrow

There are more than 170 million Web sites today, but in 1994 there were fewer than 4,000. Thus mere human beings could power the first generation of Internet search engines: Enter the query "hotdog" and the results spit back at you were those compiled by an editor who had at some point assembled a list of hotdog-possible sites.

By 1998, the Web was getting big enough that it was hard for human editors to keep up. That's when Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google and built a search engine that, by using a computer algorithm, could in theory scale to include an infinite number of Web sites. Google sent a spider into the Web that would index every page it crawled past. The massive index was then ranked and stored on Google's servers. When a user submitted a query, the algorithm generated results from ranked and indexed pages.

It proved to be an elegant and efficient system. But Messrs. Page and Brin, when they launched Google, had no idea how to make money from it. Two years into their venture, they developed a service that delivered small text ads based on the search terms that a user submitted. As Randall Stross notes in "Planet Google," his even-handed and highly readable history of the company, the service proved to be a turning point in the history of advertising, offering ads tailored for "an audience of one at the one best moment, when a relevant topic was on the user's mind." It also proved to be a goldmine for Google. The company started serving up ads in 2000. In 2002, it had revenues of $400 million; in 2005, $6.1 billion; in 2007, $16.5 billion. Roughly 99% of its income stills springs from those modest text ads that appear at the top of Google's results page.

Google may have built a better mousetrap, but it was also lucky. At the time of Google's birth, Mr. Stross reminds us, Yahoo was the Web's pre- eminent search engine. It relied primarily on human editors, but in 2000 Yahoo hired Google to provide search results for queries that its human editors hadn't tackled. When users went to Yahoo, they were often given Google results. This arrangement provided Google with cash and, more important, gave the company brand recognition and time to refine its page index and algorithm. Yahoo nurtured Google instead of recognizing it as an existential threat.

Since then, Yahoo has declined while Google has become a leviathan, using its deep reserves of cash to enter an increasing number of arenas. The Google Books project is attempting to digitize all of the world's books, for instance. YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006 for $1.65 billion, is the Web's leading repository for video. GMail is Google's foray into the email business.

Is Google an unstoppable juggernaut fated not only to "organize all information" -- as the company has itself put its goal -- but to control it as well? Mr. Stross poses the question but does not answer it. He notes that one of Google's ambitions is to usher in an age of "cloud computing," in which all the work we do on our personal computers would actually take place on servers that Google owns. The servers would hold the programs we use and store our data. That image -- Google as Skynet from the "Terminator" movies -- is a mite unsettling.

Yet the evidence in "Planet Google" suggests that this eventuality is less likely than Googlers might hope. Outside its core search and advertising business, Google has had few successes. Its home-grown products, such as Orkut, Knols and Google Checkout (knockoffs of Facebook, Wikipedia and PayPal, respectively), have largely been failures. Google's biggest successes have come from acquisitions. Google bought YouTube only after its own attempt at video on the Web, Google Video, crashed and burned. And even the "successful" acquisitions that Google has made -- Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Docs and Blogger were all purchases, too -- have taken up resources without creating significant revenue.

To make matters worse, two strategic challenges to Google's core business have already emerged. Wikipedia, a community-created knowledge base, threatens the algorithm with an army of unpaid editors -- offering a new version of the original search-engine process, the one run by human editors, only this time using volunteers. And since Wikipedia is a nonprofit, it can't be bought. Facebook presents a different problem -- the creation of a closed Web ecosystem that excludes Google's spiders. The more Internet life moves into social networking's gated communities, the less relevant Google's search will be.

Remember, people thought that Microsoft was fated to rule the world, too. Today, the once-feared operating-system giant is fighting to stay relevant. And the evolutionary parallels between Google and Microsoft are strikingly similar: Both hit upon a Big Idea at the perfect moment; both parlayed it into a mountain of cash; and both used the money to embark on a string of expansions that paid few dividends. The years have brought Microsoft back to Earth. They'll probably do the same to Planet Google.

By: Randall Stross: staff writer at the Weekly Standard and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer
Wall Street Journal; September 17, 2008