Java on Macs - Blocked by Apple

Story first appeared on USA Today -

Some Mac users were taken by surprise Thursday as their computers stopped running programs written using the Java programming language after Apple blocked Java due to security problems.

Java allows programmers to write a wide variety of Internet applications and other software programs and run them on most computers, including Apple's Mac. However, earlier this month the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recommended disabling Java in Web browsers to avoid potential hacking attacks. Oracle, which owns Java, has issued updates that fix known vulnerabilities, but the DHS expects that there are more flaws in Java's coding.

Apple sends out virtual "blacklists" to Internet-connected Macs, instructing them not to run certain programs. Apple is blocking the latest version of Java from running on the most recent versions of its Mac operating system, and blocking an older version, Java 6, from running on the older version of its Mac system, called Snow Leopard. The blocks affect programs and online games that use Java in Web browsers.

Oracle had no immediate comment on Apple's action.

Among those Java users inconvenienced by the unannounced block was the photo department of The Associated Press, which relies on a Java application to manage and distribute photos.

"The situation caught us by surprise and a number of our machines could not operate for a time, but we had enough capability to work around the problem in the meantime," said AP spokesman Paul Colford. "We expect the affected machines to be operating by day's end."

250,000 Twitter Accounts Hacked

Story first appeared on USA Today -

Twitter confirmed Friday that it had become the latest victim in a number of high-profile cyber-attacks against media companies, saying that hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users.

The social media giant said in a blog posting that earlier this week it detected attempts to gain access to its user data. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected.

But it discovered that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users. Twitter reset the pilfered passwords and sent emails advising affected users.

Bob Lord, Twitter's director of information security, said in the blog that the attack "was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident."

"The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked," Lord said. "For that reason, we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users."

Twitter's security was compromised in November,when the company publicly acknowledged that hackers had accessed passwords of users though it did not detail how many accounts were affected. It said it had detected the hack and fixed the security vulnerability.

One expert said that this week's Twitter hack probably happened after an employee's home or work computer was compromised through vulnerabilities in Java, a commonly used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicized.

Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers "a toehold" in Twitter's internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company's system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users' passwords.

In a telephone interview Friday, Soltani said that the relatively small number of users affected suggested either that attackers weren't on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company's servers.

The Twitter attack comes on the heels of recent hacks into the computer systems of U.S. media and technology companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both American newspapers reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important.

China has been accused of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate government critics. The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment Saturday, but the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyber-attacks.

"Chinese law forbids hacking and any other actions that damage Internet security," the Chinese Defense Ministry recently said. "The Chinese military has never supported any hacking activities."

Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have yielded any important secrets. But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which Internet address a user is posting from.

That might be useful, for example, for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist's movements.

"More realistically, someone could use that as an entry point into another service," Soltani said, noting that since few people bother using different passwords for different services, a password stolen from Twitter might be just as handy for reading a journalist's emails.

New High for Google Stock

Story first appeared on USA Today -

Google's stock climbed to a new high Friday as Wall Street's best known indexes approached record territory, too.

The shares of the Internet search giant peaked at $776.70 during the afternoon to eclipse the stock's previous record of $774.38 reached in early October. It closed Friday at $775.60, up $19.91, or 2.6% for the session. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., went public at $85 a share in August 2004.

Meanwhile, the benchmark Dow Jones industrial average closed above 14,000 Friday for first time since October 2007 — near the bellwether's all-time high of 14,164. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 index, which includes Google, was up 1% and also flirting with a record high.

The stock market's rising tide isn't lifting all companies. For instance, the stock of Google rival Apple is 36% below the peak price it reached in September. Apple's shares shed another $1.87 Friday to close at $453.62.

Google's stock has been on the upswing since the company reported fourth-quarter earnings 10 days ago. Google is still enjoying strong growth in Internet advertising as it extends its reach to smartphones and tablet computers.

Chinese behind computer hacking attacks at 'The New York Times'

Story first appeared on USA Today -

Chinese hackers repeatedly penetrated 'The New York Times' computer systems over the past four months, stealing reporters' passwords and hunting for files on an investigation into the wealth amassed by the family of a top Chinese leader, the newspaper reported.

Security experts hired to investigate and plug the breach found that the attacks used tactics similar to ones used in previous hacking incidents traced to China, the report said. It said the hackers routed the attacks through computers at U.S. universities, installed a strain of malicious software, or malware, associated with Chinese hackers and initiated the attacks from university computers previously used to attack U.S. military contractors.

The attacks, which began in mid-September, coincided with a Times investigation into how the relatives and family of Premier Wen Jiabao built a fortune worth over $2 billion. The report, which was posted online Oct. 25, embarrassed the Communist Party leadership, coming ahead of a fraught transition to new leaders and exposing deep-seated favoritism at a time when many Chinese are upset about a wealth gap.

Over the months of cyber-incursions, the hackers eventually lifted the computer passwords of all Times employees and used them to get into the personal computers of 53 employees.

The report said none of the Times' customer data was compromised and that information about the investigation into the Wen family remained protected.

"Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied," the report quoted executive editor Jill Abramson as saying.

The Chinese Defense Ministry asked for questions to be submitted in writing but initially declined comment. The Times, in its report, quoted the Defense Ministry as saying that Chinese law prohibits hacking and other acts that damage Internet security and that accusing it of "cyber-attacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless."

China has been accused by the U.S., other foreign governments and computer security experts of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate critics. Foreign reporters and news media, including The Associated Press, have been among the targets of attacks intended to uncover the identities of sources and to stanch critical reports about the Chinese government.

"Attacks on journalists based in China are increasingly aggressive, disruptive and sophisticated," said Greg Walton, a cyber-security researcher who has tracked Chinese hacking campaigns. China's cyber-spying efforts have excelled in part because of the government's "willingness to ignore international norms relating to civil society and media organizations," he said.

The Times reported that executives became concerned just before the publication of the Wen investigation after learning that Chinese officials had warned of unspecified consequences. Soon after the Oct. 25 publication, AT&T, which monitors the Times' computer networks, notified the company about activity consistent with a hacking attack, the report said.

After months of investigation by the computer security firm Mandiant, experts are still unsure how the hackers initially infiltrated the Times' computer systems

UK Suing Google for Safari Tracking

A British law firm says that about a dozen Apple customers are suing Internet search leader Google in the U.K. over its alleged secret tracking of their Internet browsing habits.

London-based law firm Olswang said that 12 Apple users were taking the Internet search leader to court over small pieces of tracking code — known as cookies — surreptitiously installed on computers and smartphones.

Google found itself in hot water last year after it emerged that the company had circumvented privacy features on Apple's Safari web browsers to deposit cookies on millions of users' computers. The issue has already cost Google $22.5 million, which it agreed to pay the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to settle the claims last year.

Google said it had no comment on the lawsuit.

Yahoo Profits On The Upswing

Story first appeared on USA Today -

Marissa Mayer has brought the yippee! back to Yahoo.

Under a company reboot, the Internet pioneer reported earnings that beat analyst forecasts after the close of markets Monday.

Shares of Yahoo initially jumped 4.5% to $21.22 in after-hours trading following the report.

Yahoo reported fourth-quarter profit of $272 million on revenue of $1.22 billion, compared with a profit of $295 million on revenue of $1.17 billion a year ago.

The revenue uptick marks a first year-over-year gain in four years as CEO Mayer has begun turnaround efforts at Yahoo.

Yahoo's adjusted earnings per share of 32 cents beat the 27 cent average of analyst estimates from Thomson Reuters.

"There's a lot of work to be done," Mayer said on a conference call with investors and analysts. "Mobile will be key to our business."

There's a huge exodus of consumers from PCs spending more time on mobile devices that's causing companies ranging from Google, Facebook, Zynga and Yahoo to scramble to meet new advertising needs.

Shares of Yahoo have shot up 30% since Mayer took the role in July on optimism that the former Google executive can turn around the company's fortune as it battles for advertising.

Yahoo reported a 14% increase in search revenue in the quarter compared with last year. "Theoretically, there's a lot of growth potential if they can boost search," says IDC analyst Karsten Weide, a former Yahoo employee.

Google holds 66.7% of the search market, trailed by Microsoft, with 16.3%, Yahoo's 12.2%, Ask.com's 3% and AOL's 1.8%, according to market researcher ComScore.

Despite gains, Yahoo saw a 5% decline in display advertising revenue from a year ago. Yahoo has been dogged by a need for better tools to serve advertisers. "Agencies are increasingly looking for more automation — Yahoo is kind of tepid in that regard," Weide says. I "think that's one of the ways that Yahoo can get out of a crisis."

Yahoo is the No. 2-most visited U.S. Internet destination behind Google, according to ComScore. Ranking after Yahoo comes Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon.com and AOL.

Yahoo said Flickr usage is up 25% since the company refreshed the online photo service in the quarter.

Mayer (Yahoo) Looking for Mobile Growth

Article first appeared on CNBC -

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is confident that her company will be able to capitalize on the explosion in mobile communication, saying Yahoo will focus on strong partnerships with Apple, Google and Facebook.

"The nice thing at Yahoo is we have all of the content that people want on their phones. We have these daily habits. Whenever you're dealing with a daily habit, and really providing a lot of value around it,there's an opportunity," Mayer said at the World Economic Forum in Davos,Switzerland on Friday.

"There's really an opportunity for strong partnerships. That's what we'll be focused on. So we work with for example Apple and Google in terms of the operating system. In terms of the social network we have a strong partnership with Facebook," she said.

She played down mobile privacy concerns, saying it would always be "something users should consider."

"But I also think that privacy is always a trade-off. When you give up some of your personal information, you get some functionality in return. It's really about making those trade-offs in a very informed way," she said.

Jeff Dean – Google’s Internet answer to Chuck Norris

Story first appeared on Mercury News

"The speed of light in a vacuum used to be about 35 mph. Then Jeff Dean spent a weekend optimizing physics." — Jeff Dean Facts

Jeff Dean facts aren't, well, true. But the fact that someone went to the trouble to make up Chuck Norris-esque exploits about Dean is remarkable. That's because Jeff Dean is a software engineer, and software engineers are not like Chuck Norris. For one thing, they're not lone rangers - software development is an inherently collaborative enterprise. For another, they rarely shoot cowboys with an Uzi.

Nevertheless, on April Fool's Day 2007, some admiring young Google engineers saw fit to bestow upon Jeff Dean the honor of a website extolling his programming achievements. For instance:

“Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers.”

“Jeff Dean writes directly in binary. He then writes the source code as documentation for other developers.”

“When Jeff Dean has an ergonomic evaluation, it is for the protection of his keyboard.”

“Jeff Dean was forced to invent asynchronous APIs one day when he optimized a function so that it returned before it was invoked.”

Here's a true Jeff Dean fact: You have to be a computer whiz to understand most of the jokes that people tell about Jeff Dean. But if his fake accomplishments are hard to understand without a real computer-science background, his real accomplishments are even more abstruse. The programs that Dean was instrumental in building - MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner - are not the ones most Google users associate with the company. But they're the kind that made Google - and, consequently, much of the modern Web as we know it - possible. And the projects he's working on now have the potential to revolutionize information technology once again.

When you think of the people who built today's Web, you probably conjure founders and CEOs: Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, maybe Mark Zuckerberg. That makes sense: Each of those people invented a product or framework that shaped how we use the Internet.

Meanwhile, in the shadows of these giants - all of whom have graduated from day-to-day grunt work - are legions of faceless developers who tap away at keyboards every day to build the products and systems we all use. In the tech world, more so than in most other industries, those employees are far from interchangeable. A great accountant might save you 5 percent on your taxes. A great baseball player will reach base just a bit more often than a mediocre baseball player. But a great software developer can do in a week what might take months for a team of 10 lesser developers - the difference is exponential rather than marginal. That's not a Jeff Dean fact; it's conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley, which is why the best companies go to such great lengths to attract top talent.

The Early Years:
Dean arrived at Google in mid-1999 having already earned a reputation as one of the country's top young computer scientists. Growing up when home computing power was just blossoming, Dean says he was always looking for ways to push the limits of what you could do on a given machine. As a high schooler, he wrote software for analyzing vast sets of epidemiological data that he says was "26 times faster" than what professionals were using at the time. The system, called Epi Info, has been adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and translated into 13 languages. And as a Ph.D. student in computer science, he worked on compilers, programs that translate source code into a language that a computer can readily execute. "I've always liked code that runs fast," he explains matter-of-factly.

But Dean has always been restless in his interests, and he didn't want to work on compilers his whole life. So he left academia and landed less than three years later at Google, which had only about 20 employees at the time. (According to Steven Levy's book "In the Plex," the search startup saw Dean as something like a prized draft pick.) After contributing some important early work to Google News and AdSense, the advertising product that would rewrite the rules of the Internet economy, he turned his attention to one of the company's core problems: scale.

Google's founding ideas came from Page and Brin, world-class developers in their own right. In the late 1990s they built PageRank, an algorithm for returning the most relevant results to a given search query. The focus on relevance put Google on a course to surpass Yahoo, AltaVista and the day's other leading search engines. But as the upstart grew in popularity, it faced a tremendous computing challenge. "We couldn't deploy machines fast enough" to keep up with demand, Dean recalls.

So Dean, working with fellow standout programmer Sanjay Ghemawat and others, did what he had done in high school with Epi Info: found software solutions to what seemed like hardware problems. Ghemawat helped lead a team that built the Google File System, which allowed for huge files to be efficiently distributed across thousands of cheap servers. Then Dean and Ghemawat developed a programming tool called MapReduce that allowed developers to efficiently process gargantuan data sets with those machines working in parallel. Much as a compiler allows a programmer to write code without worrying about the nitty-gritty of how the CPU will process it, MapReduce allowed Google's developers to tweak the search algorithm or add new computations without having to worry about how to parallelize the operation or handle equipment failures.

Dean and Ghemawat's approach was so powerful that, when they explained it to the public in a seminal 2004 research paper, it quickly became an industry standard. Today it underlies, among other things, Hadoop, the open-source framework that has helped make "big data" a buzz phrase in industries ranging from online travel to energy exploration. And while Google is beginning to move beyond MapReduce for some of its core operations, Dean says he still sees a big spike in usage when a new crop of summer interns arrives and begins working on new projects.

MapReduce is a good example of what Google co-founder Page is talking about when he talks about "10x" - doing things 10 times better, not 10 percent better than they've been done before. MapReduce didn't make one type of operation a little faster. It allowed every programmer at Google to do things they might never have attempted otherwise.

At this point, the real facts about Jeff Dean may be starting to sound a bit like fake Jeff Dean facts. Dean himself laughs at the phenomenon, calling it "a little embarrassing, but flattering too." The thing to keep in mind, he says, is that his real accomplishments are almost always the product of collaboration.

Almost every morning, he comes into work at the GooglePlex in Mountain View, Calif., and sits down for coffee with the same core group of people. "We've made 20,000 cappuccinos together" over the years, he estimates. These people don't all work together. In fact, as Google has grown, some have moved to different buildings on opposite sides of the campus. But when they get together to dish about what they're doing, their problems spark ideas in one another, Dean says. These coffee talks are what has enabled Dean to put his expertise in optimization, parallelization and software infrastructure to work on such a wide array of projects. That and healthy doses of ambition and confidence. "He's always very enthusiastic and optimistic about how much we can get done," says Ghemawat, his longtime collaborator. "It's hard to discourage him."

Google Struggling with Mobile Demand

Story first appeared on New York Times

Although Google is scrambling to meet consumers as they flock to mobile devices, the question is whether it is moving fast enough.

Investors were comforted on Tuesday when Google announced strong fourth-quarter earnings, and the stock rebounded from a dip over the last week, climbing 5 percent in after-hours trading.

But a closer look at the results shows that while Google continues to be a moneymaking machine, its most lucrative business, search on desktop computers is slowing, while Google has not yet figured out how to make equivalent profits on mobile devices.

“You would expect Google to be a key player benefiting from mobile, but that hasn’t played out in the last year,” said Jordan Rohan, a Stifel Nicolaus analyst.

The price advertisers pay Google each time someone clicks on an ad, known as cost per click or C.P.C., decreased 6 percent from the fourth quarter a year ago, falling for the fifth consecutive quarter on a yearly basis, though not as much as some analysts had feared.

The cost per click has been declining largely because advertisers pay less for mobile ads, and more people are using Google on their mobile devices and fewer on their desktop computers.

Still, Google has been trying to improve its mobile products — from developing new kinds of mobile ad campaigns to building devices like the Nexus 4 smartphone — and its executives say it is a matter of time before the numbers improve. Already, in the fourth quarter, the cost per click rose 2 percent from the previous quarter.

“We’re in some uncharted territory because of the rapid rate of change in these things, but I’m very optimistic about it,” said Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, on a conference call with analysts after the earnings were announced. “I think the C.P.C.’s will improve as the devices improve, as well.”

Mr. Page, who has had health problems related to his voice, sounded unusually weak and breathy.

Google reported revenue that was lower than analysts had expected. Google warned last week that analysts’ expectations were off target because Google sold Motorola’s set-top box division during the quarter and so did not include it in the quarterly results. Still, even including that division of Motorola, Google’s revenue would have missed expectations.

The company reported fourth-quarter revenue of $14.42 billion, an increase of 36 percent over the year-ago quarter. Net revenue, which excludes payments to the company’s advertising partners, was $11.34 billion, up from $8.13 billion. Net income rose 7 percent to $2.89 billion, or $8.62 a share.

The fourth quarter is generally Google’s brightest because it makes much of its money on retail ads that run during the holiday shopping season. This holiday season was the first that Google charged e-commerce companies to be included in its comparison shopping engine, and these so-called product listing ads contributed to its bottom line.

“Despite talk about retail having a weak season, Google’s product listing ad program has taken off quite successfully,” said Sid Shah, director of business analytics at Adobe, which handles $2 billion in annual advertising spending.

Home Depot increased mobile commerce sales by four times after using Google mobile ads, said Patrick Pichette, Google’s chief financial officer. He also cited YouTube ad revenue, saying the “Gangnam Style” video, the most-watched on record, has earned $8 million in online advertising deals. Election ad spending on Google increased five times over the 2008 election, he said.

Nonetheless, Google’s mobile challenge overhung even its usual holiday shopping sparkle. Consumers are increasingly shopping on phones and tablets, yet Google and other companies have not yet figured out how best to profit from mobile users.

One problem is that advertisers pay about half as much for an ad on a mobile device, in part because they are not yet sure how effective mobile ads can be. Another challenge is that consumers increasingly use apps, like Yelp or Kayak, to search on mobile devices instead of using Google.

And even when consumers use Google for mobile searches, they are often doing so on Apple devices like iPhones, for which Google has to pay Apple a fee. Those types of fees are large — equivalent to 25 percent of Google’s revenue in the quarter.

The shift to mobile is happening as Google’s biggest, most lucrative business — desktop search — is slowing. The share of clicks on Google results that happen on desktop computers has fallen to 73 percent from 77 percent in the last six months, while the share of clicks on tablets and smartphones has increased to 27 percent from 23 percent, according to data from Adobe.

The problem is that clicks on retail ads on tablets, for instance, cost about 16 percent less than they do on the desktop, according to Adobe. The price of clicks on retail ads on tablets rose 16 percent over the last year, but on smartphones they fell 11 percent.

As the desktop search sector slows, Google has a new search competitor to contend with: Facebook, which last week introduced a new form of personalized social search on the site.

Google has also recently become a maker of mobile devices, both by acquiring money-losing Motorola and by producing the line of Nexus devices with manufacturer partners.

In the fourth quarter, Google sold about 1.5 million Nexus phones and tablets, not including those sold by other retailers, according to estimates from JPMorgan, and has had trouble keeping supply up with demand.

Eventually, Google hopes, these various businesses will help it solve the mobile revenue riddle, but analysts say they do not expect it to happen in the near term. “You have your Motorola Android phone, get offered a local deal, go into the merchant, use Google Checkout to pay and get rewards,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners. “That’s the grand vision and it’s a nice vision, but it’s not happening in March.”

Ask.com – Do they have the answer for a strong comeback?

Story first appeared on USA Today.com

Doug Leeds wants the folks who work for him to get "really silly."

The CEO of dot-com pioneer Ask.com, he's quietly helped bring the company back from the brink by focusing on its original intention — answering questions — and allowing his employees to throw out crazy ideas during weekly improv sessions.

"One of the things that inhibited innovation was that folks wanted everything to be perfect first," he says. "We just want to get people to talk, to get every idea out, to get really silly."

One nutty idea was paying $300 million for a company that was dragging down the New York Times Co.'s earnings — About.com. About was purchased by Ask parent IAC, and is a separate unit.

Leeds believed About — which offers a place for in-depth information on everything from parenting and baby tips to how to change oil on a car — could be integrated with Ask's questions-and-answer format.

"Ask is a place to ask questions," Leeds says. "Think of it like a library. About is a great set of books the librarian shows you for more information. It's the best source of reference material on the Web, and it wasn't being utilized fully by the New York Times."

That it dragged down the Times company doesn't matter. About on Ask is the "right place for the right user mindset," he says.

Ask began in 1996 as Ask Jeeves, a different form of search engine that responded to questions. The company dropped the Jeeves part of the name in 2005. The question and answers also got ditched, but returned in 2010.

Ask is now consistently a top 10 website, according to ComScore Media Metrix. It averaged 104 million visitors in December, and was the eighth most visited site. It began 2012 with 95.7 million visitors.

Financials are growing, too. It is a part of IAC's search division, which reported revenue of $370 million in the third quarter. That's up from $258.9 million in the year-ago quarter. The search unit also includes Dictionary.com. IAC also owns Match.com, Vimeo and The Daily Beast.

Ask's share of search is a small 3%, according to ComScore, compared with 66% for market leader Google.

However, even at 3%, the search market is so large "that even a sliver is a significant business," says Greg Sterling, a senior analyst with Opus Research. "Search is still 50% of all online advertising."

Ask has thrived by sticking around. "They have a loyal core following," Sterling says. "Ask also benefits from being used as a secondary search engine."

Interviewed at Ask's towering Oakland headquarters, which dominates the skyline here, Leeds says Ask's original mission was derailed by Google, which became really popular, really fast. Ask decided to shift gears to search, too. But after some lean years, it found that consumers still preferred the question-and-answer format from Ask.

"So we went back to the basics, and it's been very successful," Leeds says.

Questions are answered by tapping into sites such as Wikipedia and Dictionary.com, internally via its own staff, and asking users to chime in and answer as well. "We're using every method the Internet has."

It's also looking to showcase more content from About.com. A question about this year's crop of American Idol judges, for instance, pops up articles about next week's premiere from People and the New York Daily News, an About.com backgrounder on all the judges from the last 11 seasons of the show, and links to other Idol related questions.

For 2013, Leeds wants to see more use of About on Ask, as well as another new acquisition, nRelate, a company that offers suggested links to queries.

"Our users want to go deeper," Leeds says. "Right now, they ask a question, we answer it, and we move on to the next question. We want to have them explore their interests further. It's about content discovery."

What will Facebook's big news be? Some contenders

originally appeared in USA Today:

Silicon Valley's latest parlor game this week is what Facebook is up to on Tuesday, when it announces news at its headquarters in nearby Menlo Park.

Anticipation of the first big news from Facebook in months has prompted investors to snap up shares and push them above $30 — though still shy of the company's IPO price of $38 in May. Facebook closed at $30.95 Monday.

The early money is on search engine-related news, given its high financial stakes. Google's share of the overall U.S. mobile ad market — 57%, compared with Facebook's 9% — is largely because of its search business.

Facebook might also make a more aggressive push into gaming or leverage its $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing site Instagram.

Other possibilities include new ad formats, mobile ad advancements and an external ad network, according to the CEO of Didit.

Facebook raked in about $4.2 billion from advertising last year — 84% of its estimated $5 billion in total revenue, according to eMarketer. Leading the charge were mobile display sales. Facebook took home about 18% of the U.S. market last year — or $339 million — besting Google's 17%.

Google took home 15% of the nearly $15 billion U.S. display ad market, with Facebook close behind.

Payments accounted for Facebook's remaining $800 million in 2012 revenue, eMarketer estimates.

Long odds are on a long-rumored smartphone announcement coming Tuesday despite mild protestations from CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a September public interview.

The mobile space is a particularly bedeviling proposition for Facebook, which has been late to the market even as Americans continue to eschew PCs for smartphones and tablets.

EMarketer estimates 70 million people in the USA regularly access Facebook from a phone — about half of Facebook's active domestic audience.

The marketplace has room for a Facebook phone, according to a telecommunications analyst that follows Facebook said in a note last week. Today, only Apple and Google are heavy hitters.

With more than 5m visitors so far, Google’s London Web Lab experiments are still going strong

originally appeared on TheNextWeb.com:

In July last year, London’s Science Museum announced Web Lab, an interesting-sounding collaborative project with Google, featuring a range of interactive Chrome experiments designed to bring the inner workings of the Web to life.

Six months into the year-long experiment, The Next Web ventured forth to get the lowdown on how things have gone so far, and what will likely become of it when the final curtain call arrives this July. And if truth be told, it was actually a good opportunity to experience the exhibition first-hand for ourselves.

But first…what exactly is Web Lab?
Web Lab: Showcasing modern browser tech

Visitors to the free exhibition have five separate experiments to get involved with. Simultaneously, online participants can also “visit” from around the world to interact with the very same installations. It’s about as close as you’ll get to a truly global exhibition. Each Web Lab experiment taps a modern Web technology to explore a specific idea that’s relevant to computer science.

But even if you can’t tell a WebSocket from HTML5 Canvas, Web Lab still demonstrates the power – and potential – of the Internet to in-museum and online visitors.

The five experiments are as follows:

Universal Orchestra

This is an Internet-powered eight-piece robotic orchestra creating harmonious music. Say wha’?

Universal Orchestra encourages people from around the world (including visitors to the museum) to play music together, using real instruments live in the museum or virtual incarnations online. You can choose from a selection of drums, temple blocks, vibraphones, marimbas and more.

The purpose of this experiment is to illustrate the power of WebSockets to enable real-time collaboration. The browser intervenes by taking the streams of notes played by everyone to transform them into pleasant music. So you don’t have to try and stay in-time with others all on your own.

Sketchbots

This was perhaps my favorite, and it certainly the most instantly awe-inspiring of all the experiments.

Sketchbots are custom-built robots that snap a photo of you, and then sketch them in sand. This image is one taken of me, and it does look reasonably accurate.

Until fairly recently, drawing images in a standard Web browser wasn’t easy to achieve without additional software. But Sketchbot helps illustrate the latest version of HTML, which includes Canvas. In a nutshell, it means you can draw whatever you like, including dynamically-rendered 3D graphics as you may see in computer games.

Data Tracer

Data Tracer is essentially a map that traces where all the world’s online information is physically stored.

You search for an item in Google, say, an image. Then you’ll see lines and dots across the map, as the search query tries to locate the closest matching item(s) and the servers they’re stored on.

This demonstrates WebGL, an advanced Web-based graphics library that’s present in many modern browsers. It enables complex online environments, and taps extra processing power on your machine’s graphics card.

Teleporter

Teleporter is a series of Web-enabled periscopes, through which you can see random scenes from around the world, including a 24-hour bakery in the US.

HTML5 and WebGL join forces here to demonstrate how far online video has come in recent times – no additional software is needed for many modern browsers.

In addition to a round-the-clock bakery in North Carolina, you also have a window into the world’s largest miniature model airport in Hamburg, and the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town.

Lab Tag Explorer

Lab Tag Explorer is a real-time visualisation of all Web Lab visitors from around the world, grouping and categorizing participants accordingly. For example, it can tell you that there are 39 online visitors based in Asia just now.

This experiment showcases V8, an open source JavaScript engine developed by Google, and which is built in to Chrome.

Every visitor to Web Lab receives a Lab Tag (see below) which represents them virtually. This Lab Tag lets visitors store and retrieve everything they create in Web Lab.

The Lab Tag Explorer visualizes all this information, transforming large swathes of data relating to Web  traffic, into pretty attractive Lab Tags that amble across a giant screen.
Lab Tag

It’s also worth mentioning the physical Lab Tags, which each visitor to the museum receives when they arrive.

Each Lab Tag has a unique pictogram, which is optically readable by any webcam and gives you access to your Lab creations and artefacts when you go home.
What’s next?

Google first approached the Science Museum about a year before it actually opened, and this is the first time such a project has been attempted. “It is quite a conceptually groundbreaking proposition, we’ve had people all over the world visit us, and people from other museums, and from Google in California and New York,” explains Dave Patten, Head of New Media at the Science Museum.

“We’ve learned lots of stuff from Google having worked with them so closely on this,” he continues. “And I hope they learned a few things from us too, given this is the first time it has put together such an exhibition.”

As for what the future holds for Web Lab, well, this hasn’t been decided yet, but it definitely won’t be continuing in London.

“We’re beginning to talk to Google about what they want to do with it at the end of the year-long phase,” says Patten. “It won’t stay here, as we have something else lined up to replace it. It may go somewhere else, possibly in a modified form, or it might become something completely different. Or, it could be a one-off, and you’ll never get a chance to see this again. I’m not averse to that happening, there’s something quite nice about an exhibition that doesn’t go past its sell-by date, and either you got to see it or you didn’t. There’s some additional value sometimes if you can do that.”

In recent months, Google has continued to push HTML5 with a series of sweet online experiments, such as Jam with Chrome, an experimental Web app that lets you play virtual instruments with friends online. So while the fate of this cool exhibition is yet to be determined, I have a funny feeling it will find a new home somewhere else, probably in the US, and possibly in New York.

With more than 5 million participants so far, including almost 200,000 visitors to the physical exhibits, Google will see this as the perfect opportunity to promote Chrome to the masses. Here’s hoping Web Lab will be coming to a museum near you in the not-too-distant future.

Google sinks $200 million into Texas wind farm

originally appeared on CNN:

You may remember Google's plot to take over the world in the coolest manner possible (with driverless cars and augmented reality glasses and the rest of the future). Well, the company apparently plans to take care of the world its taking over, since it invested $200 million in a Texas wind farm.

The Spinning Spur Wind Project in Oldham County, Texas generates the power needed for more than 60,000 homes with 70 turbines. The $200 million Google sunk into the project wasn't just to help out, though.

"We look for projects like Spinning Spur because, in addition to creating more renewable energy and strengthening the local economy, they also make for smart investments," Kojo Ako-Asare, Google's senior manager of corporate finance, wrote.

It makes a lot of sense, especially when you begin considering how much energy Google itself uses. Greenpeace estimates Google's eight current and planned serve farms use about 476 megawatts of electricity when operating at full capacity. That's the amount it would take to power every house in San Diego. Though Google claims it never works at full capacity, this number is kind of insane.

So Spinning Spur might have implications beyond being green. It's the tenth green energy investment Google's made since 2010. The company's sunk about $1 billion into green energy.

The New Google Contacts Integrates Voice And Brings In Voice SMS And Calls

originally appeared on makeuseof.com:

Google is giving Contacts a makeover. Google Voice Contacts is being integrated into Contacts for a more seamless user experience. Very soon you will be able to use Google Contacts alone to place calls and send voice SMS. The thought behind the new layout appears to be an attempt at unification of the multiple points for managing your Google Contacts.

Google has many different products and some like Gmail, Google Chat, Google Voice, and Google+ can be used to add and remove contacts. A common interface for managing all of that makes sense.

Google says that the feature is being rolled out gradually, but you can try out it out at  google.com/contacts. The Google Support page also lists the simple steps to access the Call and SMS buttons for the person you want to get through to. For a particular contact, simply hover over the phone number field on their contact card and then select either the phone icon or the SMS icon.