Category Archives: Google

Court rejects Google Books settlement

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Significant setback in Google’s path to world domination. CNET News reports that

Adding another chapter to a long, drawn-out legal saga, a New York federal district court has rejected the controversial settlement in a class-action suit brought against Google Books by the Authors Guild, a publishing industry trade group.

“While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA would simply go too far,” a court document explains. “It would permit this class action–which was brought against defendant Google Inc. to challenge its scanning of books and display of ‘snippets’ for on-line searching–to implement a forward-looking business arrangement that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners. Indeed, the ASA (Amended Settle Agreement) would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.”

The settlement would grant Google the right to display excerpts of out-of-print books, even if they are not in the public domain or authorized by publishers to appear in Google Books. When the settlement was initially announced in mid-2009, opposition flooded in from lawyers on behalf of Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a coalition called the Open Book Alliance who decried it as anticompetitive.

“Google and the plaintiff publishers secretly negotiated for 29 months to produce a horizontal price fixing combination, effected and reinforced by a digital book distribution monopoly,” a lawyer for the Open Book Alliance said at the time. “Their guile has cleared much of the field in digital book distribution, shielding Google from meaningful competition.”

Bad language?

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Google has converted its wonderful web-based Google Translate into a native iOS app for iPhone, with voice input for 15 languages and support for speaking results in 23 languages.

So I downloaded and installed it on my phone. It invited me to speak, so I requested a translation of the following sentence: “I am wondering what you think of President Sarkozy”.

The phone thought for a moment, and then replied: Je me demandez ce que vous pensez de sucer president ####”.

Hmmm…

Wanted: more subversive innovation

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This morning’s Observer column.

For hardcore geeks, the WikiLeaks saga should serve as a stimulant to a new wave of innovation which will lead to a new generation of distributed, secure technologies (like the TOR networking system used by WikiLeaks) which will enable people to support movements and campaigns that are deemed subversive by authoritarian powers. A really good example of this kind of technological innovation was provided last week by Google engineers, who in a few days built a system that enabled protesters in Egypt to send tweets even though the internet in their country had been shut down. “Like many people”, they blogged, “we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we can do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.”

They worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow (a company Google recently acquired) to build the system. It provides three international phone numbers and anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail. The tweets appear on twitter.com/speak2tweet.

What’s exciting about this kind of development is that it harnesses the same kind of irrepressible, irreverent, geeky originality that characterised the early years of the internet, before the web arrived and big corporations started to get a grip on it. Events in Egypt make one realise how badly this kind of innovation is needed.

LATER: Useful post about how to ensure that your domain names aren’t snaffled by the Feds.

Google extends definition of ‘docs’ to include video

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Hmmm… Just read this. Google’s encouraging me to upload my video files to Docs. Uploaded video files can be up to 1 GB.

These are the most common video formats that you can upload and play:

* WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)

* .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files – (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)

* .AVI (many cameras use this format – typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)

* .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)

* .WMV

* .FLV (Adobe – FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

I can understand why people might want to use Docs for private videos, or ones to which they wish to restrict access to selected friends and family. But for public stuff, why not use YouTube — also a Google property?

Old Europe takes on Google

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The news that the EU has decided to investigate whether Google is abusing its dominance of the market for internet searches naturally led your columnist to type "Google abuses market dominance" into, well, Google. In 0.19 seconds it reported 4.4 million results.

The same query typed into Bing, Microsoft's search engine, produced only 362,000 hits. On the other hand, typing "Microsoft abuses market dominance" into Bing produced only 218,000 results, whereas the same query produced 665,000 results in Google. From which we can draw two conclusions. The first is that the algorithmic machinations of search engines, like the Peace of God, passeth all understanding. The second is that the EU is about to spend a few years, and several million euros, coming to the same conclusion…

This morning’s Observer column.

What the EU doesn’t get about Google: it’s a SEARCH engine

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Lovely, sarcastic piece by Danny Sullivan about the EU’s attitude towards Google.

I did a search at Google today for “cars” and was shocked. Rather than list links allowing me to search for “cars” on Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Voila, Naver and Yandex, Google instead favored its own search results. I’m glad the EU will be investigating whether this favoritism violates anti-trust laws….

Facebook, Google and the battle for the inbox

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This morning’s Observer column.

The trouble with email, as the parent of every teenager knows, is that it’s so, well … yesterday. I mean to say, you have to think of a “subject” and whether you’re going to start the message with “Dear” or “Hi!” or “Yo!”. And then there’s the problem of what you put at the end: “See you!” or “xxx” or “Gotta go…” And don’t even mention the issue of the ‘signature’ at the end of the message – you know, “Sent from my iPhone” and all that. And on top of that, there’s the fact that email isn’t synchronous. You could send a message and the other person might not see it for, well, at least five minutes.

Hopeless.

This is the context in which Facebook’s latest ‘messages’ initiative needs to be seen…

Richard Harper — whose new book I am enjoying — also has a nice piece about communications overload in the paper this morning. His conclusion:

Zuckerberg’s announcement has hit a nerve – but not because of the number of messages we now receive. It’s because his announcement is asking us to think about who we want to be and how we convey that through our communications. These are human questions, not technical ones, and all the more important because of it.

Geek talent wars

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Apparently, Facebook is now paying engineers more than Google. And BusinessInsider reports that it seems to be worrying the search giant.

Google offering $100,000 cash bonuses is so last summer. Now it’s apparently offering seven-figure stock payouts to keep engineers from defecting

Last week it was $3.5 million. This week, All Things D reports that one engineer ended a bidding war by taking a $6 million stock grant.

We’ve seem talent wars like this before. Microsoft was sued back in 1997 for poaching employees from database company Borland. Google returned the favor last decade, causing Steve Ballmer throw a chair across the room. Now, Google is trying its hardest not to end up on the losing end as the cycle repeats itself.

In the past, this kind of thing was usually a symptom of a bubble. Why should it be any different now?

Android’s fragmentation problem

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One of my boys has recently adopted my Android phone after his 6-year-old Motorola handset finally gave up the ghost, and it’s been interesting to observe his reactions. On the one hand, he’s charmed by finally having a handheld device that connects properly to the Net and the Web. But his experiences with Android Apps mirror mine, namely that there not much quality control, great variability and many Apps won’t work with lots of handsets. In fact, he’s experiencing the problems that finally drove me to get an iPhone.

What he hasn’t experienced yet, though, is the maddening control-freakery of the mobile carriers in relation to updating the OS on the handset. First of all, they accept no responsibility for the OS; and secondly, even when they grudgingly offer some upgrade facility, it’s often flaky and sometimes requires serious geek skills to implement. A friend of my daughter’s has the same Android handset (a t-mobile Pulse) and when I asked her what version of the OS it was running she said “I think it’s 2 point something”. Surprised (because she is not in the least geeky), I asked her how she’d done the upgrade from the version 1.5 that’s running on my handset. She replied that her brother — who is an engineering student and a real geek — does the upgrades for her. But then she added: “the only problem is that it crashes a bit after he’s done the upgrade”.

Dan Gillmor has an interesting piece in Salon.com in which he explores some of these issues.

The first problem, as I noted in a recent post, is that Google has given the mobile carriers nearly total control over the phones they sell — including the software. In the process, they’re taking Android — an open-source operating system when it gets to the carrier — and turning it into an operating system that removes user choice, by adding software that locks down the devices in ways that are even worse, in some respects, than the famous Apple control-freakery. At least Apple doesn’t load crapware — mostly unwanted, unneeded and un-removable software — onto the iPhone and iPad, as the carriers are doing with their Android devices. This has forced users to jailbreak their Android phones, a perversion of the very idea of openness.

We’ve seen the consequences of mixing manufacturer control-freakery with open source OSs already in the Netbook market, with every vendor offering its own infuriating version of Linux Lite. I’m tired of having to clear the disk of every Netbook I try in order to install Ubuntu. But at least the Ubuntu people take responsibility for their distribution, and they’re very helpful in relation to different brands of Netbook. Google should do the same for Android.