Advocates Ask Google for Privacy Guarantees in Online Library

Three advocacy groups have asked Google to commit to protect the privacy of readers in its book search service, which is poised for a major expansionunder a pending class-action settlement. The groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Libert ies Union and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, have asked Google to limit the data it collects about users’ reading habits, to commit to protect reader records by handing them over only in response to subpoenas or court orders, and to put into effect measures giving users control of their data.

The groups made the requests in a letter to Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. In an accompanying blog post, the groups are urging people to send e-mail messages to Mr. Schmidt demanding privacy protections.

“We’ve asked that Google only respond to legitimate warrants when the government comes calling, for example, and we’ve asked that they not share your private reading data with third parties without your permission, among other things,” the groups wrote.

On its public policy blog, Google said it shared many of the privacy goals raised by the advocacy groups. But Google also said that its expanded book search service would not be built until an landmark settlement of a copyright class action filed by authors and publishers is approved by a court. (That settlement, which will allow Google to build an expansive digital library, has attracted criticism and is currently being scrutinized by the Justice Department for possible antitrust problems.) Because the service has yet to be built, it was premature to draft a detailed privacy policy it, the company said. Read more…

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Daring to Dream of a Resurgent AOL

Shortly after Tim Armstrong took over as chief executive of AOL, he asked to see the list of business deals that were being negotiated. He saw 900 of them.

It was too many by far. “If you looked through the deal sheet, would you have been able to see the strategy of the company?” he asked. “I had a hard time.”

The deals were small and incremental. At best, he said, “you would have thought it was a small- to medium-size Internet company.”

Mr. Armstrong wants AOL to think big again. Three months after leaving a senior job as Google’s president of advertising sales, he is formulating his ambitious recovery plan for AOL. He wants to make AOL the biggest creator of premium content on the Web and the largest seller of online display advertising.

Mr. Armstrong plans to outline his five-point strategy on Friday for the company at an all-hands meeting under a large tent on its half-empty campus near Dulles International Airport outside Washington. Beyond talking about business lines, however, Mr. Armstrong’s primary challenge is to address what he calls AOL’s “crisis of confidence.” He wants the weary and beaten-down company to grow again. Read more…

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EBay Plans to Ride PayPal Business to Greater Profit

SAN FRANCISCO — EBay made its name as the biggest shopping site on the Web. But now, as its e-commerce business slows, it hopes to become the biggest online payments provider on the Web through its PayPal service.

If John J. Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, has his way, PayPal will soon become the way that people pay for everything they buy on the Web or on their mobile phones. On Thursday, eBay is scheduled to announce its plans to open the PayPal platform to developers who want to build applications that use PayPal’s technology.

EBay’s payments business, which consists of PayPal and Bill Me Later, has become the company’s growth engine as e-commerce sales decline.

On Wednesday, eBay reported that net income in the second quarter, ended June 30, fell 29 percent to $327 million, or 25 cents a share, from $460 million, or 35 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Revenue fell 4 percent, to $2.1 billion from $2.2 billion.

But eBay’s online payments business posted $669 million in revenue, an 11 percent jump.

In an interview, Mr. Donahoe said that opening up PayPal platform could transform the online payments marketplace. “No other global payments platform, online or offline, has been able to open up to third-party developers. And the effect on PayPal will be very comparable to the effect on the iPhone — we’ll see the exponential innovation and growth that comes with it as you release the creativity of those developers.” Read more…

Some of resources: Internet Marketing Services, CAD Services

IBM Fires Juniper-Loaded Salvo at Cisco

IBM said today it will resell switches and routers made by Juniper under the IBM brand to compliment Big Blue’s server products aimed at data centers.The move is a direct response to Cisco’s creation of its own brand of servers it calls the Unified Computing System, as well as efforts by Hewlett-Packard to bring that company’s ProCurve networking gear closer to its servers. They’re all part of a larger attempt to keep pushing the boundaries of virtualization beyond hardware and into the network itself.

Virtualizing the network, or creating a network fabric, is the next big trend in data centers. Once the servers are virtualized the hardware is separated from the software running on it. However, when the time comes for that software to access the network, it is once again tied down to physical infrastructure — limited by the the cables that attach the server to a switch or the storage network. That means the network becomes a bottleneck in highly virtualized environments. But in many cases, by adding software and some gear to virtualize the network, a data center operator can reduce manual intervention and cut costs while increasing performance. For more on this see my article over at GigaOM Pro (subscription required). Read more…

Some of resources: Internet Marketing Services, Freelance Projects USA

Earnings Climb Nearly 8% at Yahoo

SAN FRANCISCO — Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s chief executive, is known for peppering her public presentations with the odd expletive or two. But her conference call Tuesday to discuss Yahoo’s second-quarter financial results was entirely family-friendly. Then again, Ms. Bartz did not have much to swear about.

Yahoo’s revenue declined 13 percent in the second quarter as advertisers continued to reduce spending in the downturn. But cost-cutting initiatives helped to soften the blow, and profits climbed nearly 8 percent, beating analysts’ expectations.

Yahoo also said that it planned a new round of investment in products and a rebranding campaign, which would lead to a drop in profit in the current quarter. Investors reacted by sending shares down nearly 3 percent in after-hours trading.

“Over all, the long and protracted turnaround process continues,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “We don’t see a catalyst that is going to turn things around soon.”

Yahoo continues to discuss a search and advertising partnership with Microsoft that would create a more viable rival to Google. The talks have intensified recently, according to people briefed on them.

Both companies have declined to discuss their talks publicly and, for the first time since Ms. Bartz became chief executive in January, analysts did not ask her about them. Read more…

Some of resources: Internet Marketing Services, CAD Services

Sales Drive Robust Quarter for Apple

SAN FRANCISCO — While earnings have faltered at other electronics companies, unexpectedly strong sales of Macintosh computers and a surge in iPhone purchases pushed Apple’s profit up 15 percent in the third quarter, the company said Tuesday.

“We’re making our most innovative products ever and our customers are responding,” Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive, said in a statement.

Apple recorded its best nonholiday quarter ever when other electronics makers were hurting because of a downturn in consumer spending. According to various estimates, PC shipments for the industry fell 3 to 5 percent over the last three months. But Apple said it sold 2.6 million Macs in the quarter, up about 18 percent from the 2.2 million it sold in the previous quarter, which ended March 28.

Apple said Mac sales were helped in June by updates to its line of MacBook Pro laptops, which got new features like longer battery life and a price reduction of $300, or 25 percent, from the previously least expensive Pro model. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, said the company saw an “acceleration of sales” after the introduction, which he said had led to some inventory shortages.

About half of Mac buyers in Apple’s own retail stores had never owned a Mac before, said Mr. Cook.

Shaw Wu, an analyst at Kaufman Brothers, said that Macintosh computers were “resonating with increasing number of customers, as it is arguably the best platform for what people do today, which includes Web surfing and creating and managing content.” Read more…

Some of resources: Internet Marketing Services, CAD Services

Are Microsoft and Yahoo Close to a Search Ad Deal Again?

Today, a number of rumors about a potential partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft surfaced once again. Almost a year ago, after months of back and forth between Microsoft and Yahoo, we thought any deal between the two companies was finally off the table, but rumors about potential deals continued to bubble up regularly in the last few months. Now, some news outlets are reporting that the two companies may be close to signing a partnership agreement that would allow them to collaborate on search technology and advertising. Bloomberg’s Dina Bass, citing anonymous sources, reports that a deal could be finalized within the next two weeks.

None of these sources, however, seem to be very clear about the exact details of the deal. With Bing, Microsoft has developed a product that can compete head-to-head with Google’s search engine. Yet, even though Bing is slowly gaining ground and now has more than 10% of the search market according to some sources, overcoming Google’s inertia would a very difficult challenge for any competitor, and a partnership with Yahoo could double Bing’s market share over night. For Yahoo, there is also an incentive to make a deal now, as Bing is likely to steal at least some market share away from Yahoo. Read more…

Some of resources: CAD Services, Handwriting Experts

Twittergate: “Most Difficult Part of Web 2.0 Security Is the Human”

The release of Twitter’s internal documents overnight by a hacker is a potent reminder of how much information we store in the cloud and how vulnerable that data is.

Furthermore, it raises questions about Twitter’s security practices, given that the break-in didn’t happen because of a complicated hacking strategy, but because the hacker got the right answers to password reset questions. Twitte co-founder Biz Stone stressed that the attack didn’t compromise any Twitter accounts and was instead a personal hit on an administrative employee’s and Ev Williams’ wife’s accounts. Twitter said it has performed a security audit and has reminded employees of personal security guidelines.

Although Twitter is largely known as a public platform where people communicate openly, it’s also become a substitute for instant messaging or short e-mails with the direct message function. People use direct message, or “DM” for short, to schedule meet-ups in new cities or to solicit answers to questions from followers.

Twitter has also become an important brand management and marketing tool for companies, so a break-in could leave a company open to potentially destructive tweets to customers. In January, this happened to 33 high-profile accounts, including those belonging to Barack Obama and CNN’s Rick Sanchez.

So what can you do to protect yourself? The difficult part of Web 2.0 security isn’t actually the technical side. It’s the human, said David Marcus, director of security, research & communications at security software maker McAfee. Read more…

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Pengiun FB: A Truce Offering or Trojan Horse From Facebook to Twitter?

Now this is interesting. Facebook, which at one point a few months ago seemed set on becoming Twitter, might now be experimenting with a way of making its service work rather smoothly with the microblogging service. Earlier today, Inside Facebook spotted a tweet from Facebook developer Blake Ross, who said “test” from a service called “penguin fb” (he’s since taken it down).

Facebook has gone around saying that it sees itself and Twitter as two distinct services — so that point at least seems to be bearing out.

The company isn’t commenting at this point, so we’re left to speculate. Inside Facebook suggests that Facebook could be working on a new way of sending status updates to Twitter from Facebook, thereby making itself the overnight single largest site for sending out tweets. Right now, you can only send tweets into Facebook using Twitter’s sometimes-broken Twitter application for Facebook, or another third party app like TweetPo.st (which displays the name of Twitter users within tweets on Facebook, instead of just your @username Twitter handle.)

What does it mean if Facebook is making itself a sort of third-party Twitter client? One is that it is acknowledging Twitter’s current centrality on the web. The second is that it might hope to slough off the users who are using Facebook in lieu of Twitter for the kind of microblogging that Twitter excels at. Anecdotal evidence suggests Facebook users who are not already Twitter users are relying on Facebook for sending and receiving status updates. For many people, Facebook is the main way they communicate things like photos with family and friends. Even many very serious Twitter users (like Twitter investor Fred Wilson) prefer to use Twitter for broadcasting and talking with the public, but still use Facebook for their personal lives. Other Twitter-focused clients, like desktop client Tweetdeck, are beginning to acknowledge this half-overlap between the two services by letting you post messages to both Twitter and Facebook, and letting you read friends’ status updates from both services. Read more…

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A Book and a Network: Inspiration for Personal Branding Success

Personal branding, whether you like the term or not, is something every web worker should consider. Don’t look at it as marketing or packaging yourself, but more as being true to yourself. Micheal Port’s book, “Book Yourself Solid” makes that distinction very well, while the Food Network demonstrates exactly how to make it work for you and your business.
Michael Port’s concept of personal branding starts with his belief that, “When you work with clients you love, you’ll truly enjoy the work you’re doing; you’ll love every minute of it. And when you love every minute of the work you do, you’ll do your best work, which is essential to [booking] yourself solid. Second, because you are your clients; they are an expression and an extension of you.”

The cornerstone of his philosophy is that “the greatest strategy for personal and business development on the planet is bold self-expression,” and many successful personal brands have used this very strategy to rise to the top.

The Food Network is filled with great examples of personal branding success stories using the “bold self-expression” strategy, and while the brands are very unique, they all attract their individual audiences by being exactly one thing — themselves.

Take three of the popular Food Network personal brands: Rachel Ray, Paula Deen and Emeril Lagasse. They each have individual flare and have used that individuality to create tremendous personal success. Read more…

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