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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Amazon Reports Lower-Than-Expected Sales

Amazon.com posted weaker-than-expected earnings on Thursday, punctuated by a steep decline in its flagship business of selling media products like books, music and DVDs.

Amazon, based in Seattle, said its net profit fell 10 percent, to $142 million, or 32 cents a share, in its second quarter, from $158 million, or 37 cents a share, in the quarter a year earlier. Revenue climbed 14 percent, to $4.65 billion, coming in slightly below Wall Street’s expectations.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters on average had expected $4.67 billion in revenue and earnings of 32 cents a share. A charge for a $51 million legal settlement to Toys “R” Us depressed the company’s profit.

Shares of Amazon fell more than $6, or nearly 7 percent, in after-hours trading. It more than doubled in the last eight months as investors applauded the company’s ability to navigate the recession.

“People had looked at their recent performance and assumed that Amazon was, relatively speaking, exempt from the current downturn,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. Amazon’s quarter “was by any measure a good performance, but expectations had gotten ahead of themselves,” he said.

For some analysts, the most worrisome indicator was a sharp falloff in Amazon’s media sales in North America. The company’s original business of selling books, CDs and DVDs showed no growth in the second quarter over the prior year, after posting 15.6 percent growth in all of 2008. Worldwide media sales grew only 1 percent, while worldwide sales of electronics and general merchandise grew 35 percent. 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

Connecting the Dots Isn’t Enough

This interview with Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive of Adobe Systems, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. What’s the most important leadership lesson you’ve learned?

A. I really honed a lot of my leadership skills and style at Apple. I worked for Apple for many years, and I had a mentor, Gursharan Sidhu, from whom I learned just a tremendous amount.

I think two leadership lessons really stand out for me. He forced me to think about doing things that I did not think were possible. Challenging individuals by setting goals and then letting them use their ingenuity to accomplish them is something that I hope I can pass on as part of my leadership style. If you set a common vision and then get really scary-smart people, they do things that amaze you.

The other aspect of being a good manager has always been getting gratification from what others do, because the higher you get in management, frankly, the less you do yourself.

Q. How do you make sure goals are calibrated properly?

A. I like to say that if you can connect all the dots between what you see today and where you want to go, then it’s probably not ambitious enough or aspirational enough. On the other hand, if people look at it and say there is no way that’s going to happen, then it’s probably a little too much. So it’s a balance. Read more…

Some of resources: Internet Marketing Services, CAD Services

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

Cummins Eyes IT Spend Down to Individuals

The recession has not been bad for everyone. Take Floyd Rutan. Life is good for the executive director of business services at engine maker Cummins Inc., even though he is the person who delivers the IT bill for services rendered at his company.
The business services division is responsible for IT infrastructure including PCs, networks, storage, hosting, and cell phones delivered to business units at the $14.3 billion company. Most companies bill business units for tech services, but Cummins is now detailing its bills to the most precise level possible, to usage by individual users.

This detail gives business unit customers a clear view into the actual cost of deploying and maintaining their services, but it also invites scrutiny of the bill for those services.

“All of a sudden everybody is an expert on what that cost ought to be,” said Rutan. A user, for instance, may want to know just why that PC cost a lot more than the one now on sale at Best Buy. (The bill is not just for the hardware, but for all services and support that are part of it, explains Rutan.)

But this method has also given customers new control over their costs. Every decision they make, such as getting rid of unnecessary software licenses, paying attention to storage growth, and even canceling a cell phone, can help the budget. Read more…

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The Debate Over Publishing Stolen Twitter Documents

The Web has been buzzing over confidential Twitter documents that a hacker stole and sent to some blogs after breaking into Twitter’s corporate network.

The incident has raised age-old questions about the ethics of publishing confidential material, questions that have taken new twists in the age of blogs.
TechCrunch, one of the blogs that received the confidential material, is working closely with Twitter as it determines which pieces of information to publish, said Michael Arrington, TechCrunch’s founder.

“It is within our ethical obligation to help Twitter” in this situation, Mr. Arrington said in interview. He is protecting the identity of his source, the hacker, but is assisting Twitter in other ways “to help them mitigate the damages” that could come as a result of sharing personal documents, he said.

He has sent Twitter all the documents he received and is trying to put Twitter in direct contact with the hacker, he said.

The hacker, who calls himself “Hacker Croll,” sent TechCrunch a zip file Tuesday with 310 private files from inside Twitter. They include business-related documents like financial projections and discussions of competitive threats and potential acquisitions. They also include personal information, like meal preferences and phone call logs of Twitter employees.

In an interview Wednesday, Mr. Arrington said he has been involved in two separate debates. The first is legal. He said that he has lawyers analyzing laws that cover trade secrets and the receipt of stolen goods, but that he did not want to discuss the legal issues any further.

The other debate, he said, is ethical. He decided not to publish embarrassing personal information, including call logs and a record of people who interviewed for jobs at Twitter. Read more…

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Hacker Exposes Private Twitter Documents

Twitter, which is generally quite private about its business plans, has fallen prey to an attack by a hacker who has apparently exposed confidential corporate information.

The hacker claims to have private documents including confidential contracts with Nokia, Samsung, Dell, AOL and Microsoft; the resumes of people who have applied to work at Twitter; personal information about Twitter employees including credit card numbers; future business plans; and floor plans and security codes for Twitter’s offices.

The breach occurred in May, but on Wednesday, the hacker, who calls himself “Hacker Croll,” leaked a large number of documents unearthed in the attack to TechCrunch and a French blog called Korben. TechCrunch said it received 310 documents.

One internal document the hacker claims to have includes projections that Twitter will have 25 million users this year, 100 million next year and 350 million in 2011, and will eventually become the first Web service to have 1 billion users.

The hacker apparently broke into the Internet accounts of various Twitter employees, including Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive, as well as Mr. Williams’s wife, who does not work for Twitter, and two Twitter employees. He claims to have accessed Google Apps, Gmail, PayPal, Amazon, Apple, AT&T and MobileMe accounts.

Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders, wrote on the company blog Wednesday that the hacker broke into an administrative employee’s personal e-mail account and from there gained access to the employee’s Google Apps account, where Twitter shares calendars, spreadsheets and documents with ideas and financial details. Read more…

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BingTweets: Microsoft Launches a Twitter Search Engine

Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own full-blown Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing, Microsoft’s new and increasingly popular search engine. The result is an interesting hybrid product that puts Bing’s search results at the center of the experience, while the real-time Twitter feed appears in a sidebar on the left. The top of the page features a list of trending topics, which are quite interesting, as BingTweets separates them out by popular terms, as well as by popular people, places, and products.
Disclosure: Federated Media is a ReadWriteWeb advertising partner.

Microsoft started to integrate some Twitter search results in the main Bing search engine a few weeks ago, but these were only from very popular Twitter users. Interestingly, BingTweets will run on its own Bingtweets.com domain, and, as far as we can see, isn’t linked to from the main Bing site. For now, it’s a completely separate entity, but chances are the Microsoft is already experimenting with other ways to incorporate more Twitter search results into Bing.

This is Federated Media’s second Twitter project together with Microsoft. The first was the launch of ExecTweets, a site that allowed users to find, follow, and engage business executives on Twitter. Read more…

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