Remember that Google Super Bowl search ad that your girlfriends and wives thought was really cute and clever? Well, Google recently unveiled a new widget that allows you to create your own Search Stories ads. You know, a string of related Google searches that are woven together to create a story.
To kick off the long offseason, why not take some time and create your own Georgia Tech-themed Google search story? Leave your videos in the comments section. If we get enough submissions, we might be able to put them to a vote to determine the best GT-related Search Story.
http://www.fromtherumbleseat.com/2010/4/16/1425625/georgia-tech-themed-google-searches
Welcome to The Next Web Network’s Weekly Recap. Make sure to check out this week’s podcast where we discuss the biggest stories of the week. Also, the deadline to grab your tickets to The Next Web Conference 2010 in Amsterdam (April 27 – 29) is fast approaching.
This week was all about Chirp, Twitter’s first official conference. At Chirp Twitter unveiled it’s long awaited monetization strategy as well as a bunch of new product announcements. Google also made a variety of product announcements as well as posting strong Q1 results. This week we also announced the finalists for The Next Web Paypal X Startup Rally 2010.
http://thenextweb.com/2010/04/18/tnw-network-weekly-recap-twitter-chirp-announcements/
In the past week, Google has been noticeably absent from a growing debate about the future of a net neutrality policy being proposed by the Federal Communications Commission and the agency’s role over broadband services.
Last week, a company spokesperson declined to comment on how it believes the FCC should proceed after a federal court threw the commission’s role over broadband services into doubt. Google has been a leading corporate advocate of net neutrality rules at the FCC.
The company is expected to say more over the following days but has in recent weeks sent mixed messages. On the one hand, media counsel Rick Whitt told the FCC’s general counsel, Austin Schlick, that the agency needed to “build a complete legal and evidentiary record to confirm the agency’s oversight authority, whether under Title I, Title II, Title VI, or other pertinent provisions.”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/04/in_the_last_week_google.html
Google has made its first British acquisition, buying Plink, a company founded four months ago by Oxford University PhD students Mark Cummins and James Philbin.
Plink’s first product is PlinkArt, a visual recognition app for mobile that analyses pictures of well-known artworks and paintings and identifies them. Users can then share the photo with friends and also click through to buy a poster version.
Since launching four months ago, PlinkArt has attracted 50,000 users.
Plink, which was a finalist at Mini Seedcamp London, the competition for European startups, was recently awarded a $100,000 prize from Google after winning a public vote on the best reference app on Android, Google’s mobile platform.
http://realbusiness.co.uk/internet_business/google_buys_british_tech_startup_plink
SAN FRANCISCO — This year, Netflix made what looked like a peculiar choice: the DVD-by-mail company decided that over the next two years, it would move most of its Web technology — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — over to the computer servers of one of its chief rivals, Amazon.com.
Enlarge This Image
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Kevin McEntee, vice president of engineering at Netflix, pointing, and Santosh Rau, cloud system manager. Netflix is using Amazon’s network, freeing it to focus on its movie business.
Amazon, like Netflix, wants to deliver movies to people’s homes over the Internet. But the online retailer, based in Seattle, has lately gained traction with a considerably more ambitious effort: the business of renting other companies the remote use of its technology infrastructure so they can run their computer operations. In the parlance of technophiles, they would operate “in the cloud.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/technology/19cloud.html?src=me
"It has gone as we expected," said Schmidt at a meeting of the American Society of News Editors.
"Google is an unusual company," said Schmidt, adding that other tech firms in Silicon Valley probably had a range of opinions about Google's decision to publicly report hacking attacks, and opting to end its censorship of its Chinese service.
"We were able to make a decision based on principle," he said, adding that he was unsure what the end result would be.
"It is a battle," he said. "We know that there is a reasonably large group of people in China who are seeking non-censored information."
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B0E420100412
Google is busy waging wars on two fronts.
The Mountain View search giant has its sights set on Apple's iPhone in the cell phone market. On the application and operating system front, Microsoft is its main target.
Google's Android cell phone operating system is a direct competitor to Apple's iPhone, and soon Google will be powering tablet PCs that compete with Apple's new iPad. While there are differences between Android and the iPhone operating system, both have a similar look and feel. One major difference today is that Google's OS can run more than one program at a time while the iPhone can only run one program (except for certain Apple applications). This will change, however, as Apple releases its iPhone OS 4.0 update in the summer.
But Apple isn't alone in facing competition from the search giant. Google on Tuesday introduced updates to its Google Docs suite of Web-based programs that make them more compatible and more competitive with Microsoft Office.
http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_14877258?nclick_check=1
Google and Advanced Micro Devices shares dropped sharply Friday after earnings reports from the Silicon Valley tech companies fell short of investors' high hopes.
Mountain View Internet giant Google finished at $550.31, down $44.99, or 7.6 percent. After the stock markets closed Thursday afternoon, Google reported profit for its most recent quarter of $1.96 billion, up 37 percent year over year. Revenue climbed 23 percent to $6.77 billion.
Even though the results beat Wall Street forecasts, analysts were concerned that Google was increasing spending too quickly. Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said Google intends to "remain committed to heavy investment in innovation — both to spur future growth in our core and emerging businesses." He said the company has added 800 employees so far this year.
http://www.mercurynews.com/business-headlines/ci_14899037?nclick_check=1
"As we discussed on Friday, the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland has led to flights being canceled across the EU. With travel chaos ensuing and the airlines losing an estimated $200 million per day, EU authorities are coming under increasing pressure to re-open the airways. Test flights conducted on Saturday were apparently successful, with no problems encountered during flight. Following the test flights, Peter Hartman, CEO of KLM, said, 'We hope to receive permission as soon as possible after that to start up our operation and to transport our passengers to their destinations.' Evidence possibly opposing this move comes from the Finnish Defense Forces, which released photos and a statement after F-18 Hornets flew through the ash cloud, saying, 'Based on the pictures, it was discovered that even short flights in ash dust may cause significant damage to an airplane's engine.' Is it safe to resume flights so soon, or should planes remain grounded until the ash cloud has dissipated?"
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/18/1435200/EU-Conducts-Test-Flights-To-Assess-Impact-of-Volcanic-Ash-On-Aircraft
"More than three weeks after the release of The Settlers 7, with the controversial 'always on-line' DRM, a lot of people still can't connect to Ubisoft's DRM servers. The forum threads where people can post if they are unable to connect keep growing daily. One reason for the lack of fixes or responses from support seems to be that the people responsible were on vacation during the Easter holiday, despite the promise of 24/7 monitoring of the servers. The moral of this story seems to be that it is a bad idea to buy a game just before a major holiday."
http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/04/18/1452221/Ubisoft-DRM-Problems-Remain-Unsolved
"Jonathan Corbet recently pointed out at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that the Linux kernel team was getting older and not attracting young developers. This article suggests the Linux kernel no longer has the same appeal to young open source developers that it did 10 years ago. Could it be that the massive code base and declining sense of community from corporate involvement has driven young open source programmers elsewhere?"
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/04/18/1557220/Why-Linux-Is-Not-Attracting-Young-Developers
"Alan D. Mutter writes in his journalism blog 'Relections of a Newsosaur' that some newspapers exploit bereaved families with exorbitantly priced death notices — a distasteful and strategically inept way for them to try to make ends meet. 'I stumbled across the problem this week when I tried to buy a death notice in... the San Francisco Chronicle, which proposed charging $450 for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death notice,' writes Mutter. But lose the death notice business, and newspapers risk losing a huge audience driver as well. The solution may be partnering with websites like Legacy.com, a site that already publishes death notices for about two-thirds of the people who die each day in the US. 'It may not be easy to figure out the terms of a broader collaboration, writes Rich Gordon on Poynter.org, 'partly because some newspaper executives are wary of Legacy and feel the company could become a competitive threat for audiences and revenue. But this is exactly the reaction many newspaper executives had to collaborating with Internet companies in other classified advertising categories. I'd hate to see newspapers make the same mistake with death notices and obituaries.'"
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/18/1825206/Newspaper-Death-Notices-May-Be-a-Dying-Business
"A mat of microbes the size of Greece has been discovered on the sea floor off the Pacific coast of South America. 'These tiny creatures can join together to create some of the largest masses of life on the planet... A single liter of seawater, once thought to contain about 100,000 microbes, can actually hold more than one billion microorganisms...'"
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/04/18/1842220/Microbe-Mat-the-Size-of-Greece-Discovered-In-the-Sea
"[Three years ago] I was very excited about Apache Wicket as the way to develop line of business applications with a domain model, CRUD [create-read-update-delete] screens for maintaining the model, and in the most interesting cases, doing something else useful besides. I still like Wicket. It has, as its website says a small conceptual surface area.' It reminds me of python in that 'You try something it usually just works.' In many respects, though, Wicket seems to be at the wrong level of abstraction for the for the sorts of line of business applications described above. If your team is spending any time at all writing code to produce listing, filtering, and sorting behavior, not to mention creating CRUD screens and the back end logic for these operations, they are probably working at the wrong level of abstraction. ... Recently I did a small project using Grails and was quite pleased. Grails uses groovy, a dynamic language compatible with Java and is based on the proven technologies that I know and love well: Spring, Hibernate, SiteMesh, Maven, etc. ... I get all the power of the Java ecosystem without the fustiness and lack of expressivity of the core language (no more getters and setters, ever!)."
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/04/18/2135250/Thoughts-On-the-State-of-Web-Development
"We have approximately 20 workstations which all have different hardware specs. Every workstation has two monitors and generally runs either Ubuntu or Windows. I had started using Clonezilla to copy the installs so we could deploy new workstations quickly and easily, when we have hardware failures or the like, but am struggling with Windows requiring new drivers to be installed for all new hardware. Obviously we could be booting into Ubuntu and then load a Windows virtual machine after that, but I'd prefer not to have the added load of a full GUI underneath Windows — we want maximum performance possible. And I don't think the multi-monitor support would work. Is it possible to have a very basic virtual machine beneath to provide hardware consistency whilst still allowing multi-monitor support? Does anyone have any experience with a technique like this?"
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/04/18/2244215/Virtualizing-Workstations-For-Common-Hardware
Apple is reportedly talking with Advanced Micro Devices about using the No. 2 chipmaker’s processors. Simply put, an Apple win would be huge for AMD since its profit margins just can’t keep up with Intel’s at the moment.
AppleInsider reports the following:
AMD reps have been seen talking with Apple;
Apple is working with AMD chips in its labs;
Apple wants to diversify and isn’t happy about Intel design decisions that have hurt the company’s partnership with Nvidia;
Apple may be interested in AMD for its graphics ability and the fusion of CPUs and GPUs.
The AppleInsider report is fascinating in that it shows how Apple may be looking for leverage. An Apple-AMD hookup raises some interesting questions. Among them:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=33179
BANGALORE: Microsoft is not only aiming for a higher market share or greater monetisation of its search properties, a segment where it trails market
leader Google by a wide margin. Instead, the world’s largest software firm is trying to turn search into a technology platform, one that helps consumers take complex decisions, says Qi Lu, Microsoft’s head of online business. And the simple way of doing a such thing, says Mr Lu, is to understand user intent behind search. Mr Lu, an Yahoo veteran who was hand-picked by Steve Ballmer to run the Redmond giant’s online services — most importantly, search — was in India to add more muscle to Microsoft’s local R&D efforts and streamline its partnership with Yahoo, which recently got regulatory approval.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/software/Microsoft-looks-to-turn-search-into-a-tech-platform-says-online-biz-head/articleshow/5829981.cms
Attorneys for former Texas Tech coach Mike Leach filed a fourth amended petition Friday claiming the former coach’s firing was predetermined and done so to help the university save money.
In the filing, six Tech officials are being sued individually for damages: Tech Chancellor Kent Hance, Board of Regents members Jerry Turner and Larry Anders, Tech President Guy Bailey, Tech Athletic Director Gerald Myers and Tech Investigator Charlotte Bingham. Craig James, the father of Adam James was also named as a defendant.
One of Leach’s attorneys, Ted Liggett, said Friday that the individuals are being sued — especially Hance, Turner and Anders — because they went “beyond the scope of their job.” Liggett pointed out that it was Bailey and Myers’ responsibility to deal with the Leach situation and no one else should have been involved.
Liggett believes the filings show that Leach’s firing is derived from the contract negotiations last spring.
http://www.dailytoreador.com/news/leach-expands-lawsuit-to-include-seven-officials-1.2230069
Here are a few thoughts from Saturday's Texas Tech spring game, where the 24-24 tie and much of what happened on the field provided little insight into what will happen on the field.
1. Backup quarterbacks Seth Doege and Jacob Karam did a nice job, combining to complete 47 of 68 passes for 530 yards and five touchdowns on a cold, blustery day. But much of the Tech offensive punch will be determined by the two seniors-to-be that were involved in the pregame coin flip and not much else. Either Taylor Potts (hand injury) and Steven Sheffield (broken foot) will quarterback the Red Raiders this season. "There's going to be a lot of competition," new head coach Tommy Tuberville said. "The best guy will be our starting quarterback. When you have two senior quarterbacks, it it's a great thing to happen. Both of them have experience and know how to win games. We want to have the guy who can move the ball the best and have the other guy come out of the bullpen."
http://collegesportsblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/04/what-we-learned-from-techs-spring-game.html
EDMONTON — Edmonton will soon be home to a state-of-the-art virtual reality rehabilitation system for injured soldiers and other patients, one of only two sites in Canada with such technology.
The Department of National Defence will spend $1.5 million on a computer-assisted rehabilitation environment (CAREN) system for the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital.
The system should be operational by early 2011 and will serve Western Canada. A CAREN at the Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre, also to be installed this year, will serve the eastern part of the country.
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/Glenrose+hospital+acquires+CAREN+system/2922062/story.html
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