Gmail, Google’s email service started in April Fool’s Day in 2004 as the first to offer one gigabytes storage for its users. Major email services such as Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail soon followed with the fear of losing out in the market. Gmail remains an invitation-only email service since then. You couldn’t simply sign up for the service by filling in a form, there wasn’t one.
On Wednesday, Google has decided to lift the restriction to join the nearly 3-year-old service in North America and a swath of Asian and South American countries. The primary reason for the restriction was to give away time for Google to build up the infrastructure to accommodate the generous amount of free storage provided by the e-mail service. Google has built enough of them now. However, Gmail is retaining its “beta,” or test, status, signaling that Google still considers the service to be a work in progress.
In December, Gmail attracted 60 million unique visitors which is far behind Yahoo!’s 249 million and Hotmail’s 236 million. Advertising revenues remain a heavy weight in the revenue structure of companies like Google and Yahoo!. Advertisements are usually priced in proportion to the daily traffic of a site.
The pressure on Google to institute more aggressive copyright protections and policies is growing.
A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 newspapers that complained the Google’s “cached” links offered free access to chargeable contents. The court ordered Google to remove any articles, photos or links from its sites.
Google faces a fine of 1,000 euros a day if it does not remove the copyright violated contents within 24 hours once it has been told in the future.
The media companies have been vocal about their dissatisfaction with Google in the past months. These media companies have established sales channels that are more lucrative than putting their contents online. Two incidents stand out.
1. News Corp. has subpoenaed YouTube for the identity of users who uploaded full episodes of Twentieth Century Fox’s prime-time series 24 before they even debuted on television. YouTube gave up the identities, according to a Fox statement last week.
NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a Space Act Agreement that formally establishes a relationship to work together on challenging technical problems. The whole aim of the collaboration is to make NASA massive data accessible to all stakeholders.
Google will help NASA in the following areas:
- Large-scale Data Management, e.g. incorporating agency data sets in Google Earth extension - Google Moon for public viewing, manage large-scale technical data for the benefits of NASA employees.
- Massive Distributed Computing, e.g. science data search utilizing a variety of Google technology, application of distributed computing power to scientific research.
- Human-computer Interfaces, e.g. user studies and cognitive modeling for human computer interaction.
The collaboration between Google and NASA will surely boost Google’s corporate image as consultant of rocket science computing. It is also beneficial to NASA as the vast majority of the information about our planet and universe collected over the years are scattered across technical archives and tapes. NASA needs Google’s strength on information technology to “sort out” those data.
The news release also mentioned the possibility of presenting NASA data in areas such as real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle in the future. Most of these features may be available as extensions to Google Earth.
PayPal and Google Checkout are few of the many online payment services that offer web service payment integration.
PayPal
PayPal is the most popular P2P (Person-to-Person) payment service online. PayPal web service payment is only available in Website Payment Pro. A site owner can leverage the Direct Payment API to accept credit card payments without any redirection to PayPal web site. PayPal remains invisible throughout the customer experience.
Google AdWords now supports click-to-play video ads – ads that combine the power of multimedia with the precision of Google to provide users with a relevant and engaging advertising experience. Video ads join Google’s lineup of text, image, and flash ad formats and will be displayed on sites that are part of the Google Network. You may watch the sample video here. The video is Flash Video converted from supported video formats that include AVI, ASF, QuickTime, Windows Media and MPEG. The video will have minimum 14 frames-per-second in 4:3 aspect ratio.
What is Google Network? “The Google Network is made up of thousands of content and search sites displaying targeted Google ads. These sites include major web portals and search sites, as well as sites that are enrolled in the Google AdSense program”. In an advertiser’s account, the Google Network is divided into a search network and a content network. Advertisers can choose to show their ads on either or both of these networks.
The decision for Google to acquire YouTube is largely undisclosed. However, we can still get a sneak peek of the milestones that YouTube has gone through to generate 1.65 billion dollars.
The popularity of Google Video over YouTube remained until the beginning of the second quarter of 2006 according to Google Trends. The news references in the media that increased dramatically in the first quarter help to push YouTube traffic to a series of record highs.
Continue reading ‘YouTube: 6 Critical Steps to Generate $1.65b’
Phishing emergence in online communications media allows scammers to reach many more people than ever before and at lower cost, whether through spam, e-mail and instant message scams; faked Web pages; or other online avenues. But the media usually focus on phishing’s consumer impact and seldom look at how various anti-phishing solutions affect the web site owners.
Being a victim of what I call “Anti-phishing Fraud”, it makes me feel wanting to find out how various anti-phishing solutions work. The official explanation for marking one of my pages suspicious according to Microsoft Phishing Filter FAQ is
A suspicious Web site has some of the typical characteristics of phishing Web sites, but it is not on the list of reported phishing Web sites. The Web site might be legitimate, but you should be cautious about entering any personal or financial information unless you are certain that the site is trustworthy.
In addition to IE7, the toolbar and browser solutions in the market include the offerings from EarthLink, eBay, GeoTrust, Google Safe Browsing using Firefox, McAfee SiteAdvisor, Netcraft, and Netscape. The accuracy of these solutions varies from good to useless. The latest study quoted on IEBlog based on Anti-phishing Accuracy Score indicates IE7 is the market leader in terms of accuracy.
Top 5 Risks to Use Public IM Within an Organization
1 Comment Published September 28th, 2006 in Technology.
As instant messaging technology is embraced by information workers and their organizations, it is important that system administrators and information technology (IT) professionals within these organizations recognize both the value and the potential risks posed by this new technology.
For some organizations, the use of public IM clients is an acceptable, low-cost alternative to traditional forms of communication. However, reliance on public or consumer-class IM applications creates some unique obstacles:
Risk 1
The organization has little or no control over how IM applications are used and implemented. Public IM applications cannot be easily “locked” to constrain the types of messages sent or with whom they may be exchanged.
Risk 2
The lack of interoperability between major IM applications makes standardization difficult. Users may have to install multiple IM clients to communicate with all of their intended parties.
Continue reading ‘Top 5 Risks to Use Public IM Within an Organization’