Articles about Cloud

A Google spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that soon after the company's Gmail service outage Tuesday, but in an unrelated incident, customers of the company's AdSense network were notified of a service outage.

"On February 25 in the morning Pacific Time," the spokesperson said, "there was a 90-minute AdSense outage that affected a small number of AdSense customers. All affected publishers were notified, and the problem was quickly resolved."

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There was no all-lower-case text, an absence of apology, not a single metaphor, and a definitive lack of "peanut butter" in yesterday's appearances, both in public and online, from new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. Upon assuming the post from Jerry Yang, Bartz said she would clean house, and analysts were told to expect fireworks. She absolutely delivered.

"Our brand [is] one of our biggest assets," Bartz wrote in her premiere on her new company's old blog yesterday. "Mention Yahoo practically anywhere in the world, and people yodel. But in the past few years, we haven't been as clear in showing the world what the Yahoo brand stands for. We're going to change that. Look for this company's brand to kick ass again."

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On the same day that the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News announced that it was shutting down effective Friday for lack of revenue, Google News confirmed its plan to sell AdWords placement on its Google News searches.

The ads, which officially debuted Thursday, work as AdWords usually do, serving up pages related to the search terms (rather than news results from specific publications). Josh Cohen, a business product manager for Google, described the results as "similar to what you see on regular Google searches or Google Book Search."

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In light of Facebook's recent Terms of Use conflicts, users' pages are now stamped with a message linked to a blog post from founder Mark Zuckerberg announcing suggested changes to how Facebook may be governed in the future.

Two documents, called "Facebook Principles" and "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities" have been posted for user review and comment. These will not go into effect until they have been voted upon and changed by the users. The comment period closes at 12:01 am Pacific Time on March 29.

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Everyone in the digital music "value chain" needs enough compensation, said Ted Cohen, managing partner of TAG Strategic and a long-time observer of the music scene. Cohen spoke today on a topic that's becoming an ongoing theme at the Digital Music Forum East in New York City.

Taking the stage soon after the conference opened this afternoon, Cohen divided the digital music constituency into several groups: artists, content owners, and service providers. Artists "want music to be their day job," said the music industry veteran.

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It's a tough game job creating a new search engine. Trying to break into the market with Google, Yahoo, and MSN is sort of like trying to start your own baseball league to draw fans away from MLB. Three-month-old search engine LeapFish isn't trying to start a new league, it's just trying build a better stadium.

LeapFish takes the indexed results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and does what what CEO Ben Behrouzi calls "the heavy lifting." That is, it gives a selection of results that include web entries, related statistics, videos, and other such relevant information rather than the same information you'd find if you were to use those individual search engines.

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The company responsible for Second Life, the once-fashionable-now-beleaguered virtual realm, has gotten an F from a Bay Area branch of the Better Business Bureau. In its writeup, the BBB cited the number of complaints filed against business, the business' failure to respond to complaints, and the length of time the business has taken to resolve complaint(s).

According to the BBB, Linden has received 43 complaints in the past three years, 25 of them closed in the last 12 months (and 31 in all). Ten were administratively closed by the BBB, and 2 went unaddressed by Linden.

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Eircom will be blocking the Pirate Bay and sites of that nature under threat of legal action from the Irish Recorded Music Association.

In late January, Irish ISP Eircom adopted the now famous "graduated response" to illegal file sharing pioneered by the French, where suspected file sharers are given three strikes and then cut off from the Internet entirely. Now, Ireland's Sunday Business Post reports that Eircom is working with the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) to block all music swapping sites from general user access. The ISP's move was reportedly made under threat of legal action from IRMA.

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This morning's announcement of the June exit of Peter Chernin from the Chief Operating Officer's post of News Corp. -- a post that's more influential than most COO positions in the world -- is probably more than what financial journalists are speculating this morning: a way for CEO Rupert Murdoch to pave the way for a line of succession for his immediate family. Chernin's position put him in effective operational control of Fox Interactive Media, with the mandate to work out some kind of workable business model for the operation.

Square one for Chernin came in August 2006, brokering a deal with Google that led to Google paying FIM's MySpace $900 million to be its search provider. But every other component of the business model -- some way to monetize the indisputably high-traffic business of social networking -- never came together. During its last earnings call, Google said it was having trouble monetizing the business of search with social networking, and Google's biggest deal to date in that department was with MySpace. In response, Chernin attempted to reassure analysts last Feburary 4 (our thanks to Seeking Alpha for the transcript) that FIM and Google were still trying to work out a way to make that business profitable.

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A service outage that impacted users of Google services including Gmail for approximately 75 minutes early this morning, is calling attention to a potential kink in the cloud: While an estimated 113 million Gmail accounts were forced to resort to Google's new offline mode, introduced last month, a number of Google service users were also forced to wait, since Gmail also serves as the company's central source of service authentication.

The outage came at the worst possible time for users in Western Europe, including Great Britain, where users were just getting settled to work. Google Apps can work offline, though the degree of offline functionality they offer has only been increasing in small steps. Calendar functionality through Google Gears, for instance, was only introduced earlier this month, although the company announced its trend toward the "offline cloud" in April 2007.

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Apple's iTunes today opened the first iTunes Pass purchases, which lets users pay a fee up front to receive every piece of content an artist releases for a certain period of time.

While this has not officially been announced by Apple yet, a diligent Mac Forums reader located details on it in the Spanish iTunes store terms of service:

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University of Washington researchers this week have released a peer-to-peer file-sharing technology that actually does, or can, limit one's sharing to one's actual peers. The client, called OneSwarm, uses a "friend-to-friend" (F2F) model that gives users extremely granular, extremely hard-to-expose sharing capabilities.

The OneSwarm technical paper, (PDF available here) submitted by graduate students Tomas Isdal and Michael Piatek and faculty members Arvind Krishnamurthy and Tom Anderson, is quite explicit in its concerns about the dangers of indiscriminate sharing. "Although widely used, currently popular P2P networks expose the sharing behavior of their users to scrutiny by third parties," the paper's conclusion states.

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AOL Classifieds, which launches today in the US and Canada, allows sellers to post listings free, just as Craigslist does. (The service makes money from selling increased-visibility ads, sort of the way eBay makes money from the featured-auction option.) A UK version of the service will launch in the near future.

The service is powered by Oodle and aggregates listings from over 80,000 sources and 250 partner sites, many of them intensely local in orientation. Higher-profile members of the Oodle network include the Washington Post Express, Military.com Classified, MySpace Classifieds, Etsy, LiveDeal, and Local.com Classifieds.

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By consolidating some of its acquired technologies, AOL now hopes that folding together functionality from two of its recent acquisitions will ease the pain.

AOL bought Bebo back in March 2008 for $850 million. The service, which is similar to Facebook or MySpace, skews young and is most popular in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. In August, AOL picked up SocialThing, which is a "lifestreaming" service -- that is, it aggregates status updates and other information posted by friends on multiple social networks. FriendFeed is a lifestreaming application, and the Flock browser has lifestreaming functionality as well.

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While major service providers like Google, Microsoft and Apple offer cloud-based contact synching for personal records, DubMeNow is like a mobile business card swap.

With the Dub application loaded onto a user's phone -- the company says all US mobile phones are supported -- the user's contact information can then be blasted out to e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or other Dub users. Let's say you meet a potential client whilst out somewhere, you enter that person's number into the Dub app, and it then sends all your flagged contact information directly to that person's address book. It syncs with Outlook and CRM apps such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, and Siebel, allowing for a single contact to be sent to multiple recipients in one action.

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