Alibaba takes on Google and Apple

29 July 2011 Last updated at 06:57 GMT Alibaba operates some of China's biggest e-commerce websites China's Alibaba has taken on established players such as Google and Apple in the mobile operating system market.

It has launched its own operating system, Alyun OS, in a bid to capture the fast-growing Chinese market.

The launch comes as sales of smartphones in China, the world's largest mobile handset market, are expected to grow rapidly.

Alibaba is one the world's biggest internet conglomerates.

The company said the operating system will feature services such as email, internet search and support web-based applications.

"Mobile users want a more open and convenient mobile operating system (OS), one that allows them to truly enjoy all that the internet has to offer, right in the palm of their hand," said Wang Jian, president of Alibaba Cloud Computing.

"The cloud OS, with its use of cloud-based applications, will provide that," he added.

Hardware Continue reading the main story

We are not responsible for selling the phone, we just provide the system, so there is no hard number”

End Quote Wang Jian Alibaba Cloud Computing Alibaba also launched K-Touch, the first smartphone to run the OS. The phone will be manufactured by handset maker Tianyu.

The company said it was also in talks to with phone manufacturers to develop low-end mobile phones that will run the operating system.

However, Alibaba said it has no plans to enter the phone manufacturing sector on its own.

"We shouldn't make a phone. We're not in that ecosystem," said Mr Wang.

He also added that the company is concentrating only on developing the operating system and was not focussing too much on the sales of mobile phones that will use the software.

"We are not responsible for selling the phone, we just provide the system, so there is no hard number," he said.

Alibaba said it plans to launch a tablet PC running on the software by the end of this year.

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Google profits beat expectations

14 July 2011 Last updated at 21:05 GMT Google boss Larry Page said the company had "a great quarter" Internet giant Google has reported a large rise in profits and revenue, well ahead of market expectations.

Net profit for the three months to June rose 36% on the same period last year to $2.5bn (?1.5bn), while revenues rose 32% to $9bn.

Last month, Google launched its social networking site Google+, in an attempt to take on Facebook.

The results were the first under chief executive Larry Page, who replaced Eric Schmidt in April.

Mr Schmidt had held the role for 10 years. Analysts said the decision for Google co-founder Mr Page to take over was made because he now carries more weight with investors and could re-energise the search giant.

The results will help reassure investors that the company is still thriving under his leadership.

"We had a great quarter," said Mr Page. "I'm super excited about the amazing response to Google+."

'Six-trick pony'

Shares in Google surged 11% in extended trading.

Jordan Rohan, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, said the results were "well beyond expectations from Wall Street".

"Clearly, the combination of mobile search, Android, ad exchange, YouTube, and the core search businesses, they're all doing well," he said.

"Google is no longer a one-trick pony. You might say six-trick pony if you count Google+."

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Google faces 'wire tapping' case

1 July 2011 Last updated at 11:06 GMT Google's Street View cars took snaps and scooped up data from wi-fi networks Google could be sued for scooping up data from open wi-fi networks after a US court ruling.

A judge in San Francisco decided that the company's actions may have violated federal laws on wire tapping.

Google had tried to have the class action lawsuit thrown out, claiming that anyone could have intercepted the wireless signals.

It had previously admitted collecting the data by mistake while gathering images for its Street View service.

Since the blunder was revealed, Google has stopped its Street View cars logging wi-fi networks.

Private data

The problem was discovered in 2010 when German data protection officials asked the company what information its Street View photography cars were collecting.

As well as taking panoramic images, it emerged that they also logged wi-fi networks to help with the search firm's location services.

That involved sampling packets of data from wireless hotspots. On open, unencrypted networks the system grabbed logins, passwords and other personal details. About 600MB of data was collected in 30 countries.

At the time, Google apologised for its action, blaming a coding error, and pledged to delete the data.

The revelation led to investigations in several countries. France fined Google 100,000 euros (?87,000) over the breach.

In the US, a class action lawsuit was brought on behalf of plaintiffs from nine states. The case is being heard in California where Google's headquarters is located.

The company tried to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the data gathering was inadvertent. It also said that anyone could have intercepted the transmissions.

Continue reading the main story

the law doesn't clearly cover that issue right now and that the law is really a mess.”

End Quote Jim Dempsey Center for Democracy and Technology US District Court Judge James Ware disagreed and said that just because a wi-fi network was open did not mean it was meant to be public.

"Merely pleading that a network is unencrypted does not render that network readily accessible to the general public," Judge Ware wrote in his decision.

The fact that Google used some specialist equipment meant it was was liable for prosecution under federal wire tap laws.

Judge Ware threw out several other elements of the complaint against Google, relating to state laws on wire tapping and unfair competition.

In a statement, the company dismissed the claims and said it would consider the latest ruling before deciding whether to launch an appeal.

US laws on wire tapping were in need of updating, said Jim Dempsey, a privacy expert at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

The laws were last updated in the late 1980s to address such things as CB radio and baby monitors, he said.

"I don't think anyone doubts that it should be illegal to intercept someone's communications," said Mr Dempsey.

"But I think it's equally clear that the law doesn't clearly cover that issue right now and that the law is really a mess."

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Google unveils new Facebook rival

29 June 2011 Last updated at 01:50 GMT Google+ has been released for use by a small, selected number of users Online search giant Google has launched a new social networking website in its latest attempt to take on Facebook, which now claims more than 500m users.

Google+ allows individuals to share photos, messages and comments but also integrates the company's maps and images into the service.

It also aims to help users easily organise contacts within groups.

But some analysts say Google has simply reproduced features of Facebook while adding a video chat function.

Google, which handles roughly two out of every three internet searches in the US, has taken several stabs at Facebook in recent years.

But its previous efforts ended in failure, with both Google Wave and Google Buzz proving unpopular with users.

New functions

The company is now boasting that four features in Google+ could help make the company a permanent player in social networking:

Continue reading the main story

Google is playing it canny by only releasing the product via invite to a limited set of users before being gradually opened up to the general public”

End Quote Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley Circles - a functionality that allows individuals to place friends into groups, allowing users to share different forms of content with targeted clusters of friendsHangouts - live multi-user video conferencing that permits friends to drop in and out of live group conversationsHuddle - group instant messagingSparks - a feature that connects individuals on the network to others with common interests.The current version of Google+ has only been released to a small number of users, but the company has said it soon hopes to make the social network available to the millions of individuals that use its services each day.

"Online sharing needs a serious re-think, so it's time we got started," Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of engineering at Google, said in a press release.

"Other social networking tools make selective sharing within small groups difficult," she added, taking what appears to be a jab at Facebook's recent grouping function.

But some analysts have said Google could have a difficult time converting Facebook devotees to their new social network.

"People have their social circles on Facebook - asking them to create another social circle is challenging," Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst with research firm eMarketer, told the Associated Press news agency.

"The whole idea of a Google social network... they've been throwing stuff against the wall for several years and so forth nothing has stuck," she added.

In April, Google reached an out-of-court settlement with a US policy group over its rollout of Google Buzz, a previous social effort.

The legal action claimed Google deceived users and violated its own privacy policy by automatically enrolling all Gmail users in its Buzz social network without seeking prior permission.

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Google faces French court claim

28 June 2011 Last updated at 10:24 GMT The FTC is looking at whether Google manipulates its search results to steer users to its own sites French search engine 1PlusV is suing Google for 295m euros (?264m), the largest damage claim the search engine has faced in Europe.

It claims that Google used its market dominance to block the development of rival services.

An earlier complaint from 1PlusV and others, including Microsoft, triggered a European Commission investigation.

It also faces a probe from the US Federal Trade Commission.

Lost profits

1plusV, which runs the Ejustice.fr legal website and search engine, said that court action was the "logical" next step in its campaign to force closer scrutiny of Google's practices.

"Our actions benefit not just one company, but all players in the booming vertical search business," said 1plusV founder Bruno Guillard.

It filed its initial complaint with the EC in February 2010 and a formal investigation was launched in November.

Google was served notice of the claim on Monday.

"We have only just received the complaint so we can't comment in detail yet. We always try to do what's best for our users. It's the key principle that drives our company and we look forward to explaining this," the firm said in a brief statement.

At the core of 1plusV's case is the claim that it lost revenue because Google prevented it from developing specialised "vertical" search engines.

Black-listed

"Google employed a number of anti-competitive practices and unethical behaviour over a period of four years to cripple 1plusV's ability to generate business and advertising," it said in a press release.

Between 2007 and 2010, it claims that 30 vertical search engines it had created were "black-listed".

Some of these have since been "white-listed" - indexed again, it said.

It also accused Google of artificially pushing its services to the first page of search results.

Another key element of the case against Google hinges on its Adsense system which allows advertisers to buy keywords which, when typed in as a search, query produce a commercial link alongside the search results.

In order to take advantage of Adsense, 1plusV said it was forced to abandon its own search technology and adopt Google's.

Google's advertising revenues hit $8.3bn in the first quarter of 2011.

The European Union has the power to fine companies up to 10 percent of their global turnover for breaching EU rules.

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Google airs Arab Spring web fears

27 June 2011 Last updated at 18:08 GMT Google has already found itself at odds with some countries, such as China, over censorship The use of the web by Arab democracy movements could lead to some states cracking down harder on internet freedoms, Google's chairman says.

Speaking at a conference in Ireland, Eric Schmidt said some governments wanted to regulate the internet the way they regulated television.

He also said he feared his colleagues faced a mounting risk of occasional arrest and torture in such countries.

The internet was widely used during the so-called Arab Spring.

Protesters used social networking sites to organise rallies and communicate with those outside their own country, such as foreign media, amid tight restrictions on state media.

'Completely wired'

Mr Schmidt said he believed the "problem" of governments trying to limit internet usage was going to "get worse".

Continue reading the main story

In most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television”

End Quote Eric Schmidt Executive Chairman, Google "The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television."

"If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket," he added.

Google has regularly clashed with China over attempts to limit public access to its internet services.

Mr Schmidt also said he was concerned about the danger faced by employees of the company in parts of the world that deemed material found on its search engine illegal.

He said he would not directly name the countries because of the sensitivity of the situation.

During the uprising in Egypt, Google executive Wael Ghonim was detained by Egyptian authorities after taking part in the protests that led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak.

Mr Ghonim had been involved in founding an anti-torture Facebook page that helped inspire demonstrations.

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Google Street View halts in India

21 June 2011 Last updated at 09:50 GMT Google launched Street View in Bangalore last month Google has stopped collecting images for its Street View service in the southern Indian city of Bangalore after objections from police.

Police in Bangalore said they had security concerns and that Bangalore was a "highly sensitive" area.

Google launched its project to collect high definition images to give Google users 360 degree views of streets only last month in Bangalore.

Google data collection has caused concern in numerous countries.

Cameras mounted on cars and tricycles had been taking pictures in streets across Bangalore.

"We received a letter from Bangalore's commissioner of police and are reviewing it. We will not be collecting any more images for Street View until we speak to the police," a Google spokeswoman told AFP.

Police told the BBC that they had expressed concern about the project and said they asked Google to seek clearance from India's ministry of home and external affairs.

Bangalore's additional police commissioner, Sunil Kumar, said that Bangalore, home to key defence and scientific institutions such as Indian Space Research Organisation and Hindustan Aeronautics, was high on the list of terror targets.

In 2008 a series of bombs exploded around the city, killing one woman and injuring several others.

But Google India's Product Head Vinay Goel told India's CNN-IBN news channel that they were "only driving on public roads and taking publicly available imagery."

Last year almost 250,000 Germans told Google to blur pictures of their homes on the Street View service and the Czech government also banned Google from taking any new photos for the service.

In the UK Google has also agreed to delete private emails and passwords mistakenly picked up from wireless networks by its Street View cars.

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British Library makes Google deal

20 June 2011 Last updated at 11:02 GMT The British Library receives more than one million visitors a year Thousands of pages from one of the world's biggest collections of historic books, pamphlets and periodicals are to be made available on the internet.

The British Library has reached a deal with search engine Google about 250,000 texts dating back to the 18th Century.

It will allow readers to view, search and copy the out-of-copyright works at no charge on both the library and Google books websites.

The library gets more than a million visitors a year.

The works selected to be digitised date from between 1700 and 1870, and the project will take some years to complete, with Google covering the costs of digitising.

Among the first works to go online are a pamphlet about French Queen Marie Antoinette and Spanish inventor Narciso Monturiol's 1858 plans for one of the world's first submarines.

Google has similar partnerships with about 40 libraries around the world.

Library chief executive Dame Lynne Brindley said the scheme was an extension of the ambition of the library's predecessors in the 19th Century to provide access to knowledge to everyone.

"The way of doing it then was to buy books from the entire world and to make them available in reading rooms.

"We... believe that we are building on this proud tradition of giving access to anyone, anywhere and at any time.

"Our aim is to provide perpetual access to this historical material, and we hope that our collections coupled with Google's know-how will enable us to achieve this aim."

Director of external relations at Google Peter Barron said: "What's powerful about the technology available to us today isn't just its ability to preserve history and culture for posterity, but also its ability to bring it to life in new ways."

Google's plan to digitise copyrighted texts has run into serious legal problems in the US. Among critics were the Authors Guild of America and the Association of American Publishers.

The digitised works are just a small fraction of the library's collection which totals more than 150 million items representing every age of written civilisation, including books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs, newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages.

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Google ramps up speed of search

15 June 2011 Last updated at 10:14 GMT By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, Silicon Valley Google hopes that improved search times will drive growth in advertising revenue Google has made changes to its search engine as it strives to get consumers the information they want faster.

Its new Instant Pages system will shave between two to five seconds off the time it takes for a web page to load, the company said.

It is also planning to offer voice-activated and enhanced image searching.

Google, which processes one billion requests every day, said search remained its core focus.

The firm still dominates the market although Microsoft's Bing is slowly eating into its share.

Bing's US searches rose to 14 percent in May from 12 percent at the end of 2010. It also powers searching on Yahoo, which has 15.9 percent of the market while Google's share slipped to 66 percent from 67 percent, according to measurement firm comScore

Instant Pages works by pre-loading the page associated with the top search result in the background as a user decides what to click on.

Google relies on its relevance technology to confidently predict the number one result a user will pick.

That means when the top pre-rendered link is chosen, the web page opens instantaneously.

The search giant said it typically takes around five seconds for a web page to launch once someone clicks on it.

"We at Google will not be happy until we make the Web as easy to flip through as a magazine," Google fellow Amit Singhal said at the Inside Search event in San Francisco.

"We are obsessed with speed. We often say speed is still the killer app," he added.

During a demo at the event the Washington Post home page loaded immediately with Instant Pages, compared to 3.2 seconds without it.

Last year the Silicon Valley firm introduced Google Instant which gives users results to queries while queries are being typed into the search box.

Positive impact

"What we have observed is that every time we shave 15 milliseconds from the speed, users search more and more, said Mr Singhal.

Over the next couple of weeks Instant Pages will be made available to users of Google's Chrome web browser.

The company said it would open access to the software code so other browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer could also incorporate the feature.

"Making it ubiquitous will make people go wow, Google just made the web faster," said Matt Rosoff, west coast editor of Business Insider.

"As far as Google is concerned it is another thing that will continue to draw people to Google and make sure they don't leave for another competitor like Microsoft."

Say it

On mobile, Google is offering an alternative to the traditional keyword search with icons linked to common searches such as restaurants, coffee shops and bars.

It said that the move was prompted by a rise in searches involving nearby places.

The company is also preparing to introduce voice-activated search for personal computers. The feature already exists on mobile devices.

The tool, represented by a small microphone icon in the far right of the Google search box, will appear over the coming days.

In a demonstration, reporters were shown that the search engine understands the difference between Worcester, Massachusetts, and Wooster College - words that sound the same but are spelt differently.

"Arguably speaking is the most natural way we learn to express our needs. It remains to be seen what kinds of usage scenarios may be important when it comes to the desktop. As the data comes in we will learn (that) over time," said Mike Cohen, manager of speech technology at Google.

According to Google, voice search traffic has grown six-fold over the past year, and every day users speak about two years' worth of speech into the system.

The company also revealed during its presentation that as many as 230 billion words a day are entered into the language bank system, helping to improve the way it deals with accents, pronunciations and colloquialisms.

The speech recognition tool will only be available on Google's Chrome web browser for now but executives said they hope other software makers would eventually implement the technology.

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