News - Digital Media

The GeoEye-1 satellite that launched into orbit Saturday is on a mission from Google.

Well, not just Google. The GeoEye-1 is part of the NextView program of the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a dot-mil organization that, odd as it may seem, wants access to commercial satellite imagery to support its national security mission. GeoEye, the company, won its $500 million NextView contract four years ago.

Google's rocket-borne logo.

(Credit: GeoEye/ULA)

But the search titan does have the exclusive rights among online mapping sites to the GeoEye-1 images, which it will use in its Google Earth and Google Maps offerings. It even got its corporate logo emblazoned on the launch rocket, right below Boeing's.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were on hand at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for Saturday morning's launch, according to the Reuters news agency.

GeoEye said Saturday afternoon that the satellite had separated from the second stage of the Delta II rocket and was initializing its onboard systems.

The GeoEye-1 will zip around the Earth at about 4.5 miles per second, taking both color and black-and-white images from a distance of 423 miles. Its camera can distinguish objects on the ground as small as 16 inches in size, according to GeoEye. Because of U.S. licensing restrictions, Google's resolutions won't be quite that sharp.

High-resolution color images are expected later in the fall.

A GeoEye-2 satellite is scheduled for launch in 2011.

Adobe Systems' Flash technology may not have qualified for the Olympics, but it is in tip-top shape for the National Football League season just getting under way.

With the bulk of NFL teams hitting the gridiron in earnest Sunday, it'll be Flash that delivers the live video streaming on the Web of NBC's Sunday Night Football games. This marks the first time that full-length NFL games are widely available online in the U.S., according to Adobe and the NFL.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

The NFL-Adobe partnership wouldn't normally be quite so notable--after all, Flash is one of the most well-established technologies on the Web. But it was only a few short weeks ago that NBC had delivered streaming video from the Beijing Olympics courtesy of a technology that's looking to overturn Flash's dominance: Microsoft Silverlight.

The Olympics deal no doubt stuck in Adobe's craw; NBC has said that it initially expected to use Flash for the Olympics. Adobe's press release on the NFL deal certainly doesn't mention the upstart Silverlight by name, but it does get in a subtle bit of trash-talking--the widespread, existing installation of Flash on desktop PCs "will enable fans to access NFL games on the Web without having to download additional software."

Anyone who wanted to watch NBC's online streaming of the Olympics first had to download Silverlight, an additional step that some folks may not have been ready to take.

Its name notwithstanding, the Web-streamed Sunday Night Football Extra (delivered via NFL.com and NBCSports.com) made its debut Thursday, with the season's inaugural game between the Washington Redskins and last season's Super Bowl champions, the New York Giants. On Sunday, the streaming video will start up on its namesake day with the Week 1 nighttime contest between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts.

Beyond the live streaming, fans get some interactive extras, including alternative camera angles, in-game highlights, live statistics, and a live blog.

The experience may be something of a mixed bag. Writing at Silicon Alley Insider, Michael Learmouth had this to say about Thursday night's streaming video:

We gave it a try and there were some hiccups. Inititally, we couldn't get the live stream, and were told we had been placed in a queue 'due to overwhelming demand.'

Once the video began, it was pixelated and jumpy, and there's no full-screen mode. But there were some cool features, such as a 'star cam' trained on individual players like Fred Smoot and Plaxico Burress.

We were asked to watch a Sprint pre-roll ad to get to the video, and there were a few online ads within the broadcast, but not nearly as many as on TV. In fact, during most TV ad breaks, online viewers were sent to the NFL network studio for recaps of other games, which is nice but perhaps a sign advertising for the Webcast wasn't sold out.

As for the Flash-Silverlight competition, that will have to play itself out over time. As noted by Paul Glazowski at the Mashable blog:

It's not an impossibility for Silverlight to grow, mind you. Given the right level of attention to the platform, Microsoft could mark its Olympic foray as only the first big starter in the long slog toward mass adoption. But 'could' is the key word. The hill climbs (yes, climbs plural) will be trying.

One key challenge, Glazowski says, is "to convince the public of its validity and utility in the presence" of a "semi-household" name like Flash.

It wasn't long ago that we weren't able to "Google" people, places and things.

But, observes CBS News Science and Technology Correspondent Daniel Sieberg, in just 10 years, Google has grown exponentially from garage start-up to Web juggernaut--and a verb as well as a noun.

As Google marks its 10th anniversary this weekend, it's become "part of culture, much like Xerox," points out John Battelle, who wrote a best-seller about the rise of Google called The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.

He notes that the verb "google" quickly became synonymous with speedy learning on virtually every subject.

"Nearly anything and everything to get smart on any topic exists on the Web," says Battelle, "and Google does a good job of organizing it."

"Good," remarks Sieberg, "may be an understatement." These days, more people use Google than all other search engines combined.

Of course, that hasn't always been that way.

"Google wasn't first," says Sieberg. "They were just the best."

Remember Lycos? AltaVista?

Yahoo once held the mantle for search, but even with its catchy name and expensive advertising, Google was able to make its way into the mainstream, mostly by word-of-mouth, and without airing a single commercial, Sieberg says.

In January 2005, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the CBS News broadcast 60 Minutes, "We just let a few of our friends know about it so they would go to that Web site--search engine--and try it out, and people started to use it."

Brin and Google's other renowned co-founder, Larry Page, started the company as Stanford grad students in a garage.

They now run the it from what's called the Googleplex, in Mountain View, Calif.

Workers enjoy an array of not-so-typical perks, such as billiards, a pool, volleyball court, and much more.

Vice President of People Operations Laszlo Bock says, "They're certainly working. But they're also having a lot of fun. One of the things we believe is that you want to make an environment that's efficient for people so that, in their personal lives, they can live and enjoy and have a great time and, when they're working, they can focus on getting their work done."

The Google search page design hasn't changed all that much since 1998. For a full gallery of Google's search engine rivals a decade ago, click on the image.

(Credit: The Wayback Machine, via CNET Networks)

And plenty of folks would like to try--Google gets some 7,000 job applications--a day.

All that inspiration within the company, says Sieberg, has led Google to countless projects beyond just search--"not that that's always a good thing."

Battelle says concerns may be reflected in Google's stock price, which went from $85 when the company went public in August 2004 to a high of almost $715 last year, then down to its current price of about $465 dollars.

"The big question," says Battelle, "is, can they choose the right directions? Can they let go of the things that perhaps they aren't very good at doing and just focus on three, four, five projects that, taken together, make for a cohesive company that can win in every market it's in?"

In addition to the fluctuating stock price, Sieberg says, Google's had some ups and downs with public opinion, mostly attributed to privacy concerns over what happens to all that search info.

So, Sieberg concludes, in some ways, Google is still finding its way--at 10 years old.

The Mozilla Corporation has released an advance testing version of its popular Firefox Web browser, just days after Google revealed its competing Chrome software.

The second alpha of Firefox 3.1 was made available overnight. The software, code-named Shiretoko, is at this stage intended for software developers and testers only, with the stable and recommended version of Firefox being 3.0.1.

In a statement, Mozilla said the testing version of Firefox introduced several new features, including the browser's highly anticipated support for a new video tag element introduced with the HTML 5 standard to provide more functionality around the amount of video that is increasingly being delivered through Web browsers.

In addition, Shiretoko allows users to drag and drop tabs between browser windows, improves performance in some areas and provides better integration with Windows Vista's Aero 'Glass' theme for those wanting to add extra themes on top of Firefox.

The new software also adds some speed enhancements to the browser, particularly in the area of JavaScript handling, which was one area Google highlighted as being a strength of the Chrome browser it launched this week, also in testing form.

Mozilla is planning to integrate a faster JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, into Firefox. However the organization noted that technology was not included in the software released overnight, although it could be tested by following a set of instructions posted online.

The alpha release of Firefox 3.1 can be downloaded from Mozilla's Web site.

Renai LeMay of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

Social networks are designed to be all about friends, right? Yet when it comes to the competition behind the scenes at social networks, I'm reminded of the '70s song by War, "Why can't we be friends?"

That song especially comes to mind with Google's OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit that was officially established this week to promote the open developer platform OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a common set of application protocol interfaces (APIs) for social networks. It's designed to make it easy for companies to create a social network or related applications and have them work seamlessly with other social networks using the platform. (Some argue it's also designed to compete with Facebook's developer platform.)

And if companies aren't comfortable with the OpenSocial premise--for fear that it's just an anticompetitive ploy--they now have a nonprofit foundation that will help ease their mind.

"This organization seeks to ensure that OpenSocial will remain implementable by all, at no cost, in perpetuity," wrote Dan Peterson on the OpenSocial Foundation blog.

Specifically, the foundation will provide operational guidelines about the technology and details on intellectual property as the platform changes and grows.

(The whole thing reminds me of when Microsoft submitted its streaming media compression technology, or codecs, to an industry standards body so that they would be adopted by Hollywood. Critics were wary of the software giant's past monopolistic behavior.)

For its part, the OpenSocial Foundation has a new board of directors that spans the industry. It includes Anil Dharni, director of products at the social network hi5; Google Director of Engineering David Glazer; Joe Greenstein, founder of the movie site Flixster; Allen Hurff, a vice president of engineering at MySpace; and Sam Pullara, a vice president of platforms at Yahoo.

The foundation will choose two other members from the community at large by vote. Perhaps someone from Facebook?

Google made its long-rumored foray into Web browsers with the introduction of its open-source Chrome, but in the process, it ruffled some privacy feathers.

Word of the browser first accidentally leaked on the Web in the form of a detailed 38-page comic book that appeared on Google Blogoscoped, an unofficial Google blog.

The browser was written with WebKit, the open-source engine at the core of Apple's Safari and Google's Android. The browser is also getting a new JavaScript virtual machine, V8. It's said to be a better solution for complex and rich Web applications, yielding better performance and "smoother drag and drops" in interactive applications.

The project should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it's less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology's most powerful companies just entered the battlefield.

Even before Google's browser became available for download, its repercussions were traversing the industry. There are plenty of implications from a company as large as Google that builds a browser tuned to advance the company's agenda of Web-based applications.

Chrome, Google said during its launch event, is much faster at showing Web pages than the most widely used browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Google's hope is that performance will open up the bottleneck that chokes the speed and abilities of today's Web-based applications.

In short, Chrome is more of a long-term competitive threat to Microsoft Office and Windows than it is to Internet Explorer. That may sound a little grand, but the evidence is on display in Google's own lobby, where the search company's computer kiosks present a browser only--no start menu, no desktop shortcuts, no operating system.

So how does Chrome actually stack up? Google was eager to toot its horn about Chrome's performance running JavaScript, a programming language used to power many sophisticated Web applications such as Google Docs, Yahoo's Zimbra e-mail site, and Zoho's online application suite. On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition.

However, Mozilla fought back with some performance results to show a forthcoming version of Firefox outpacing Chrome in a different test called SunSpider.

Firefox 3.1, which Mozilla hopes to release by the end of the year, comes with JavaScript acceleration technology called TraceMonkey. In Mozilla's test that pitted TraceMonkey-enhanced Firefox against the Chrome beta, Google's browser was 28 percent slower on Windows XP and 16 percent slower on Windows Vista.

Privacy advocates objected to Chrome's End User License agreement, which appeared to give Google a perpetual right to use anything one entered into the browser. Section 11 stated that although users retain copyright to their works, "by submitting, posting, or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and nonexclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute any content which you submit, post, or display on or through the services."

However, Google backtracked, saying it plans to alter those contract terms. Google said the change, once made, will apply retroactively to anyone who has downloaded the browser.

Privacy concerns were also raised over the issues of what information Google plans to store on its servers. Provided that users leave on the auto-suggest feature in Chrome and have Google as their default search provider, Google has the right to store any information typed into Chrome's Ominibox, which serves as both search bar and address bar. Google told CNET News that it plans to store about 2 percent of all such data, along with the IP address of the computer that entered the information.

Going mobile
Google co-founder Sergey Brin expects the Chrome technology to make its way to Android, the company's mobile-phone operating system and software suite. Chrome and Android were developed largely separately, Brin said in an interview at the Chrome launch event.

"We have not wanted to bind one's hands to the other's," Brin said. But you can expect that to change, now that both projects are public and nearing their first final releases.

"Probably a subsequent version of Android is going to pick up a lot of the Chrome stack," Brin said, pointing to JavaScript improvements as one area.

When and if that happens, Google will have to contend with Apple, which has seen a large increase in the iPhone's global Web share, according to new figures. The figures, collected by Web analytics company Net Applications, show that in June 2008, before the launch of the iPhone 3G, the iPhone had 0.16 percent share of the operating-system market, as measured by OS detection during Web browsing; and in July, it had 0.19 percent.

However, as of September 1, the iPhone had 0.3 percent of global market share, an increase of 58 percent in one month. According to Net Applications, this was due to the July launch of the iPhone 3G. The figures also showed Microsoft's dominance steadily, if slowly, decreasing.

Meanwhile, AT&T said it had fixed a problem that caused many iPhone users in the northeastern United States to complain that they couldn't access the mobile Web. The problem, which caused some users to not be able to surf the Web on their phones, did not affect phone calls, text messages, or mobile e-mail from devices such as Research In Motion's BlackBerry.

And it looks as though Microsoft is joining Apple and Google in the mobile "application store" market. The software giant expects to launch "Skymarket" this fall for its Windows Mobile platform, if a recent job posting spotted by Long Zheng at Istartedsomething.com is accurate. According to the ad, posted on Computerjob.com, the Skymarket senior product manager will head a team that will "drive the launch of a v1 marketplace service for Windows Mobile."

Tech goes to the Republican convention
While John McCain saw a flood of online donations last week, thanks to his newly announced vice presidential choice, Sarah Palin, his campaign was steering Web donors to a site that helps victims of Hurricane Gustav.

The Republican Party canceled nearly all scheduled events for the Republican National Convention on Monday, save official business, out of respect for those impacted by the hurricane. However, a few special guests remained on the docket of speakers at the St. Paul Xcel Energy Center, including Cindy McCain and First Lady Laura Bush.

"I would ask that each one of us commit to join together to aid those in need as quickly as possible," Cindy McCain said. "As John has been saying for the last several days, this is a time when we take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats."

Republican National Convention leaders also asked convention attendees to pledge donations to hurricane relief funds via text to the code 2HELP, using the keyword GIVE.

Hurricane Gustav's unexpected interference with the four-day event highlighted the deft communications needed to direct nearly 5,000 delegates and alternate delegates through the formal presidential nomination process. The RNC turned to cloud computing for the most efficient means of registering the delegates, and when the clouds of Hurricane Gustav threatened to throw the event off course, the RNC stepped up their communications with the delegates.

Early in the week, before the storm subsided, Republican leaders were reviewing the convention schedule on a day-to-day basis to determine whether to proceed with planned events. The party maintained a text message alert system for the delegates "to keep them fully informed not only of delegate activities but also to get them information about the storm," McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said.

McCain got the enthusiastic endorsements of two of Silicon Valley's best-known female executives, who said he was a far more attractive candidate than his Democratic rival on economic and tax grounds.

The pro-McCain pair were Meg Whitman, who stepped down as eBay's chief executive officer in March, and Carly Fiorina, the chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005. Both are active in the McCain campaign; both have been talked about as receiving high-level appointments, if McCain is elected.

Also of note
Comcast is appealing a ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that found the broadband provider had illegally blocked some customers' Web traffic...Silicon Valley start-up NebuAd has suspended plans to deploy a controversial program that displays ads based on the monitoring of Web activity while Congress reviews privacy concerns...Intel is expected to announce the "Dunnington" processor later this month, the first six-core processor and last of its Penryn chips...Apple sent out invitations for a music-related event next week, and the smart money is on new iPods.

Joost isn't letting the public try out the site yet but that will change soon.

(Credit: Joost)

Finally, Joost is going to correct the error that badly hobbled the Web video service many once considered to be a serious YouTube competitor.

Currently available for Windows and Mac, Joost is planning to launch a test version of its new site later this month that will feature a browser-based plug-in and will no longer require users to watch via the company's much maligned desktop client. In a not so surprising move, users will be able to embed Joost's videos.

CEO Mike Volpi acknowledged in an interview with CNET that the desktop client was one of the company's missteps but that the new browser-based player would provide ease of use, a high-quality video experience, and more content. The new site, according to Volpi, will even be less taxing on laptop batteries. News of Joost's new site was first reported by The Industry Standard.

But the big question that Joost must answer is whether the site overhaul comes too late to catch to Hulu or Google's YouTube.

Joost pounced onto the online-video scene with seemingly the right combination of founders, investors, and technology. The media instantly christened it a legitimate YouTube killer.

The start-up was the brainchild of Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the founders of Skype and Kazaa. Among the backers were media conglomerates Viacom and CBS, parent company of CNET, publisher of News.com. Joost was powered by the same peer-to-peer technology that turned Skype and Kazaa into the most disruptive forces in the telephone and music sectors, respectively.

The public wasn't impressed. The content offering was thin. The player often stalled or stuttered, and it relied on the desktop client--meaning that you couldn't just log on to the Web from any computer to access your Joost account.

Volpi came on a year ago, and not much changed until January, when the company's CTO left and Volpi initiated a house cleaning. Volpi says it's still too early in the game to crown any site a winner.

"There is still ample opportunity to create a portal or aggregation site," Volpi said in an interview last week. "People will go where they can find the content they want."

Yes, but are Web video fans already used to getting what they want at Hulu, the company created by NBC Universal and News Corp? The competitor launched last spring to glowing press reviews, and traffic has continued to mushroom. A report issued this week by LiveRail reported that Hulu is probably already generating as much revenue as YouTube, which launched in 2005.

When it comes to YouTube, the Google property is still far and away the Internet's most popular video site. More than a third of every video viewed online is at YouTube. But YouTube is a user-generated site, with most of its content 10 minutes or shorter. Joost is much more like Hulu, a distribution platform for mostly professionally made content.

Volpi said Joost has greatly enhanced the content selection. The site will feature shows from Warner Bros., CBS, and Comedy Central, as well as other Viacom properties. Volpi said Joost will eventually offer a greater selection than Hulu. Volpi said Hulu offered little outside of the shows from NBC and Fox.

He called the selection "tired."

Joost's videos will follow a five-second advertisement or "preroll." Despite enabling users to embed video, the site will not concentrate on syndicating content.

"Our plan is to be a destination site where people go to watch their favorite shows," Volpi said.

Filmmaker Michael Moore plans to premiere his latest documentary exclusively on the Internet for free, forgoing the traditional theatrical release.

Slacker Uprising , which documents Moore's 62-city tour through swing states during the 2004 U.S. presidential election to rally young voters, will be available for download for three weeks, beginning September 23. A DVD of the 97-minute film will be released on October 7 through Amazon.com and Netflix.

"This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans," Moore said in a statement Thursday. "The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters ever at the polls in November. I think Slacker Uprising will inspire (millions) to get off the couch and give voting a chance."

Moore's camp said no consideration was ever given to a theatrical release for the film, which cost about $2 million to make, perhaps forfeiting a nice profit at the box office. His last two documentaries, Sicko and Fahrenheit 9/11, are two of the three highest-grossing documentaries ever released.

The download will be available on BlipTV. See trailer below

The planned release takes a page out of Radiohead's book, which released its album In Rainbows on the Internet in October 2007. The band invited fans to pay what they wanted for the download, but the music was essentially free for the taking. Radiohead has never revealed the promotion's sales figures, but there was speculation that the money wasn't very good.

Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor, followed Radiohead by offering the digital version of the album Ghosts I-IV for free, as well as charging for premium versions. As of last month, Reznor said that the album had generated 781,917 transactions and $1.6 million.

You could easily forget a business birthday, but Google wields more star power than most. It was officially incorporated 10 years ago this Sunday while co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still working from a garage.

To celebrate, the journal Nature has asked researchers and business pundits to postulate on which young technologies might have as much impact on the world as Google 10 years down the road. After all, in the last 10, Google has grown from running a few loaner servers to a vast network of data centers that can not only deliver a map to a local store but also could have major effects on scientists' understanding of nature.

According to Nature, the common theme of their projections is the integration of "the worlds of matter and information." Here is a selection of responses.

Sam Schillace, engineering director at Google: better browsers. (Oddly enough, Google just introduced its own browser, Chrome.)

"The next generation of browsers...will make communication and collaboration even more transparent and let me focus on what I really want to do--connect with the person at the other end and get work done together. It will turn the web into a superconductor for interactions with other people and change the way we work pretty radically."

Bill Buxton, principal researcher at Microsoft: electronic paper.

"The history of communication technologies over the past century tells me that anything that's going to impact on the next ten years is going to be ten years old already. (The components that made Google possible 10 years ago were already there 10 years earlier, with the creation of the Web.)

"One prime candidate is electronic paper, displays that are as easy to view in ambient light conditions as paper and that consume hardly any power. It started with E Ink a decade ago; now we are seeing it in devices such as Amazon's Kindle."

Investor Esther Dyson, board member of DNA start-up 23andMe (which was co-founded by the wife of Google co-founder Brin): the mining of genetic information.

"Everyone dies of something; your genome gives you hints of which causes are most likely for you. But it doesn't predict precisely or with certainty, or tell you when. People's level of understanding of statistics in relation to soccer or gambling always amazes me, so there is hope that people can likewise understand the difference between correlation and causation in genetics."

Ian Pearson, a futurist with the U.K.-based Futurizon group: video visors.

"We're crying out for technology that will allow us to combine what we can do on the Internet with what we do in the physical world. One technology that springs to mind is the video visor, which gives you a computer image superimposed over the world around you."

And in the really out-there category...

Vincent Hayward, professor of engineering, Pierre and Marie Curie University: haptic, or tactile, computer interfaces, e.g., for mobile phones.

"A dry, flat screen will be able to simulate the feel of fur or wetness."

Google has added a new level of detail to the tools advertisers can use to track the performance of their search-ad campaigns, showing them the geographic region of the users who clicked on the ads.

Advertisers pay Google for ads next to search results when users click on them, so obviously advertisements have an interest in knowing details about where those users are located. "By specifically targeting those locations where your ads perform best you can maximize your campaign's performance," Google's Trevor Claiborne said on the Inside AdWords blog Thursday.

The move illustrates one of the aspects of online advertising: detailed analytics let advertisers much more precisely determine the success or failure of advertising as measured by clicks on ads, views to Web sites, and conversions of advertisements into actions such as registering for a site or buying a product.

Separately, Google also said in a separate AdWords post on Thursday that it's adjusted performance-monitoring tools so advertisers can distinguish ads viewed through search results and through browsing content.

"Because search and content network statistics can differ greatly, viewing aggregate statistics for a campaign running on both networks may not give you granular insight into your performance," Google's Christian Yee said on the blog. "For example, a high number of impressions and a low click-through rate on the search network may be signals that you should optimize, but similar statistics on the content network are unlikely to indicate poor performance."