Digital Media

Google is looking for ways to make sure its engineers have ways to get their ideas up the food chain before they take them somewhere else.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google has begun to hold "innovation reviews," where employees can pitch their bosses on their latest idea or product, who then in turn take the idea before Google's ruling triumvirate of CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It's part of an effort to make sure the ideas conceived in a Google employee's famous "20 percent time" have a chance to make it out of the cubicle.

Google is growing up. No longer a scrappy start-up where ideas could float up to top executives over lunch in the cafeteria, Google is being forced to adapt to life as a big corporation with structure and processes as seen by initiatives such as this one.

It's also grappling with the notion that it's no longer the automatic destination for Silicon Valley's most skilled engineers and marketers who are looking to do cool work and get rich. Companies like Facebook have lots of ex-Google employees within their ranks, and start-ups through the Valley are headed by those with a stint at Google on their resume.

However, if Googlers get the sense that their budding ideas and projects could be treated the same way as the ideas of the brothers Rasmussen--the developers of Google Wave who received a personal blessing from Brin to start their project--perhaps they will be more likely to stay. Google is already trying to identify employees who are likely to leave in hopes of reaching out to them before they head out the door.

The question of whether consumers will be given a legal means to make copies of DVDs inched closer to an answer this week as a preliminary hearing got under way in the movie studios' case against RealNetwork's DVD-ripping software.

The case before U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel--the same judge who ruled against Napster--was filed last year by the Motion Picture Association of America in an attempt to stop the sale of RealNetwork's RealDVD software. RealDVD lets users copy DVDs to their computer hard drive. The case is being watched closely as it has the potential to lead to an overhaul of Hollywood's DVD business model.

At the heart of case, the MPAA alleges that RealDVD violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) because it bypasses the copy protection built into DVDs. The DMCA prohibits companies from developing products that circumvent antipiracy protections. Real Networks has long denied that the encryption technology is ever cracked by RealDVD.

The hearing got off to a dramatic start last week when Patel temporarily sealed the San Francisco courtroom, buying arguments from MPAA attorneys and the Hollywood-based DVD Copy Control Association that trade secrets might be disclosed during testimony. The courtroom was sealed once again on Wednesday, for the same reasons. CNET News objected in both instances.

Testimony that was heard publicly focused on just how easy RealDVD makes it for people to copy DVDs--and how many times they can do it. The film industry tried to show that the software entrusts RealNetworks with the job of protecting digital film copies from piracy.

The MPAA called up upon a security expert who said RealDVD's copy controls can be altered or removed all together from Real's servers in the form of a software update, and those limits could easily be removed all together by removing just one line of code.

RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser acknowledged that RealDVD could be used to make unauthorized copies of DVD rentals, but the company does all it can to "steer people away from that," including limiting playback of copies to five separate machines. Moreover, he said the problem could be eliminated if the major movie studios helped create a way to identify a movie as a rental.

But perhaps the most revealing testimony from Glaser was about a sort of DVD jukebox the company is working on, codenamed "Facet." Glaser demonstrated the box, which comes equipped with a hard drive and software that enables owners to duplicate DVDs--in a similar fashion as RealDVD--and then store hundreds of movies on the device. Facet may in fact be much more important to Real than RealDVD, the proceeding revealed.

The preliminary hearing in the case is expected to resume at the end of next week.

Also of note

All-electric Mini vs. Ford Fusion hybrid

CNET News' Martin LaMonica road tests two of the latest cars to use electric battery power to improve fuel efficiency.
• Photos: Gas alternatives hit road
May 1, 2009

A Facebook exec's bid for law and order

Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer at the massive social network, talks about his just-announced candidacy in California's 2010 attorney general race.
• Photos: From tech execs to pols
May 1, 2009

Hulu-Disney deal hurts YouTube, helps cable

Hulu now boasts long-form content from three major movie studios. One analyst says Hulu could solve the cable industry's Web problem.
• Disney signs onto Hulu
• Levinsohn: Hollywood, as you know it, is dead
April 30, 2009

Microsoft chugs toward Windows 7 release

A near-final release candidate--expected to be the last public test version--is being given to developers on Thursday. It is slated to be publicly available May 5.
• Images: A peek at Windows 7 release candidate
• Acer exec: Windows 7 available on October 23
April 30, 2009

Apple plots course for middle of mobile

For years, the PC industry has longed to make a compelling device that's bigger than a phone but smaller than a notebook. They have failed. Can Apple pull it off?
April 29, 2009

Obama's transparency vow: Mixed reviews

At 100 days, the administration has made some big steps toward being more Internet-friendly. In other ways, it hasn't yet lived up to the campaign promise.
• Obama's tech agenda on hold
April 29, 2009

Where federal energy research money should go

The Energy Department's new ARPA-E program aims to find "transformational energy technologies" beyond fossil fuels. Here are some offbeat ideas on how it could get started.
April 28, 2009

Google crashes Wolfram Alpha debut party

Mathematica maker publicly demonstrates a Web service to dig into data like stock prices or mortality--but Google launches a similar service on the same day.
April 28, 2009

The latest from Facebook: 'Open Stream API'

The social-networking giant will let developers tap into and tinker with the Twitter-like flow of user content that Facebook calls the "stream."
April 27, 2009

More headlines

Senators aim to protect electric grid from hackers

Images: The house Jobs doesn't want to call home

Time Warner: AOL's revenue slide continues

Judge issues extension in Google Book Search settlement

Which smartphone maker isn't Verizon talking to?

Scope of clean energy, climate bills takes shape

Google CEO, Microsoft exec on Obama tech board

Moto Labs screens interactive display concept

Adieu to the old-fashioned desktop computer?

In response to criticism that small business were largely powerless against negative reviews on Yelp, the community reviews site has rolled out a feature that allows business owners to respond to reviews of their establishments, whether good or bad.

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman wrote in a company blog Thursday that the free feature was rolled out Wednesday:

Last night we rolled out a highly anticipated feature that allows business owners to publicly comment on their reviews. Already we've seen a number of sharp-eyed businesses make good use of this new functionality to provide additional context around specific reviews for the benefit of consumers and yelpers alike.

The service was created to give business owners a way to provide constructive feedback in a public forum, instead of the previous system, which required businesses to correspond with users through private messages, Yelp told its " elite users" in an e-mail earlier this month. The feature is expected to help quell some business owners' biggest complaint about the social reviews site--that businesses had few avenues to respond to negative reviews or unfounded claims.

Business owner comments will be given a more stringent review than user comments, and Yelp promises to remove any owner-written comments deemed disparaging, attacking, or pandering with some sort of incentive. The company has put up a guide that clarifies what businesses should and should not do with the new system.

Before business owners can use the comment feature, they must claim ownership of the business at biz.yelp.com, Stoppelman wrote.

The new feature is being introduced in the wake of some business owners resorting to libel lawsuits against former clients. In January, a San Francisco chiropractor filed a lawsuit against a patient who wrote a negative review of him on Yelp, but that suit was quickly settled.

A similar lawsuit soon followed in which a California dentist sued a couple, claiming libel over a negative review posted to Yelp's site. Yelp was named as a defendant in that case, but the plaintiff's attorney indicated at the time that the reviews site would likely be dismissed as a defendant because Web sites are protected against liability for content their users post.

These days, everyone's a gamer. If not a traditionalist firing away at bad guys through a high-end video game console and large TV, he or she might just be in an ongoing Scrabble duel with a Facebook friend or hooked on an addictive iPhone game like ReMovem.

Nowhere was this notion of the mainstreaming of gaming more pronounced than at this week's Game Developers Conference, the massive gathering of which some consider all the more critical to the industry this year, given market forces. Sure, the video game industry is growing and some say it's even recession-resistant, but it hasn't escaped the wrath of the downturn entirely, with a series of recent studio closings, and layoffs and killed projects at even the strongest console manufacturers and biggest game publishers.

While Nintendo's Wii continues to outpace expectations, and certain games are making fortunes for their publishers, a strong argument can be made that the hottest segment of the video games industry is one that is still in its infancy: social games.

These titles, which are popping up by the bushelful on platforms like Facebook and MySpace, as well as on Apple's iPhone, are garnering user numbers that would previously have been thought impossible.

At GDC on Thursday, Kristian Segerstrale, the CEO and co-founder of PlayFish, one of the most successful publishers of social games stated his case for how the mainstream video games industry can learn from his side of the business.

Among other assertions, Segerstrale argued that while the nature of the social games business differs significantly from that followed for many years by the more traditional, retail-oriented publishers, times are changing, customers' behaviors and expectations are shifting rapidly, and the winning model may well be the new one.

The monetization comes when a social game publisher figures out how to attract a sizable audience and convince many of those people to engage in relatively cheap microtransactions for any number of things: level-ups, game gear, music, or whatever is on offer. Advertising is also a possible revenue producer.

In another threat to the likes of the Xbox, PS3, and Wii, a start-up called OnLive announced a brand-new game distribution system Monday night that, if it works as planned, could change the games industry forever.

OnLive, which was started by WebTV founder Steve Perlman and former Eidos CEO Mike McGarvey, is aiming to launch a system--seven years in the works--that will digitally distribute first-run, AAA games from publishers like Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Atari, and others at the same time that those titles are released into retail channels. The system is designed to allow players to stream on-demand games at the highest quality onto any Intel-based Mac or PC running XP or Vista, regardless of how powerful the computer is.

The system will also stream games directly to a TV via a small plug-in device, and players can use a custom wireless controller as well as VoIP headsets in conjunction with it.

Meanwhile, EA Mobile is making a big bet on the iPhone and iPod Touch, announcing plans this week to port more than a dozen of its most popular games to Apple's gadgets.

EA Mobile's Travis Boatman--who's appeared onstage at Apple's last two iPhone software events--announced this news during a keynote address at GDC. At some point this year, EA Mobile will release versions of franchises like Madden NFL, Wolfenstein, Command and Conquer, and NBA Live, according to PocketGamer.

Gaming continues to be one of the most active areas of Apple's App Store, and game developers at GDC flocked to sessions regarding the iPhone--conference organizers were forced to turn away late-arriving attendees to some sessions.

Also at GDC, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata revved up a packed house at his opening keynote address, but his revelations were limited to three new games and a new storage infrastructure for the Wii virtual console.

The games included Rhythm Heaven, an American version of a rhythm game for the Nintendo DS that Iwata said had already sold 1.7 million copies in Japan; a new Wii Ware game called Rock 'n Roll Climber that lets players use their Wii controllers and a Wii Balance Board to simulate the motions of climbing a rock wall; and a new Zelda title for the DS called The Legend of Zelda: Spirit.

Google also got in on the GDC action by unveiling the latest addition to its iGoogle start page service: a collection of themes designed by video game publishers.

The search giant has partnered with nine publishers to come up with about two dozen themes from recent games such as Electronic Arts' Spore to arcade classics such as Galaga.

And finally, at GDC Friday, engineers spelled out the inner workings and target markets for Larrabee, Intel's first graphics chip in over a decade.

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, announced the new set of themes at a GDC event, then hosted a panel of gaming personalities, including Capcom producer Yoshinori Ono, and Charles Huang, co-founder of RedOctane, which makes Guitar Hero.

Among the topics discussed was how the Web had changed gaming development. The general answer was that game developers and publishers alike are getting much more feedback during the development process, in part from increasingly simpler ways to aggregate information from blogs and message boards, as well as public beta programs.

Huang also noted that user-generated content created inside of games has been on a sharp rise, as witnessed by the number of user-designed tracks that have been created and downloaded in the latest Guitar Hero title; the figure now tops 10 million.

Getting social
Social networks, for their part, also managed to grab quite a few of the week's headlines. Facebook, for example, after being deluged with mostly negative feedback about its new layout, announced it's making a handful of changes to appease the outraged masses.

"Over time, we'll continue to give you more control over what's in your main stream and how you consume it, wrote Product Director Christopher Cox in a blog post Tuesday. "We have the eventual goal of building filters that summarize this activity so you can see a more condensed view of what's been going on. We're also thinking about ways of filtering out some of the Wall posts and content directed to specific people to focus more on posts shared with everyone."

Among the changes already in the works is live updating, which gives users the ability to turn on auto-updating so they don't have to refresh the page to see what's new.

And on the security front, Facebook has changed the way its password reset tool works so that it does not easily verify e-mail addresses to potential spammers, after CNET News contacted it with concerns from an Israeli security expert.

A company representative also says that Facebook has been "looking at" the possibility of building in a virtual currency, but his language was about as ambiguous as it gets.

Later in the week, during a Q&A session at the Global Technology Symposium held Thursday at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company's still not sure why the recent redesign process irked so many of the Web site's users.

"In terms of what went wrong with the redesign, we don't know yet." But she added that the percentage of users giving the redesign a thumbs-down was smaller than previous changes to the site.

"As a percentage of our users, this one is much less than before," she said. She also offered a backhanded compliment to Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook considered buying last year.

"What's interesting about Twitter is that they are a very good company doing one thing very well, which is real-time update," she said. "We are, by far, the largest photo-sharing site on the Web...Similarly, we are larger at doing what Twitter does. We think what they're doing is good. Our redesign is not in reference to them--nor was our redesign in reference to Flickr."

Speaking of which, Twitter and online advertising company Federated Media earlier this week rolled out ExecTweets, a Microsoft-sponsored site featuring Twitter feeds from "top business execs."

But CNET's Rafe Needleman quickly pointed out that this is not the mythical revenue model we're waiting to see from Twitter. It can't be. It's just one of those oddball content partnership sites that will look interesting for a while but probably fade away as the Microsoft contract to sponsor it runs down.

Twitter still has not announced a business model, Needleman later continued. There are no Pro Twitter accounts. There is no TwitterWords advertising program. You still can't buy plush toy Fail Whales from Twitter. But that's OK, he says. "There is rich value inside Twitter, and I do believe the company can afford to take its time to find the good ways to extract it."

Net news
Internet service providers this week started coming forward about agreeing to work with the recording industry to battle illegal file sharing.

Joe Waz, a senior vice president at Comcast, the nation's second largest ISP, told a gathering of music industry executives that the company has issued 2 million notices on behalf of copyright owners, according to multiple people who were in attendance.

Comcast said Wednesday afternoon that the notices Waz referred to were part of the company's standard practice and not a new policy.

"Comcast, like other major ISPs, forwards notices of alleged infringement that we receive from music, movie, videogame, and other content owners to our customers," Comcast said in a statement. "This is the same process we've had in place for years--nothing has changed. While we have always supported copyright holders in their efforts to reduce piracy under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and continue to do so, we have no plans to test a so-called 'three-strikes-and-you're-out' policy."

Waz made the comments Tuesday while part of a panel at the Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville. This was the same event where an AT&T executive told the gathering that it was cooperating with the Recording Industry Association of America by sending notices to customers accused of illegal filing sharing. The letters are part of a trial program, the executive told the audience. That exec, Jim Cicconi, later clarified that there will never be disruptions of service as a result.

In addition, sources confirmed that Cox Communications is also assisting the RIAA in the group's new campaign to use ISPs to help discourage consumers from pirating songs.

In other Internet-related news, Google now believes there's a financial incentive for companies to support the next-gen Internet standard, IPv6. And Google itself could profit.

The big advantage IPv6 has over IPv4 is the number of unique addresses it can accommodate--4.3 billion for IPv4 compared to about 34,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for IPv6. Although 4.3 billion may sound like a lot, addresses are often allocated in large blocks that mean many aren't generally available, and expert estimates forecast an end to new IPv4 addresses in 2011.

Also of note
Rhomobile says it's got a way for software developers to write apps once and have them run on five different modern smartphone operating systems...Obama commits $1.2. billion in energy R&D, holds an online town hall meeting, and his staff meets with tech execs...In job news, Amazon is reporting closing three facilities, Google is cutting nearly 200 sales and marketing jobs, and IBM job cuts hit its applications services unit...Tesla takes the covers off the Model S, an electric sedan priced at $56,400 but which qualifies for a $7,500 federal tax credit, and the company's CEO makes an economic argument for buying it...and Ubuntu's "Jaunty Jackalope" Ubuntu springs into beta.

NEW YORK--"They have that saying, 'don't shoot the messenger,' but the reason they say that is because the messenger gets shot," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me over coffee on Tuesday morning. "So I have to take my shots."

He was talking, of course, about the PR fiasco that ensued when the Emeryville, Calif.-based East Bay Express newspaper published a lengthy expose on the business reviews site, alleging that it strong-armed businesses into paying to remove negative reviews. As a fairly regular Yelp user, I was repulsed by the possibility that its corporate practices were so sketchy. But Stoppelman, visiting from the company's home base of San Francisco, claims there's no truth to the allegations.

"There are business owners out there who don't think consumer reviews are good," said Stoppelman, who called the expose's accusations a "conspiracy theory" and likened them to similar tiffs that have arisen over Google's advertising program. "(They're) looking for confirmation that Yelp is this bad entity."

He wrote last week in a lengthy post on the official Yelp blog that the activity called out as "extortion" and likened to the Mafia in the East Bay Express can be attributed in part to the algorithm that Yelp developed to weed out suspicious reviews.

"When we set out to built Yelp, we said we didn't want to be this anonymous reviews site," Stoppelman said to CNET News on Tuesday. "When you go to Yelp and you search for a business, (because of the algorithm) you're seeing reviews that are reasonably trustworthy." Yelp will, for example, flag reviews that appear to be spam, may be overly positive reviews coming from a business itself or overly negative ones coming from its competitors, or are coming from new users with no track record or profile data.

The fallout wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, Stoppelman explained. Inquiries and complaints in the wake of the East Bay Express story were primarily restricted to the San Francisco Bay Area. His visit to New York was routine and already on the books, rather than a face-saving measure.

Stoppelman also said he didn't think the allegations could be connected to, say, a rogue Yelp employee independently engaged in shady tactics. "This doesn't come up, because we have all these processes in place," he said. "It would be caught in the account manager hand-off."

"We haven't made it obvious enough about what systems are in place for our users, especially business users."

But he did admit to some error on Yelp's part in not explaining its technologies and practices thoroughly enough--from the review-filtering algorithm to the sponsored-listing offerings.

"We haven't made it obvious enough about what systems are in place for our users, especially business users," he acknowledged. "As these stories have sort of come out, we've been focusing on making sure that the messaging is very, very clear and tight."

Given the Web's gradual shift toward a culture of "transparency," any site with a behind-closed-doors algorithm is going to be eyed with suspicion. The spotlight has fallen on the technology that powers social news site Digg, especially when people learned how to game it. And last spring, Facebook pulled a little-known friend-search feature when tech gossip blogs called it a "stalker list."

And the Yelp algorithm does pull down some legitimate reviews, something that was pointed out in the East Bay Express story and which Stoppelman said will invariably happen given Yelp's system. "We're not going to get it right, and it's not perfect, because you're going to lose some legitimate content as you try to get rid of the spammy content." Reviews that are taken down through the algorithm aren't deleted, he said; they're not displayed on a business' review page but still appear on the reviewer's profile.

Yelp nevertheless welcomes feedback, Stoppelman said. It's possible, for example, to review Yelp on Yelp. Over 1,500 people have reviewed it, and he said he tries to respond to as many of the reviewers as possible.

Internet leaders Facebook and Google made big headlines this week by officially rolling out, within minutes of one another, their universal log-in systems--Facebook Connect and Friend Connect, respectively.

Both promising users an easy way to sign in to multiple Web sites using just a single name and password, the news came amid the backdrop of better-than-expected Cyber Monday sales results and yet continual layoff announcements as the now officially declared recession deepens.

The week kicked off with lots of buzz about Facebook Connect, which was announced last spring, but wasn't officially rolled out until Thursday. It lets members connect their Facebook identity across the Web, including profile photos, names, photos, friends, groups, events, and other information.

Similarly, Google Friend Connect lets users register with a log-in that they're comfortable with and probably use every day--their Google or Gmail ID and password. Friend Connect is linked to OpenSocial, the Google-led set of common APIs for building social applications across multiple Web sites.

Both Facebook Connect and Friend Connect are simple and bring the concept of data portability--something standard created in 2005--into the mainstream.

All of the universal log-in services have their merits, but many are betting on Facebook's because, in addition to boosting involvement, what users do on these sites can get reflected back to their activity stream on Facebook. In other words, it's not just a registration system, but also a marketing channel with a built-in audience of 130 million monthly active users (according to Facebook).

The services will likely make life easier for users. Sites get more users. Central registration authorities get more valuable user behavior data. With all that, however, comes more potential for abuse on the part of sites and identity providers--or even cyberscoundrels.

Facebook users this week had to deal with Koobface, a nasty virus triggered by an e-mail lure and a fake Adobe Flash update request. Once infected, searches performed on the likes of Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Live.com were hijacked to other, lesser-known search sites.

And also amid all the "Connect" news, Google detailed extension plans for its Chrome browsers. Among the most requested features for the open-source browser are plug-in customization, and yes, an ad-blocking extension would be allowed.

And in the realm of Web pioneers, reports surfaced again this week that AOL's former CEO, Jonathan Miller, might be interested in buying some or all of Yahoo. This sent Yahoo's beleaguered stock rising, and triggered billionaire investor-activist Carl Icahn to publicly oppose selling just a portion of Yahoo.

Faces of recession
It's nice to know we'll all be easily connected on the Web, even if we're cash-strapped with no credit and no job. That is to say, the gloomy recession news just kept coming in this week, with AT&T laying off 12,000 employees and other reductions reported at RealNetworks, Viacom, Adobe Systems, Carlyle Group, and Gawker Media. (See our layoff scorecard for more details.)

Meanwhile, tech companies are reducing revenue forecasts and cutting back on planned projects.

We've gone one step deeper this week, however, and started telling stories about not just the numbers and the dollars, but the real people dealing with the recession.

LogLogic's Patricia Sueltz, for example, heard a clear message about the economy from investors, but she already knows a thing or two about navigating through tough times.

And we also heard a confession from a CEO who actually has to hand out the pink slips. It's easy to vilify him, but contrary to popular notions, these aren't decisions that are taken lightly, at least with the executive we interviewed.

Meanwhile, the downturn in the economy has meant start-ups like green-tech Mascoma have had to slow expectations. Just six months ago, Mascoma had the wind in its sails, as did the rest of the clean-tech sector. Now, the company is treading carefully and scaling back.

And we also learned about how the Erickson family has learned to cope with a layoff, a story becoming less and less unique. Balancing the checkbook is a tense chore for this unemployed IT consultant and his wife.

Consumers still buying
Despite all the bad economic news, Cyber Monday turned out to be a welcome relief for an industry that had been bracing itself for the worst. Visitors to e-commerce sites spent $846 million on Monday, an increase of 15 percent over the same day a year ago, according to ComScore.

It also ranked as the second-biggest day of online shopping ever and capped off a successful Thanksgiving holiday weekend for the industry, which overall saw spending jump 13 percent.

Google also saw double-digit jumps for paid click results on Cyber Monday.

But consumers were wooed mostly by amazing deals and aggressive promotions--they certainly aren't buying the likes of Nokia's much buzzed about mystery device, the fancy N97, which was unveiled this week to much fanfare at the Nokia World 2008 conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Part of the company's high-end N series of multimedia computers, the N97 trumps all previous models with a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard and a tilting 3.5-inch touch screen. It's expected to ship in Europe during the first half of 2009, with an estimated price of 550 euros ($695). No official word on when we'll see the N97 stateside.

It takes a jab at other popular touch-screen smartphones like the Apple iPhone 3G, T-Mobile G1, and Research In Motion BlackBerry Storm. But it remains to be seen whether it will succeed. CNET News' Maggie Reardon, who got a live demo of the N97, offers more details and claims "it's no iPhone."

Also of note
Making the transition to digital television...With JavaFX, Sun seeks new coders, new revenue...Dell racks up Microsoft as data center customer...Photo buffs grapple with video SLRs...Tim Lincecum, motion capture video game star... Apple deletes Mac antivirus suggestion...Qi Lu to head Microsoft's online effort...Entertainment dominates top iPhone applications...Is Obama's AG pick, Eric Holder, good on privacy?...and Obama's security adviser, James Jones, calls for energy action.

Search is inextricably woven into the use of computers, but it's still a relative rarity when it comes to the mobile phone market.

That's why I was keen to try Yahoo's attempt to make the technology more approachable through its free voice-controlled search product, OneSearch with Voice. My overall assessment after trying it on a BlackBerry Pearl 8130 Yahoo lent to me: the software is useful, but it whetted my appetite more than it actually transformed my life.

To use OneSearch with Voice, you hold down your phone's "talk" button and speak a few words into the phone. The phone sends what you said to Yahoo servers that convert it into text and run a search tailored for mobile phone users. Whereupon, the results and sometimes an accompanying ad appear on the phone.

It didn't always produce the right answer, but it did so often enough and easily enough that I found myself turning to the application more and more frequently. And its textual results were more useful for me than Google's 1-800-GOOG-411 voice-only search service.

There's no secret why Yahoo is eager for the market: mobile search is growing fast and is a powerful conduit for targeted advertising.

Google long since passed Yahoo for search on personal computers, but the mobile market is relatively immature--and it's growing fast. From June 2007 to June 2008, "the number of people accessing mobile search at least once a week grew 50 percent in Europe, with France and Spain leading at a rate of 69 percent and 63 percent, respectively," according to ComScore analyst Alistair Hill, and the number in the U.S. grew 104 percent to 10 million. But Google leads Yahoo by a wide margin for mobile search usage in the U.S., U.K., Italy, France, Spain, and Germany.

So how's does OneSearch with Voice stack up?

What's good
The best thing about the service, far and away, is that it frees you from your phone's keyboard. Even on finger-friendly phones such as the BlackBerry, typing is a pain. With voice control, you can run searches much more easily.

I'll plead the Fifth about whether I tried OneSearch while driving, but there are other times when one-handed typing on a phone keypad is difficult. One early aha moment came while I was walking through the rain holding an umbrella. Another was lugging a bag through the airport. With OneSearch with Voice, I could have my say, then check back after a few moments to see if the phone fetched what I wanted rather than trying to pay attention to typing and walking at the same time.

... Read more

The unveiling of the first cell phone with Google's Android operating system made the most noise this week. But news about new and improved online music services also played loudly in the background (as did the ongoing U.S. economic crisis).

T-Mobile USA and Google on Tuesday unveiled the first phone powered by Google's open platform to much New York fanfare. The phone, previously code-named the HTC Dream, is now called the T-Mobile G1. It goes on sale in the U.S. on T-Mobile's network starting October 22 for $179 with a two-year service contract.

T-Mobile USA's parent company Deutsche Telekom will also be selling the device starting in November in the United Kingdom through its T-Mobile service. And the phone will be available throughout the rest of Europe via T-Mobile starting in the first quarter of 2009.

By most accounts, the G1, from a hardware perspective isn't a game changer. The device, which has a full QWERTY keyboard that slides out from a touch-screen exterior, looks similar to other devices on the market, such as the T-Mobile Sidekick or Verizon's LG Voyager.

But inside, the Google Android software offers an improved mobile Web experience, making it a viable rival to Apple's popular iPhone (click here for comparisons between the iPhone and the G1) and a winner over other smartphones. Of course, until other partners in the Google-spawned, 34-member Open Handset Alliance bring their Android products to market, the G1 is shouldering a lot of ambitions.

Incidentally, Google has since released the software developer kit that will allow programmers to create applications that will run on Android phones. Click here for more details on the G1's offerings, or here for a roundup of all of the week's Android news.

The music plays
One feature in the G1 that got a bit overshadowed in the launch hype is the inclusion of Amazon.com's DRM-free MP3 store, which comes preloaded on each Android phone. That's bound to catch on once users start to realize that--unlike with iTunes--you can put songs downloaded from the store on any mobile device.

Also big news for online music aficionados this week was MySpace's much-anticipated debut of MySpace Music, which many see as the official stand-off between media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

MySpace Music, backed by all four of the largest recording companies, represents the most significant challenge to Apple--at least in terms of firepower--in some time. This is the first time the top labels have all joined in taking a stake in an iTunes competitor.

As with the Android phone, MySpace Music songs come from Amazon in the DRM-free MP3 format.

But among the many challenges the service faces is that it offers no hardware solution. Apple can provide everything a music listener needs--hardware and software. Also, while MySpace has long been an Internet concert hall, where bands went to market their wares to the Web, neither MySpace nor its owner News Corp. have much experience in music retail; consider that Apple has zoomed past Wal-Mart to music retail's top spot. Some critics have said that something like MySpace Music should have been in place on the site years ago.

Also in music news this week, mobile phone company Sony Ericsson announced Tuesday that it will launch a music service called PlayNow Plus, which will feature unlimited music downloads, also from all four of the major labels.

PlayNow Plus will compete with Comes with Music, the music service launched by Sony Ericsson rival Nokia earlier this year. And out of the gate, PlayNow can offer a more complete music library than Nokia's offering. EMI has yet to join Comes with Music.

Later in the week we also learned that Universal Music Group, the largest of the major recording companies, plans to launch a "Hulu-like" video portal.

The new venture would offer professionally produced music videos as well as other original programming that features the label's artists. The Killers, Mariah Carey, Kanye West, and Amy Winehouse are just a few of the company's acts.

The effort, sources say, allows the the label to squeeze more revenue out of music videos and offer artists a new and more polished platform to display their talents than what's available online now. And it could help draw larger numbers of premium advertisers to music videos. Right now, YouTube has become the most prominent online venue for music videos, and all four of the major labels have licensed music to the video-sharing site; YouTube's troubles at attracting top-tier advertisers are well chronicled.

And for those with an eye for indies, Muxtape founder Justin Ouelette this week explained that the bureaucracy of the music industry was just too much for him to deal with, which is why he took down the playlist creation Web site that became a hipster craze earlier this year. The site will be relaunching soon, he said, but strictly as a service for independent bands to share their own music.

Also of note
Microsoft's Windows 7 won't include built-in programs for e-mail, photo editing, and movie making...Social news site Digg has raised $28.7 million in a Series C venture round...Mad Men star joined company executives in the launch of the "APT by Yahoo" ad platform...Oracle entered the hardware market with a storage server to ride shotgun with database intelligence...and Microsoft has had to delay Windows Mobile 7, a much anticipated update to its cell phone operating system.

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.