Webware

Google wants to make sure more key employees stick around at its Mountain View, Calif., campus.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Google thinks it will be able to tell which of its employees are going to quit, maybe even before they know.

The company revealed Tuesday that it is using its fabled data-collection and analysis powers for more than just search results. The Wall Street Journal reported that Google has developed an algorithm for assessing the number of employees likely to turn their back on the free lunches and multicolored walls of Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus in hopes of convincing the best of those folks to stay.

A few years ago, Silicon Valley workers were flocking to Google, and the company was hiring like mad. The world has changed, however, and Google is no longer automatically seen as the best place for a budding young coder or entrepreneur to hone their talents--especially as the stock price has declined since its late 2007 heights.

As a result, Google has seen recent defections to companies du jour such as Twitter and Facebook, and is determined to retain its best people, according to a company representative quoted by the Journal. The algorithm is still in testing (insert joke about Google's beta culture here), but the idea seems to be to identify disengaged employees before they lose interest in staying with Google.

It's almost like a kinder, gentler version of the "forced ranking" Six Sigma program that encouraged companies to regularly fire the bottom 10 percent of their employees to get rid of the malcontents. Google's not going down that road, but nor is it shy about using quantitative analysis to categorize its workforce.

From a MySpace-related suicide to hate speech on YouTube, the world of user-generated content has been plagued by plain, old nastiness since its early days.

That's why, as part of the Family Online Safety Institute conference in Washington, D.C., YouTube parent company Google has unveiled an "Abuse and Safety" resource guide.

According to a post on the official Google blog, the new section of YouTube's help center features "straightforward safety tips and multimedia resources from experts and prominent safety organizations" regarding topics like cyberbulling, privacy, spam, and sexual exploitation.

YouTube also said that the resource guide will make it more straightforward to find out how to manage privacy and safety settings.

The dark underbelly of online video was in the spotlight once again when a Florida teenager used live-streaming service Justin.tv to broadcast his suicide last month.

SAP on Tuesday sent out a notice to employees that the deck chairs will be realigned following its megamerger with Business Objects, according to sources close to the company.

SAP's business user organization, which is responsible for information worker and organizational performance applications, will be moved over to Business Objects, the sources said.

In some ways, that should come as no surprise.

SAP, as part of its $6.8 billion Business Objects merger announcement in October, said Doug Merritt, the head of its Business User Development and a corporate officer, would join the Business Objects group and report to Business Objects Chief Executive John Schwarz, rather than Henning Kagermann, SAP's chief executive.

Post-merger, Business Objects will continue to operate as a standalone business under the SAP Group.

SAP's business user organization, according to its presentation to financial analysts in Vienna last year, includes Duet, enterprise search, mobile, Adobe Systems forms, and analytics dashboard, as well as governance, risk, and compliance software and corporate performance management software.

Kagermann and Business Objects executives plan to chew the fat with the press on this topic in greater detail Wednesday.

And chew they did. Kagermann, along with Leo Apotheker, SAP deputy CEO, and Business Object's Schwarz, offered up their vision and road map of the combined company. SAP on Tuesday closed its merger with Business Objects.

SAP and Business Objects plan to jointly introduce nine products by the end of this month, of which two will specifically be targeted at mid-size to small companies. Those two products include its SAP Business All-in-One with BusinessObjects Edge Standard package, which focuses on delivering a business process platform with comprehensive business intelligence, and also the Crystal Reports Server Package, which is a type of reporting technology.

The other seven products include: a financial performance management package geared toward chief financial officers, a.k.a. head bean counters; a governance, risk and compliance package for tackling regulatory issues; a visualization and reporting package; enterprise query, reporting and analysis package; data integration and data quality management package; and, finally, a master data services package.

With Business Objects, a pioneer in the business intelligence arena, SAP is looking to build its fourth pillar in its four-pillar growth strategy, said Kagermann. SAP has viewed business intelligence as key to their strategy of maintaining a high growth rate, given the recent rapid acceleration SAP has seen in that market.

This guy could probably have used some help from Whiskipedia to learn just how much that J.D. would knock him out. (I took this photo in college.)

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/Long Before CNET News.com)

Confession: I don't know a whole lot about alcoholic beverages. I'm that girl who pours blue Curacao into stuff simply because it turns your drink a cool color. I don't actually know what it is. That's probably not a good thing.

My cluelessness is starting to give my friends headaches--literally. I read in The New York Times that rose champagne was going to be really trendy this season, so I got some for a New Year's Eve party, only to learn that the stuff tastes even worse than regular (cheap) champagne and makes you feel even worse the next day. (And it's pink, so guys won't touch it.)

So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that 2008 will shape up to be the year of the booze industry's full-out digital debut. We're off to a good start. On New Year's Day, as many of us were still whimpering about hangovers, Whiskipedia launched. It's exactly what you think it is--a wiki about whiskey, or whisky, or however you spell it. Like its namesake Wikipedia, user contributions will keep the site's content flowing, but the site has expert oversight from administrator Ian Buxton (of The Whisky Channel) and the preliminary content was derived from the book Whisky: A Book of Words.

Of course, it's just about whiskey, so it couldn't help me learn how to avoid crappy champagne. But maybe it's a start. Here's to hoping that Whiskipedia sets a fine new precedent for online booze information dissemination. Because, really, I can't be the only clueless person out there.

(And ideally, perhaps better education will lead to more responsible drinking.)