Google Joins a Heavyweight Competition in Cloud Computing

Google already runs much of the digital lives of consumers through email, Internet searches and YouTube videos. Now it wants the corporations says Quentin Hardy of the New York Times.

The search giant has for years been evasive about its plans for a so-called public cloud of computers and data storage that is rented to individuals and businesses. On Tuesday, however, it will announce pricing, features and performance guarantees aimed at companies ranging from start-ups to multinationals.

It is the latest salvo in an escalating battle among some of the most influential companies in technology to control corporate and government computing through public clouds. That battle, which is expected to last years and cost the competitors billions of dollars annually in material and talent, already includes Microsoft, IBM and Amazon.

As businesses move from owning their own computers to renting data-crunching power and software over the Internet, this resource-rich foursome is making big promises about computing clouds. Supercomputing-based research, for example, won’t be limited to organizations that can afford supercomputers. And tech companies with a hot idea will be able to get big fast because they won’t have to build their own computer networks.

Take Snapchat, the photo-swapping service that recently turned down a multibillion-dollar takeover offer from Facebook. It processes 4,000 pictures a second on Google’s servers but is just two years old and has fewer than 30 employees. The company started out working with a Google service that helps young companies create applications and was chosen by Google to be an early customer of its cloud.

Working with Google has allowed Snapchat to avoid spending a lot to support its users. “I’ve never owned a computer server,” said Bobby Murphy, a co-founder and the chief technical officer of Snapchat.

That is a big shift from the days when, for young companies, knowing how to build a complex data center was just as important as creating a popular service.

“These things are incredibly fast — setting up new servers in a minute, when it used to take several weeks to order, install and test,” said Chris Gaun, an analyst with Gartner. “Finance, product research, crunching supercomputing data like genomic information can all happen faster.”

Amazon’s cloud, called Amazon Web Services, was arguably the pioneer of the public cloud and for now is the largest player. Amazon says its cloud has “hundreds of thousands” of customers. Though most of these are individuals and small businesses, it also counts big names like Netflix, which stopped building its own data centers in 2008 and was completely on Amazon’s cloud by 2012. All of Amazon’s services are run inside that cloud, too.

A more traditional consumer goods company, 3M, uses Microsoft’s public cloud, called Azure, to process images for 20,000 individuals and companies in 50 countries to analyze various product designs. Microsoft says Azure handles 100 petabytes of data a day, roughly 700 years of HD movies.

“People started out building things on Amazon’s service, but now there are a few big players,” said Mr. Murphy. “Hopefully the time between an idea and its implementation can get even quicker.”

Google is cutting prices for most of its services like online data storage and computer processing by 10 percent and its high-end data storage prices by 60 percent, while offering access to larger and more complex computing systems. Google is also guaranteeing that critical projects will remain working 99.95 percent of the time, far better performance than in most corporate data centers.

“People make a mistake thinking this is just a version of the computers on their desks, at a lower cost,” said Greg DeMichillie, director of Google’s public cloud platform. “This is lots of distributed computing intelligence, not just in computers and phones, but in cars, in thermometers, everywhere. The demand will only increase.”

Mr. DeMichillie, who came to Google from Amazon Web Services, allowed that Google was far slower than Amazon to get into the business. “I give them a lot of credit,” he said of Amazon, adding that in the long run he believes Google’s deep experience in data centers will help the company provide a stronger and more reliable service.

Google has a mixed record in similar efforts. The business version of Drive, its word processing, spreadsheet and storage service, was first introduced under a different name in 2007. It now has revenue of over $1 billion a year, but current and former executives have complained that it is a low priority inside the company because Google makes so much more money from consumer advertising.

But Google is one of the few companies that has the heft to compete with the others.

Over the last several years, each of the big cloud providers has built a global network of over a million computer servers. In the process, the companies are rethinking almost every step to maximize efficiency and power. Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor maker, now has six salespeople assigned full time to Amazon, feeding a continuous appetite for new computers.

Only a few other companies, mostly in China, are likely to manage either the capital or the expertise to build such systems, analysts say. Facebook, which does have a giant global computing network, so far has not shown interest in corporate computing.

IBM, which in July paid $2 billion to buy another cloud provider, will add 12 new facilities in 2014, eventually with 240,000 more servers around the globe, according to a senior IBM executive. It already has 25 such facilities. Hundreds of cloud-based services will be introduced, including cheap new communications systems and software for big, complex companies.

David Campbell, the chief technical officer of Microsoft’s cloud group, said he was often surprised by the growth of the clouds.

“It’s vastly different from anything anyone has done, a completely different beast,” he said.

And this shift is just beginning, maybe three years into a 10-year process that is democratizing heavy-duty processing power, Mr. Campbell said.

“Walmart did amazing things by running computers on its supply chain and analyzing customer demand,” said Mr. Campbell. “Now you can imagine some guy in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains producing that kind of thing for 500 or 1,000 retailers.”

The biggest promise of these clouds is their ability to make it easy to do things that would have cost millions of dollars in hardware just a few years ago.

That is, unless you want to build your own public cloud. Executives at all four public cloud competitors say there is no college course or professional training for running computers at this scale: The only real way to learn how to do it is by working at the handful of companies with the resources to pull it off.

“We’re giving people the same services we rely on to run Google,” said Mr. DeMichillie. “I wouldn’t say spending billions of dollars doesn’t matter, but there is a learning by doing in this, too; hard information problems we’ve tackled.”

Twitter halo fades after listing; Facebook, LinkedIn hold ground

After a big-bang listing, Twitter shares seem to be losing its fizz while social media rivals Facebook and LinkedIn are holding the fort amid portfolio churn by investors the Hindu reports.

In a dream debut, microblogging site Twitter’s stock popped up on NYSE debut on November 7, and closed with 73 per cent gain for investors who subscribed to its initial public offering price of $26 apiece.

The firm, which lets people post 140-character messages, raised $1.8 billion in a keenly watched IPO.

Skeptics were left speechless as the valuation of the firm, which is yet to make profit after 7 years of existence, soared to over $25 billion even as tech firms like Facebook and LinkedIn ended 2-4 per cent lower that day.

However, the momentum in Twitter shares seem to be falling already and analysts have begun to question the company’s current valuations vis-a-vis Facebook and LinkedIn, arguing on better margins and larger size for the two.

After closing at $44.90 on November 7, Twitter share price has failed to reach new highs and has entered December with a last traded price of $41.57 apiece — an over seven per cent drop from first day closing.

Along with a knock on share price, volumes have sharply dried up too. From 117 million shares traded on debut day, daily number of shares traded stand at about 6 million at present.

In contrast, the overall U.S. markets have inched up during this period as economic recovery picked up pace. Besides, Facebook and LinkedIn stocks have also begun to warm up.

Mark Zuckerberg-led social networking giant’s shares haven’t moved up from $47 levels on the day of Twitter’s fantastic debut but investors have not lost money in Facebook.

In fact, Facebook IPO investors are sitting on good profits since its listing in May, 2012 at around $38 levels.

“A multiple (of Twitter) that far above its peer group of 17.4 times leaves little to the imagination; there seems to us no upside (to price) scenario not already more than included in Twitter’s implied growth outlook...,” research firm Hudson Square said in a note to clients.

Professional online networking portal LinkedIn has already landed gains for investors if they bought its shares instead of Twitter on Day 1 of microblogging site’s listing.

From $211 apiece, LinkedIn now trades six per cent higher at $224.

It’s been a dream run for LinkedIn IPO investors after the issue hit markets in 2011. From $45 levels, the stock has more than quadrupled in less than 4 years.

Experts feel in the medium term, business-wise Facebook and LinkedIn are better-placed than Twitter.

“We expect Twitter’s average annual revenue per user to amount to $2.8 in 2013, which stands significantly below our expectation for Facebook and LinkedIn. While the figure for Facebook is expected to hit $6.5, the same for LinkedIn will reach $8.3. It is evident that Twitter has a long way to go in terms of monetising its platform,” analyst firm Trefis said in a report this month.

Social Media Stocks Taking A Plunge

As reported by Brent Molina the social media stocks are taking a hit.

Following a hot start after the launch of its initial public offering, Twitter shares have dipped below $40 as stocks in social media companies are plunging in Monday trading.

Twitter is down nearly 5% to $39.05 in midday trading. Facebook shares have sunk 4%, while recommendations service Yelp has dropped 8%.

Monday's decline in social stocks arrives as the Nasdaq broke through the 4000 mark for the first time since September 2000. Companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Yelp trade on the Nasdaq, while Twitter trades on the New York Stock Exchange.

Despite Twitter's plunge, the company's stock still trades well above its IPO price of $26, briefly hitting the $50 mark on its first day of trading. However, shares have steadily declined since mid-November.

Google Plus Moving On Up

As a user of Google+ I can tell you that they are superior to Facebook. The features they have are just better and easy to use. As Vince Font reports this is why Google+ will keep increasing their user base. He writes in their never-ending quest to knock Facebook off its perch as the most used social media platform this side of the Kuiper belt, the peeps at Google recently unveiled a host of new Google+ features that make the search giant’s social offering a lot more attractive. In fact, if you aren’t already using Google+, you’ll want to check it out soon.

New in Hangouts

Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, you’ll know that the Google+ Hangouts feature is catching fire as a free and easy method for people to communicate, both globally and locally. Numerous politicians (including the POTUS himself) have begun using Hangouts to hold online town hall meetings with their constituents, no doubt saving serious cash on airfare and conference halls. You can also initiate video conferences with up to 10 friends at a time from your computer or your mobile device. In their recent announcement, Google indicated the rolling out of a handful of interesting upgrades that might just get you off that Facebook bandwagon.

• Location Sharing – If you need to let a friend know where you are and aren’t into seeking out the nearest street sign and typing in the address – or if you just want to let everyone know where the party’s at – you can enable Location Sharing in Hangouts to broadcast your precise location. Your location can be set to approximate (using your Wi-Fi network) or precise (by turning on GPS). Just click the map pin icon in your current Hangout session to launch the Google Maps locator, then click “Share location”. Doing so attaches your location to whatever message you choose to send. Your recipient can then launch the map of your location on their end and plot a course straight to you.

• SMS Support – Prior to the upgrade, sending an SMS to a Google+ pal required you to toggle between the app and your texting platform. This is no longer the case, as Google Hangouts for mobile now comes with full SMS functionality, which essentially lets you send and receive text messages (or pics or videos) from inside the Hangouts app without the requirement of being logged into Hangouts. This shouldn’t be considered a way to bypass your carrier’s text limit however, as texts still count toward your carrier’s rate – so watch that. SMS support for Hangouts works on all Android devices 4.0 or higher. The way it works is simple: the first time you enter the updated Hangout app, you’re greeted with a message asking you if you want to enable SMS support. Options are “yes” or “maybe later.” After you’ve selected “yes” your conversations are imported into the Hangouts app. From that point forward, unless you decide to disable the feature in your settings, you’ll begin to receive texts through your Hangouts app. You can also choose whether to use Hangouts or your factory SMS platform anytime you begin a new conversation.

• Animated GIF Support – Because Google knows everyone’s grown tired of sharing boring, motionless images, the new and improved Hangouts will also feature the ability to send animated GIFs.

• Full-Screen HD – There’s nothing quite like a poor quality video image to make you feel as if the person you’re chatting with is a million miles away, which is why one of the upgraded functionalities of Google+ Hangouts is full-screen, 720p HD. Webcam lighting is also automatically enhanced. Improved video quality is being rolled out across desktop and mobile devices.

• Google Effects – In addition to lately released backgrounds that can be used to spice up video chat (these are labeled as still being in the experimental stage) comes the ability to entirely blur out the background in Hangouts, which could be an effective tool for professional video chat purposes. Other improvements to come include toggling between black and white video chat.

Better Organization for Photos and Videos

Sharing photos and videos is a big thing online, and why not? Until the world has decided it’s seen enough crazy cat photos and stupid human tricks, let the sharing continue. Google+ is making this even easier with the implementation of some fun functionalities and nifty organizational tools, many of which will be available for Android, iOS and desktop – still others which will only be available on devices running Android 4.3 or higher. 

• Automatic Photo and Video Backup at Full Size – As a feature of the new and improved Google+ for mobile experience, you can set all photos and videos to automatically back up to your associated Google Drive folder as you take them. Additionally, you can select to back up all photos and videos currently on your mobile device. You can choose to back up your pics and videos at standard size or full size. When you go standard, there’s no limit to the number of either you can store online (as long as pics are 2048px or less and videos are 1080p or less and under 15 minutes long). If you store at full size, pics and videos will be put in your Google Drive storage and will count toward your storage limit there, where the first 15GB are free and you’ll have to pay for anything after. Other options let you choose to back up only when connected over WiFi, or WiFi and mobile connection, or not at all. The good news is that automatically backed up pics and vids do not get shared with anyone until you specify you want that to happen.

• Auto Awesome – With a name like that, it’s got to promise some pretty cool features, and it does. Auto Awesome offers a suite of unique photo and video enhancements that include: Auto Awesome Action, which can combine a series of photos into one shot to simulate motion; Auto Awesome Eraser, which can literally erase background objects and people from a photo; and Auto Awesome Movie, which automatically stitches selected videos and still images together to create a mini-movie. Auto Awesome Movie includes controls that let you set background music and determine the length of the mini-movie. And of course, the final product is easily sharable via Google+.

• Photo Editing Tools – Once you access your photo gallery on Drive, you can click on specific images and enhance or edit them. Once you open up a photo, all you have to do is click “Edit” to launch a series of tools that enable you to tune the image, crop and rotate, adjust brightness and saturation, and other controls normally associated with third party editing programs.

• Intuitive Search – Not everyone has time to name their photos for future reference, or to page through their expansive online photo gallery in search of something they want to share. Now new with Google+ it’s simple to take a snapshot on your phone, save it to Drive, then find it later by keying in a search term. According to Google, it can now recognize over 1,000 different objects. This will purportedly make it easy to enter in search terms like “bike” or “mountain” to instantly access all photos of bikes or mountains in your Drive gallery. Searches can be limited to your own gallery or expanded to include the shared images of your friends in Circles.

• Sharing Control – Improved sharing controls let you decide when an image gets shared and who gets to see it. Clicking the “share” button on a photo launches a comment box and lets you make photos public or choose certain individuals you want to be able to access the image in Google+.

New LinkedIn Showcase Page

Kurt Wagner discusses the new LinkedIn news feed. He writes: LinkedIn replaced its news aggregator LinkedIn Today last week in order to get the right content in front of the right users.

The company took that mantra a step further on Tuesday, unveiling Showcase Pages for companies that will, in theory, allow them to share content to a more focused and interested audience.

Showcase Pages work like less-robust Company Pages, giving major corporations like Microsoft the ability to create pages for niche divisions or business units, such as Microsoft Office or Xbox. Showcase Pages will be followable, meaning Microsoft can share Xbox content with LinkedIn users who have shown interest in the product, rather than every user who simply follows Microsoft.

LinkedIn hopes that brands will start focusing their content to specific audiences. Companies can operate up to 10 Showcase Pages, but LinkedIn says it will work with larger companies that have the need (and manpower) to operate more.

Showcase Pages aren't Company Pages, and they don't have all the same features. For example, Showcase Pages won't have a tab for Careers or Products & Services, says a LinkedIn spokesperson.






Showcase Pages are also different from Groups on LinkedIn. (Xbox and Microsoft Office groups already exist.) The difference is that companies control the content of a Showcase Page, while an administrator controls the Group.

The other major difference is that companies can advertise on Showcase Pages.

Companies can purchase Follower Ads aimed at increasing the Showcase Page's total follower total, as well as Sponsored Updates that will put the page's posts and content in front of others who aren't following the page.

LinkedIn has about 3 million Company Pages on the site, but isn't saying how many Showcase Pages it expects to add. It seems likely that an abundance of new pages will increase the number of ads on the site, simply because there will now be more business units and brands looking to spread their news.

Showcase Pages weren't the only changes for LinkedIn on Tuesday. The company also announced Talent Updates, a feature that lets LinkedIn Recruiters post content to their company page directly from their recruiter dashboard. Previously, recruiters needed to log out of their recruiter dashboard, and log in as the page administrator to post. (Or ask the administrator to post on their behalf.)

This is a behind-the-scenes change that shouldn't impact users — they'll still see content the same way they always have on a company's page. It simply makes it easier for those operating LinkedIn pages to internally manage the content they choose to share.

Social Media Helps Tornado Victims Find Lost Property

When all you see in the news is despair and ruin seeing something good from the heart of people is a wonderful thing. Using the power of social media those folks lifted up some people in bad need of good news. Here is the story by Lauren Zumbach.

The tornado that leveled Beth and Dennis Doolan's home in Washington, Ill., scattered their belongings, the winds lifting valued possessions and trash alike and carrying them away.

Some time later, and about 80 miles from the devastation, a photograph dropped into a yard. It was a favorite photograph, taken on the Doolans' 40th anniversary.

But with the help of a Facebook page created after the tornado, they found it once more. A friend looking at the site saw the Doolans' photo and contacted their daughter.

It was the first successful match for the Facebook pages using social media to reunite tornado victims in Washington and Diamond with their storm-tossed possessions, but not the last."There were tears of joy when I told them," said their daughter, Lisa Hoffman.

Each page cataloged found items, some mundane — unopened mail, school work sheets, a church bulletin — and some potentially priceless, including the muddied, unclaimed bridal veil that drifted onto a roof in Streator.

Each post, marked with the city where the item was found, showed the storm's power. It carried a Washington resident's paycheck about 140 miles before dropping it in a Park Ridge garden and scattered Amanda Hicks' great-aunt and great-uncle's pictures, papers and bank statements among Joliet, Minooka and Downers Grove.

The pages showed how determined the finders were to help tornado victims get at least a few familiar items back.

"If there was a fire in my house, my pictures are the first thing I'd grab after getting my family out of the house," said Brenda Strange, who found the photo of the Doolans happily embracing among the insulation, newspapers and roofing debris that landed in her yard in Morris. "Forty years is really something, and even though this is small, hopefully it will give them a little hope."

Becky Siegel-Harty, of Seneca, created the Facebook group that Strange posted on, PHOTOS found from Nov 17, 2013 Illinois Storms/Tornadoes, on Sunday afternoon. She remembered seeing similar social media campaigns after the Joplin, Mo., tornado that killed 161 people in 2011.

"It's a small way to make a difference if you can't get down there to help," Siegel-Harty said. As of Monday afternoon, she said she knew of four matches made through her more than 750-member group, though she speculated that more had been arranged through private messages.

One of those success stories was a photo that her children found of a girl holding a present on Christmas morning. Later that evening, the owner found Siegel-Harty's post. The photo was from one of the now-scattered scrapbooks she'd made with her mom, the woman wrote on Facebook.

Siegel-Harty, who said her 16-year-old son died last year, knows how precious photos can be. "If I lost everything, one picture of him would be the world," she said.

Dan Davidson, who grew up in Morris but now lives in Dayton, Ohio, started another Facebook page called Found items from the Washington Illinois and Diamond Illinois Tornadoes.

It had more than 6,500 likes, dozens of posts and about 20 matches by Monday afternoon, Davidson said. The only images he wouldn't post were sensitive documents, such as medical records and bank statements, which he said should be turned over to police.

The Grundy County Chamber of Commerce, 909 Liberty St. in Morris, also volunteered to collect photos and documents and deliver them to a central Illinois location where Washington and Diamond residents could claim them, Siegel-Harty said.

Davidson said the submission that most affected him was an envelope found in Plainfield addressed to one of the men killed by the tornado, Steve Neubauer, of Washington.

But there were also baby pictures, wedding portraits and even a couple of pets. Bonnie Jones, owner of Beagle's Bay Animal Hospital in Metropolis, added a photo of a Labrador mix rescued Sunday evening in Brookport, with injuries that suggested it had been picked up and dropped by the tornado, Jones said.

The dog — in severe shock and suffering from a broken paw, bruised lung and neck wound when found — is doing well, Jones said, though its owner still hadn't been found. Another Facebook page, Illinois Tornado Animals Lost & Found, featured photos of a couple of dozen missing and unclaimed cats and dogs, as well as a handful of happy reunions.

Several people said they planned to keep searching for lost mementos. Sidney Perrier, of Crest Hill, said he saw some photos while walking his dog at Joliet's Rock Run Preserve. He never imagined they might have been deposited by the tornado until he found an index card with family names and dates of death going back to 1844, he said.

He Googled the most common surname, Kindrig, and found several people living in Roanoke, not far from where the tornado hit. Perrier, who posted his find on Facebook, said he hadn't yet been contacted by anyone who knew the family. In the meantime, he said he would go back to the trail to see if he could find any of the photos he passed by.

According to Chris Miller, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, the 90-mile trek that amazed Perrier isn't unusual. Vertical winds within tornadoes can lift light debris high into the atmosphere where powerful jet streams, blowing more than 100 mph, can carry items hundreds of miles away, he said.

Mike Janulis marveled at the power of social media after posting a portrait of a dark-haired girl in a red sweater that landed in his front yard in Shorewood. He said a tornado destroyed his parents' home in Plainfield in 1990, when there were no such sites.

Janulis said he wanted to find the portrait's owner because he understood what the victims were going through.

"It seems like a long shot and it's just one photo, but at least it's something I can do," Janulis said.

Google, Microsoft ramp up fight against online child pornography

Major kudos to Microsoft and Google. Microsoft shared picture detection technology with Google in a crackdown on child pornography. Here is the full article by Steven Musil.

Web giants agree to modify search algorithms to exclude search terms associated with photos and videos containing sexual abuse of children.

In response to the longtime, alarming proliferation of photos and videos containing child pornography on the Internet, Web search giants Google and Microsoft plan to introduce measures to block the content from their search results.

The modifications will prevent more than 100,000 search terms from generating results that link to images and videos associated with child sex abuse and instead trigger a warning that the associated content is illegal. The restrictions, which apply to English-speaking countries, will be expanded to more than 150 languages in the next six months, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt wrote in an article for the Daily Mail on Sunday.

"We've listened, and in the last three months put more than 200 people to work developing new, state-of-the-art technology to tackle the problem," Schmidt wrote. "We've fine-tuned Google search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results."

Once it's determined that content represents genuine abuse and not innocent bath time photos, the content is assigned a unique digital fingerprint that speeds the detection and deletion process when the images appear in Google's system, he wrote. "Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for developing and sharing its picture detection technology," Schmidt wrote.

Engineers at YouTube have also created new technology to identify child porn videos on the video-sharing site, and the company plans to make the technology available to other Internet companies and child protection agencies, Schmidt wrote.

The effort is the result of a call to arms this summer by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who praised the move as a "really significant step forward."

"Google and Microsoft have come a long way," Cameron told the Daily Mail. "A recent deterrence campaign from Google led to a 20 percent drop off in people trying to find illegal content, so we know this sort of action will make a difference."

The companies have long been focused on eradicating child pornography from the Internet. Google announced plans in June to build a database of child porn images that can be shared with other tech companies, law enforcement, and nonprofits around the world, allowing for greater collaboration toward content removal. In addition to joining the Technology Coalition, which looks at how technology can be used to end child exploitation, the search giant has also donated millions of dollars to nonprofit organizations that work for the cause.

Microsoft has also actively battled child pornography on the Web. The software giant helped develop the image-matching technology for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's PhotoDNA program. The technology is also used by other Internet companies,including Facebook.