February 15, 2011,
7:23 am
By
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Google has been
facing
swelling
criticism
from tech types over the quality of its search results because they often include links to sites like
eHow
, which critics disparagingly refer to as content farms.
Now Google is giving its users a chance to block those sites from search results — and to help it figure out which sites are least useful to them. With that information it can tweak its algorithm so the sites rank lower in search results.
Users of Google’s Chrome browser can
install an extension
that lets them choose to block certain sites. Google will study which sites people block to figure out which ones bother users, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s spam-fighting team, wrote in
a company blog post
.
When critics refer to
content farms
, they generally mean sites like eHow and Associated Content from Yahoo that publish articles
based on what people search for
on Google. The articles, they say, provide questionably useful information (so questionable that they inspired
a satirical blog
, which Google winked at in its blog post.)
Read more…
February 1, 2011,
9:10 pm
By
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Google
has
weathered criticism
in the past that it has copied some features of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, like background images. Now it has turned the tables, contending that Bing copies something much more important: search results.
Danny Sullivan, head of the blog Search Engine Land,
wrote Tuesday about a “sting operation”
by Google that the company says proves that Bing watches Google’s search results to improve its own.
Google says it suspects Microsoft is doing this by using Internet Explorer 8 and the Bing toolbar, both of which send user data to Microsoft, to watch how people use Google.
In a company blog post
, Microsoft did not deny that. But Harry Shum, corporate vice president of Bing, called Google’s sting “a spy-novelesque stunt” and “a creative tactic by a competitor.”
Google grew suspicious when it noticed a few odd things about Bing’s search results, such as surprising similarities between the top results in the two search engines — including results that Google considered to be mistakes, Amit Singhal, who oversees Google’s search ranking algorithm,
wrote in a company blog post
.
So Google went into detective mode.
Read more…
September 22, 2010,
4:34 pm
By
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Michael Arrington, the TechCrunch founder and blogger,
threw a bombshell into Silicon Valley with a blog post on Tuesday night
, accusing the Valley’s top angel investors of colluding to reduce the price of investing in tech start-ups and keep competitors from investing.
Now, a few of the angel investors are firing back.
In his post, Mr. Arrington said he was tipped off about a secret meeting of the Valley’s most prominent angel investors at a San Francisco restaurant. He stopped by, unannounced, and was met with deafening silence, he wrote. He left, having gathered nothing from the group.
The next day, he talked to a few of the participants, whom he did not identify, about what they had discussed at the meeting. His conclusion, he wrote, was that they were “colluding (and I don’t use that word lightly) to solve a number of problems.” Those problems included how to keep competing investors out of deals and how to drive down valuations of start-up companies before investing, he wrote.
“This isn’t minor league stuff,” he wrote. “We’re talking about federal crimes and civil prosecutions if in fact that’s what they’re doing.”
Read more…
June 22, 2010,
11:04 am
By
NICK BILTON
thinkgeek.com
ThinkGeek received a cease-and-desist letter from the National Pork Board over its Canned Unicorn Meat.
Several years ago
ThinkGeek
, a Web site devoted to selling gadgets, nerdy T-shirts and brainy games, decided to sell some fake products for April Fool’s on its Web sites. Now its sale is a yearly tradition.
thinkgeek.com
For April Fool’s in 2005, for example, the company promised to sell
The Fundue
desktop USB Fondue Set. Luckily for my neighboring cubicles, this was not a real product. (Bread and cheese dip anyone?) In 2006, the company offered to sell customers a
USB Desktop Tanning Center
, where they could tan while working at a computer. And 2008 helped usher in the
ZapCam
, a Taser that could record clips of Taser victims directly to YouTube.
As ThinkGeek needs to up the ante each year, in 2010 it decided to create a product called
Canned Unicorn Meat
. The tag line for this new delicacy? “Pate is passe. Unicorn, the new white meat.” It promised to be an “excellent source of sparkles!”
It was, of course, fake.
Read more…
June 18, 2010,
6:36 pm
By
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Left, Shizuo Kambayashi/Associated Press; right, Mike Nelson/European Pressphoto Agency
Soccer fans wrote a record-breaking 2,940 posts per second in the 30 seconds after Japan scored against Cameroon in a World Cup match on Monday. Their record fell three days later when the Lakers won the N.B.A. championship.
Sports fans have spent the week furtively watching the
World Cup
during the workday and staying up late to watch the N.B.A. playoffs. They have also been logging on to Twitter.
Despite the
serious technical problems
that Twitter had during the week, which caused long periods of downtime, three World Cup goals broke the all-time record for the number of Twitter posts written per second,
Twitter reported
. And those records were quickly shattered Thursday night, after the Lakers won the final game of the N.B.A. playoffs.
People typically write about 65 million Twitter posts a day, according to the company, and about 750 messages per second. But in the 30 seconds after
Japan scored against Cameroon
on Monday, soccer fans wrote a record 2,940 posts per second. Basketball fans quickly broke that record with 3,085 posts per second after
the Lakers’ victory
.
In the last few months, the growth in visitors to Twitter’s site has slowed, prompting people to wonder whether the Twitter trend was plateauing.
Read more…
April 9, 2010,
7:35 pm
By
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
The romance between Twitter and its outside developers has hit a rough patch, one that Chief Executive Evan Williams, along with
many Twitter developers
, saw coming.
The storm began on Wednesday, when Fred Wilson, the Union Square Ventures partner who invested in Twitter and serves on its board of directors, wrote
a blog post
. He said that many of the current apps — which do things like post photos to Twitter, shorten URLs or make Twitter accessible on cellphones — were filling holes in Twitter, and he is waiting for new “killer apps” that go beyond that.
Some Twitter developers are worried, and even started a Twitter hashtag to discuss it,
#unionoftwitterapps
. But software developers who build on top of platforms have always experienced the same give and take, other developers say.
“There’s some misunderstanding around platforms,” Mr. Williams, also a Twitter founder, said in a recent interview before
the storm
blew through the blogosphere. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to developers about this.”
The tension is natural, he said. “There are tons of opportunities created by the Twitter platform, and things that people will probably be disappointed if they invest in,” he said. “It’s a question of what should be left up to the ecosystem and what should be created on the platform.”
Read more…
February 24, 2010,
6:40 pm
By
THE NEW YORK TIMES
In this week’s episode of Tech Talk, Bettina Edelstein talks to Ashlee Vance, the New York Times technology reporter who just returned from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the world’s biggest trade show for cellphones and other mobile devices. The discussion on the podcast includes
Microsoft
’s new Windows Phone 7 operating system for cellphones and
Intel
’s and
Nokia’s
joining forces on a new open-source OS called Meego.
Do you post videos online on YouTube, Vimeo or other sites? J.D. Biersdorfer and Pedro Rafael Rosado explain how to share with friends and family without letting in the whole world ? or certain people, like parental units or your boss. (Check those privacy settings!)
Pedro becomes an early adopter of “wideband” fiber optic service, which prompts him to explore the term “DOCSIS.”
And J.D.’s roundup of tech news includes
Wal-Mart
’s latest push into the online movie business with its planned purchase of Vudu and the controversy around a Pennsylvania school district’s alleged spying on a student via laptop Web cam, now the subject of a lawsuit and an F.B.I. investigation. Finally, The Times’s personal technology editor, Sam Grobart, offers a look at what’s in the Gadgetwise blog this week.
For more information about the podcast and links to the topics discussed on the show, go to the
Tech Talk page
.
Read more…
February 14, 2010,
11:59 pm
By
STEVE LOHR
In the last couple of years, the research laboratories at companies like
Hewlett-Packard
and
Intel
have been working on the
next generation of digital sensors
. They are smarter, smaller, consume less energy, and they can communicate wirelessly.
Their promise, writ large, is to help link the digital world of computing to the physical world as never before. The payoff would be to bring data-rich measurement, more intelligence and higher levels of optimization to all sorts of fields ? including energy, traffic management, food distribution and health care. Lots of companies are working on parts of the broad vision, and
I.B.M.
’s “Smarter Planet” advertising campaign is the probably clearest articulation of the vision.
Royal Dutch Shell
and Hewlett-Packard are announcing on Monday a step toward the mainstream use of next-generation sensor technology. The application ? on-land oil and gas exploration ? points toward the potential gains from advanced sensing systems.
Read more…
January 27, 2010,
8:36 pm
By
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
When
Apple
announced the name of its tablet computer today — the iPad — my mind immediately went to the feminine hygiene aisle of the drugstore. It turns out I wasn’t alone.
The term “iTampon” quickly became a trending topic on
Twitter
because of Tweets like this one: “Heavy flow? There’s an app for that!” A CNBC anchor, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, said the iPad was a “
terrible name
” for the tablet. “It reminds me of feminine products,” she said.
“Are there any women in Apple marketing?” asked Brooke Hammerling, founder of Brew Media Relations, a technology public relations firm. “The first impression of every single woman I’ve spoken to is that it’s cringe-inducing. It indicates to me that there wasn’t a lot of testing or feedback.”
It is not just women who were surprised. When Peter Shankman, a public relations and social media expert, saw the name on television, he was taken aback. “I’m waiting for the second version that comes with wings,” he said.
Read more…
November 9, 2009,
5:10 pm
By
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
and
BRAD STONE
Virtual goods for sale in the game Pet Society by Playfish.
Electronic Arts
, the video game company, announced Monday that it had acquired
Playfish
, one maker of the social-network-based games that have become so popular this year.
The acquisition is more evidence that,
as we wrote this weekend
, online games that make money by selling virtual goods are turning into a surprisingly big business. EA paid $275 million in cash and $25 million in equity, and Playfish could receive an additional $100 million if it performs well.
Games are becoming more lucrative as people get accustomed to buying things as they play, as opposed to paying once for the game before playing it, said Barry Cottle, general manager of EA Interactive. “The traditional model of ‘pay and then play’ is morphing toward ‘play and pay,’ ” he said.
But the way that these fledgling businesses, including Playfish and its major rival,
Zynga
, make money has recently drawn scrutiny and some criticism. In addition to paying cash for virtual goods, players can also apply for offers, fill out surveys or sign up for subscription services from advertisers in order to get free virtual goods. Some of these offers are legitimate. But as the blog TechCrunch has been
reporting
over the last week, others have been misleading or fraudulent, leading people to sign up and pay for things they did not intend to.
Read more…
October 10, 2009,
12:12 am
(Paramount/Associated Press)
A scene from “Paranormal Activity.”
If you have not yet heard of the horror movie “
Paranormal Activity
,” you will soon. It is about to become the first major studio film to be released nationwide as the result of online requests from the public.
The film is about a young couple who become convinced that a demonic presence lurks in their bedroom at night, so they decide to set up a video camera to catch it. The movie was shot on an extremely low budget of $10,000 and opened at the end of September with midnight screenings in just 13 small college towns.
From there, it has become a Web sensation, with chatter about the movie bouncing from
Twitter
to
Facebook
, spurring a coming nationwide release.
The company behind the viral buzz is
Eventful
, a venture-backed start-up in San Diego hired by Paramount Pictures, the movie’s producer. Eventful provides a service that lets performers ask their fans where they should appear. For $30,000 to $250,000, Eventful builds and hosts a Web page where people can vote by clicking on a button that says “Demand it!”
Read more…
August 27, 2009,
12:00 pm
By
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Forrester Research
, the big technology research company, has recently lost three of its star analysts. They have now resurfaced at
Altimeter Group
, a consulting firm that helps big companies figure out how to use new technologies.
Jeremiah Owyang, Charlene Li and Ray Wang made names for themselves at Forrester as savvy thinkers about technology. It turns out they got tired of researching the ways in which businesses can better use technology and became eager to help businesses actually do so.
The three, along with a fourth person, Deborah Schultz, are now partners at Altimeter Group, a consulting firm in San Mateo, Calif., that Ms. Li founded when she left Forrester last year. It advises large businesses on emerging technologies, like social networking, mobile applications and as-yet-unknown innovations.
“Brands have not adapted well to these,” Mr. Owyang said. “Right now, companies are having knee-jerk reactions to social. They say, ‘Oh my gosh, our customers are uploading nasty videos about us on
YouTube
. Quick, form a team,’” he said. But companies often do not know the best way to use social media, and corporate culture is often not ready for it, resulting in half-baked efforts and conflicting messages across companies, he said.
Read more…
August 24, 2009,
7:29 pm
By
CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
The hearts of Silicon Valley’s unemployed engineers started beating faster Monday upon reports that
Facebook
plans to go on a hiring spree.
Don’t get too excited. It turns out that Facebook is actually planning to grow cautiously amid a severe recession and slowdown in online ad spending.
A
Bloomberg article
published Monday quoted Facebook’s chief executive,
Mark Zuckerberg
, saying the company would expand its staff by as much as 50 percent this year to take advantage of a surplus of engineers.
In fact, said Larry Yu, a Facebook spokesman, Mr. Zuckerberg was making “the exact opposite” point. “If anything, we’re being more careful about growth,” Mr. Yu said. Many companies of Facebook’s size and age double in size each year, he said, but Facebook is making a conscious effort to avoid expanding that quickly and plans to grow at less than half that rate.
Read more…
August 4, 2009,
12:11 pm
By
JENNA WORTHAM
Update | 12:17 p.m.
Response from Google included below.
Ever since Google began deploying a roving fleet of cars to capture panoramic, street-level views as a function of the company’s
Maps
service, a gallery of unusual and
occasionally controversial
finds have been discovered through the feature.
But nothing quite this mystical.
An image,
first highlighted by the blog Buzzfeed
, shows a spot radiating with light, blurring the image of a residential, tree-lined street. The
strange shimmery patch
has prompted some readers to offer their own interpretations of the blazing spectacle.
“It’s not heaven,” said a commenter on Buzzfeed who went by the name Chopped. “The Google cars can reach warp speed. That’s how they are mapping the planet so quickly.”
Read more…