my news

2011年7月6日星期三

Bits: Google Executives Throw Themselves Into the Google+ Fray

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

It may be too soon to say whether Google+, the search company’s answer to Facebook, will avoid the same disastrous fate as some of its earlier social networking products like Buzz and Wave, but there’s no shortage of action on the site among those who have early access.

Members are already sharing content and photos through the site, but it seems as though most of the activity revolves around poring over the intricate details of the service and dissecting the best ways to use the features of the service.

There’s another unlikely suspect jumping into the fray: Googlers.

When Danny Sullivan, a noted blogger and early users, complained that it was difficult to set up an account for his blog, Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management who is overseeing the project jumped in to clarify that the service wasn’t yet set up for that. On another thread, where users were discussing the challenges around sorting their networks into groups for sharing, Jim Prosser, another Googler who works in public relations, gave tips on how to more easily shuffle friends around.

The transparency is not uncommon for smaller start-ups, whose momentum rests almost entirely on their ability to listen to user feedback and nimbly and quickly respond to bugs and glitches in the system. But for the larger companies, such as Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, it is not as common to see executives directly involved with the project working with users in real time to answer questions and resolve issues. Google has a lot riding on the success of Google+, its latest effort to build a successful social networking service that won’t turn people off or cause them to cry privacy foul. Google has long hoped to understand the social connections and interests of its users. It also hopes to gain access to data and information about the links, topics, photos and products that its users are sharing with each other to improve targeted advertisements. This, in turn, helps them compete with Facebook, which has long reaped the benefits of having access to such data.

Mr. Horowitz, who was also involved with Google Buzz, said that it was not uncommon for him to join discussions about product introductions to try and answer questions and give feedback.

“Obviously in a launch like this, for a product like this, direct engagement is the best and most important means of understanding what’s working and how to prioritize features,” he said.

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DealBook: Apple and Microsoft Beat Google for Nortel Patents

Blair Gable/ReutersGeorge Riedel, chief strategy officer of Nortel, after testifying to a House of Commons committee in August 2009.

8:31 p.m. | Updated

Nortel Networks, the defunct Canadian telecommunications equipment maker, says it has agreed to sell more than 6,000 patent assets to an alliance made up of Apple, Microsoft and other technology giants for $4.5 billion in cash.

The group of companies, which also includes Research in Motion, Sony, Ericsson and EMC, beat out Google and Intel for the patents and patent applications that Nortel had accumulated when it was still one of the largest telecommunications equipment makers in North America.

Nortel, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009, said in a statement late Thursday that it had sold its last remaining patents, covering businesses including wireless and networking technology and semiconductors, in an auction that it called “very robust.”

“The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world,” said George A. Riedel, chief strategy officer of Nortel.

Nortel delayed the auction once last month because of what it called “significant interest,” and started the sale on Monday. Nortel said it hoped to close the transaction in the third quarter.

In April, Google made a stalking-horse bid of $900 million for the patents, some of which are related to the wireless technology known as long-term evolution. Networks based on that technology, considered crucial to the future of telecommunications, are created to carry large amounts of data like streamed video to mobile devices.

The Google offer was interpreted as a defensive move. The search giant was seeking intellectual property rights to shield itself from lawsuits as it moves deeper into the mobile business with its Android software.

Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, wrote at the time of the bid that it was supposed to “create a disincentive for others to sue Google.”

“The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents,” Mr. Walker wrote.

Now, thousands of crucial patents will be in the hands of rivals like Apple and Microsoft, both of which have shown themselves to be much more aggressive in patent litigation than Google.

On Friday, Mr. Walker said in an e-mail that the auction’s outcome was “disappointing for anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity and competition.”

The sale announced Thursday will require approval from courts in Canada and the United States, Nortel said. About 2,600 of the patent assets are American. A joint hearing has been scheduled for July 11.

Nortel, based in Mississauga, Ontario, was once a flagship Canadian company but filed for bankruptcy in 2009 after losing nearly $6 billion in 2008.

Since then, it has sold its wireless equipment business for $1.13 billion to the Swedish company Ericsson, which walked away with $340 million worth of patents from the auction on Thursday. More recently, Ericsson bought Telcordia, an American telecom network equipment maker, for $1.15 billion.

In 2009, Nortel sold another unit dealing with enterprise solutions for $475 million to Avaya, a former AT&T unit that is now owned by private equity and which filed for an initial public offering of stock last month.

RIM, Canada’s most prominent technology company since Nortel collapsed, said in a separate statement that it had paid about $770 million for patents at the auction. The sale of patents raised more than the rest of Nortel’s disposals combined.

The company said it did not anticipate that holders of its common shares or preferred stock would benefit from the bankruptcy process. Creditor protection proceedings “will result in the cancellation of these equity interests,” Nortel said.

Nortel was advised by Lazard.

Nortel’s creditors’ committee, which includes the Bank of New York Mellon and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, hired Jefferies as its financial adviser for the auction, which saw the patent assets reap five times the stalking-horse bid.

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Ping: Silicon Valley Culture, but in San Francisco?

FREE lunch — heck, free breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus all the M&Ms and Red Bull you can stand — is a delicious perk of working in Silicon Valley.

Free or even subsidized food in corporate cafeterias makes eminent sense in such a suburban setting. Corporate campuses, built where fruit and nut trees once stood, are cut off by busy thoroughfares. To go out for lunch, you have to drive a mile or so, park, eat and then high-tail it back to work.

Nothing much, food-wise, has sprouted around those campuses. There is not a bite to eat within a half-mile of Hewlett-Packard’s midcentury modern lab building in Palo Alto, the model of tech campuses in the valley.

So when this cafeteria culture hits the big city, does the collision somehow stultify economic activity??Cities, after all, need people out on the sidewalks.

That was an important lesson learned in the 1960s and ’70s, after urban renewal advocates like Robert Moses in New York bulldozed neighborhoods in hopes of starting afresh. Buildings with no space for shops rose on the scraped earth, and it took years for people to return to the sidewalks.

All of this comes to mind because San Francisco is offering tax breaks to tech companies that relocate their offices to the city’s blighted neighborhoods. Twitter will be the first recipient of this largess when it moves into new offices in the Furniture Mart on a particularly desolate section of Market Street next year.

Twitter, which is competing for talent with Google and Facebook, gives its employees free food. The question is whether those urban employees will leave the building often enough to dramatically improve the neighborhood.

Gabriel Metcalf, the executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, an urban policy research group, says the impact of corporate cafeterias in an urban setting has not been rigorously studied. But, Mr. Metcalf says, “You certainly get more life on the street if everyone is going out to lunch.”

Twitter may be a good test case. Market Street, a wide avenue that bisects downtown San Francisco, begins at the Ferry Building. Smart designers transformed that structure from a seedy and little-used transportation hub; it now teems with shops and restaurants that attract tourists and office workers alike. During the twice-a-week farmers’ market, people stand in line for a half-hour to buy ramen, exotic sausages or rotisserie pork sandwiches from food carts.

But a mile and a half up Market, in the shadow of the golden dome of City Hall, it’s a different picture. Boarded-up buildings. Empty, littered lots. Even in boom times, the area never improved.

This is where the city has encouraged Twitter to set up shop. To transform the area, though, people will have to get out on the street. When the people come, shops open. When the shops open, more people come. A virtuous cycle begins.

But what happens when people don’t leave the buildings — when the culture of the suburban campus drops into an urban center? Two places in the city offer laboratories of sorts for a possible answer.

In a former industrial neighborhood called Mission Bay, the University of California, San Francisco, built its medical center. The university stashed its cafeterias up off street level. As a result, the area has remained sterile and empty. Employees and students drive in, then drive out. The public stays away.

That is expected to change when Salesforce.com, a company that has thrived providing Web services to corporate sales representatives, finishes building a new headquarters nearby. It will consist of eight buildings over 14 acres — a suburban campus in the city. The architects, Legorreta & Legorreta, of Mexico City, have incorporated street-level retail space into the project that is open to the sidewalk. They say they want to invite the public in. Salesforce has never had a corporate cafeteria.

Then there is a no-name neighborhood, south of San Francisco’s financial district, that is home to a satellite office of Google. While the fare in that office’s corporate cafeteria isn’t as extensive as it is in the company’s home office in Mountain View, 40 miles to the south, it is still copious and free for employees.

The results are not surprising. In the time that Google has been in San Francisco, few establishments that draw people to the sidewalk have opened in its neighborhood. There is a new expense-account-set restaurant across the street, and a taco truck popular with the employees at the nearby Gap headquarters, which also has a corporate cafeteria, though meals there are unsubsidized.

EVEN a city like San Francisco, which in some ways likes to tell people how to live their lives — trying to ban McDonald’s Happy Meals, second-hand smoke outdoors and plastic shopping bags — is unlikely to start telling companies how to feed their employees.

“It’s not the kind of thing you can micromanage,” says Mr. Metcalf of SPUR. “It’s nice to have something that they leave alone.”

But he hopes that the executives who move into blighted city neighborhoods see a reason to encourage employees to get out.

?“The city benefits,” he says, “when a company decides to integrate more with the public life of the street.”

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Link by Link: Speed Bumps on the Road to Virtual Cash

MONEY is accumulated, traded and transferred online every day, but can there be a form of currency that exists only online and yet has real-world value?

That is the premise of Bitcoin, an open-source virtual currency system that since 2009 has grown to a market worth more than $100 million.

But the past few weeks have shown that a virtual currency can be just as vulnerable as the paper kind. Bitcoin accounts have been subject to hacking and theft; the currency itself experienced a bubble and a crash. And at least one group that was collecting donations in Bitcoins has decided against using them because of possible legal entanglements.

Gavin Andresen, who is the lead developer of the open-source software that operates the currency, said in an interview from his home in Amherst, Mass.: “I expected it to have lots of speed bumps along the way — but I didn’t expect there to be so many speed bumps in a row.”

There are several appeals to the idea of an online currency. The standard way to ensure the validity of online transactions, according to Jerry Brito, a technology expert at George Mason University, is “to have an intermediary to keep the ledger,” that is, a service like PayPal or a credit card company that takes a percentage of the transaction.

A virtual currency would not need an intermediary. It would also make it harder for authorities to track transactions (particularly appealing for gambling sites or other quasi-legal activities).

Bitcoin began as a kind of thought experiment. In 2009, an anonymous programmer published a paper proposing a virtual currency that would elegantly solve many of the problems surrounding currency that exists only on the Internet, including the main one, that the money would simply be copied like, say, music files, and plummet in value.

Another part of the challenge was to create a currency without having to resort to a central bank to issue the currency and track the transactions. In other words, the transactions would be genuinely “peer-to-peer” rather than pass though a virtual bank.

The solution of the Bitcoin programmer, who wrote under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, was to ensure that each “coin” was its own certificate of authenticity — that the coin, in essence, would be nothing more than that certificate.

In the Bitcoin system, a new coin is produced whenever a computer can calculate an answer to a difficult problem, and then attaches that answer to a digital record of every transaction of every Bitcoin ever traded — a breathtakingly large amount of information to carry around in order to buy a pack of gum, but in a time when information can zip around the Internet, not too much to ask. Anyone would be free to create a new coin, within proscribed supply limits, by having a computer do the work needed to prove that it was in fact a valid Bitcoin.

“The incentives are right, they are a check that everyone is following the rules,” said Mr. Andresen. “Early adopters want it to succeed, because they already own the currency. And if you generate Bitcoins no one thinks is valid, you have wasted a lot of computer time.”

In fact, Bitcoin is a rarity for a currency in that it is neither a so-called fiat currency — one like dollars, which are valuable because the government says they are — nor is it a specie currency, one that gets its value because it can be converted into a precious metal like silver or gold.

But why would a Bitcoin have value if it is only a stream of numbers, unsupported by government fiat or by some underlying asset?

“Why does any tool have value?” Mr. Andresen asked. “It is valuable because it is useful.”

Starting almost as soon as the coins were introduced, they have been traded for dollars at online exchanges, serving as a crude measure of the currency’s popularity and health (and also giving a market where owners can trade in Bitcoins for real dollars).

After two years, there are seven million of these “coins” in circulation and the rate of increase — currently 50 coins are added every 10 minutes — will slow each year until the number tops out at 21 million coins around 2025. The coins, which trade for about $17 each at online exchanges, have a cumulative value of about $100 million. “I do think of it as the market cap of Bitcoin,” said Mr. Andresen. Today, a list of businesses that accept Bitcoin currency is a motley collection of companies on the fringe of the computer world, groups that conduct gambling or the like, and, notably, the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, which accepts contributions in Bitcoins. You certainly can’t stock the pantry or furnish your home with Bitcoins.

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Tools of Entry, No Need for a Key Chain

New technology lets smartphones unlock hotel, office and house doors and open garages and even car doors. ?

It’s a not-too-distant cousin of the technology that allows key fobs to remotely unlock automobiles or key cards to be waved beside electronic pads at office entrances. What’s new is that it is on the device more people are using as the Swiss Army knife of electronics — in equal parts phone, memo pad, stereo, map, GPS unit, camera and game machine.

The phone simply sends a signal through the Internet and a converter box to a deadbolt or door knob. Other systems use internal company networks, like General Motors’ OnStar system, to unlock car doors.

Because nearly everyone has a cellphone, a number of start-ups, lock companies and carmakers are betting on broad acceptance of the technology.?

Schlage, a major lock maker, markets a system that lets homeowners use their mobile phones to unlock their doors from miles away, and manage their home heating and air-conditioning, lights and security cameras. Customers buy locks that are controlled by wireless radio signals sent from an Internet-connected box in their home.

Recently, Dwight Gibson,?vice president for connected home solutions at Ingersoll Rand, Schlage’s parent, said that he used the system to let a friend into his house while he was sitting at his desk at work. “She thought it was magic,” he said.

Daimler-Benz now has it on its Mercedes. ?Zipcar, the car sharing service, has a mobile phone app that allows customers to unlock their car doors by pressing a button on their phone screen that looks like a lock. They have used it 250,000 times since it was introduced two years ago.?

In October, General Motors introduced an app that lets owners of most 2011 G.M. models lock and unlock the doors and start the engine remotely. It allows car owners to warm up the engine on a frigid day or fire up the air-conditioning on a hot one from the comfort of their office cubicle, said Timothy Nixon, who oversees “infotainment” products for the automaker. “In the winter, when my wife and I went to dinner and the check came, I pulled out my phone and started the car,” he said. “By the time we got to it, it was toasty and warm.”

Other times, Mr. Nixon has landed after a flight and used his phone to double-check that he had locked his car door at his departure airport.

But having a phone double for entry or ignition does not yet feel fail-safe. “You don’t want a dead phone battery and discover you can’t go anywhere,” Mr. Nixon said.

It’s unlikely you’d hide a spare phone under a rock or in the bushes. (Though a homeowner may want to stash a physical house key outside in case the home Internet connection goes down.)

Another sticking point is that the technology remains fairly cumbersome by requiring users to push buttons on their phone to establish a connection with a system in the car or house.

Mobile phone industry analysts say that process will get easier with the emergence of a technology called near field communications, or N.F.C. It allows a phone to be waved like a magnetic card near a device that can capture the signal and click open a door.

N.F.C is now in only a handful of phones, but manufacturers should ship around 550 million N.F.C. phones in 2015, according to IHS iSuppli, a technology consulting firm. Rajeev Chand, head of research for Rutberg & Company, a boutique investment bank that focuses on emerging companies and technology in the mobile phone industry, said keys might seem like outdated technology in a few years. “Keys are not going away, but they will become an arcane thing.”?

In an eight-month trial that ended last month using N.F.C technology, visitors to the Clarion Hotel in Stockholm were invited to use their phones to gain access to their rooms. ?

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Cultural Studies: Talking (Exclamation) Points

One shudders to imagine what Twain would have made of e-mail.

Writing is by definition an imperfect medium for relaying the human voice. And in the age of electronic communication, when that voice is transmitted so often via e-mail and text message, many literate and articulate people find themselves justifying the exclamation point to convey emotion, enthusiasm or excitement. Some do so guiltily, as if on a slippery slope to smiley faces.

“I’ve degenerated to the point where I allow one per e-mail, but I don’t feel good about it,” said Alex Knight, a media and technology investor in Seattle. “If I use one, I will go back and delete the previous ones. It’s sort of ‘Sophie’s Choice.’?”

In their book “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” David Shipley and Will Schwalbe say that the exclamation point was originally reserved for an actual exclamation (“My goodness!” or “Good grief!”) but that they have become unexpected champions of this maligned punctuation. “We call it the ur emoticon,” Mr. Schwalbe said in a recent phone conversation. “In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.”

“E-mail has such a flattening effect: it’s toneless and affectless,” he said. “The exclamation point is the quickest and easiest way to kick things up a notch, but not if you’re angry. Only happy exclamation points.”

It’s unusual for a punctuation mark to carry such infamy. “Italics are far more expressive, and they never get a bad reputation,” Joni Evans, chief executive of the Web site WowOwow.com, wrote in an e-mail. “I’m not ashamed of using exclamation points to convey emphasis. I would never use a smiley face, but there are smiley-face personalities. Kathie Lee Gifford comes to mind. People are what they type. But now I am worried: I’m a frequent user of the dash, which might mean that I’m a dash kind of person. Could be a bad sign.”

Coincidentally, many of the earliest typewriters did not include a specialized key for the exclamation point, and the endeavor to sound animated required three strokes: an apostrophe, a backspace and a period. The computer not only renders such labor unnecessary but also, with a lingering finger on the key, facilitates exclamatory abuse: A conga line (!!!) is effortless, so standards must be self-imposed. “I draw the line at more than one at a time,” said Cyndi Stivers, a digital media consultant in Manhattan, but she permits herself three if she wants to signify being “gobsmacked.”

Classic style manuals generally decree that exclamation points be used sparingly. “But e-mails seemed from the start to require different punctuation,” said Lynne Truss, the author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” “As if by common consent, people turned to the ellipsis and the exclamation point. There must have been a reason for this. My theory is that both of these marks are ways of trying to keep the attention of the reader. One of them says, ‘Don’t go away, I haven’t finished, don’t go, don’t go,’ while the other says, ‘Listen! I’m talking to you!’?”

“Since the advent of e-mail, I have personally started all my messages with a yell,” she said. “Instead of ‘Dear George,’ I write, ‘George!’ My belief is that when we read a printed page, we engage an inner ear, which follows the sense, the voice and the music in a linear way. We sort of listen to the writer. Whereas on a computer screen, we tend to pick out bits of information and link them for ourselves. The exclamation point is a natural reaction to this: Writers are shouting to be heard.”

Unsurprisingly, the literati are particularly sensitive to, or particularly defensive about, the use of the exclamation point. “I’m definitely guilty of abusing it in e-mails,” said Jennifer Egan, whose book “A Visit From the Goon Squad” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And she notes a curious rebound effect: “The more exclamation points you use, the more you need to use in order create an impression of exclamation.”

Aimee Lee Ball writes for numerous national magazines and is the co-author of four books, including “No Time to Die.”

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Citing Homeless Law, Hackers Turn Sights on Orlando

Anonymous, a large yet loosely formed group of hackers that claimed responsibility for crashing the Web sites of MasterCard and the Church of Scientology, began attacking the Orlando-based Web sites earlier this week.

The group described its attacks as punishment for the city’s recent practice of arresting members of Orlando Food Not Bombs, an antipoverty group that provides vegan and vegetarian meals twice a week to homeless people in one of the city’s largest parks.

“Anonymous believes that people have the right to organize, that people have the right to give to the less fortunate and that people have the right to commit acts of kindness and compassion,” the group’s members said in a news release and video posted on YouTube on Thursday. “However, it appears the police and your lawmakers of Orlando do not.”

A 2006 city ordinance requires organizations to obtain permits to feed groups of 25 people or more in downtown parks. The law was passed after numerous complaints by residents and businesses owners about the twice-weekly feedings in Lake Eola Park, city officials said. The law limits any group to no more than two permits per year per park.

Since June 1, the city police have arrested 25 Orlando Food Not Bombs volunteers without permits as they provided meals to large groups of homeless people in the park. One of those arrested last week on trespassing charges was Keith McHenry, a co-founder of the first Food Not Bombs chapter in 1980 in Cambridge, Mass. He remained in the Orange County Jail on Thursday awaiting a bond hearing.

This week Anonymous offered a “cease-fire” if no volunteers were arrested during Wednesday evening’s feeding of the homeless. But the police arrested two volunteers, and on Thursday morning Anonymous disrupted the Web site Downtown Orlando, which promotes redevelopment there and is run by the city. An organization spokeswoman confirmed the attack but declined to comment, referring questions to the mayor’s office.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Buddy Dyer, whose re-election campaign site was disabled on Tuesday, called the attack on the Downtown Orlando site an “inconvenience.” She said the city would not change its policy of arresting volunteers who feed homeless people without a permit.

“We will continue to enforce the city ordinance,” said the spokeswoman, who asked not to be identified out of a concern she would become a target of Anonymous. “We must continue to focus on what our Orlando residents want and not the desires of others from outside the community.”

The attack on the Orlando Web sites was the second on a city or state government in two weeks. Last week, hackers gained access to the computer system of the Arizona Department of Public Safety and released law-enforcement records.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Orlando Police Department are investigating, officials said.

Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs condemned the cyberattacks. “We have absolutely nothing to do with Anonymous or any other group that is doing this kind of thing,” said one member, Ben Markeson. “And what Anonymous is doing is a distraction from the real issue at hand.”

Mr. Markeson said the Orlando mayor and City Council members had attempted to “criminalize poverty” by passing a series of ordinances intended to “hide the homeless.”

“Mayor Dyer wants to hide the poor and the hungry people living in our community,” he said.

The mayor’s spokesman denied the allegation, saying: “Nothing could be further from the truth. The city has a strong relationship with our region’s homeless providers and will continue to dedicate resources and services that assist our homeless population.”

Anonymous has become known for prominent denial-of-service attacks on high-traffic Web sites. A denial-of-service attack takes place when an overwhelming crush of Web traffic is intentionally sent to a Web site until it is incapacitated and knocked off line.

Anonymous members rallied a call-to-arms against the city as part of a campaign it dubbed Operation Orlando. Its members promised that future arrests of volunteers helping the homeless would be met with fresh attacks. “For every arrested person,” the group said on Twitter, “Anonymous will deface or assault TEN websites in Orlando.”

Nick Bilton contributed from New York.

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