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

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。
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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Bits: Google Plans to Streamline Android

 

Android phones have been a runaway success for Google — perhaps too runaway. Now Google is trying to add some order to the craziness.

On the first day of Google I/O, its developers’ conference here in San Francisco, the company announced new guidelines for working with phone manufacturers as well as a single operating system for cellphones, tablets and Google TV.

More than 310 types of devices made by 36 manufacturers run on the Android system, and 100 million have been activated, Google said, because unlike Apple and others, it gives away its software.

But that has also caused problems. Google has released new Android software to manufacturers at different, irregular times, and did not broadly release Honeycomb, the latest software for tablets. For consumers, that has meant that they might read about the latest and greatest Android software but not be able to buy a phone that uses it.

To fix the problem, Google announced a new partnership with Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T. For 18 months after each Android software release, these partners will receive the latest updates, as long as their hardware is compatible, which could be a significant loophole.

What about other details, like how quickly they will receive updates and who will get them first? The company hasn’t figured those out yet.

“The people at the table are actually actively figuring it out right now,” said Andy Rubin, head of Android at Google, during a news conference here.

Mr. Rubin also addressed criticism that Android had not been as open as it promised to be, for example, when it did not widely release Honeycomb. He drew the distinction between offering open-source code, which Android does, and being a community-driven project.

For instance, if Google released Honeycomb for tablets, he said, developers might try to use it for phones and the user experience would be poor as a result. Google’s job is to be “the shepherd of this ecosystem,” he said.

Google has also confused both consumers and software developers by offering different versions of Android for phones and tablets. That will change by the end of the year, the company said, when it will release a new version of Android software called “ice cream sandwich” that will be the same for phones, tablets and televisions.

That means that developers can build one app that works on all three devices, and the app will adjust accordingly. Google’s new Web-based music player, announced Monday night, is an example.

“We want one OS that runs everywhere,” said Hugo Barra, product management director for Android, during a presentation for developers.

One operating system for Android, that is. Complicating things is the fact that Google also has the Chrome operating system for laptops, which it is expected to talk about Wednesday at the developers conference.

 

Google Lobbies Nevada To Allow Self-Driving Cars

And yes, the proposed legislation would include an exemption from the ban on distracted driving to allow occupants to send text messages while sitting behind the wheel.

The two bills, which have received little attention outside Nevada’s Capitol, are being introduced less than a year after the giant search engine company acknowledged that it was developing cars that could be safely driven without human intervention.

Last year, in response to a reporter’s query about its then-secret research and development program, Google said it had test-driven robotic hybrid vehicles more than 140,000 miles on California roads — including Highway 1 between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

More than 1,000 miles had been driven entirely autonomously at that point; one of the company’s engineers was testing some of the car’s autonomous features on his 50-mile commute from Berkeley to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.

At the time, Google gave little indication what its commercial intent might be. The company confirmed on Tuesday that it has lobbied on behalf of the legislation, though executives declined to say why they want the robotic cars’ maiden state to be Nevada. Jay Nancarrow, a company spokesman, said the project was still very much in the testing phase.

Google hired David Goldwater, a lobbyist based in Las Vegas, to promote the two measures, which are expected to come to a vote before the Legislature’s session ends in June. One is an amendment to an electric-vehicle bill providing for the licensing and testing of autonomous vehicles, and the other is the exemption that would permit texting.

In testimony before the State Assembly on April 7, Mr. Goldwater argued that the autonomous technology would be safer than human drivers, offer more fuel-efficient cars and promote economic development.

Although safety systems based on artificial intelligence are rapidly making their way into today’s cars, completely autonomous systems raise thorny questions about safety and liability.

Policy makers and regulators have warned that the technology is now advancing so quickly that it is in danger of outstripping existing law, some of which dates back to the era of horse-drawn carriages. New laws will be required, they argue, if autonomous vehicles are to become a reality.

Policy analysts say Nevada is the first state to consider the commercial deployment of a generation of vehicles that may park themselves, perform automatic deliveries or even act as automated taxis on the Las Vegas casino strip.

“In some respects this is a great template and a great model,” said Ryan Calo, a legal scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “It recognizes a need to create a process to test these vehicles and set aside an area of Nevada where testing can take place.”

Google’s fleet of six autonomous Toyota Priuses and an Audi TT are easily identifiable by a distinctive laser range finder mounted on the roof. The cars also have a variety of radar and camera sensors and a trunkful of computer equipment.

In the testing program, each vehicle is overseen by a driver and a second Google employee who monitors the equipment from the passenger seat. Because of the human oversight, the company has avoided legal action against reckless — or, in this case, driverless — driving.

The project is being guided by the artificial-intelligence researcher Sebastian Thrun, who as a Stanford professor in 2005 led a team of students and engineers that designed the first winning entry in an autonomous vehicle contest organized by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Since then, Dr. Thrun has focused more of his activities at Google, giving up tenure at Stanford and hiring a growing array of experts to help with the development project.

In frequent public statements, he has said robotic vehicles would increase energy efficiency while reducing road injuries and deaths. And he has called for sophisticated systems for car sharing that, he says, could cut the number of cars in the United States in half.

“What if I could take out my phone and say, ‘Zipcar, come here,’?” he asked an industry conference last year, “and a moment later the Zipcar came around the corner?”

Google’s autonomous vehicle ambitions hint at an emerging vehicle-industrial complex in Silicon Valley. Mercedes, Volkswagen and other carmakers have laboratories in the region, I.B.M. has a battery development initiative, and the Nummi plant in Fremont, once a joint venture of General Motors and Toyota, has been reopened by Tesla.

 

Google to Unveil Service to Let Users Stream Their Music

 

SAN FRANCISCO — Google plans to introduce its long-awaited service to allow people to upload and store their music collections on the Web and listen to their songs on Android phones or tablets and on computers.

The announcement of the new service, a so-called cloud-based music player, will be made on Tuesday at Google I/O, the company’s developers conference here, which will run through Wednesday.

The service, to be called Music Beta by Google, is similar to one introduced by Amazon in March, although it will store considerably more music. And like Amazon, Google does not have the cooperation of music labels, which means that users cannot do certain things that would legally require licenses, like sharing songs with friends and buying songs from Google.

But Google’s announcement at this time was unexpected because it has been negotiating with the music labels for months to try to make a deal to team with them on a cloud music service.

“A couple of major labels were not as collaborative and frankly were demanding a set of business terms that were unreasonable and did not allow us to build a product or a business on a sustainable business,” said Jamie Rosenberg, director for digital content for Android. “So we’re not necessarily relying on the partnerships that have proven difficult.”

After Amazon introduced its service, music label executives said they were disappointed and exploring their legal options.

Neither Google’s nor Amazon’s cloud players make true many Web companies’ dream, which is for people to be able to listen to their music whenever they want, on any device. Ideally, Web companies would keep a copy of every song in the cloud, creating a kind of Internet jukebox, and give users instant access to those they own without uploading. But that would require licenses.

“This whole upload thing just seems like a significant barrier to wide consumer adoption, because even with broadband it just takes a long time” to upload, said David Pakman, who invests in digital media start-ups for the venture capital firm Venrock, and helped found a similar music service, Myplay, in 1999.

But Amazon forced Google’s hand, he said. “If you’re faced with another six months of brutal negotiations and your competitor just launched this, you just get in the market and get a lot of users.”

Mr. Rosenberg characterized Music Beta as a first step in a broader cloud music service and said Google hoped to continue negotiating with the record labels to get licenses to offer other things, like a music store that sells songs or a service that suggests new music to listeners.

For Google, the new service is a way to compete with the iPhone by giving Android users the ability to easily use their music collections. Android users could previously store MP3 music files on their phones but it was a cumbersome process. Amazon’s service, Cloud Player, also works on Android phones, but stores many fewer songs free.

Since songs stored by Google will stream from the Web, they are not always as accessible as songs stored on iPods, because people can’t listen to them in places without data connections, like airplanes. But Google stores copies of recently played songs and certain songs that users choose for offline access.

The music labels have long argued that they should be paid when people listen to songs on various devices. Google, Amazon and Apple, along with start-ups like Spotify and the now-defunct Imeem, have struggled to strike agreements.

Apple is still expected to be working on such a service. It acquired Lala, a cloud music service, and built a data center in North Carolina that could store users’ music collections. It also has relationships with the labels through iTunes.

Google and Amazon, meanwhile, say they do not need licenses to store music for users and play songs on multiple devices because users upload the songs they own, just as they would if they backed up their computers. “This is really a personal storage service in the same way that you would put songs on an iPad or you would put songs on a backup hard drive, so this service does not involve licenses for the music industry,” Mr. Rosenberg said.

The service is invitation-only to start. Verizon Xoom owners will receive invitations and others can sign up at music.google.com. Users download an application to their computer and upload their music, which could take many hours. The songs will be available on any device linked to the user’s Google account using a mobile app or a Web-based player, as long as they support Flash, which excludes iPhones and iPads.

Users can store 20,000 songs free, as opposed to Amazon’s service, which stores up to 1,000 songs without charge.

The service syncs activity on different devices, so if users create playlists on their phones, the playlists will automatically show up on their computers.

“We looked at the power of Google to deliver a compelling cloud-based service and essentially married those technologies with what we felt was lacking in the Android experience up until now,” Mr. Rosenberg said.

 

Suit Opens a Window Into Google

Android is Google’s gateway technology to a lucrative new arena for mobile advertising. Google provides the Android operating system free to handset makers, and allows them to tailor the open-source software somewhat, yet limits their freedom to tinker.

Android phones must adhere to a “compatibility” standard determined by Google. In an e-mail on Aug. 6, 2010, Dan Morrill, a manager in the Android group, noted in passing that it was obvious to the phone makers that “we are using compatibility as a club to make them do things we want.”

Whether that club is an anticompetitive weapon is an issue in the court case.

Yet industry analysts see another motivation as well. In the smartphone market, they say, Google faces the challenge of being the creator of a popular operating system that must work smoothly with hardware and software made by other companies. In broad strokes, Google’s predicament echoes the past.

“Google has the same problem today that Microsoft had 20 years ago, when Windows started to take off in the personal computer market,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “It needs to maintain the integrity of its technology, and control it.”

The e-mails in the case, filed eight months ago, recalls another parallel with Microsoft. Big high-tech companies, in particular, are run and knit together with electronic communications, which can leave a minute-by-minute trail for lawyers and litigants to mine.

In the Massachusetts court, Skyhook Wireless has alleged that Google used its control over Android not to maintain the quality of its technology, but to squelch a competitor.

The Boston-based Skyhook, founded in 2003, has been a pioneer in location-based services for use in mobile phones, developing a technique for combining location data from Wi-Fi hot spots with other sensors to pinpoint a user’s location.

Last April, Motorola chose to use Skyhook’s service in its Android phones instead of the free location data service offered by Google. Motorola reversed that decision in July.

“After we announced our deal with Motorola, Google went crazy,” said Ted Morgan, Skyhook’s chief executive. “That’s when Google went looking for compatibility compliance issues.”

Skyhook had reached a similar agreement with Samsung in April, which was also reversed in July.

Google and its lawyers declined to discuss the case or the e-mails, released along with a ruling in Massachusetts Superior Court allowing discovery of evidence to continue and witnesses to be deposed.

But in a court filing in April, Google’s lawyers called the Skyhook suit “a baseless complaint” and its requests for Google documents and e-mail a “thinly veiled fishing expedition.” In the filing, Google notes that Motorola, in terminating its agreement with Skyhook, did not mention technical compliance issues, other than Skyhook interfering with Google’s “contractual rights to collect end-user data.”

In the past, Google has portrayed the Skyhook suit as the desperate tactic of a small company trying to sell location services in a market that has changed abruptly, especially since Google offers its location services free.

The Google e-mail messages released by the court, some heavily redacted, begin on April 26, 2010, when Skyhook announced that it had reached an agreement with Motorola.

Vic Gundotra, a senior vice president, forwarded a link to a news article on the Skyhook win, to Steve Lee, an Android product manager.

“First I’d heard of it,” Mr. Lee wrote, and then suggested two possible reasons for the deal.

 

Suit Opens a Window Into Google

Android is Google’s gateway technology to a lucrative new arena for mobile advertising. Google provides the Android operating system free to handset makers, and allows them to tailor the open-source software somewhat, yet limits their freedom to tinker.

Android phones must adhere to a “compatibility” standard determined by Google. In an e-mail on Aug. 6, 2010, Dan Morrill, a manager in the Android group, noted in passing that it was obvious to the phone makers that “we are using compatibility as a club to make them do things we want.”

Whether that club is an anticompetitive weapon is an issue in the court case.

Yet industry analysts see another motivation as well. In the smartphone market, they say, Google faces the challenge of being the creator of a popular operating system that must work smoothly with hardware and software made by other companies. In broad strokes, Google’s predicament echoes the past.

“Google has the same problem today that Microsoft had 20 years ago, when Windows started to take off in the personal computer market,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “It needs to maintain the integrity of its technology, and control it.”

The e-mails in the case, filed eight months ago, recalls another parallel with Microsoft. Big high-tech companies, in particular, are run and knit together with electronic communications, which can leave a minute-by-minute trail for lawyers and litigants to mine.

In the Massachusetts court, Skyhook Wireless has alleged that Google used its control over Android not to maintain the quality of its technology, but to squelch a competitor.

The Boston-based Skyhook, founded in 2003, has been a pioneer in location-based services for use in mobile phones, developing a technique for combining location data from Wi-Fi hot spots with other sensors to pinpoint a user’s location.

Last April, Motorola chose to use Skyhook’s service in its Android phones instead of the free location data service offered by Google. Motorola reversed that decision in July.

“After we announced our deal with Motorola, Google went crazy,” said Ted Morgan, Skyhook’s chief executive. “That’s when Google went looking for compatibility compliance issues.”

Skyhook had reached a similar agreement with Samsung in April, which was also reversed in July.

Google and its lawyers declined to discuss the case or the e-mails, released along with a ruling in Massachusetts Superior Court allowing discovery of evidence to continue and witnesses to be deposed.

But in a court filing in April, Google’s lawyers called the Skyhook suit “a baseless complaint” and its requests for Google documents and e-mail a “thinly veiled fishing expedition.” In the filing, Google notes that Motorola, in terminating its agreement with Skyhook, did not mention technical compliance issues, other than Skyhook interfering with Google’s “contractual rights to collect end-user data.”

In the past, Google has portrayed the Skyhook suit as the desperate tactic of a small company trying to sell location services in a market that has changed abruptly, especially since Google offers its location services free.

The Google e-mail messages released by the court, some heavily redacted, begin on April 26, 2010, when Skyhook announced that it had reached an agreement with Motorola.

Vic Gundotra, a senior vice president, forwarded a link to a news article on the Skyhook win, to Steve Lee, an Android product manager.

“First I’d heard of it,” Mr. Lee wrote, and then suggested two possible reasons for the deal.