Microsoft Move Will Drive Enhanced Online Search Privacy
Gartner believes Microsoft's new privacy principles are targeted primarily at increasing regulators' and consumer groups' pressure on competitor Google. But this is still a welcome development in online privacy protection.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Sunday, July 22, 2007
FT.com / Columnists / John Gapper - Google’s view into the lives of others
FT.com / Columnists / John Gapper - Google’s view into the lives of others
Google’s view into the lives of others
By John Gapper
Published: July 22 2007 18:58 | Last updated: July 22 2007 18:58
Google shows no signs of relenting in its effort to take over the world – sorry, to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Last week, it promised to bid $4.6bn (€3.3bn, £2.2bn) or more to run a mobile phone service in the US if the auction is conducted in the way that it wants. It also missed analysts’ expectations for its second-quarter earnings because it was in so much of a rush to employ people that it hired more than it intended.
Eric Schmidt, its chief executive, made clear at Allen and Company’s Sun Valley conference for media and technology executives 10 days ago that resistance to Google is useless. He dismissed the refusal of social networks such as Facebook to let search engines scan their content as a “transient” phase. He also took a potshot at Viacom, which sued Google over its YouTube video-hosting site, suggesting that the media group is simply an outfit run by lawyers.
Comments such as these make me worry that Mr Schmidt, who used to be a mild-mannered and open-minded soul, is becoming too big for his boots. The thing that unites these two remarks is the disdain they imply for anyone wanting to hide details of their private lives, or protect their intellectual property, from Google’s algorithms. They suggest that Google will eventually be able to publish all the data it wants and be justified in so doing. Neither claim is true.
Taking privacy first, young people are more comfortable than previous generations about giving out personal details to all-comers by posting gossip and photos on blogs and social networking sites. That may mark a sea change in social attitudes but it could equally be, pace Mr Schmidt, transient. It will only take a few job rejections or disciplinary actions by employers and universities (Oxford is already trawling for miscreants on Facebook) for privacy to regain its former cachet.
While it is useful for such organisations, and for the nosy, to have the lives of others searchable, it is not always useful for those whose lives are searched. One of Facebook’s appeals is that the site has privacy controls that allow users to share information only among their friends or chosen networks. If everyone’s entry were made “universally accessible” and showed up on Google searches, Facebook would soon lose its appeal to adult users.
Google’s fight with Viacom over breach of copyright on YouTube is analogous: YouTube wants to exploit something to which Viacom holds rights – video clips of programmes such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report – for its own benefit. It hopes to strike deals with companies such as Viacom to display such clips and share the resulting advertising revenue, just as it has already made deals with music companies including Warner and Universal.
Until then, YouTube plays cat and mouse with Viacom over the illegal posting of video clips on YouTube. It warns its users not to upload other people’s copyrighted content but has not put in place a filtering mechanism to identify and block pirated clips, as it has done with music owned by companies with which it has struck deals. Instead, it asks television and film companies to monitor the site and point out copyright-infringing clips, at which point it is willing to take these clips down.
This state of affairs suits YouTube (and, since Google acquired YouTube for $1.65bn last year, Mr Schmidt). Viacom has to take the time and the trouble to monitor YouTube; illegal clips stay up on YouTube until Viacom serves it with a take-down notice. It is impossible to identify how many video clips on YouTube are amateur and how many are professional but its 60 per cent of the US video-sharing market clearly owes much to copyright foot-dragging.
YouTube’s defence, which will be familiar to those with teenagers, is that it can’t do much about copyright infringement and, anyway, it doesn’t have to. It says that automatic filtering of videos is very hard to do; it is now testing a system with companies including Walt Disney but does not know when it will be ready to launch. Meanwhile, it insists that it is not required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, or by European law, to block every breach of copyright.
I doubt whether Google is on such safe legal ground as Mr Schmidt asserts. Congress passed the relevant clauses of the DMCA to protect internet service providers and others from being held liable for breach of copyright by their users. But YouTube is not a neutral party to copyright infringement in the way that ISPs are: its business model is not merely to provide bandwidth but to encourage users to upload and share videos, many of which it knows quite well belong to other people.
As far as ethics go, it is definitely on shaky ground. If you were having a party in your house and, when your neighbour came around to complain about the noise, you said “sorry” and turned down the volume, only to allow a guest to raise it again five minutes later, you would obviously be in the wrong. The fact that you might have done enough to escape prosecution would not mean that you were behaving fairly.
Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, but it should meet higher standards. Mr Schmidt can muse about the digital future and ridicule Viacom for being run by lawyers all that he likes. The fact remains that he wants to profit from the private lives and intellectual property of others without obtaining their permission first. Never mind about not being evil, Mr Schmidt; don’t be anti-social.
john.gapper@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Google’s view into the lives of others
By John Gapper
Published: July 22 2007 18:58 | Last updated: July 22 2007 18:58
Google shows no signs of relenting in its effort to take over the world – sorry, to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Last week, it promised to bid $4.6bn (€3.3bn, £2.2bn) or more to run a mobile phone service in the US if the auction is conducted in the way that it wants. It also missed analysts’ expectations for its second-quarter earnings because it was in so much of a rush to employ people that it hired more than it intended.
Eric Schmidt, its chief executive, made clear at Allen and Company’s Sun Valley conference for media and technology executives 10 days ago that resistance to Google is useless. He dismissed the refusal of social networks such as Facebook to let search engines scan their content as a “transient” phase. He also took a potshot at Viacom, which sued Google over its YouTube video-hosting site, suggesting that the media group is simply an outfit run by lawyers.
Comments such as these make me worry that Mr Schmidt, who used to be a mild-mannered and open-minded soul, is becoming too big for his boots. The thing that unites these two remarks is the disdain they imply for anyone wanting to hide details of their private lives, or protect their intellectual property, from Google’s algorithms. They suggest that Google will eventually be able to publish all the data it wants and be justified in so doing. Neither claim is true.
Taking privacy first, young people are more comfortable than previous generations about giving out personal details to all-comers by posting gossip and photos on blogs and social networking sites. That may mark a sea change in social attitudes but it could equally be, pace Mr Schmidt, transient. It will only take a few job rejections or disciplinary actions by employers and universities (Oxford is already trawling for miscreants on Facebook) for privacy to regain its former cachet.
While it is useful for such organisations, and for the nosy, to have the lives of others searchable, it is not always useful for those whose lives are searched. One of Facebook’s appeals is that the site has privacy controls that allow users to share information only among their friends or chosen networks. If everyone’s entry were made “universally accessible” and showed up on Google searches, Facebook would soon lose its appeal to adult users.
Google’s fight with Viacom over breach of copyright on YouTube is analogous: YouTube wants to exploit something to which Viacom holds rights – video clips of programmes such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report – for its own benefit. It hopes to strike deals with companies such as Viacom to display such clips and share the resulting advertising revenue, just as it has already made deals with music companies including Warner and Universal.
Until then, YouTube plays cat and mouse with Viacom over the illegal posting of video clips on YouTube. It warns its users not to upload other people’s copyrighted content but has not put in place a filtering mechanism to identify and block pirated clips, as it has done with music owned by companies with which it has struck deals. Instead, it asks television and film companies to monitor the site and point out copyright-infringing clips, at which point it is willing to take these clips down.
This state of affairs suits YouTube (and, since Google acquired YouTube for $1.65bn last year, Mr Schmidt). Viacom has to take the time and the trouble to monitor YouTube; illegal clips stay up on YouTube until Viacom serves it with a take-down notice. It is impossible to identify how many video clips on YouTube are amateur and how many are professional but its 60 per cent of the US video-sharing market clearly owes much to copyright foot-dragging.
YouTube’s defence, which will be familiar to those with teenagers, is that it can’t do much about copyright infringement and, anyway, it doesn’t have to. It says that automatic filtering of videos is very hard to do; it is now testing a system with companies including Walt Disney but does not know when it will be ready to launch. Meanwhile, it insists that it is not required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, or by European law, to block every breach of copyright.
I doubt whether Google is on such safe legal ground as Mr Schmidt asserts. Congress passed the relevant clauses of the DMCA to protect internet service providers and others from being held liable for breach of copyright by their users. But YouTube is not a neutral party to copyright infringement in the way that ISPs are: its business model is not merely to provide bandwidth but to encourage users to upload and share videos, many of which it knows quite well belong to other people.
As far as ethics go, it is definitely on shaky ground. If you were having a party in your house and, when your neighbour came around to complain about the noise, you said “sorry” and turned down the volume, only to allow a guest to raise it again five minutes later, you would obviously be in the wrong. The fact that you might have done enough to escape prosecution would not mean that you were behaving fairly.
Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, but it should meet higher standards. Mr Schmidt can muse about the digital future and ridicule Viacom for being run by lawyers all that he likes. The fact remains that he wants to profit from the private lives and intellectual property of others without obtaining their permission first. Never mind about not being evil, Mr Schmidt; don’t be anti-social.
john.gapper@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Thursday, July 12, 2007
FT.com / Technology - Where do we go from here?
FT.com / Technology - Where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here?
Alan Cane
Published: July 11 2007 09:40 | Last updated: July 11 2007 09:40
It is easy these days to be overtaken by the future. Take e-mail, for example, the mainstay of modern business communication: “Younger people see e-mail as something older people do,” grimaces Don Rippert, chief technology officer for Accenture, the world’s largest consultancy.
“I thought it was a novel, next generation technology, but to young people it’s: ‘You should post to my site on MySpace [a social networking website], you should text message me, you should instant message me, why would you want to e-mail me? I don’t even check my inbox any more’.”
Indeed, the Gartner Group predicts that by 2011, instant messaging will be the de facto tool for voice, video and text communications in business. By then, of course, the young will have moved on to something else – refinements of the imaginary worlds of Second Life and other “virtual worlds”, or metaverses, perhaps.
Sometimes our technological future and our traditional present even collide, with risible results. “I will pay with my phone,” Tero Ojampera, Nokia’s chief technology officer, declared as he ordered coffee in a branch of McDonald’s, the fast food chain, expecting to be able to wave his handset over a wireless card reader. His waitress was unimpressed: “We don’t accept phones as payment,” she sniffed dismissively.
Such misunderstandings aside, near field communications (NFC), a short range (hand’s width) wireless technology, looks set to turn mobile handsets into electronic wallets and could revolutionise the way we pay for goods and services within the foreseeable future. Prototypes already exist and trials are under way, underlining a truism about forecasting technological futures: what we can reliably predict already exists, at least in the laboratory.
Beyond that, according to Andy Mulholland, chief technology officer at Capgemini, Europe’s largest computing services group, other factors cloud the issue: “I have a formula about where technology takes us. For a year ahead, you can be confident about where it is going because betas [prototypes in test] and alphas [finished designs] for the products which are going to come out already exist.
“For three years to five years ahead you have people collecting requirements definitions for the releases beyond that. Beyond five to 10 years, you might have an idea of what could come out of the laboratories. But from 10 to 20 years ahead, your only guidance is demographics: what people have grown up with and what they see as normal.”
So for this article, we will stick with the foreseeable and practical rather than the blue yonder. Inevitably, an expert’s view of the future is coloured by his or her area of expertise – Mr Ojampera looks forward to mobile handsets fabricated in new materials that would enable them to be bent or stretched, while Mr Mulholland anticipates technologies based on communications and interaction rather than today’s transaction-based approach.
But overall, this straw poll of some of the IT industry’s leading experts reflects a thoughtful, rather downbeat view of the future rather than the technocratic, gung-ho self-assurance of earlier years.
Many were concerned about personal privacy and security in a world where miniature video cameras would be ubiquitous and failure to safeguard sensitive data could open individuals and companies to legal action. “E-mail, voicemail and text messages used to be ethereal,” says Mike Lynch, chief executive of the UK company, Autonomy. “But no longer. Now you can see them being brought up in court.”
Crispin O’Brien, chairman of the technology group at consultancy KPMG, while questioning whether fixed line telephones have a future, worried about the mobile alternative: “There are huge, huge risks in mobile working,” he says. “If you leave a laptop on the back seat of a car, you could be in breach of all sorts of confidentiality issues.”
He argued that business was remiss to “just hunker down behind the firewall” – the defensive barrier at the perimeter of the business – rather than working out how to guard BlackBerrys – devices offering mobile e-mail and more – from eavesdroppers. “Mobile working and devices such as the BlackBerry require a new approach to security,” he says. The French security service’s recent decision to ban BlackBerrys from the president and prime minister’s offices underlines the point.
Mobility is clearly a challenge and opportunity. Mr Ojampera of Nokia thought the principal underlying trend would be the merging of mobility and Web 2.0 – shorthand for the latest iteration of the World Wide Web that emphasises interactivity and shared experiences: “Communities of people sharing experiences combined with a very intelligent mobile device which ‘knows’ your location will bring a completely new type of interactivity.”
He predicted in three or four years the emergence of mobile devices with visual recognition technology linked to intelligent databases. A tourist in London for example, could point their mobile phone at the Houses of Parliament. The phone would recognise the image and provide a commentary – perhaps spelling the beginning of the end for the tour guide?
Mr Ojampera also argued the next iteration of the internet would be created around mobile rather than the fixed computers. Each individual’s mobile device would become a web server in its own right with other internet users given specific rights to access the content.
According to Mike Lynch of Autonomy, the emergence of the first elements of Web 2.0 such as YouTube and MySpace and other social networking sites represents the biggest change in the IT industry since its formation.
Instead of simplifying the material world so that it can be handled by computers, people now expect computers to be able to cope with human-friendly information: “Rather than us being slaves to what the computer needs, the computer will have to follow what we like.”
The cause, of course, is the explosion of unstructured information and Mr Lynch, as head of a company that specialises in the management and retrieval of such information, is in no doubt about the complexity of dealing with it: “No one is going to be able to tag every piece of information and knowledge, even if they agreed on how the tags are defined. It’s a case of the hype getting ahead of the reality.”
Important information will, however, be tagged with metadata and made easily accessible. Andrew Herbert, head of Microsoft’s Cambridge laboratories, argues that computers will increasingly become a prothesis for civilisation’s overburdened memories: “The computers will know who you work with and show you things before you need them.
“So if you usually interact with certain documents while you have the monthly accounts open, then the computer might go ahead and get those documents ready for you in case you need them. It will be a sort of intelligent pre-search function – in search, we’re moving on from searching on key words to searching for concepts and the technology behind this is machine learning.”
There is broad agreement that there will be fundamental changes to ways of working. Don Rippert of Accenture points to an increase in the use of contractors – people employed for specific projects – and ways of substituting for today’s centralised workforces: “Having people drive through traffic for an hour to get to work will become unacceptable.”
“Increasingly, we will have to find ways for a distributed workforce to collaborate across time and distance,” he says, arguing that the latest, highly realistic videoconferencing systems would play a part, as would elements of Web 2.0: “Look at how teenagers use computers and the internet. They seem to be able to collaborate with each other with no effort whatsoever.”
He argues that derivatives of consumer products such as MySpace could be used in an enterprise setting. It was already happening in an informal way: “If you put SOA into a keyword search in YouTube [a video-sharing website] you will get video after video about service oriented architecture” – hardly regarded as a popular topic on teenage-orientated websites.
Crispin O’Brien of KPMG agrees that the elements of Web 2.0 – something he called Enterprise 2.0, or social networking in a business context – would be significant: “The more you can network people in an informal way, the more value a company can create,” he says.
He also argues that computers have to behave more like humans and that the next phase of workplace IT could be as influenced by social anthropology as by writers of computer code.
John Gage, chief researcher for Sun Microsystems, combines the sinister and social potential of technological progress in pointing out that, in his view, the big issue is the conjunction of the identity of people, objects, programs and data with location.
“Couple Google’s plans to map the surface of the Earth to an accuracy of 20cm with global positioning systems – which means the position of the 2bn-3bn existing mobile devices could be located to within a metre – with IPV6 [the latest internet protocol that allows for a virtually unlimited number of internet addresses and therefore objects connected to the internet] and we have the makings of a police state as well as incredible logistical power. We would know the location of every package, truck, container vehicle and traffic jam.”
In fact, with the latest storage and processing technologies, the capability is almost here to record every incident in an individual’s life. But is that something to which we should aspire, the experts ask?
Some corners of every life are best left dark. Indeed, bloggers are already being warned that their words ay come back to haunt them in later life in applying for jobs or promotion.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Where do we go from here?
Alan Cane
Published: July 11 2007 09:40 | Last updated: July 11 2007 09:40
It is easy these days to be overtaken by the future. Take e-mail, for example, the mainstay of modern business communication: “Younger people see e-mail as something older people do,” grimaces Don Rippert, chief technology officer for Accenture, the world’s largest consultancy.
“I thought it was a novel, next generation technology, but to young people it’s: ‘You should post to my site on MySpace [a social networking website], you should text message me, you should instant message me, why would you want to e-mail me? I don’t even check my inbox any more’.”
Indeed, the Gartner Group predicts that by 2011, instant messaging will be the de facto tool for voice, video and text communications in business. By then, of course, the young will have moved on to something else – refinements of the imaginary worlds of Second Life and other “virtual worlds”, or metaverses, perhaps.
Sometimes our technological future and our traditional present even collide, with risible results. “I will pay with my phone,” Tero Ojampera, Nokia’s chief technology officer, declared as he ordered coffee in a branch of McDonald’s, the fast food chain, expecting to be able to wave his handset over a wireless card reader. His waitress was unimpressed: “We don’t accept phones as payment,” she sniffed dismissively.
Such misunderstandings aside, near field communications (NFC), a short range (hand’s width) wireless technology, looks set to turn mobile handsets into electronic wallets and could revolutionise the way we pay for goods and services within the foreseeable future. Prototypes already exist and trials are under way, underlining a truism about forecasting technological futures: what we can reliably predict already exists, at least in the laboratory.
Beyond that, according to Andy Mulholland, chief technology officer at Capgemini, Europe’s largest computing services group, other factors cloud the issue: “I have a formula about where technology takes us. For a year ahead, you can be confident about where it is going because betas [prototypes in test] and alphas [finished designs] for the products which are going to come out already exist.
“For three years to five years ahead you have people collecting requirements definitions for the releases beyond that. Beyond five to 10 years, you might have an idea of what could come out of the laboratories. But from 10 to 20 years ahead, your only guidance is demographics: what people have grown up with and what they see as normal.”
So for this article, we will stick with the foreseeable and practical rather than the blue yonder. Inevitably, an expert’s view of the future is coloured by his or her area of expertise – Mr Ojampera looks forward to mobile handsets fabricated in new materials that would enable them to be bent or stretched, while Mr Mulholland anticipates technologies based on communications and interaction rather than today’s transaction-based approach.
But overall, this straw poll of some of the IT industry’s leading experts reflects a thoughtful, rather downbeat view of the future rather than the technocratic, gung-ho self-assurance of earlier years.
Many were concerned about personal privacy and security in a world where miniature video cameras would be ubiquitous and failure to safeguard sensitive data could open individuals and companies to legal action. “E-mail, voicemail and text messages used to be ethereal,” says Mike Lynch, chief executive of the UK company, Autonomy. “But no longer. Now you can see them being brought up in court.”
Crispin O’Brien, chairman of the technology group at consultancy KPMG, while questioning whether fixed line telephones have a future, worried about the mobile alternative: “There are huge, huge risks in mobile working,” he says. “If you leave a laptop on the back seat of a car, you could be in breach of all sorts of confidentiality issues.”
He argued that business was remiss to “just hunker down behind the firewall” – the defensive barrier at the perimeter of the business – rather than working out how to guard BlackBerrys – devices offering mobile e-mail and more – from eavesdroppers. “Mobile working and devices such as the BlackBerry require a new approach to security,” he says. The French security service’s recent decision to ban BlackBerrys from the president and prime minister’s offices underlines the point.
Mobility is clearly a challenge and opportunity. Mr Ojampera of Nokia thought the principal underlying trend would be the merging of mobility and Web 2.0 – shorthand for the latest iteration of the World Wide Web that emphasises interactivity and shared experiences: “Communities of people sharing experiences combined with a very intelligent mobile device which ‘knows’ your location will bring a completely new type of interactivity.”
He predicted in three or four years the emergence of mobile devices with visual recognition technology linked to intelligent databases. A tourist in London for example, could point their mobile phone at the Houses of Parliament. The phone would recognise the image and provide a commentary – perhaps spelling the beginning of the end for the tour guide?
Mr Ojampera also argued the next iteration of the internet would be created around mobile rather than the fixed computers. Each individual’s mobile device would become a web server in its own right with other internet users given specific rights to access the content.
According to Mike Lynch of Autonomy, the emergence of the first elements of Web 2.0 such as YouTube and MySpace and other social networking sites represents the biggest change in the IT industry since its formation.
Instead of simplifying the material world so that it can be handled by computers, people now expect computers to be able to cope with human-friendly information: “Rather than us being slaves to what the computer needs, the computer will have to follow what we like.”
The cause, of course, is the explosion of unstructured information and Mr Lynch, as head of a company that specialises in the management and retrieval of such information, is in no doubt about the complexity of dealing with it: “No one is going to be able to tag every piece of information and knowledge, even if they agreed on how the tags are defined. It’s a case of the hype getting ahead of the reality.”
Important information will, however, be tagged with metadata and made easily accessible. Andrew Herbert, head of Microsoft’s Cambridge laboratories, argues that computers will increasingly become a prothesis for civilisation’s overburdened memories: “The computers will know who you work with and show you things before you need them.
“So if you usually interact with certain documents while you have the monthly accounts open, then the computer might go ahead and get those documents ready for you in case you need them. It will be a sort of intelligent pre-search function – in search, we’re moving on from searching on key words to searching for concepts and the technology behind this is machine learning.”
There is broad agreement that there will be fundamental changes to ways of working. Don Rippert of Accenture points to an increase in the use of contractors – people employed for specific projects – and ways of substituting for today’s centralised workforces: “Having people drive through traffic for an hour to get to work will become unacceptable.”
“Increasingly, we will have to find ways for a distributed workforce to collaborate across time and distance,” he says, arguing that the latest, highly realistic videoconferencing systems would play a part, as would elements of Web 2.0: “Look at how teenagers use computers and the internet. They seem to be able to collaborate with each other with no effort whatsoever.”
He argues that derivatives of consumer products such as MySpace could be used in an enterprise setting. It was already happening in an informal way: “If you put SOA into a keyword search in YouTube [a video-sharing website] you will get video after video about service oriented architecture” – hardly regarded as a popular topic on teenage-orientated websites.
Crispin O’Brien of KPMG agrees that the elements of Web 2.0 – something he called Enterprise 2.0, or social networking in a business context – would be significant: “The more you can network people in an informal way, the more value a company can create,” he says.
He also argues that computers have to behave more like humans and that the next phase of workplace IT could be as influenced by social anthropology as by writers of computer code.
John Gage, chief researcher for Sun Microsystems, combines the sinister and social potential of technological progress in pointing out that, in his view, the big issue is the conjunction of the identity of people, objects, programs and data with location.
“Couple Google’s plans to map the surface of the Earth to an accuracy of 20cm with global positioning systems – which means the position of the 2bn-3bn existing mobile devices could be located to within a metre – with IPV6 [the latest internet protocol that allows for a virtually unlimited number of internet addresses and therefore objects connected to the internet] and we have the makings of a police state as well as incredible logistical power. We would know the location of every package, truck, container vehicle and traffic jam.”
In fact, with the latest storage and processing technologies, the capability is almost here to record every incident in an individual’s life. But is that something to which we should aspire, the experts ask?
Some corners of every life are best left dark. Indeed, bloggers are already being warned that their words ay come back to haunt them in later life in applying for jobs or promotion.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Google's Postini Buy Will Boost Gmail Corporate Appeal
Google's Postini Buy Will Boost Gmail Corporate Appeal
Google's planned acquisition of Postini shows a commitment to penetrate the enterprise e-mail market. The purchase will provide needed business features for Gmail, and thereby enhance its attractiveness for enterprises.
Google's planned acquisition of Postini shows a commitment to penetrate the enterprise e-mail market. The purchase will provide needed business features for Gmail, and thereby enhance its attractiveness for enterprises.
With Purchase, Google Targets Large Businesses - washingtonpost.com
With Purchase, Google Targets Large Businesses - washingtonpost.com
With Purchase, Google Targets Large Businesses
By Kendra Marr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 10, 2007; Page D01
Google delved deeper into the business software market yesterday with its announcement it would acquire Postini for $625 million in cash.
Postini, a closely held company with about 300 employees, sells software that protects e-mail, instant messaging and other Web-based communications from viruses and spam. The company said it hopes the acquisition would attract larger business clients seeking to comply with complex security regulations.
With Purchase, Google Targets Large Businesses
By Kendra Marr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 10, 2007; Page D01
Google delved deeper into the business software market yesterday with its announcement it would acquire Postini for $625 million in cash.
Postini, a closely held company with about 300 employees, sells software that protects e-mail, instant messaging and other Web-based communications from viruses and spam. The company said it hopes the acquisition would attract larger business clients seeking to comply with complex security regulations.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Autonomy bietet Suchtechnologie für Microsofts Sharepoint Server 2007
Autonomy bietet Suchtechnologie für Microsofts Sharepoint Server 2007
Autonomy, ein Unternehmen der Suchtechnologie für Großunternehmen, stellt den IDOL-Server jetzt für Kunden von Microsofts SharePoint Server 2007 zur Verfügung. Mit über 500 erweiterten Funktionen als SharePoint Web Parts bietet IDOL jetzt eine flexible Grundlage für die unternehmensweite Verarbeitung strukturierter und unstrukturierter Daten. Die Technologie von Autonomy verfügt über ein konzeptionelles und textuelles Verständnis für jegliche Art von elektronischen Daten und ermöglicht damit die Suche nach Informationen in Texten, E-Mails, Audio- oder Videodateien.
Autonomy, ein Unternehmen der Suchtechnologie für Großunternehmen, stellt den IDOL-Server jetzt für Kunden von Microsofts SharePoint Server 2007 zur Verfügung. Mit über 500 erweiterten Funktionen als SharePoint Web Parts bietet IDOL jetzt eine flexible Grundlage für die unternehmensweite Verarbeitung strukturierter und unstrukturierter Daten. Die Technologie von Autonomy verfügt über ein konzeptionelles und textuelles Verständnis für jegliche Art von elektronischen Daten und ermöglicht damit die Suche nach Informationen in Texten, E-Mails, Audio- oder Videodateien.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Autonomy Buys Zantaz To Beef Up Enterprise Archival Searching -- Autonomy Corp. -- InformationWeek
Autonomy Buys Zantaz To Beef Up Enterprise Archival Searching -- Autonomy Corp. -- InformationWeek
Autonomy is buying the e-mail archiving firm for $375 million.
Autonomy is buying the e-mail archiving firm for $375 million.
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