Questions Arise on Google's privacy policy

A European Commission advisory group has raised concerns about how Google uses and manages users' search data.

A privacy advisory group composed of representatives from all of the European Union countries sent Google a letter expressing concern over the search giant's new privacy policy announced in March.

The issue surrounds Google's policy of anonymizing its server logs after 18 to 24 months. According to a Commission source, the advisory group is concerned with how the information is managed, rather than the length of time it is stored.

Google, which confirmed it received a letter from the chairman of the advisory group, said it will respond, as requested, before the group holds its next meeting in mid-June.

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Harmful program distributed through e-mail

Hackers are trying to play on business' fear of legal action from customers to trick them into downloading a harmful program distributed through e-mail.

The e-mails purport to come from the Better Business Bureau, an organization that monitors and arbitrates disputes between consumers and businesses in the U.S. and Canada. The e-mails assert that a customer lodged a complaint against the recipient's business, according to a warning on the Web site of Websense, a security vendor.

The e-mails contain a Microsoft Word attachment with the text of the supposed complaint and instructions for how to respond. But embedded in that document is a keylogging program that captures data on the victim's computer and then uploads it to a server in Malaysia.

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Powerful new weapon to fight against movie pirates

Malaysian cinemas have found a powerful new weapon in their fight against movie pirates -- military-style night-vision goggles.

After showing people to their seats, trained ushers are strapping on the goggles and scanning darkened cinemas around the country to spot anyone trying to make illegal copies of movies with hand-held video recorders or mobile phones.

The Motion Picture Association, which is training Malaysian ushers to catch the pirates, said cinemas had caught 17 people in the past two months, during which Hollywood studios released blockbusters like "Spider-Man 3" and "Pirates of the Caribbean."

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Skype Worm Jumps to ICQ, MSN

A new variant of the Stration worm, which has been plaguing Windows users for the past year, has made the jump from Skype to the ICQ and MSN Messenger networks.

This latest variant popped up earlier this week, according to Chris Boyd, a researcher at FaceTime Communications Inc., who blogs under the pseudonym "Paperghost."

"They're using Skype as a jump off into other more established networks," Boyd said. "The infection will go looking for other instant messaging clients that are on the PC and then attempt to send the infection message that it initially sends through Skype through these other chat systems."

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Firefox 3.0 Passes Major Milestone

Mozilla Corp. has met a major milestone in its march to Firefox 3.0, developers said yesterday, by adding another chunk of the new Places feature to the alpha set for release late next week.

Places -- a complete revamp of the bookmarks and history functions of the browser -- was at one point slated to debut in Firefox 2.0, but was yanked a year ago in the run up to that version's October 2006 release. Instead, it will debut in Firefox 3.0.

"We enabled the Places implementation of bookmarks on the trunk," said the Places team in a post to the Mozilla developer center blog. "Although there is still much to be done, this is an important milestone for us." Firefox 3.0 alpha 5 is scheduled to launch June 1.

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Intel India contributes 50 per cent to global revenues

The contribution of India to Intel’s global products is on the rise. The latest contribution has been on the notebook processor technology front with the Intel India Development Centre (IIDC) in Bangalore making around 50 per cent contribution to the Intel Centrino Mobile platform. Intel in India has around 3,000 people spanning various functions with the majority engaged in R&D activity.

Addressing media persons here on Thursday, Sandeep Shah, director - mobility group, Intel India, said, “We are on a ramp-up and increasing our value & inputs to these products.”

The latest mobile platform of Intel, formerly codenamed Santa Rosa, saw the India centre making various contributions in the areas of software validation, hardware board design, chipset and validation for the customers.

Mr Shah said that for the first time, the entire hardware board has been designed in Bangalore. Intel has also seen its three previous mobile platforms having contributions from IIDC. This also signifies the growing confidence of Intel in its India operations.

Intel India officials said that its expertise has been growing and has developing domain expertise in certain verticals. It was earlier providing support and validation functions and now has gone about implementing products independently. Mr Shah said this latest mobile platform will also be used in the small form factor PCs. This has been the second such activity for Intel in the recent past. It had recently unveiled a new chip called teraflop processor, which is capable of doing trillions of calculations per second. The IIDC had contributed 50 per cent towards the products in the areas of logic, circuit and physical design.

Microsoft introduces Fortza 2 in India

Microsoft Game Studios on Wednesday launched the upgraded version of its motor sports game, Fortza Motorsport 2, in India priced at Rs 1,895.

"The launch of Fortza 2 marks a new price point that Microsoft has introduced in the Indian market. We were earlier selling our titles for Rs 2,599 and have brought this popular title for just Rs 1,895," Microsoft Country Manager Entertainment and Devices division Mohit Anand told reporters.

He said the company had spent nearly 40 million dollars and two years in upgrading the title for gamers globally.

Microsoft is also planning to bring a top-end variant of its high-definition gaming console, X-Box Elite, in the Indian market by August.

The company is presently looking at bringing online gaming through XBox live in the country soon.

"We will introduce XBox live in India within this year," Anand said.

The company presently sells over 70 gaming titles in India and would soon introduce two new titles here, he added

Intel should be ashamed: Negroponte

The much-talked about 'One Laptop Per Child' project (OLPC) has sparked off yet another controversy. A big one actually! Nicholas Negroponte, founder and leader of the OLPC project and professor at MIT, has said in a TV interview that he would have notched up three million orders for the $100 laptop (now revised to $175), but for Intel's "shameless" business practices.

Negroponte bitterly accused the microprocessor major of selling its own cut-price laptop -- the Classmate PC – well below cost to drive him out of market. "Intel has hurt the mission enormously," Negroponte said.

Both Intel and Negroponte's not-for-profit organisation, OLPC, have developed a low-cost laptop aimed specifically at school children in the developing countries. Intel's Classmate PC runs Microsoft Windows and Linux, besides Open Office. There are several other differences in both the hardware and software. (Stay tuned in as we plan to bring more on this topic in the coming weeks!)

Negroponte believes that the main problem is that his machine uses a processor designed by Intel's arch rival AMD. "Intel and AMD fight viciously," he said. "We're just sort of caught in the middle."

Negroponte says Intel has distributed marketing literature to governments with titles such as "the shortcomings of the ‘One Laptop per Child’ approach," which outline the supposedly stronger points of the Classmate.

Negroponte's project is currently in a critical phase. Countries have time until this month-end to place their orders for the first batch and will be able to purchase in the lots of 250,000.

The laptops will initially cost $176, but the eventual aim is to sell the machine to government-run educational institutions in developing countries at its originally promised price tag of $100.

Speaking to US broadcaster CBS, Intel's chairman Craig Barrett denied the claims. "We're not trying to drive him out of business," said Craig Barrett. "We're trying to bring capability to young people."

Barrett has previously dismissed the $100 laptop as a mere "gadget." Meanwhile, Intel is very aggressively pushing its Classmate PC worldwide.

Infy to give biz edge to social entrepreneurs' dreams

After incubating purely-for-profit firms like Yantra and Onmobile, Infosys Technologies now plans to give social entrepreneurs a leg up.

The company, which donates 1% of its profits to social causes through the Infosys Foundation, has started a new initiative within the company through which it will support, and in some cases fund, ideas on social entrepreneurship and convert them to viable business plans.

However, the focus will not be so much on funding, as it will be on providing guidance in taking the idea forward and making it self-sustaining, says Sanjay Purohit, associate vice-president & head of corporate planning at Infosys. Mr Purohit is one of the key people spearheading the initiative in the company.

“Right now, what we have is an operational corpus to run the program. Entrepreneurs can approach Infosys like any other corporate. We’re not shutting out the possibility of seed funding some of the initiatives,” Mr Purohit told ET.

The linkage will allow entrepreneurs to tap the management expertise of one of India’s most admired firms and use it to build world-class organisations working for social causes. Apart from Mr Purhoit, CEO designate Kris Gopalakrishnan will also be actively involved in the initiative. He will be the sponsor and official mentor of the initiative.

The initiative, called InfYi will function as the corporate chapter of the Young India initiative started by the Confederation of Indian Industry. Reflecting that charter, all its members below the age of 35 will be Infoscions.

So far, 90 people have been enrolled in the program, in addition to the dozen people who form part of the InfYi’s core team. The core team is made up of Infosys management council alumni — these are young Infoscions who are selected every year from among the employees to be on the management council for a year.

InfYi will have the backing of the Infosys management council to review the progress of the entrepreneurial ideas. The management council consists of the board members, head of departments, business heads and the 12 young Infoscions. It meets about eight times a year.

Based on the inputs that a project or idea needs, a senior council member will contribute to it. The projects could be in youth affairs, education, healthcare, economy or any other socially-relevant area. So far, InfYi has received 13 project ideas. Three of these will be shortlisted taken from concept to execution. They will be put through the paces by a team which has worked out how to capitalise on opportunities and survive downturns.

IBM rules out setting up fab unit in India

Ruling out setting up of any fab facility in India, IBM has said that it would be keen to providing the technology know-how to any of the units coming up in the country.

“We will be ready for technology transfer whenever they (fab units) are ready as we are keen on contributing towards the growing ecosystem of the Indian semiconductor industry,” said, Adalio Sanchez, GM of global engineering solutions, STG, IBM.

IBM has been associated with the semiconductor industry for around 30 years and its activity includes manufacturing, design and R&D. The multi-billion dollar IT giant had also recently set up the Semiconductor Research and Development Enablement Centre (SRDC) in Bangalore, which is its sixth globally and the first outside the US and Europe. Mr Sanchez said it would be keen on the transfer of process technology to proposed fab units in India and not any chip design activity.

IBM has also announced a grand alliance with four other major players in the semiconductor industry to work on the latest 32nm bulk CMOS process technology. The other partners include Chartered, Samsung, Infineon and Freescale.

According to IBM, the five companies intend to work together to come out with technology for chips which is high on performance while using lesser power. It is also looking at a common manufacturing platform strategy, whereby the technology can be more easily transferred between partners.

Mr Sanchez said that the Bangalore centre will also be playing very key role in latest development. As the centre is less than a year old, it is still on the growth phase it has been engaged in the testing and validation services. The chips developed by IBM and its partners have found its application largely in servers and storage products. However, it has also used in video games, medical electronics, telecom, defence among others

Google hopes search translation tools make profit

Google Inc. planned to introduce a feature Wednesday that automatically translates Internet search requests and results in 12 languages, underscoring the rapidly growing company's ambitions outside the United States.

The tools allow Google's users to enter search requests in their native languages and then choose to have the phrases as well as the accompanying results automatically translated into another language. Users can then click on a link and have the entire Web page translated through a service that Google had already been offering.

Google expects the new translation service for search results to be particularly popular outside of the United States and the United Kingdom because so much of the Internet's content is published in English.

Besides English, Google's search results translator works in Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese. Yahoo Inc., which runs the Web's second largest search engine behind Google, already offers a service that has been automatically translating search results in Germany, France and Japan since 2005, spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly said. The Sunnyvale-based company also offers translation tools through its BabelFish site.

More recently, Yahoo has been trying to woo more traffic outside the United States through its ``answers'' service, which relies on its users to respond to each other's questions in nine different languages.

By making its search engine more appealing to people who don't speak English, Google is angling to sell more advertising in international markets and maintain the impressive financial growth that has driven a more than fivefold increase in its stock price in less than three years. The Mountain View-based company's shares fell $1.89 to $473.97 Wednesday.

Google's family of Web sites, including online video pioneer YouTube.com, already attracts the world's largest audience, according to comScore Media Metrix.

American Technology Research analyst Rob Sanderson is among those who believe Google is poised to cash in on its opportunities outside the United States and Britain.

Google collected $7.6 billion (euro5.63 billion), or 72 percent, of its 2006 revenue from sources in the United States and Britain, Sanderson said in a report issued Tuesday. If the company had fared as well in other key markets around the world, Sanderson estimated Google would have generated an additional $4.9 billion (euro3.63 billion) to $8.7 billion (euro6.45 billion) in revenue last year

``Clearly growth in international markets can significantly move the needle for'' Google, Sanderson wrote. ``We believe it is only time that stands in the way of capturing this opportunity.'' In a separate move to boost its profits, Google reportedly is nearing a $100 million (euro74 million) deal to buy privately held FeedBurner Inc., which helps Web logs and other online publishers attract traffic and advertising through a distribution channel known as ``really simple syndication,'' or RSS.

The acquisition, which has been rumored for the past week, is expected to close in early June, according to TechCrunch, a well-connected blog that revealed Google's plans to buy YouTube three days before that deal was announced last October. Contacted Wednesday, Google declined to comment on its reported interest in Chicago-based FeedBurner.

In another move Wednesday that had long been anticipated, Google began experimenting with the distribution of video ads to a small group of Web sites. The company will share the video revenue with its partners, just as it does with the short, text-based ads that account for most of its profit.

The video ads, which will be limited to 30 seconds, can be skipped by a Web site's visitors.