According to the Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals, Inc. press release, Addiction411 has started a new MySpace page to educate people all around the world regarding Opioid addiction.
For those who do not know what Opioid addiction is, let me educate you. Opioid addiction is the addiction to prescribed pain killers such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine, heroine, and methadone. An estimated number of 6 million Americans of all ages will misuse or become addicted to prescribed pain killers at one point in time of their life. Opioid addiction has increased so drastically over the past few years that the National Institute for Drug Abuse now considers Opioid dependence as a chronic brain disease.
With all of the new information and statistics coming about regarding Opioid dependency, Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals has become the first company to become partners with MySpace and offer people from around the world important information regarding Opioid addiction. The MySpace page which is located at MySpace.Com/Addiction411 has much needed information for anyone who is interested in educating themselves regarding the dangers of Opioid addiction.
The Addiction411 page at MySpace offers an interactive online addiction questionnaire. A doctor locater in your area to help with the Opioid addiction. Information regarding how prescription drug use can lead to addiction, as well as information regarding the dangers and the red flags you should look for if someone you love or care for is misusing prescriptions drugs. Unfortunately those who are misusing prescription drugs do not realize it until it is so bad that they are embarrassed to even mention it or get help. With the Addiction411 MySpace page, abusers can help find the resources they need to get their life back without announcing to everyone around them that they have an addiction.
Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is a specialty pharmaceutical company that makes Suboxone, a drug that treats Opioid dependency in a medical based setting. Suboxone and Subutex, also made by Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals, Inc., are the only two drugs approved by the FDA to be used in treating Opioid dependency inside a medical facility. To learn more about these two drugs, please visit opioiddependence.com.
For all other information regarding Opioid dependency and what you can do if you know someone or if you are that someone who needs help. Please visit the TurnToHelp.com website and order your free information kit regarding Opioid dependency and it's dangers.
Source:www.associatedcontent.com
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Will Google Be Destroyed By Open Source Search Engines?
Could open source kill the golden egg that laid Google? If Wikia has their way, it just might.
The Wikia project, started by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, seeks to the turn the process of building a search engine from a multimillion dollar project to one that could cost just hundreds or thousands of bucks. That's a game changer.
Here is a look at what Wikia hopes to accomplish:
The project, which was started by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, consists of four components, the indexing of the Web, developing a search engine application, an algorithm, and using people to help filter sites and rank results.
One of the most expensive components of a search engine is the effort needed to index the Web. Companies have to buy servers and software to crawl the Web looking at what's on every page, in order to create a comprehensive list of what's on the Web.
Well, how will Wikia be able to provide all this search engine technology and service -- especially crawling the Web -- for free? Open user participation, of course:
The cost of indexing the Web is one of the main hurdles to starting a search engine, and for-profit companies have raised the bar year after year by indexing the Web more and more often. It used to be catalogued once a week, or once a day. Now it's once an hour, or even more often. The high cost of running these crawls has become a competitive weapon.
Wikia believes its crawl of the Web will cost nearly nothing, because it's asking Internet users to help out by downloading Web crawling software from Grub, which will use their computers during idle time to crawl the Web, and send results back to Wikia for the index. So far a thousand people have downloaded the application, and Penchina is hoping for 100,000 or more. The goal is to post the entire index online, as well as regular updates, so anyone can use them.
If I have any skepticism about Wikia, it centers on this piece. I know that distributed computing and its white hot offspring grid computing are big IT trends (and that they can work), but crawling the Web is the competitive advantage that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft use to maintain their market share. Will a mishmash of random crawls from across the Web really be an adequate substitute to a centralized effort? We'll have to wait and see.
As for Wikia itself, I think that even if the distributed Web crawling doesn't work as well as Google, just having that option available -- along with open and free search engine parts -- will be the catalyst that both vertical search and the local search advocates have been looking for.
In May I predicted that Google would probably die not from direct competition with a new, direct rival but from competition from an army of tiny, but by the challenge posed by thousands specialty search engines and Web apps.
We've seen Technorati and Blinkx beat Google at its newer search initiatives. How many more little search engines will we see once Wikia goes live?
Source:http://informationweek.com
The Wikia project, started by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, seeks to the turn the process of building a search engine from a multimillion dollar project to one that could cost just hundreds or thousands of bucks. That's a game changer.
Here is a look at what Wikia hopes to accomplish:
The project, which was started by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, consists of four components, the indexing of the Web, developing a search engine application, an algorithm, and using people to help filter sites and rank results.
One of the most expensive components of a search engine is the effort needed to index the Web. Companies have to buy servers and software to crawl the Web looking at what's on every page, in order to create a comprehensive list of what's on the Web.
Well, how will Wikia be able to provide all this search engine technology and service -- especially crawling the Web -- for free? Open user participation, of course:
The cost of indexing the Web is one of the main hurdles to starting a search engine, and for-profit companies have raised the bar year after year by indexing the Web more and more often. It used to be catalogued once a week, or once a day. Now it's once an hour, or even more often. The high cost of running these crawls has become a competitive weapon.
Wikia believes its crawl of the Web will cost nearly nothing, because it's asking Internet users to help out by downloading Web crawling software from Grub, which will use their computers during idle time to crawl the Web, and send results back to Wikia for the index. So far a thousand people have downloaded the application, and Penchina is hoping for 100,000 or more. The goal is to post the entire index online, as well as regular updates, so anyone can use them.
If I have any skepticism about Wikia, it centers on this piece. I know that distributed computing and its white hot offspring grid computing are big IT trends (and that they can work), but crawling the Web is the competitive advantage that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft use to maintain their market share. Will a mishmash of random crawls from across the Web really be an adequate substitute to a centralized effort? We'll have to wait and see.
As for Wikia itself, I think that even if the distributed Web crawling doesn't work as well as Google, just having that option available -- along with open and free search engine parts -- will be the catalyst that both vertical search and the local search advocates have been looking for.
In May I predicted that Google would probably die not from direct competition with a new, direct rival but from competition from an army of tiny, but by the challenge posed by thousands specialty search engines and Web apps.
We've seen Technorati and Blinkx beat Google at its newer search initiatives. How many more little search engines will we see once Wikia goes live?
Source:http://informationweek.com
Google clicks with job-seekers
Growing firm eyes more office space
When your company's name is so well-known that it's used as a verb, it's hardly a surprise to see the payroll growing.
Google Boston -- which leases an 18,000-square-foot space on the seventh floor of One Broadway in Kendall Square in Cambridge -- is expanding.
The number of employees in Google's Cambridge office has doubled in the last four months -- and the company is still hiring, said the firm's engineering and site director, Steve Vinter. Company officials wouldn't specify the number of current employees, except to say it was more than 50.
"If you would have come in here four months ago, it would have seemed half-filled," Vinter said. "Right now it's starting to be a little tight, whereas before it wasn't."
Vinter laughed when asked if there are lines for the bathroom, but said that video conferencing rooms have become hard to book between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. He also said he noticed a line in the cafeteria for the first time this month.
It was "long enough to make good conversation," he said.
The Cambridge office of Google Inc., based in Mountain View, Calif., is one of 20 in the United States and 40 in the world. This office houses an advertising department, which sells customized search services to large businesses, and an engineering department, which works with other Google offices to develop search applications for digital books and cellphones.
Despite the apparent shortage of office space, Google Boston is not slowing down on hiring.
On July 25, the company held its largest recruitment event in Boston to date, according to Google spokeswoman Sunny Gettinger. The Google Boston Open House, which was advertised on Facebook and held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, attracted approximately 100 prospective employees to an evening of appetizers, drinks, networking, and a talk by YouTube's chief marketing officer, Suzie Reider.
Eleven types of positions are listed on the jobs website for Google Boston, and Java engineering and technical writing positions were added in the last two weeks, Vinter said. Google is looking to hire a number of employees in each of the positions.
"We don't have classic hiring targets. We are expanding and we are looking for great people across the board," Gettinger said. "We're going to hire as many great people as we can find."
Google is also looking for additional office space to accommodate new employees, including both temporary space and more permanent locations, according to Vinter.
"We are definitely making arrangements all the time," he said.
Officials would not say when or where the company will lease additional space.
Google's Kendall Square office is just around the corner from an outpost of the Microsoft Corp., which signed an agreement to lease four floors at One Memorial Drive in June.
Vintner said he welcomes Microsoft to the neighborhood, noting, "It's really healthy for industry leaders in high-tech areas to be concentrated in the same area because it encourages really qualified people to stay in the area."
Even with Microsoft nearby, qualified applicants in the Boston area are not hard to find, he said, because of proximity to schools that focus on computer science and engineering.
"The biggest advantage is that there's a great pool of talented people here," he said.
Jim Klocke, executive vice president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, is happy about Google and Microsoft expanding their presence in Cambridge.
"That's the kind of job growth we like to see," Klocke said. "Because these are great jobs, they pay well, they support spinoff jobs. . . . They are the kind of jobs that help expand our reputation for innovation."
Source:www.boston.com
When your company's name is so well-known that it's used as a verb, it's hardly a surprise to see the payroll growing.
Google Boston -- which leases an 18,000-square-foot space on the seventh floor of One Broadway in Kendall Square in Cambridge -- is expanding.
The number of employees in Google's Cambridge office has doubled in the last four months -- and the company is still hiring, said the firm's engineering and site director, Steve Vinter. Company officials wouldn't specify the number of current employees, except to say it was more than 50.
"If you would have come in here four months ago, it would have seemed half-filled," Vinter said. "Right now it's starting to be a little tight, whereas before it wasn't."
Vinter laughed when asked if there are lines for the bathroom, but said that video conferencing rooms have become hard to book between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. He also said he noticed a line in the cafeteria for the first time this month.
It was "long enough to make good conversation," he said.
The Cambridge office of Google Inc., based in Mountain View, Calif., is one of 20 in the United States and 40 in the world. This office houses an advertising department, which sells customized search services to large businesses, and an engineering department, which works with other Google offices to develop search applications for digital books and cellphones.
Despite the apparent shortage of office space, Google Boston is not slowing down on hiring.
On July 25, the company held its largest recruitment event in Boston to date, according to Google spokeswoman Sunny Gettinger. The Google Boston Open House, which was advertised on Facebook and held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, attracted approximately 100 prospective employees to an evening of appetizers, drinks, networking, and a talk by YouTube's chief marketing officer, Suzie Reider.
Eleven types of positions are listed on the jobs website for Google Boston, and Java engineering and technical writing positions were added in the last two weeks, Vinter said. Google is looking to hire a number of employees in each of the positions.
"We don't have classic hiring targets. We are expanding and we are looking for great people across the board," Gettinger said. "We're going to hire as many great people as we can find."
Google is also looking for additional office space to accommodate new employees, including both temporary space and more permanent locations, according to Vinter.
"We are definitely making arrangements all the time," he said.
Officials would not say when or where the company will lease additional space.
Google's Kendall Square office is just around the corner from an outpost of the Microsoft Corp., which signed an agreement to lease four floors at One Memorial Drive in June.
Vintner said he welcomes Microsoft to the neighborhood, noting, "It's really healthy for industry leaders in high-tech areas to be concentrated in the same area because it encourages really qualified people to stay in the area."
Even with Microsoft nearby, qualified applicants in the Boston area are not hard to find, he said, because of proximity to schools that focus on computer science and engineering.
"The biggest advantage is that there's a great pool of talented people here," he said.
Jim Klocke, executive vice president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, is happy about Google and Microsoft expanding their presence in Cambridge.
"That's the kind of job growth we like to see," Klocke said. "Because these are great jobs, they pay well, they support spinoff jobs. . . . They are the kind of jobs that help expand our reputation for innovation."
Source:www.boston.com
Advertisers find new headaches in lawless world of social Web sites
First came the soaring ascent of online social networking sites and now comes old fashioned soul searching about a sprawling universe where staid advertisements can scrape up against profiles of giddy young professionals and pages devoted to self-proclaimed angry "straight, white men."
While sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Habbo Hotel have a powerful allure, the companies that run them are finding themselves on the front lines of criticism about fast-evolving standards. Some of the criticism in Britain involves advertising for junk food that is migrating to the sites from children's television programming, where such ads are now banned, and corporate concern about employees distracted by time-sapping virtual networking.
For traditional advertisers rushing headlong into this new territory to reach tantalizing, young users, the ultimate nightmare is the surprise of sharing virtual real estate with risqué material or racist rants.
"Ultimately there are going to be mistakes and unfortunate incidents," said Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst with the research firm, eMarketer, and the author of a report predicting that global advertising spending on social networks would grow to $3.6 billion by 2011 from $445 million this year.
"Social networking content is very dynamic and it's always changing," she added. "We're moving to a world of user-generated content and it's changing on a minute-by-minute basis. I think marketers are just going to have to get used to it."
Online advertising is a vital part of development for social networks, which have grown dramatically in the past two years with MySpace attracting more than 114 million visitors internationally in June, followed by Facebook with 52.2 million and Bebo at 18.2 million, according to comScore, an Internet tracking service. And all of those sites are feeling some growing pains.
In London, with the number of Facebook users swelling, government agencies and six companies, including Vodafone, Virgin Media and First Direct, made a jumpy, temporary exodus from the site this month. The companies withdrew advertising accounts from Facebook after their brands surfaced in blind purchases alongside a page for the anti-immigrant, right-wing British National Party.
Now the party's Facebook profile has been whisked clean of advertising, but the government's Central Office of Information has temporarily pulled advertising until it receives assurances about appropriate placements.
Other companies are jittery for other reasons; Credit Suisse and Dresdner Kleinwort cut off company access to such sites because of concerns about unproductive use of work time.
"Access to Facebook is denied by our automatic Web site filtering software as it may contravene our Internet use policy," said Murray Parker, a Dresdner Kleinwort spokesman. "Dresdner Kleinwort only provides Internet facilities to staff for the purpose of conducting company business."
MySpace and Bebo, which has evolved into the most popular social site for European users, have already given their assurances to British government authorities. Facebook, as well, announced last week that it was developing new systems to allow advertisers more control.
But the controversy in Britain has had an impact on all companies in the social networking category, many of which have been taking steps to highlight their ethical responsibilities, by hiring special "safety officers" or to refuse ads for profile pages.
"Bebo, unfortunately, gets tarnished with the same brush as Facebook, which is very new in the U.K. market," said Mark Charkin, head of Bebo sales for England and Ireland.
The British flap happened just after Bebo rolled out an edgy new series called KateModern, which it had commissioned from the producers of infamous and fictional Lonelygirl15, a Web series about a young girl named Bree. The ambition is to attract more users to the site, but also to tap a new revenue pool by integrating products into the story line to give advertisers greater exposure instead of click-through advertising banners.
The advertising is just starting to surface, like a glimpse of a Microsoft brand on a computer. But Charkin said no ads would appear in the more serious and dramatic scenes. Orange, Proctor & Gamble and Buena Vista, have all signed up to give their products bit parts, according to Charkin.
Bebo and Habbo House, an animated world with sites in 19 countries that draws users between the ages of 10 and 16, are both integrating candy and food advertisements into their sites, which has drawn particular criticism in England, where authorities banned junk food advertisements in April for television programming aimed at children aged 4 to 9 years. At the start of next year, the ban will extend to programs for viewers younger than 16.
Bebo has been running a campaign for Skittles candy, "A World of My Own," that offers users a chance to create their own ads. Habbo Hotel, with its headquarters in Helsinki, Finland, incorporates brands like Burger King or Juicy Fruit gum, into the public spaces where players hang out in rooms with shiny tile floors and counters that look very similar to a fast food restaurant. "We think the future is having users acting or interacting with your brand. How do we solve that?" said Henrik Hoglund, who leads advertising sales for Habbo. "By setting up a competition, a quest and other things that can activate brands."
Habbo, according to Juhani Lassila, a company spokesman for Sulake, the parent company of Habbo, has adopted a code of following the rules in different countries; in the case of Britain, it is not showing the Burger King advertisements on local sites.
A Bebo spokeswoman, Sarah Gavin, said the company was working with the British regulator Ofcom and was following guidelines from the U.K. Advertising Standard's Authority.
Some institutions have reacted by building their own walls. A number of schools, companies and government authorities are filtering out social networks by blocking access. That counter-reaction has been building over the past three months, said Greg Miller, the head of sales for Email Systems, a Web services company, which also filters billions of mail messages a month for hundreds of private and public clients.
"Social networking has come into the fore in the work space," Miller said. "People knew it was there, but they were quite happy to not necessarily ignore it, but to accept it. But now it's gotten to the point where they can no longer tolerate it."
But the desire to communicate about personal issues is a powerful force. One of the newest entrants into the field is an international Web site called Respectance, which is creating a virtual memorial for the dead that enables surviving friends and relatives to create and share user-generated tributes and obituaries.
Ultimately, the company's founders and investors want advertising, but they are moving into untrammeled territory while striking the right dignified tone. "This has to be handled very carefully," said Barend Van den Brande, a partner in Big Bang Ventures, a Belgian venture capital fund that has invested in Respectance. "What you don't want to see is an ad for a BMW on your grandmother's obituary."
Source:www.iht.com
While sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Habbo Hotel have a powerful allure, the companies that run them are finding themselves on the front lines of criticism about fast-evolving standards. Some of the criticism in Britain involves advertising for junk food that is migrating to the sites from children's television programming, where such ads are now banned, and corporate concern about employees distracted by time-sapping virtual networking.
For traditional advertisers rushing headlong into this new territory to reach tantalizing, young users, the ultimate nightmare is the surprise of sharing virtual real estate with risqué material or racist rants.
"Ultimately there are going to be mistakes and unfortunate incidents," said Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst with the research firm, eMarketer, and the author of a report predicting that global advertising spending on social networks would grow to $3.6 billion by 2011 from $445 million this year.
"Social networking content is very dynamic and it's always changing," she added. "We're moving to a world of user-generated content and it's changing on a minute-by-minute basis. I think marketers are just going to have to get used to it."
Online advertising is a vital part of development for social networks, which have grown dramatically in the past two years with MySpace attracting more than 114 million visitors internationally in June, followed by Facebook with 52.2 million and Bebo at 18.2 million, according to comScore, an Internet tracking service. And all of those sites are feeling some growing pains.
In London, with the number of Facebook users swelling, government agencies and six companies, including Vodafone, Virgin Media and First Direct, made a jumpy, temporary exodus from the site this month. The companies withdrew advertising accounts from Facebook after their brands surfaced in blind purchases alongside a page for the anti-immigrant, right-wing British National Party.
Now the party's Facebook profile has been whisked clean of advertising, but the government's Central Office of Information has temporarily pulled advertising until it receives assurances about appropriate placements.
Other companies are jittery for other reasons; Credit Suisse and Dresdner Kleinwort cut off company access to such sites because of concerns about unproductive use of work time.
"Access to Facebook is denied by our automatic Web site filtering software as it may contravene our Internet use policy," said Murray Parker, a Dresdner Kleinwort spokesman. "Dresdner Kleinwort only provides Internet facilities to staff for the purpose of conducting company business."
MySpace and Bebo, which has evolved into the most popular social site for European users, have already given their assurances to British government authorities. Facebook, as well, announced last week that it was developing new systems to allow advertisers more control.
But the controversy in Britain has had an impact on all companies in the social networking category, many of which have been taking steps to highlight their ethical responsibilities, by hiring special "safety officers" or to refuse ads for profile pages.
"Bebo, unfortunately, gets tarnished with the same brush as Facebook, which is very new in the U.K. market," said Mark Charkin, head of Bebo sales for England and Ireland.
The British flap happened just after Bebo rolled out an edgy new series called KateModern, which it had commissioned from the producers of infamous and fictional Lonelygirl15, a Web series about a young girl named Bree. The ambition is to attract more users to the site, but also to tap a new revenue pool by integrating products into the story line to give advertisers greater exposure instead of click-through advertising banners.
The advertising is just starting to surface, like a glimpse of a Microsoft brand on a computer. But Charkin said no ads would appear in the more serious and dramatic scenes. Orange, Proctor & Gamble and Buena Vista, have all signed up to give their products bit parts, according to Charkin.
Bebo and Habbo House, an animated world with sites in 19 countries that draws users between the ages of 10 and 16, are both integrating candy and food advertisements into their sites, which has drawn particular criticism in England, where authorities banned junk food advertisements in April for television programming aimed at children aged 4 to 9 years. At the start of next year, the ban will extend to programs for viewers younger than 16.
Bebo has been running a campaign for Skittles candy, "A World of My Own," that offers users a chance to create their own ads. Habbo Hotel, with its headquarters in Helsinki, Finland, incorporates brands like Burger King or Juicy Fruit gum, into the public spaces where players hang out in rooms with shiny tile floors and counters that look very similar to a fast food restaurant. "We think the future is having users acting or interacting with your brand. How do we solve that?" said Henrik Hoglund, who leads advertising sales for Habbo. "By setting up a competition, a quest and other things that can activate brands."
Habbo, according to Juhani Lassila, a company spokesman for Sulake, the parent company of Habbo, has adopted a code of following the rules in different countries; in the case of Britain, it is not showing the Burger King advertisements on local sites.
A Bebo spokeswoman, Sarah Gavin, said the company was working with the British regulator Ofcom and was following guidelines from the U.K. Advertising Standard's Authority.
Some institutions have reacted by building their own walls. A number of schools, companies and government authorities are filtering out social networks by blocking access. That counter-reaction has been building over the past three months, said Greg Miller, the head of sales for Email Systems, a Web services company, which also filters billions of mail messages a month for hundreds of private and public clients.
"Social networking has come into the fore in the work space," Miller said. "People knew it was there, but they were quite happy to not necessarily ignore it, but to accept it. But now it's gotten to the point where they can no longer tolerate it."
But the desire to communicate about personal issues is a powerful force. One of the newest entrants into the field is an international Web site called Respectance, which is creating a virtual memorial for the dead that enables surviving friends and relatives to create and share user-generated tributes and obituaries.
Ultimately, the company's founders and investors want advertising, but they are moving into untrammeled territory while striking the right dignified tone. "This has to be handled very carefully," said Barend Van den Brande, a partner in Big Bang Ventures, a Belgian venture capital fund that has invested in Respectance. "What you don't want to see is an ad for a BMW on your grandmother's obituary."
Source:www.iht.com
Universal Partners With Google To Rival iTunes
Another online music download service is set to enter the ring. The difference this time? The partnership is between Universal and Kingpin, Google. The pairing off was announced earlier last week, but now more details have emerged on the business plan. The service called gBox, (not a euphemism), will be different to traditional offerings such as iTunes, as Google will play the role of advertiser and Universal will pick up the cash from the sale. The dangerous-duo are set to launch on August 21, 2007.
The system actually seems fairly smart and sounds like it may prove to be a threat to the stranglehold Apple has on the market at the moment. Here is how it is intended to work:
Universal will purchase advertising space from Google; the adverts will appear when a relevant search is made for an artist. These will then direct the customer to gBox, where the artists work will be for sale. The prices are competitive and this is key to any potential success. At 99 cents for a DRM free track, the prices at gBox will be undercutting iTunes by a full 30 cents. For an inexplicable reason you may opt for a DRM enabled track for the same price. We are guessing that option will not be as popular.
Certainly this paves the way for more competition in a market that is currently monopolised by Apple. However, any start-up company with no iPod support is bound to be on the back foot and Universal's image of being greedy piggy will not help their situation in the slightest.
Source:http://gizmodo.com
The system actually seems fairly smart and sounds like it may prove to be a threat to the stranglehold Apple has on the market at the moment. Here is how it is intended to work:
Universal will purchase advertising space from Google; the adverts will appear when a relevant search is made for an artist. These will then direct the customer to gBox, where the artists work will be for sale. The prices are competitive and this is key to any potential success. At 99 cents for a DRM free track, the prices at gBox will be undercutting iTunes by a full 30 cents. For an inexplicable reason you may opt for a DRM enabled track for the same price. We are guessing that option will not be as popular.
Certainly this paves the way for more competition in a market that is currently monopolised by Apple. However, any start-up company with no iPod support is bound to be on the back foot and Universal's image of being greedy piggy will not help their situation in the slightest.
Source:http://gizmodo.com
Google unveils paid storage
GOOGLE has begun selling expanded online storage, aimed at users with large picture, music or video file collections.
The annual prices established were $US20 ($24) for 6GB of online storage, $US75 for 25GB, $US250 for 100GB and $US500 for 250GB.
Google said the storage could be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa and the email service Gmail. The storage will soon also work with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the company's word processing and spreadsheet applications.
Gmail users currently get nearly 3GB of free storage while Picasa users get 1GB. The expanded storage would kick in when a user runs out of free storage in a particular service.
Yahoo and AOL already offer unlimited free storage for their email services.
Google has been adding about 145MB of free storage to each email account annually - a pace that would raise storage limits to more than 3.25GB in three years. Instead of matching Yahoo and AOL, Google decided instead to charge for additional storage to users with extraordinary needs.
Most users, however, don't even come close to reaching the free storage limits.
Source:www.australianit.news.com.au
The annual prices established were $US20 ($24) for 6GB of online storage, $US75 for 25GB, $US250 for 100GB and $US500 for 250GB.
Google said the storage could be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa and the email service Gmail. The storage will soon also work with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the company's word processing and spreadsheet applications.
Gmail users currently get nearly 3GB of free storage while Picasa users get 1GB. The expanded storage would kick in when a user runs out of free storage in a particular service.
Yahoo and AOL already offer unlimited free storage for their email services.
Google has been adding about 145MB of free storage to each email account annually - a pace that would raise storage limits to more than 3.25GB in three years. Instead of matching Yahoo and AOL, Google decided instead to charge for additional storage to users with extraordinary needs.
Most users, however, don't even come close to reaching the free storage limits.
Source:www.australianit.news.com.au
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Future Implications: Why Microsoft will fear Google and Linux
Google and Microsoft are at it again. But this time Google is attacking Microsoft for threatening Linux users for patent violations.
In an announcement made earlier this week, Google signed on with the Open Invention Network (OIN), which is supported by Red Hat and a few other Linux heavyweights. The Open Invention Network is an organization designed by and for Linux developers, distributors, sellers, resellers, and end-users to protect them from the onslaught of costly lawsuits or other attempts made on them by bigger and better-funded enterprises. But until Google joined the fray on the side of the OIN, some people were skeptical of the ability of Linux to stand up to Microsoft.
That skepticism is over--Microsoft is in for a rude awakening.
Microsoft and Google are two of the most powerful tech companies you will ever come across. Microsoft carries no debt in its financial structure. Google carries no debt in its financial structure. Microsoft enjoys a $281.26 billion market cap while Google harbors about half that. What does all of this mean? Both companies have lots of cash with high-powered lawyers who are poised to take each other to task. And while I believe this is true and both companies will square off in a courtroom eventually, Microsoft is deathly afraid of Google. Google may not have the cash on hand that Microsoft does, but it has a more advantageous public perception as well as the same contacts and pull with Congress that Bill and his boys have.
If you take a look back at all of the lawsuits Microsoft has been a part of, I don't think you can find me one instance where the company wasn't able to get its way. The federal government tried to take Microsoft to task and even that didn't work!
But the difference between the late '90s and today is that Google wields equal, if not more, power than Microsoft. If Redmond took on the boys at Google, it would be ugly and costly for sure. But regardless of the camp you side with, Google would come out on top.
Microsoft's claim on patent violations is nothing more than glorified bullying in the hopes that the "weak" will raise the white flag. Along with threats of costly lawsuits, Microsoft has also silently hinted that it would accept a closure of the distributions in return for some financial remuneration. But finally Google has stepped in to raise the ante. Why should Microsoft be allowed to bully these Linux developers? An even better question: why does Microsoft bully these developers?
It's very simple: because they could. But with the inclusion of Google in the OIN, could has become the operative word. Microsoft doesn't want to have an all-out battle with Google--it's too costly, and if Google wins, where does Microsoft stand?
But Microsoft's fear of Google goes far beyond Linux and open source. Microsoft is deathly afraid of Google's continued dominance on the stock market, Google's significant control over Web searching and, most important, Google's dominance on Internet advertising. Google represents the future of the technology industry while Microsoft is the past. And while Microsoft knows this and is desperately trying to work its way back to prominence, it has a long way to go, and sparring with Google for a few rounds will not help matters.
Microsoft and Google will have a day to go at each other for everything--the writing is on the wall. But at this point in each company's development cycle, the time for a fight just isn't right for Microsoft, while Google would welcome a knock-down, drag-out. Simply put, a fight between Microsoft and Google would end badly for the former, while the latter would cement itself as the most prominent tech company for the next decade.
As hard to believe as it is, Microsoft is running scared. Courtesy of Google.
Source:www.cnet.com
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