Google bids $900 million for Nortel patents

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Internet giant Google said Monday it is bidding $900 million to buy the patent portfolio of Canadian technology company Nortel at a bankruptcy auction.

The Mountain View, California-based Google said the move is aimed at protecting the company from potential frivolous patent litigation.

The bid came on Google co-founder Larry Page's first day as chief executive of the Internet search titan. Page, 38, replaced Eric Schmidt as CEO on Monday.

Nortel said the portfolio includes approximately 6,000 patents and patent applications for wired, wireless and digital communication technologies.

Google's $900 million dollar bid for Nortel's portfolio will be the starting bid for the auction, which is expected to take place in June 2011 pending the approval of courts in Canada and the United States.

"The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation," Google general counsel Kent Walker said in a blog post.

"Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival?s new technology," Walker said.

"One of a company's best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services," he said.

"Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories," Walker said. "So after a lot of thought, we've decided to bid for Nortel's patent portfolio in the company?s bankruptcy auction."

He said obtaining the portfolio would "create a disincentive for others to sue Google" and also help open source software projects such as Android and Chrome.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110404/tc_afp/usitcompanypatentinternetgoogle;_ylt=AkTpNWEGo.OqYJPqyyuLW5b6VbIF;_ylu=X3oDMTM2NXJkdWJzBGFzc2V0A2FmcC8yMDExMDQwNC91c2l0Y29tcGFueXBhdGVudGludGVybmV0Z29vZ2xlBHBvcwMzBHNlYwN5bl9wYWdpbmF0ZV9zdW1tYXJ5X2xpc3QEc2xrA2dvb2dsZWJpZHM5MA--

Firefox 5 and Beyond: A Look at What's Coming

Mozilla has some big plans for future versions of Firefox, including Internet Explorer 9-style dynamic jump lists, new sharing capabilities, identity management, and the end of the home button.

Firefox 4 is less than two weeks old, and already the folks at Mozilla are hard at work to keep their promise of releasing Firefox 5, 6, and 7 by the end of 2011. The next iteration of Firefox is expected to be ready for download by the summer.

At the moment, Firefox 5 is still in early development so Mozilla may delay certain features currently being discussed until future releases. In fact, some of the features discussed below, such as the home tab, were originally slated for Firefox 4 so you can never tell when a feature might actually make it into Firefox. It's also possible that Mozilla could cancel certain features entirely. With than in mind, here's a look at what Mozilla has planned for Firefox 5 and beyond in 2011.

Prism Takes on IE9

Mozilla looks set to integrate its Prism add-on with Firefox 5 and include new enhancements such as IE9-style dynamic jumplists.

Prism, currently available for Firefox 3 through 3.6, lets you place a shortcut to sites or Web apps right in your taskbar (Windows) or dock (OSX). When you launch the site shortcut it opens as a separate processfrom your main Firefox browser, and can include a variety of app-like functions such as notifications when you receive a new mail message.

Based on current UI design proposals, Mozilla may add menus to Prism Web apps so you can access a site menu right in your browser.   This feature would depend on the Website implementing the option. Desktop-accessible site menus is exactly what Microsoft included for IE9 with its dynamic jumplists feature used by sites such as Facebook, The New York Times, Windows Live, and PCWorld.

Unlike Microsoft, however, Mozilla may offer the option to access Website menus directly from the browser tab as a drop-down instead of right clicking on the taskbar or dock. This decision would be consistent with Firefox's design of the new orange Firefox button that houses most of the browser's menus in Firefox 4 as a drop-down menu.

Check out Mozilla's early mock-ups for the new Prism feature here.

No Place for Home

Firefox 5 may dump the home button and replace it with a permanent home tab instead, according to a list of new Firefox features on Mozilla's user experience page.

Mozilla has been talking about a permanent home tab since the early days of Firefox 4, so it's not clear what is the status of this feature.

In late 2009, Mozilla discussed including dynamic content in the home tab such as social networking updates and RSS feeds instead of providing a link to a specific website such as iGoogle or Yahoo. If you want to read up on current thoughts about the home tab, check out this discussion on bugzilla.

Sharing

Mozilla wants to enhance the sharing features for later versions of Firefox. The new sharing feature would let you integrate your logins for social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter into Firefox. Then you would be able to click an icon in the URL address bar that would automatically let you share a link to specific Web pages with your Twitter followers or Facebook friends.

You can find a complete set of mock-ups for this feature here.

Enhanced Account Manager

Mozilla plans to beefing up Firefox's account management features by allowing you to save login credentials for multiple accounts at once. You can find mock-ups of Mozilla's Firefox account management plans here.

In-Browser PDF Viewer

It's not the most exciting feature, but Mozilla is finally working on an integrated PDF viewer for Firefox. This means you won't have to download PDFs to your hard drive to see them or rely on Google's "Quick View" option to see the PDF in Google Docs.

Don't worry, download fans -- you will still have the option to save PDFs to your hard drive if you want to view them offline.

Mozilla has a lot of work ahead of it to get three more versions of Firefox finished by the end of 2011, but it looks like some great new features are coming to the open source browser. If you haven't checked it out yet, take a look at @ianpaul) and Today@PCWorld on Twitter for the latest tech news and analysis.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20110404/tc_pcworld/firefox5andbeyondalookatwhatscoming;_ylt=Av3mQlBmdFSAuclVGq8dKin6VbIF;_ylu=X3oDMTNmc3VxbDc0BGFzc2V0A3Bjd29ybGQvMjAxMTA0MDQvZmlyZWZveDVhbmRiZXlvbmRhbG9va2F0d2hhdHNjb21pbmcEcG9zAzEwBHNlYwN5bl9wYWdpbmF0ZV9zdW1tYXJ5X2xpc3QEc2xrA2ZpcmVmb3g1YW5kYg--

'Skype school' brings knowledge to Indian village

NEW DELHI (AFP) – The electricity keeps cutting out, the Internet connection is crackly and the speakers don't always work, but Santosh Kumar knows that 20 pupils far away in eastern India are relying on him.

Once a week, Kumar uses the Skype computer programme to teach maths to children in Chamanpura, a poor village in the struggling state of Bihar, 600 miles (970 kilometres) from his two-storey house in the suburbs of New Delhi.

The free Internet service allows the class to see, via a projector, Kumar's tutorial which includes an animated tale about a greedy priest and a wily countryman to teach the students about numbers and the concept of infinity.

"The first time I did this, they were really excited by the technology, now they don't care," Kumar said. "It's normal to them."

Kumar, a successful 34-year-old engineer, grew up in Chamanpura village before battling his way to a place at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and on to a well-paid job in the Indian capital.

"It's an uphill task to bring education to villages," he said, recalling his teenage years when he would cycle eight miles to college in a nearby town.

Kumar's cousin Chandrakant Singh, also now a well-paid engineer, decided during a trip back to the village to set up a school for children aged between 6 and 12.

"I wanted to provide a world-class education to students in the remotest place on Earth," said Singh, who remembers studying at night under the dim light of a kerosene lamp.

Unfazed by the fact that Chamanpura has no mains electricity, or by the refusal of experienced teachers to travel to Bihar, Singh approached his friends for donations to fund the Chaitanya Gurukul boarding school.

He installed two power generators and organised training for 16 local teachers before hitting on the idea of using Skype to connect students with professionals across India.

"The world's greatest teachers don't want to go there, so I thought maybe we could use technology to help our students learn faster," he said.

The school opened its doors in April 2010, offering admission to 500 students, 50 of whom pay nothing, with the rest charged according to their parents' ability to afford fees.

The Skype lessons take place in the evenings after the day's regular classes and at weekends.

Kumar was on board from the beginning, adamant that he could help the students and give them more "clarity" on what they learnt in class.

"Some of them were curious, others got intimidated, I had to work with them to rid them of their fear," he said, pointing out many of them had never seen a computer before.

"Now it's like television for them, it entertains them and hopefully they learn something," he said during another power outage. "The technical problems happen often. It's extremely frustrating but we carry on."

During his maths lesson, some students appeared engrossed by the video, while others chattered inaudibly in the back rows.

But they snapped to attention during the question session, with everyone answering correctly.

"It's a very different way of teaching, it helps me remember what I learn better than if I just read it," Anmol Kumar Jaiswal, 11, told AFP via the two-way Skype link.

Pragya Parashar, a 12-year-old girl sitting behind Jaiswal nodded in agreement.

"I like these lessons, it helps me understand things better," she said shyly. "I also want to become an engineer like my teacher."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110405/tc_afp/indiasocietyeducationitschool;_ylt=AhfTyqoz5Twv3R5fvA4j6rH6VbIF;_ylu=X3oDMTM1NzV2c2ZwBGFzc2V0A2FmcC8yMDExMDQwNS9pbmRpYXNvY2lldHllZHVjYXRpb25pdHNjaG9vbARwb3MDMjQEc2VjA3luX3BhZ2luYXRlX3N1bW1hcnlfbGlzdARzbGsDMzlza3lwZXNjaG9v

Google, Facebook take France to court over privacy

PARIS (AFP) – Internet heavyweights including Google and Facebook are to file a complaint with France's highest judicial body against a decree obliging them to keep web users' personal data for a year.

More than 20 Internet companies active in France, including Dailymotion and eBay, are bringing the case before the State Council, their representative French Association of Internet Community Services (ASIC) said on Tuesday.

"The ASIC is appealing at the State Council against the decree to keep connection data," ASIC head Benoit Tabaka told reporters.

The decree, published at the start of March, obliges e-commerce sites as well as video-music sites and online email services to keep a battery of data on their customers.

These include users' full names, associated postal address, pseudonyms, associated email addresses, telephone number, passwords and data used to check or modify them.

The data must be kept for a year and can be demanded in the context of an enquiry by police, the fraud office, customs, tax or social security authorities.

ASIC will lodge the complaint on Wednesday morning, Tabaka said.

"Several elements are problematic. For instance, there was no consultation with the European Commission," he said.

"This is a shocking measure, this obligation to keep passwords and hand them over to police services," he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110405/tc_afp/franceinternettechnologyrightslaw;_ylt=Au7iJdcnjX981gOj05PNr4D6VbIF;_ylu=X3oDMTM5bm1uN25mBGFzc2V0A2FmcC8yMDExMDQwNS9mcmFuY2VpbnRlcm5ldHRlY2hub2xvZ3lyaWdodHNsYXcEcG9zAzEwBHNlYwN5bl9wYWdpbmF0ZV9zdW1tYXJ5X2xpc3QEc2xrA2dvb2dsZWZhY2Vibw--

5 Google Alternatives in Europe

Google is the dominant force in Europe—there is no other search engine which even comes close to Google’s market share. I think everybody will agree when I say that Europe could use some competition for Google. Bingshould be the designated search engine to become that big competitor, but for now that is not the case. Even the recent launch of the “new” Bing in France and the years of Bing in the UK haven’t made most people switch away from Google.

But despite its dominance, there are alternative search engines in Europe, and they can be worth looking at. With Europe’s more than 800 million people, of whom about 60% spends time online, even a small percentage using alternatives to Google offer attractively large numbers, and targeting users of those search engines could be very profitable. Lets take a look at some of the alternatives.

Bing (UK and France)

As in almost every country Google is the dominant force in the UK, but here we see that Bing is more popular than anywhere else. That is not surprising since the UK has been the only European country until recent in which Bing showed its full potential. Bing now accounts for about 4% of the search market share in the UK. Adding Yahoo’s Bing-powered results can add another 4% making Bing a very good alternative to Google. Bing also is the “runner up” in many other European countries with France leading the way with a 2.8% share.

It therefore makes sense to optimize for Bing in Europe, but be careful: in many countries Bing is nothing more than Live Search with a Bing logo.

Yandex (Russia)

Going from Western Europe to Eastern Europe you can’t overlook Yandex. This search engine is the dominant force in Russia where it even outranks Google with a 64% market share. This is extra special because Yandex is one of the few non-English-language search engines which is able to beat Google at its own game. Yandex is growing rapidly, not just in search, but it also adding lots of other features to make it a bigger competitor in Eastern Europe. And Yandex will be aiming at Western Europe soon too. They recently launched an English-only search engine, so Google beware!

If you are targeting Russians, optimizing for Yandex is the best choice, not just because it has the biggest market share but also because it gets closest to how the Russians think. Yandex is able to recognize Russian inflection in search queries, which means that you can really understand the intent of the Russian user. Therefore, take extra care when it comes to keyword research. Get a native speaker to help you out here because Russian really differs from other languages.

Seznam (Czech Republic)

Its not far from Russia to the Czech Republic, where Seznam is dominant. This search engine was originally a web portal but today is used primarily as a search engine. In the Czech language they beat Google in numbers when it comes to dominance in search. If you want to target the Czech Republic this is one search engine you cannot leave aside. Seznam, which means “list” in English, is the only real force to reckon with in the Czech Republic—perhaps not the biggest audience, but one of the most active ones in Europe.

Conduit (Germany & Spain)

In Germany the second biggest search service after Google is T-Online. This really is a portal with Google-powered search engine. Therefore you can see it as an alternative but you will still be using Google. A real alternative is Conduit. This search engine, which also has quite the market share in South America, has a bigger market share in Germany than Bing or Yahoo. In Spain Conduit even has a larger market share: 2.9 percent.

Vinden.nl (The Netherlands)

The Netherlands has a huge Google culture. No other engine can even come close to the market share of Google (94%). If you have to name one it is probably Vinden.nl. Vinden (“finding”) is said to have a 3% market share but also relies on some Google technology. Vinden.nl, as well as “startpagina”, however also do it the old fashioned way: offering browsable lists, the good old directories so to speak.

These search engines are a few examples of alternatives for googe in Europe. For each specific country there are of course more alternatives. For example, Onet.pl in Poland, Ask.com in the UK and the Nordic countries, Orange in France and even more local search engines in other regions. I’d love to know what your favorite local search engine is, so let us know and we might just take a closer look at them!

Source: http://www.stateofsearch.com/5-google-alternatives-in-europe/