New York’s attorney general - Andrew Cuomo intends to sue Tagged.com for deceptive email marketing practices and invasion of privacy, reported NY Times.

Cuomo said that Tagged.com illegally tried to trick visitors into providing their personal address books. This is then used to send out more invitations. Tagged made these emails appear as though a friend was inviting them to view personal photos.

Cuomo said:

“Tagged.com has stolen the address books and identities of millions of people. Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their email contacts for Tagged’s unethical — and illegal — behavior. This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts. We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online.”

Response to Attorney General Cuomo, CEO Greg Tseng – Tagged.com, issued an official statement in a blog post expressing disheartenment:

“Today’s announcement by New York Attorney General Cuomo is disheartening. Identify theft and invasion of privacy are very serious allegations and it is not accurate to portray Tagged, or any other social network, in this regard. As a social networking company, our membership is built on word of mouth. Friends invite their friends to join — this has been standard practice among all social networking sites for over five years. When our company tested a new registration process, we discovered that our “invite your friends” language was confusing. The registration drive generated some complaints and as a business that succeeds or fails based on word of mouth, we took every complaint very seriously. We immediately stopped using this registration process, before being contacted by the Attorney General’s office. In no instance did Tagged access a person’s personal address book without their consent and no emails were sent without the person giving us permission. We realize that some were confused and accidentally agreed to invite their friends. We are truly sorry for any inconvenience or frustration that these people experienced.”

He said that Tagged had already temporarily suspended its email marketing campaign in June. They had recently started testing a new registration process based on Tags photo-sharing feature and were fully switched to this new version in the first week of June. Although more than 3 million people joined Tagged with this new process, they received almost 2,000 complaints from people who invited all the contacts in their email address books but didn’t intend to. Some even complained that Tagged invitation confirmation language was confusing.

Tseng said that Tagged had stopped using the method before Cuomo contacted them.

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Power.com, a site that allows people to sign in to several social networking sites from one place, is suing Facebook. According to Power.com, Facebook is trying to monopolize the social networking market by not allowing people from accessing their Facebook accounts from Power.com.

What is Power.com?

Power.com is a start-up company based in Brazil. It integrates social sites and creates a common environment for connecting users, communities and content in order to facilitate communication, browsing, and interactivity. The site is compatible with Orkut, Twitter, MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn, Flogão and VoteMe. However, has faced some problems with Facebook in the recent past.

Why are Social Networks unhappy?

Many social networks are unhappy about Power.com trying to keep users on its own site.

Among other things, earlier in January, Facebook had sued Power.com for:

1. Copyright and trademark infringement
2. Unlawful competition
3. Violation of the computer fraud and abuse act

According to Facebook’s complaint, Power.com “is offering a product that solicits, stores and uses Facebook login information to access information stored on Facebook computers without authorization and to display Facebook copyrighted material without permission.”

Is Facebook stifling competition?

According to a statement from Power Company, Facebook is stifling competition by

• Restricting users
• Blocking access to Power.com.
• Restraining trade and monopolization.

Share your comments on what you think.

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Although Google still dominates the US and global search market, Bing seems to have made some progress lately. Although it is still behind Yahoo search, but Bing has increased Microsoft’s share of search market by 1% in the US as per the analysis done by StatCounter in June.

Highlights from the June StatCounter report

US Stats

• Microsoft had 8.23% of the search market
• Yahoo had 11.04%. of the search market
• Google continued to dominate the US market but slightly fell back from 79.07% in April to 78.48% in June.

Although a 1% increase in market share is not a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made, but the trends still appear quite positive for Microsoft’s new search engine.

Take a look at Microsoft’s market share for May/June in the US:

• 18th to 24th May: 7.41%
• 25th to 31st May: 9.11%
• 1st to 7th June: 9.21%
• 8th to 14th June: 7.47%
• 14th to 21st June: 7.6%
• 22nd to 28th June: 8.45%

Global Stats

Reports globally reveal that:

• Microsoft, from 3.08% in April has reached to 3.30% in June.
• Yahoo, in the same period, has fallen from 5.48% to 5.15%.
• Google continues to dominate the global market with 89.80%.

Slow and steady, Bing continues to grow! Microsoft should be happy with the continued positive market reaction since its launch.

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According to StatCounter, Firefox 3.5 has quickly gained more than 2% of the US browser market since its launch, bringing the overall Firefox’s usage of the US browser market to 31.8%. This has come along in a very short span of time indeed.

This data is based on an analysis of 180 million page views (42 million from the US) for the 1st July 2009 collected from the StatCounter network of over three million websites.

US Stats

Take a look at the US stats till July 01, 2009:

• Internet Explorer 7.0 is at 31.6 %
• Firefox 3.0 is at 28.9%
• Internet Explorer 8.0 is at 13.98%
• Internet Explorer 6.0 is at 10.18%
• Safari 4.0 is at 3.69%
• Chrome 2.0 is at 2.81%
• Safari 3.2 is at 2.47 %
• Firefox 3.5 is at 2.06%
• Others are at 5.12%

Global Stats

• Globally Firefox 3.5 is running with 1.95% usage.
• All Firefox usage globally is 30.7%.

It is clear that Microsoft IE (IE 6, 7 and 8 ) continues to lead the market with 60% of the global browser market and 55.8% in the US.

Google’s Chrome has a 2.9% usage in the US and similar globally (2.87%).

Well, so far so good for Firefox 3.5 I’d say!

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Google will soon partner with PC makers, wireless chip developers and software companies in order to develop and launch its new Chrome OS and build devices that can work with Chrome.

Partners

Some of the Google partners will include:

• Acer
• Adobe
• ASUS
• Freescale
• Hewlett-Packard
• Lenovo
• Qualcomm
• Texas Instruments
• Toshiba

What does this mean?

• Acer and Asus are among the top netbook manufacturers worldwide.
• Also, with Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, Google could be looking to tap into the mobile market.
• Partnership with Adobe could mean Flash in Chrome?

The OS will be available for free.

According to Google post:

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

Let’s wait to see what these partnerships yield for Google.

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Competition grows and Amazon drops the price of its Kindle device by $60, which means the e-Book reader is now for $299. It is believed that the 17 % slash in the price has come with the economic slowdown and stiff competition from the new players in the e-Book market.

For instance:

• Amazon will be facing competition from Plastic Logic and FirstPaper. Both companies are developing similar competing products.
• Scribd had launched an e-commerce publishing marketplace in May as a complement to its free content-sharing platform. Scribd boasts more than 60 million readers a month.
• Google is to soon enter the e-book market enabling publishers to sell digital versions of their latest titles directly to consumers.

Google is aiming to build a “digital book ecosystem” to allow partner publishers to sell access to their titles, even if buyers don’t have dedicated book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle or Sony Corp.’s Reader. This means that with Google’s new program, you will be able to read eBooks on any device - be it a PC, mobile phone or a dedicated eBook reader. You could temporarily cache them in your Internet browsers and also read them offline.

Google will start charging users to view some full text books that they’ve indexed (this is separate from the Google Book Search Library Project). Google would allow publishers to set a list price for books, although the company will reserve the right to discount titles at its own expense.

Well, there is definite competition, however, the analysts believe that Amazon’s Kindle still has an edge over all others.

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Former US national security advisor Mark Pfeifle has said that microblogging site Twitter should win the Nobel Peace Prize for its role during the civil unrest in Iran.
“When traditional journalists were forced to leave the country, Twitter became a window for the world to view hope, heroism, and horror,” The Telegraph quoted Pfeifle, as saying.

The former aide for George W Bush said that more than 220,000 Iran tweets were sent through Twitter every hour at its peak, helping document the crisis in Iran following the contested presidential election results last month.
“It became the assignment desk, the reporter, and the producer. And, because of this, Twitter and its creators are worthy of being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize,” he wrote in the Christian Science Monitor.

The annual Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to those who push for “ f r a t e r n i t y
between nations” and for “holding the promotion of peace”. Previous winners of the award include Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr and the Dalai Lama.

Last year’s Nobel prize winner was former Finnish president and United Nations diplomat Martti Ahtisaari, who acted as a UN special envoy during the Kosovo-Serbia dispute.
“Twitter has been criticised as a time-waster — a way for people to inform their friends about the minutiae of their lives, 140 characters at a time. But 140 characters were enough to shine a light on Iranian oppression and elevate Twitter to the level of change agent,” Pfeifle told Fox News.

“Even the government of Iran has been forced to use the tool they tried to squelch to try to hold on to power,” he said.

Pfeifle also stressed the importance of other social networks, like Facebook, where Iranian presidential candidate Hossein Mousavi has more than 100,000 supporters.

(Source: twitter official blog)

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Within a span of two weeks, there were more than 1 million downloads on Sirius XM’s application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This is in spite of the fact that the app got a user rating of 2 out of 5 from some 57,000 people. Amazing to see such a crazy response.

The app was launched on June 18 of this year and provides 120 channels of Sirius XM programming, including:

• Sports
• Entertainment
• Comedy
• Commercial-free music.

Sirius XM Radio is America’s satellite radio company delivering to subscribers commercial-free music channels, premier sports, news, talk, entertainment, and traffic and weather. It has content relationships with an array of personalities and artists, including Howard Stern, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Jimmy Buffett, Jamie Foxx, Barbara Walters, Opie & Anthony, Bubba the Love Sponge(R), The Grateful Dead, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Bob Edwards. SIRIUS XM Radio is the leader in sports programming as the Official Satellite Radio Partner of the NFL, Major League Baseball(R), NASCAR(R), NBA, NHL(R), and PGA TOUR(R), and broadcasts major college sports.

Sirius XM’s iPhone app received negative reaction because of the absence of Howard Stern. As some might put it: “What is Sirius without Howard Stern? Nothing!”

The cost?

The app is free, but subscription to Sirius XM is necessary to listen to content on the Apple devices:

• All Internet-only subscribers who pay XM Sirius $12.95 per month to stream stations on their computers (at 128 kbps), can play channels on their iPhone or iPod Touch.
• All XM Sirius subscribers who pay for the radio access to listen on the Apple handsets, have to pay $2.99 per month in addition to the $12.95. This means that the extra $2.99 also allows them to listen on their computer.

Sirius XM already stands at the number 6 spot on the top free iTunes download list. The Sirius XM app is available for free from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore/ and www.siriusxm.com/app.

(Source: Sirius press release)

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Google Chrome has always been a little more than a browser: it’s optimized for running web applications, each tab runs as a separate process, the interface is minimalistic and there’s even a task manager. “We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build,” that’s what  Google quoted in September 2008 at the launch of Chrome.

Yesterday, Google announced a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s Google’s attempt to re-think what operating systems should be. Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year they will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. The OS will be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface will be minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as they did for the Google Chrome browser, Google is going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web will be the platform.

With a new open source communication protocol (Wave), Browser, a bunch of web applications, a mobile OS and now a main stream OS for desktops / netbooks Google is surely investing big time! Lets just hope they stick to their motto of ‘do no evil’ with all these changes.

(Source: Official Google Blog)
(Image Credits: Google Chrome)

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Oh boy! It has been over 5 years that Gmail has been in beta. It sure took Google A LOT of time to shed its “beta” label, I wonder why?

Like many other software products, Google’s Gmail service too was launched in “beta.” A product in Beta means that it is still in its testing phase. Typically, Beta versions are squeezed between internal versions called “alpha” and the final versions, which is the “release”, for a time frame of a few weeks to maybe even months.

But, in Gmail’s case it was five years and millions and millions of users later. Well, better late than never, I’d say.

Bye-bye to beta

Both enterprise and consumer versions are now out of beta which means you will not see the beta label on the product logos anymore. In a blog post yesterday, Gmail announced this change, which in fact is effective across all Google Apps sites:

1. Google Docs
2. Google Talk
3. Google Calendar
4. Gmail

Breaking the barriers

Although this change will mean little to millions of Gmail users, however, it will do away with all “beta” labeled barriers that big companies till now have normally shied away from. Now, corporations will be more open to adopting Gmail, Calendar, Docs and other products.

Innovations continue

Even though beta is out, Gmail will continue to innovate and improve upon the applications. Google has announced a few other Google Apps features that probably will appeal to large enterprises:

• Mail delegation
• Mail retention
• Enhancements to Apps reliability

Separation anxiety? Go “Back to Beta”!

For those of you who have been using Gmail for a very long time now and find it hard to do away with the familiar grey “BETA” label, then don’t loose heart.

• Just go to Gmail Settings
• Click on Labs
• Turn on “Back to Beta”

…and you will see Gmail with the beta label again!

(Source & Image credits: Gmail blog)

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