Three Google execs convicted over Italian bullying video

10 Mar 2010 at 09:52

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Three Google executives were handed suspended six month prison sentences by a Milan court on Wednesday for privacy law violations relating to a video posted on Google Video showing the bullying of a handicapped boy.

Judge Oscar Magi Wednesday sentenced David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, Peter Fleischer, its global privacy counselor, and George Reyes, the former chief financial officer to six months imprisonment for allowing the posting on Google Video in Italy of a mobile-phone video showing the harassment of an autistic youth by classmates in a Turin technical school.

The three were found guilty of violating Italy’s privacy law over the matter but acquitted on a second charge of defamation. A fourth executive, the former head of Google Video Europe, Arvind Desikan, was acquitted on the single defamation charge.

A Google spokesman expressed shock at the conviction of three company executives and said the three men intended to appeal.

“This verdict is a great disappointment. It attacks the very principles of freedom of expression on which Internet was built,” said Google spokesman Bill Echikson.

None of the convicted executives had even been aware of the existence of the controversial bullying video at the center of the trial, Echikson said, speaking on the phone from the Milan courtroom.

“Our responsibility is to remove illegal content once we are notified. There is an important question of free speech here. If this principle passes then the Web as we know it will cease to exist,” Echikson said.

The Google spokesman dismissed the suggestion that the effect of the ruling by Judge Magi was largely symbolic, since sentences under three years are automatically suspended for people without a prior criminal conviction.

“You tell Pete Fleischer it’s just a suspended sentence. It means these people will have a criminal record,” he said. “We will support these employees all the way through the appeal process. It’s not just for Google but for the entire Internet.”

The ground-breaking legal pronouncement followed the posting of the distasteful video in the “fun videos” section of Google Video in September 2006. It was taken down two months later, after receiving 5,500 visits, as a result of an official complaint by the charity ViviDown, which represents the interests of Down Syndrome sufferers. The charity became involved because one of the handicapped boy’s tormentors made a joking reference to the organization in the video.

Google lawyers argued at the trial that the company did not have editorial responsibility for the content carried on its platforms and that it had immediately removed the offensive material once it had been brought to its attention via the correct official channels. They said Google and other Internet companies’ activities would be crippled if they were held responsible for the illegal acts of third-party users. And they stressed the fact that Google had collaborated with Italian investigators to help identify the perpetrators of the bullying as soon as the company was officially notified about the problem.

Guido Camera, the lawyer representing ViviDown at the trial, said he was very pleased with the outcome, despite the fact that neither his client nor the Milan City Council, also admitted as an injured party at the trial, had been awarded damages. The victim of the bullying episode withdrew from the case shortly after the beginning of the year-long trial after receiving an apology from Google.

“It’s a very important result because it establishes that a privacy violation had indeed taken place and that privacy is one of the fundamental rights of the individual,” Camera said in a telephone interview. “In his summing up the prosecutor described privacy as the habeas corpus of the future and said it required adequate protection. This verdict demonstrates that privacy must be protected, whether we are talking about the president of the United States or a handicapped teenager.”

The outcome was also welcomed by Prosecutor Alfredo Robledo. “This trial wasn’t about freedom of the Internet, as some people have said. Instead, for the first time in Italy, there has been a discussion of the serious question of the rights of the individual in today’s society,” Robledo told reporters.

“The rights of a business enterprise cannot take precedence over the dignity of the individual.”

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Google Granted the Right to Buy and Sell Electricity

10 Mar 2010 at 09:50

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Back in December, Google took steps to form Google Energy, a subsidiary created for the express purpose of buying and selling electricity in bulk. In January, the company filed a request with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to enter the market, and yesterday received permission to purchase and resell wholesale energy (PDF).

Google says it made the move primarily to better manage its high electricity costs, but also to give it more flexibility in pursuing the goal of becoming completely carbon neutral. “We want to buy the highest quality, most affordable renewable energy wherever we can,” a representative told CNET news. A company buying and selling energy to help it manage costs isn’t unusual, but — then again — Google isn’t your typical company.
There is some expectation that Google will actually enter the energy business at some point, whether it sells direct to consumers or partners with existing utility companies. Back in January, the same representative told CNET, “We want the ability to buy and sell electricity in case it becomes part of our portfolio.” Then there was the announcement that the company was developing low cost mirrors for use in solar panels. And, of course, there’s the Google PowerMeter, which allows users to track electricity usage, as long as they have the proper equipment to upload the data.

Google has extended its reach across almost every type of Web service into the world of smart phones, announced a plan to (at least experimentally) enter the ISP business, developed a netbook OS, and now has implied that it may attempt to enter the consumer electricity market. With each passing day, those folks previously dismissed as paranoid for comparing Google to Big Brother seem a little less crazy.

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Facebook directs more online users than Google

10 Mar 2010 at 09:48

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A big part of the Facebook experience is how friends and family share Web links to interesting news stories, photos, videos and Internet sites.

This “friend-casting” of information has helped propel Facebook into a major force in directing traffic around the Web.

According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites.

This trend is shifting the way Web site operators approach online marketing, even as Google takes steps to move into the social-media world.

Some experts say social media could become the Internet’s next search engine.

“People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends’ recommendations or their friends’ activities,” said Dave Yovanno, chief executive of Gigya Inc., a Palo Alto firm that offers social-media services. “That’s one of the big trends we started picking up on probably four or five months ago.”

For years, Web content creators had to worry whether they had the proper level of search-engine optimization to make sure search engines listed them among the top results. Now, they have to consider what companies like Gigya offer – social-media optimization.

“Marketers must focus on social marketing in addition to traditional search, as customers have a multi-pronged way of finding information,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a Web strategist for the Altimeter Group, a San Mateo consulting firm with clients like Gigya. “The clear-cut channels of yesteryear are now an intricate set of connections.”

Using a snapshot of Web traffic from December, Compete’s director of online media and search, Jessica Ong, found that 15 percent of traffic to major Web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook and MySpace. The lion’s share of that traffic, 13 percent came from Facebook.

Google, which has profited handsomely from directing Web surfers to their destinations during the past decade, was third with 7 percent, just behind e-commerce site eBay, which had 7.61 percent. MySpace was fourth with just under 2 percent.

Surprise gain

The numbers proved eye-opening because Google used to dominate most Web-referral categories. “I was surprised to see Facebook has become No. 1,” Ong said.

In other categories, Compete’s data showed Mountain View’s Google still on top, but Palo Alto’s Facebook was not far behind. For example, Google accounted for 21.3 percent of referrals to sites catering to movie fans, but Facebook was second with 12.4 percent. And in a video category, Google – which owns YouTube – was first with 22.9 percent, but Facebook was next at 12.7 percent.

Facebook’s meteoric growth as a Web destination was a factor. Facebook says it has 400 million active members, including about 225 million added in just the past 12 months. Its size now rivals that of major Web portals and its demographics mirror those of the Internet in general, Ong said.

“Putting all this information together, we can say that Facebook has become an integral part of the consumer Web experience, similar to how portals like Yahoo and MSN are part of most consumers’ online sessions,” Ong said. “So the message for the advertising industry is that more serious attention needs to be paid to social-networking sites like Facebook, and advertisers need to figure out how to leverage this traffic.”

TurboTax gamble

One of Gigya’s clients is financial software maker Intuit Inc. Seth Greenberg, Intuit’s director of national media and digital marketing, said the company is betting on social media to draw customers to its TurboTax Web site this year. The tax preparation program generates about $1 billion in revenue in the 10 t0 15 weeks leading to April 15.

Half of TurboTax’s 20 million users are on Facebook and each has an average of 150 friends. Intuit is using social media to generate more buzz about the program through the sharing of product reviews and answers to tax preparation questions.

Greenberg coined the phrase “friend-casting” to describe how Intuit is using social media.

“We actually want our customers to be our best sales force, not us,” Greenberg said. “Enabling our 20 million-customer base to be a word-of-mouth army for us is much more interesting.”

Strong influence

Although methods such as paid search, Web display ads and TV commercials still reach a larger audience, the “influence” tapped in social media “is a heck of a lot stronger than it is with traditional advertising,” he said.

David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy for the digital marketing firm 360i of New York, said the importance of search engines isn’t going away.

“But there’s always been one downside to search,” he said. “Consumers only spend about 5 percent of their time online searching and the other 95 percent of the time at the destination. Social media is quickly accounting for a large percentage of that 95 percent. Google’s biggest acquisitions, DoubleClick and YouTube, have been all about playing a big role in the rest of consumers’ Web usage.”

He noted that last week Google purchased San Francisco’s Aardvark, a social-media search engine for questions and answers, and then unveiled Google Buzz, which allows Gmail users to post updates, videos, photos and links, Facebook-style.

“Mobile will be another new source for search, and some of that will be incremental rather than cannibalistic,” he said.

“But social media’s just finding its feet and the business models are just starting to emerge. And they’re evolving quickly.”

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Federal Government builds secret database to fight cyber-terrorism

10 Mar 2010 at 09:46

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Australia’s biggest banks, telcos, and utilities have handed sensitive data to government for the protection of critical infrastructure (CI) against terrorism and natural disasters.

The rare move, which began in 2009, makes the country one of a few in the world with a centralised national critical infrastructure protection model.

The Critical Infrastructure Protection Modeling and Assessment (CIPMA) program was launched in 2007 and received a $23.4 million funding boost to 2012 in last year’s budget.

It is spearheaded by the Federal Attorney-General which received a $15.2 million share and its research department Geoscience Australia which scored $800,000.

The CIPMA program is also an initiative of the Trusted Information Sharing Network formed to examine the relationships and dependencies between CI systems and how failures in one sector affect other sector operations.

A spokesperson from the Attorney General’s Department responding to Computerworld questions said the program is on time and budget, and owes its success to the industry’s willingness to trust the government with highly sensitive data.

“Identifying, tracking the cascading effects of [CI] and quantifying these consequences is a key rationale for establishing the CIPMA program,” the spokesperson said.

“Direct relationships with industry means that there is a high level of trust to enable the provision of accurate data for modelling and analysis.”

The department would not elaborate on what scenarios are being tested or what organisations are participating but said all scenarios use factual data and produce realistic results, something few countries have the ability to do.

Participants with approval can use the data to defend Australia in the annual international wargame Cyberstorm, which pits countries against each other including the US, UK and New Zealand in a mock online attacks on CI.

They can also use the models to cut internal costs by examining supply chain data and manufacturing processes.

About 4Tb of CI data will be stored in central databases, eliminating the need to retrieve information from knowledge experts who may be unreachable in a disaster.

System Dynamic Models are used to examine stock and flow data in CI such as network connectivity and the energy output of generators, to create an amalgamated output to be fed into a People, Building and Infrastructure profile. Data is then broken down into demographic, economic and business profiles, and statistical divisions to create unique disruption footprints.

An ASIO T4 approved security system protects stored data which includes highly secretive industry information entrusted to CIPMA.

The Attorney-General’s Department is establishing a panel of additional technical providers for the 2010 service delivery phase, following an expression of interest process. Work will be guided from the results of a pending interim review.

The CIPMA program is one of many actions that have been taken by authorities in recent times to counter the growing number of threats from cyber space, including those such as those undertaken this week by a group calling itself ‘Anonymous’, which launched a denial of service (DoS) attack on two government websites to protest the Federal Government’s plans to introduce mandatory ISP-level Internet content filtering.

The attack, named “Operation Titstorm”, hit the Australian Parliament House and the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) websites.

In January, the Federal Government moved to step up its cyber warfare defence capabilities with the opening of the Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) announced as part of the Defence White Paper released last year.

The centre, housed inside the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) headquarters in Canberra, will provide critical understanding of the threat from sophisticated cyber attacks, according to the minister for defence, senator John Faulkner.

In November 2009, Computerworld revealed the CSOC had already reached some operational capability but an acute lack of information on the offensive capabilities being developed remains with the government and Defence department refusing to divulge details.

There is also little clarity around its governance or oversight mechanisms, a circumstance that sparked calls from academics and information security analysts for greater public debate and disclosure.

Also in early November, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) confirmed that Internet-based attacks have been used by hostile intelligence services to gain confidential Australian Government and business information. That same month the Government created a new national computer emergency response team, CERT Australia.

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HP Opens First Ever Wind-cooled Data Center

10 Mar 2010 at 09:44

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From the outside, Hewlett-Packard’s newest data center looks like a massive, well-secured loading dock, devoid of logos and surrounded by a robust barbed-wired fence in a nondescript industrial park.

The low-profile approach is intentional, as HP’s Wynyard center is intended to hold the most valuable asset for many companies: their data. HP will use the data center to compete with companies such as IBM for IT services and management contracts, a growing source of revenue that requires secure data centers.

HP is hoping several of the environmentally friendly design features of the 360,000-square-foot Wynyard facility will push it ahead. It is HP’s most energy efficient data center that it has built, said Maurice Julian, U.K. facilities project director. Half of the facility is now complete, comprising four data halls, with room to create four more data halls as demand dictates.

The data center was originally started by IT outsourcer EDS, which was then acquired by HP for US$13.9 billion in May 2008. The building sits in a blustery and chilly area about eight miles west of the North Sea in the northeast of England. It is entirely air-cooled: HP has built eight 2.1-meter stainless steel and plastic intake fans to draw cool air.

The air runs through a massive bank of modular filters to remove dust and other contaminants before it circulates in a massive cavity, called a plenum, below its data center halls.

The air is forced up though the floor and runs over the front of server racks before being exhausted. The system keeps the hall at a constant 24C (75.2F). When it is cold outside, some of the exhausted heat is recirculated with the outside air to maintain the right temperature.

In Billingham, the outside temperature only rises above 24C for about 20 hours a year, but the facility still needed traditional chillers for those occasions, Julian said. To run a closed system, data center operators can close the louvers that let in outside air.

“It’s an ideal climate for this type of solution,” Julian said. “We’re moving large volumes of air at a low speed.”

Installing chillers in addition to building the natural air cooling added about 6 percent to the cost of building the data center, Julian said. The extra cost should be recouped in as few as two years due to the power savings.

Power is one of the highest costs for a data center. A facility’s efficiency is measured in PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, which is a ratio that compares the total power used by a facility to the power used by its equipment.

Running at a full load, HP has calculated that the Wynyard facility has a 1.2 PUE, meaning that for every 1.2 watts of electricity used by the data center, 1 watt is used to power IT equipment, the rest being used for cooling and other facility needs.

Julian said each of the four data halls actually have a 1.16 PUE on their own, but that increases slightly to take into account electricity consumption in other areas, such as the 20,000-square foot office facilities.

PUEs have been falling as companies such as Google, Microsoft and IBM have sought ways to reduce costs, by locating data centers near cheaper power suppliers and employing more efficient cooling techniques. A short time ago, data centers had PUEs of 2.0 or higher, but new custom-built ones are routinely hitting 1.5 or below, the mark for an energy-efficient site.

Assuming HP pays between 10 to 11 pence per kilowatt hour, using outside air over chillers should save HP up to £2.6 million ($4.16 million) in power annually, Julian said.

The facility is also harvesting rainwater. In the winter, the outside humidity can drop, and the data center should be kept between 40 percent to 60 percent humidity, said John Finlayson, Wynyard data center manager.

Rainwater, which is filtered, is stored in 80,000-liter tanks. If the outside air is too dry, the filtered water is sprayed in a fine mist to bring the humidity up before the air passes into the data halls.

Inside the data hall, HP has opted to put in light-colored server racks, Finlayson said. Since lighter colors reflect, HP found data halls required 40 percent less lighting if the cabinets were not painted black.

Like other data centers, Wynyard has been built to ensure everything runs even if the power goes out. It has tens of thousands of batteries on hand to provide an uninterrupted power supply, which are then relieved by up to 10 diesel generators supplied by four 85,000-liter underground fuel tanks. The facility could run up to four days on those reserves.

Security is tight. Access cards and biometric details are needed to access halls. Server cabinets are locked, and the keys are only released if the particular engineer has permission encoded on an access card. The entry system to the data halls prevents two people from entering at the same time. The data center also has a high perimeter fence, reinforced walls and constant security.

From the outside, no one would guess what actually goes on in the building, and that’s intentional. For example, “we tried to make the air intakes blend in with the facade of the building,” Finlayson said.

The Wynyard data center went live last weekend with its first clients in its fourth hall. HP opened up the hall to journalists on Tuesday, but no photos were allowed. Several workers crawled on top of server cabinets, finishing off cabling tasks.

The data center is designed to serve clients that are purchasing IT services from HP, but it is hardware agnostic, and equipment from vendors such as Sun Microsystems and EMC could be seen. Overall, HP is pushing its services business, which emphasizes allowing companies to get applications up and running faster and being able to modify those services quickly and with a heavy emphasis on virtualization technology.

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SETI opens up its data to ‘citizen scientists’

10 Mar 2010 at 09:39

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You are officially invited to join the search for extraterrestrial life. And no, that doesn’t mean you should head to Kansas and lie in a cornfield awaiting the mothership to scoop you up. All you have to do is log on to SETIQuest.org, which went live on Wednesday. The site’s launch was announced at the TED 2010 conference currently underway in Long Beach, California.

SETIQuest is the product of astronomer Jill Tarter’s TED Prize wish. After being awarded the TED Prize last year, Tarter was given the opportunity to make a single wish before an auditorium full of the top names in technology and design. Tarter wished that they would “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”.

With SETIQuest, Tarter and TED are making that happen. The website will make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish the SETI Institute’s signal-detection algorithm as open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to make it even better.

“With available cloud storage and processing resources, we can provide digital signal processing experts and students with a lot of raw data … and invite them to develop new algorithms that can find other types of signals that we are now missing,” the website explains.

Even if you’re not a coder, you can still take the opportunity to search for ET using nothing more than the naked eye. “Citizen scientists” can visually search the data for anything that looks suspiciously like something other than white noise. Should you spot something anomalous, alert the global community. If enough citizen scientists agree that something looks fishy, their collective concern will direct SETI’s telescopes to zoom in on the questionable patch of sky.

Who knows – you just might play a part in a discovery that changes history.

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Biggest mobile operators join forces on app store project

10 Mar 2010 at 09:38

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Twenty-four mobile network operators have formed the Wholesale Applications Community to avoid fragmenting the apps market and to give developers one point of entry to all the members, the GSM Association announced on Monday.

The operators will now start working on uniting their existing developer communities, so developers will be able to go to one place to get their applications distributed instead of having to go through multiple application approval processes.

The community will also start working on a common development standard that should be ready within the next 12 months. The standard will be independent of phone type and operating system, according to the members.

That will allow them to better compete against Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market, which have independent and competing approvals processes tied to their phone or operating system.

“Developers are going to have a lot more access to a lot more customers,” said Alex Sinclair, chief technology and strategy officer of the GSMA, at a news conference at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The Wholesale Applications Community members include: AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Telefónica, Telenor Group, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. Together the operators in the group have about 3 billion subscribers, the GSMA said.

The group has the full backing of the GSMA and the list of supporters will grow in the coming days. “There are several people who are annoyed they couldn’t get their name on the list in time,” said Sinclair.

Apple is not among those clamoring to be added to the list, but if the company wants to join the group, “it will be welcome,” he said.

Just like many phone manufacturers, operators have seen the success of Apple’s App Store and want a piece of the pie. Some, including Orange, Verizon and Vodafone, have already launched their own application stores.

Mobile phone manufacturers LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony Ericsson have also voiced their support for the apps community.

The Wholesale Applications Community faces a number of obstacles, according to analysts at CCS Insight.

“Operators are trying to regain control of apps, but have a poor track record with this type of industry consortium,” they said in a research note.

“Big challenges remain overcoming inconsistency between standards bodies like JIL and Bondi,” the analysts continued, referring to the Joint Innovation Lab created by a group of mobile operators including Vodafone, China Mobile, Softbank and Verizon Wireless, which also has the support of phone manufacturers LG Electronics, Research in Motion, Samsung Electronics and Sharp.

There is no competition between the Wholesale Applications Community and JIL, as all members of JIL are also members of the community, according to Sinclair.

“The last thing we wanted was a Jack versus JIL situation,” he said.

The groups hope to converge their various specifications within 12 months, he said.

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A 50-Watt Cellular Network

10 Mar 2010 at 09:34

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Solar-powered base stations can link up remote rural areas.

An Indian telecom company is deploying simple cell phone base stations that need as little as 50 watts of solar-provided power. It will soon announce plans to sell the equipment in Africa, expanding cell phone access to new ranks of rural villagers who live far from electricity supplies.

Cellular power: A low-power cell phone base station made by VNL on a rural rooftop in India.
Credit: VNL

Over the past year, VNL, based in Haryana, India, has reengineered the traditional technology of the dominant cellular standard, called GSM, in order to create base stations that only require between 50 and 150 watts of power, supplied by a solar-charged battery. The components can be assembled and booted up by two people and mounted on a rooftop in six hours.

One such station–dubbed a “village station”–can handle hundreds of users. Groups of such village stations feed signals to a required larger VNL base station within five kilometers. In turn that larger station, which is also solar-powered, relays signals to the main network. The village station can turn a profit even if customers spend on average only $2 a month on the service, instead of the $6 required to make traditional systems cost-effective, the company says.

“We’ve scaled down the cost, the energy, and the equipment so that almost anybody can deploy it,” says Rajiv Mehrotra, VNL’s CEO. “It lends itself to many business models that can serve the bottom of the pyramid,” a reference to the roughly 1.5 billion rural people who do not have access to electricity grids.

To date, some 50 VNL base stations have been installed in the Indian state of Rajasthan, introducing thousands of people to cell phone service for the first time. An African rollout is imminent, the company says, without elaborating. The initial batch of 50 stations support voice and data transmission–but not initially text-messaging, a decision mainly based on the fact that many new users may not be able to read or write.

Besides enabling basic communication, cell phones can provide enormous financial opportunities for rural people, especially if those people adopt services that provide banking and lending via cell phone. More than half of India’s 1.1 billion people lack any access to basic financial services, and instead pay usurious rates to local loan sharks. Furthermore, while microlending can lift people from poverty, only about 150 million people worldwide use such services. Expanded cell networks, together with banking programs geared to the rural poor, could change all of that.

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Outlook harnesses social networking

10 Mar 2010 at 09:29

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Microsoft is transforming Outlook from an e-mail client, or messaging platform, to a social networking hub with the addition of social connectors. The integration of social networking is a huge benefit for Outlook users, and may even help drive adoption of Outlook as others look for a tool to help sift through the social network noise.

Outlook with social connectors is much closer to what many, myself included, expected Google Buzz to be. We already have enough social networks to manage. What we need is a tool to help aggregate the various messages and status updates and simplify keeping track of it all, not yet another social network to tame.

There has been a concerted effort to create such an interface on mobile devices. Motorola has MotoBlur, Palm has Synergy, and HTC has developed FriendStream. The common thread among these initiatives is the attempt to bring all of the various social networks together in one interface and make it easier for users to stay in touch.

There have been similar attempts for desktop software as well. Two that stand out are TweetDeck, and AOL’s Lifestream. Tweetdeck allows you to harness Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, TwitVid, TwitGoo, MobyPicture, and MySpace, while Lifestream has similar connectivity, including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, and Delicious.

While these tools help simplify social networking some by providing a single tool for managing multiple networks, it is still an additional application to install, configure, and maintain. There is also still a significant amount of noise to sift through to find relevant communications. Google and Microsoft have an opportunity to integrate social network management with the messaging platforms that users rely on every day.

Google’s Buzz has some potential as a sort of crowd-sourcing collaboration tool for business customers (assuming Google resolves the various privacy concerns), but Microsoft’s approach might be just what busy business professionals need to use social networking more effectively.

A given contact might be a part of multiple social networks. But, logging in to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social networks one by one to stay up to date with current updates and communications from that contact is cumbersome and inefficient. The multitude of social networks, combined with the sheer volume of communications on each make staying in touch daunting and threaten to render the whole concept of social networking useless from a business perspective.

Outlook with social connectors resolves most, if not all, of those issues. The People Pane at the bottom of the Outlook Reading Pane provides users with an intelligent and effective way to access all relevant information about a given contact, including e-mail, calendar events, file attachments, as well as RSS feeds and social network status updates.

You can also access the same information through Outlook contacts. The contact details for an individual include a pane at the bottom providing a single location for you to find all relevant information related to that contact.

LinkedIn is the only social connector available right now, but Facebook and MySpace are coming soon, and Microsoft has built social connectors as an open platform, providing the tools to enable developers to create social connectors for virtually any network or feed.

While many feel Microsoft is too large, and too “yesterday” to keep pace and adapt to the rapidly changing Web 2.0 world, Outlook social connectors are exactly what users — particularly business professionals — need to harness social networks and use them effectively.

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Windows Phone 7 Series: everything you ever wanted to know

22 Feb 2010 at 09:56

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Microsoft just planted a massive flag in the ground with the debut of Windows Phone 7 Series. The company’s new mobile operating system is a radical and potent departure from the past, and there’s a lot to take in — so we’ve gathered together all our knowledge and impressions of the device so far and rolled them into a single, concise guide. Of course, there will be plenty more to learn in the coming months, and we’re going to be beating down Redmond’s door for more details on this thing, but for now let’s dive into what Microsoft has revealed so far about its latest and (potentially) greatest phone operating system.

The basic facts

Windows Phone 7 Series is the successor to Microsoft’s line of Windows Mobile phone operating systems. It’s based on the Windows CE 6 kernel, like the Zune HD, while current versions of Windows Mobile are based on Windows CE 5. Microsoft announced the new OS at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, and says that the first handsets to run it are supposed to be released by the holiday shopping season of this year.

The visual and underlying differences in the operating system are almost too numerous to mention, including a completely (and we do mean completely) upended user interface, an emphasis on finger-based touchscreen input, deep social networking integration, fully branded and expansive Zune and Xbox components, and extremely strict hardware requirements for partners. A couple familiar touchstones from the past include plans for Outlook and Office support, as well as licensing to a wide variety of third party hardware vendors — despite the name change, Microsoft still isn’t building any phones itself.

Hardware

Part of what makes Windows Phone 7 Series a departure for Microsoft is that the company is taking a much bigger role in dictating what hardware is allowed to run the OS. While we still haven’t seen an actual device produced by a manufacturer for retail (the demo unit being shown off is a prototype slab allegedly made by Garmin-Asus, but not a device that might ever come to market), Microsoft has a very clear picture of what they want these units to be built like. Still, while the company is laying down the ground rules in an attempt to create a more consistent experience across phones, it doesn’t mean there won’t be variety. You’ll see variation in devices (yes, some with and some without a keyboard), but there will be a much more steady tone in the nature of Windows Phone 7 Series handsets. Here’s a look at some of the minimum specs detailed to us thus far:

  • Large WVGA screen with a single aspect ratio (which means BlackBerry-style devices won’t be readily available to begin with)
  • Five specific hardware buttons required: Start, back, search (a dedicated Bing button), camera button, and power — no more, no less
  • Capacitive multitouch
  • CPU and GPU requirements (beginning with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon as the go-to processor)
  • WiFi
  • AGPS
  • Accelerometer
  • FM radio
  • High resolution camera

As we said, Microsoft is showing the OS off on unbranded prototype hardware. It’s a simplistic slate phone with a 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen, what appears to be a front-facing camera (a point we haven’t heard the company sound off on yet)… and not much else. We still have plenty of unanswered questions on hardware, not just about that camera, but storage specs, whether or not we’ll be able to use microSD or some form of removable storage, and how we’ll go about connecting these devices to our laptops.

How exactly is Windows Phone 7 Series different than previous versions of Windows Mobile? The question is probably better phrased as “how isn’t Windows Phone 7 Series different than previous versions of Windows Mobile.” This isn’t a coat of paint or a touch up — this is a full-scale nuclear assault on everything you knew about Windows on phones. Basically, every interface paradigm you’ve seen in earlier versions is obliterated here, and the design has been utterly decimated (in a very, very good way). There’s no longer a Start menu, drop downs, check boxes, radio buttons, windows, lists of icons… we could go on and on, but suffice to say this thing is just a totally different beast altogether. Microsoft clearly worked long and hard developing new ways to navigate a phone, and this doesn’t even bear a resemblance to other phones currently on the market. There are no icon grids, no pull down menus, no card view, and no task manager (more on that in a moment).

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