Archive for June, 2010
CNN reports that President Obama will address the nation live Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET about the latest on the BP oil disaster. In related news, Google has announced that people are invited to submit their questions about the disaster on Google Moderator and vote for the ones they think are most important. About 15 minutes after the president’s speech, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs will answer the questions on the White House YouTube channel.
As of 4:30 p.m. PT, the White House YouTube channel had 98,098 votes on 3,692 questions from 7,498 people.
The New York Times reports that start-up Data Warehouse Magnetic has raised $4 million in its first round of institutional funding. Previously called Domdex, the New York-based company uses data from search engines to help advertisers target their messages to specific demographic.
Similar to BlueKai, Magnetic lets ad networks, ad exchanges and demand side platforms purchase information from Magnetic’s warehouse of data to better target their ads. However, Magnetic’s data comes from search engines instead of BlueKai’s e-commerce driven data. Data from people who search for items such as “computers” is collected by Magnetic and used by computer companies, for example, to better target ads for new PCs.
The new round of investment was led by Charles River Ventures, Ron Conway and the NYC Investment Fund. The company has raised $5.25 million in funding to date; previous investors include Founder Collective and IA Capital Partners.
The number of unique viewers of online video increased 1.6 percent year-over-year, from 133.7 million unique viewers in May 2009 to 135.9 million in May 2010, according to new data from the Nielsen Company.
YouTube came in as the top online brand ranked by unique viewers for May 2010, with 101.34 million unique viewers. Facebook and Yahoo! trailed behind with 26.2 million unique viewers and 24,200 million respectively.
Apple Inc., under growing scrutiny from antitrust regulators, may have to loosen restrictions on software developers and music labels to avoid legal wrangling with the government and prevent damage to how its brand is perceived by the public, lawyers and analysts said.
Google may face a Spanish court over the legality of the Wi-Fi snooping activities of its Street View fleet, El País reports.
The snappily-titled Asociación para la Prevención y Estudio de Delitos, Abusos y Negligencias en Informática y Comunicaciones Avanzadas (Association for the Prevention and Investigation of Crime, Abuse and Malpractice in Information Technology and Advanced Communications), aka Apedanica, has filed suit in the Police Court of Madrid against the legal representative of Google Spain.
It suggests the company has breached Article 197 of the Penal Code, which provides for between one and fours years’ jail for anyone who “intercepts telecommunications, or uses listening, transmission, recording or reproduction devices on any other communication signal”.
When it confessed back in back in May that Street View spymobiles had been “collecting information sent over open Wi-Fi networks”, Google claimed the whole thing was a “mistake”, and later blamed it on a rogue software coder.
This explanation has failed to impress. Apedanica president Miguel Angel Gallardo insisted that “something which was carefully programmed and has been done in 30 countries can’t be an error”.
On 19 May, the Spanish Data Protection Agency (Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, or AEPD) opened an investigation into the matter, and last Tuesday Google Spain’s director general, Javier Rodríguez, promised all culled data would be handed over to the agency.
Apedanica has evidently decided that’s not good enough, and its legal action adds to increasing international pressure on Google over its Orwellian black Opel black ops. ®
