Judge rejects Google’s deal with authors and publishers to put books online

In a blow to Google’s bid to put all books online and expand its Internet dominance, a federal judge in New York on Tuesday rejected the search giant’s settlement with authors and publishers, saying the terms “simply go too far” in giving Google an advantage over competitors and copyright holders.
The decision comes as regulators in this country and in Europe scrutinize Google’s supremacy in the search business. The judge’s thinking, laid out in a 48-page filing, echoed many of the antitrust arguments made by the Department of Justice when it criticized the deal a year ago.

Google vowed on Tuesday to continue digitizing books, only a portion of which are affected by the settlement, which would have allowed Google to sell access to millions of out-of-print books to consumers and libraries.

“This is clearly disappointing, but we’ll review the court’s decision and consider our options,” said Hilary Ware, managing counsel at Google. “Like many others, we believe this agreement has the potential to open up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the U.S. today.”
Google could appeal the decision or attempt to satisfy the judge’s concerns by negotiating a new settlement.

The judge, Denny Chin of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, said the deal would “arguably give Google control over the search market.” Specifically, Chin was concerned that the settlement would allow third parties to show small portions of books scanned by Google only if they had entered into agreements with the company.

He added the deal also presented concerns about privacy, since Google could potentially collect information on what kinds of books people were reading.The class action settlement, reached in 2008, came after the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google to stop the company from scanning books and putting them on the Web. Under the terms of the deal, Google said it would pay $125 million and allow authors and publishers to collect money anytime their books are viewed online.

Critics of the deal cheered the judge’s decision.

“This opinion is, in effect, a microcosm of the big issues that Google’s confronting in Washington,” said Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer and leader of the Open Book Alliance, a group that opposed the settlement. “We think it’s as much as we could have asked for. We’re very pleased with it.”

“We believe the court reached the right result on this complex, proposed settlement,” said Gina Talamona, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department. “We are pleased that the court supported our position.”

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Can Google Save Itself From Google?

The New York Times, this past weekend, ran a story about Google building a new kind of manager. It outlined Google’s attempts to create a process to find and create better managers. To me the story didn’t ask the more pertinent question — why does Google need “management mantras” in the first place? And are these needs a symptom of perhaps a malignant ailment?

My questions aside, I do like Google’s candor at admitting to the exercise, even though it gives credence to skeptics’ grumblings about Google’s lack of management structure. It was also a strong reminder that Google is willing to apply its quantitative, algorithmic and data-driven approach to building a management structure for the future.

In my opinion, this data-driven approach might work when it comes to deciding search algorithms, but not to people. After all didn’t mathematician Paul Erdos once say that a “mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”

Jokes aside, I think Google’s issues might go beyond just finding good bosses. Though only 11 years old, Google has entered corporate middle age that is showing around its proverbial waistline. To give you sense of what I am talking about — in 2010, Google hired 4,500 people and in 2011 it plans to hire about 6,100.

At the end of 2010, Google had 24,400 employees — a stunning number by any measure, and even more jaw dropping considering that five years ago, the search engine giant had 5,680 employees. (In comparison, Microsoft had about 89,000 employees at the end of its most recent quarter.)
Baby to Big Daddy

In the lifecycle of a technology company that goes from being a start-up to a large enterprise, growth comes in three phases.

1. Early days when the company is almost entirely focused on developing technology and figuring out a business model.
2. Phase Two is when it revs up its engine and starts to bring in dollars, and goes on a hiring binge to support the growth of the business.
3. Phase Three is when it starts to seek newer areas of growth in order to sustain its growth engine, and keeps hiring more and more people.

For Google, Phase One ended around 2002, while Phase Two ended sometime in 2007. Google had about 16,807 employees then. Since then it has added about 7,600 employees and by end of 2011 it will have 28,883 employees according to estimates from Ben Schachter, analyst with Macquarie Capital. It was in 2007, the company started to make a serious push into newer markets — productivity apps and Android OS, followed by Chrome OS, Google TV and the social web., over the course of the next few years.
The Challenges of Growing Up

The very fact the company has to go through an exercise to codify a process for building managers points to the fact that Google is now focusing all its energies inwards, rather than outwards. This is a crucial and perhaps Google’s biggest challenge (hence my choice of the headline.)

It so happens that somewhere between Phase Two and Phase Three, big technology companies start shifting their focus from products to managing their processes and people. The growth in the company size and scope bring in bureaucratic morass and politicking, which in turn breeds a culture of consensus.

Others, who don’t want to spend their creative energies on trying to survive (or just do they their jobs) end up leaving for greener and more importantly, intellectually more challenging enterprises — like the recent exodus of Googlers to Facebook.

These are challenges not unique to Google — pretty much every company goes through such a painful phase. The problem is that Google is facing these issues at a time when it is competing with a more nimble and definitely more formidable foe in Facebook. Furthermore, its recent success in the mobile market notwithstanding, Google cannot afford to exhale as Apple continues to breathe down its neck.

But let’s focus on the Mark Zuckerberg production for now — it is ruthless in its pursuit of its goals, and most importantly it is still in Phase One of its life. That gives the company a lot more flexibility to reshape its future. Facebook may not threaten Google’s revenue stream today, but it will eventually pose challenges to Google’s way of the web: search. It would be fun to watch how the incoming chief executive and co-founder Larry Page helps get Google’s focus back on products and overcome the curse of size.

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Advantages of PSD To XHTML conversion

Introducing PSD and XHTML: XHTML is the latest version of HTML. PSD to CSS Conversion, PSD to XHTML/HTML Conversion is the most important web making services that has been growing in popularity day by day. It is an extended form of HTML it can compete with all the high-level mark up languages. PSD to XHTML conversion for web design services with smooth finishing maintain w3c standard & cross browser supports.

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Google blames software update for lost Gmail data ?

Google blames software update for lost Gmail data CNET Google said today a storage software update was responsible for causing some Gmail users to lose access to their e-mail data and said full functionality would be restored soon.

Some Gmail users--less than 0.02 percent actually affected, according to Google--complained yesterday of suddenly and mysteriously losing e-mails, contacts, and folders. In an update on the situation this evening, Ben Treynor, Google VP of engineering and site reliability czar, apologized for the inconvenience and said the company expects to have the lost data restored soon.

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Now Facebook plays part in college admissions too

Perfect score is not the only criteria for getting admission into a reputed college in US now, off late, Facebook too has become an important selection tool.

Four out of five college admissions officers use Facebook to recruit students, according to last year's survey by Kaplan Test Prep.

"We found that 82 per cent of admissions officers reported that their school is using Facebook to recruit students," Russell Schaffer, Kaplan's Senior Communication Manager, told All Facebook.

The website StudentAdvisor reports at least one case of an applicant being rejected because of something in his or her social media profile.And one interviewer has said she is "absolutely" prejudiced by what she sees online about candidates.

"I think it's always better to be safe than sorry," Allison Otis, who conducts interviews for Harvard College, posted in a thread on the website Quora.

"When you apply to college you spend such a long time crafting an image through your applications and essays that to be careless about your online data is just silly".

Otis said she regularly searches Google for students' names and looks through their Facebook and Twitter profiles.The content of a prospective student's Facebook profile is fast becoming more important than their grades, extracurricular activities, or teacher recommendations, but it's not that huge of a surprise that the social network is playing a role in the admission process.

After all, if recruiters check Facebook when hiring future employees, there's really no reason why schools can't do the same for students.

Sometimes your online profile can be the tiebreaker. It's also important to note that the high number likely also includes college representatives finding interesting students online and encouraging them to apply to their school.

If you're a student, there are two ways to take advantage of this information. On the one hand, you can try to make your Facebook profile as exemplary as possible. This is quite difficult given that you have to stay on top of what your Facebook friends tag you in and so on.

The other option is to simply lock down your Facebook's privacy settings. You should probably already be doing this regardless of whether you are applying to a college, university, or new job.Facebook is much more of a private social network than competing services: if you don't want anyone but your friends to see your Facebook posts, then change your settings!

A Facebook profile obviously doesn't hold as much weight as grades, test scores, extracurricular activities, teacher recommendations and essays.But when you're looking at a tie between equally talented students, social media content could be the tiebreaker.

Dean Tsouvalas, editor of StudentAdvisor, recommends in a recent blog post that students use social media to their advantage.He suggests following the school's Twitter feed or "liking" its Facebook fan page.Students also can post a video resume on YouTube or blog about volunteering efforts or other extracurricular activities and provide a link on their applications.

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