A rather standard how-to YouTube clip is causing a stir in Russia after becoming the focus of a dispute between the government and the video site.

The three-minute clip, which provides instructions for applying scary Halloween makeup, was banned at the end of 2012 by Russian authorities claiming it encouraged suicide or infliction of bodily harm. YouTube, owned by Google, is now suing the government to keep the video online.

Why is YouTube — which has more than 72 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute – bothering to fight the government over this seemingly insignificant clip? It’s the principle. Internet censorship may start from small things.

The dispute is a result of a new law that allows Russia to block online content it deems harmful to children, such as child pornography or content promoting drug use or suicide. Facebook and Twitter have already complied with requests to delete content.

While the Internet companies and authorities often agree on what content should and shouldn’t be allowed, that isn’t always the case. Russian free-speech advocates have expressed concerns that the government will use its censorship powers to go beyond what the new law intended.

Original post is Why YouTube Is Fighting Russia Over a Halloween Video by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, with the Firefox logo during a news conference at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

While many European technology companies have pared back their presence at this week’s Mobile World Congress, Silicon Valley’s Mozilla is leaving a noticeably bigger footprint.

The maker of the popular Firefox web browser sent about a hundred employees — which is a sixth of its staff and a 50 percent increase from last year — and prepared a much larger stand to help it showcase its new open mobile operating system.

The hope? That by letting loose its fox in the smartphone world, it can steal some of the spotlight from Google’s Android, which dominates the market.

“We have made a more significant investment this year because we have more to say and show,” Peter Scanlon, senior director of global branding at Mozilla, said Sunday in an interview in Barcelona.

Mozilla’s new marketing message, “blaze your own path,” shows the fox from its logo unleashed and following people as they move around to explain how they can access the Internet regardless of where they are.

The question remains whether that campaign, which included a lavish presentation in front of hundreds at the luxurious Hotel Arts Barcelona, was convincing. Mozilla’s mobile software, first discussed a year ago, has been a long time coming. Phone buyers looking for a bargain may be tempted to see whether a new generation of feature phones — such as Nokia’s 105 — may do the trick and be available faster.

Mozilla does have some big names in its corner. As I wrote about yesterday, more than a dozen wireless carriers including billionaire Carlos Slim’s America Movil are supporting Mozilla’s open mobile operating system to make a range of cheaper smartphones. Firefox-based devices may arrive as early as the second quarter, Mozilla said.

We’ll see how fast and far this fox can run.

–With assistance from Cornelius Rahn.

Original post is Mozilla’s Fox Tries to Steal Spotlight and Outrun Google’s Android by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Meng Chenguang/Xinhua Press via Corbis

Entrepreneurs in Nairobi said Google’s Eric Schmidt visited the iHub, a startup co-working space, to meet a dozen companies.

After a week of traveling around sub-Saharan Africa, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt saw what he thinks could be the continent’s technology leader: Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.

“Nairobi has emerged as a serious tech hub and may become the African leader,” he said in a post on Google+ yesterday. Rwanda is “a jewel with a terrible past” and Nigeria has an “international image problem.”

But Kenya, with relatively stable politics and the British legal system, attracts foreign investment with fewer problems, he wrote.

Like the rest of Africa, Kenya is being transformed by mobile technology. Coffee shops display a code so people can make a purchase using a text message. It’s also how people pay their rent. In his post, Schmidt pointed out M-Pesa, a mobile payment service backed by Safaricom, the biggest carrier in Kenya.

Entrepreneurs in Nairobi said Schmidt visited the iHub, a startup co-working space that has taken over a couple of floors of a mall there, to meet a dozen companies.

“His questions were very sharp, as one would expect, on the local market and he was impressed by what some of the local startups like Kopo Kopo, SafariDesk and eLimu were doing,” said Erik Hersman, a Kenyan entrepreneur, in an e-mail.

Kopo Kopo is a startup that makes it easier for businesses to accept money via text message. SafariDesk helps plan East African vacations, and eLimu makes a computer tablet for Kenyans in primary school to use.

“Google already has a very strong focus in Kenya,” Schmidt said. Mobile connectivity is the biggest thing Africa has going for it, he said. “The Internet in Africa will primarily be a mobile one,” he said in his post. “Information is power, and more information means more choices.”

Africa’s youth can avoid being taken advantage of through corruption or militarism by spreading information and connecting with it, Schmidt said.

One test of his thesis will be Kenya’s March elections, which citizens fear will erupt into violence. In 2007, more than a thousand were killed and hundreds of thousands were displaced from their homes after the elections.

“If they manage to get through the upcoming March elections without significant conflict, they will grow quickly,” Schmidt wrote.

Original post is Google’s Eric Schmidt Sees Nairobi as Africa’s Technology Leader by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Noah Berger/Bloomberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduces Graph Search at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

If you follow directions, Facebook’s new search engine is pretty amazing. But veer off course, and the results reveal just how limited the tool is right now.

During an event today at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Facebook introduced Graph Search, a drastically revamped version of the social  network’s search function. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg called this feature as important to the site as the News Feed on the homepage and the Timeline profiles. It’s also the most nascent.

The promise of social search is compelling. For example, I might be more interested in movies my friends enjoy rather than whatever gets the highest ratings from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

A tiny slice of Facebook’s 1 billion users were provided with a beta version of Graph Search today. For the past few hours, I’ve been testing the tool on my profile, sifting through my groups of friends.

When first clicking on the search box, which now takes up most of the blue toolbar on the top of the website, I’m presented with a personalized tour of the new search features. It starts by showing me how I can search for people who went to the University of Maryland (my alma mater). Then it shows my unique results and a bunch of familiar faces.

From then on, the search box presents six sample queries whenever I activate it, such as “my friends,” “music my friends like” and “restaurants nearby.” I can choose any of those, click to see more suggestions or enter my own search terms. Once on the results page, a list of optional filters guides me on how to further refine my search.

The search engine currently handles four main categories: people, photos, places and interests. There are lots of options within those groups. For example, I can find friends who like Coldplay (so that I can unfriend them), or I can look up pictures taken before 1990 or at the Empire State Building. I can also find movies my friends like or search by genres such as rock music, comedy films and Italian restaurants.

The results are surprising because there was previously no good way to unlock Facebook’s trove of data about my contacts. However, the system is a little slow. First, the natural-language processing needs to figure out what framework my query fits into, and then display that beneath the search box. Then it needs to dig through all of my data. Multiply that by a billion. To be fair, those are challenging tasks. “We have years and years of work ahead of us,” Zuckerberg said at the event today.

Facebook’s search engine, as in previous versions, can pull in Web results from Microsoft’s Bing. The pages look a little different from those you might see on Bing.com, and they include additional data that Facebook sprinkles on top, said Lars Rasmussen, a former Google executive who is a director of engineering on Facebook’s search project.

But if you were hoping to use this as your one-stop search shop, look elsewhere. The method for doing a Web search on Facebook is fairly cumbersome. If I type “weather,” the system suggests I check out the Facebook pages for the Weather Channel or Weather Underground, or people whose last names have the word “weather” in them. I need to click “See more” in the auto-complete list, and then scroll down before even getting the option to do a traditional search.

For Facebook, building its own Web-crawling technology is “nowhere” on the company’s list of priorities, Rasmussen said in an interview after the presentation today. This effort is about tapping into all the information Facebook has locked away on its servers.

In addition to making the whole process snappier, Facebook plans to add more languages, open it up to applications from outside developers and bring in more types of data. Facebook’s own events and messages apps aren’t integrated yet. A search for “parties next week” returns a suggestion for “people who party.” (The people on this list aren’t as cool as you might expect, judging by their profile pictures.)

“We need to start getting data on how people use it in order to improve the product,” Zuckerberg said. But that won’t be a quick process. “We’re going to start rolling it out very slowly,” he said.

During the news conference, Facebook executives emphasized their attention to privacy. Before the search feature is rolled out widely, users will be prompted to review their settings on what content is shown publicly, they said.

Facebook’s search engine is an impressive first effort, but like other recent entrants, it has a long way to go before you can expect to rely on it. Just ask Siri. If she’ll understand you, that is.

Original post is First Impressions of Facebook’s New Graph Search by Tech Blog.

Several stories have posited ideas about why the show doesn’t bring out the heavy hitters like it used to. But part of the reason is likely in the name of the show itself — consumer electronics.

The fact is, top executives at companies don’t need big shows anymore to come together and strike deals. They can use Skype and Facetime and Google video chat. In other words, some of the same technologies showcased at CES can be used to skip CES. Of course, they could also just hop on their private jets to meet in person. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer did make a surprise appearance yesterday during a presentation by Qualcomm to tout the new Windows tablets.

As demonstrated by companies such as Apple and Google, the digital world is as much about software as it is hardware. A vast convention floor may not be the ideal setting to showcase the latest apps and operating system upgrades.

The idea of a consumer electronics show today is also so broad. The lack of specificity adds to the confusion and may hurt the show’s focus. The future of TV, mobile, personal computers, smartwatches and the inevitable 2015 ”Back to the Future”-style hovercrafts are all lumped together at CES. Smaller, more focused conferences at other times during the year tend to bring out the CEOs. Apple, which has long avoided CES, typically dominates the news when it holds its events.

CES continues to grow in size and number of participants but increasingly shifts toward small startups and middle management, as Bloomberg TV’s Jon Erlichman notes. The size of the show actually makes getting business done more difficult, especially for easily recognizable CEOs who border on celebrity status.

And thanks to the wonders of technology, many of the biggest names in tech may not come back.

Original post is Are Consumer Electronics Killing the Consumer Electronics Show? by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

A Toshiba Excite Android tablet is shown at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Google’s Android software for mobile devices has opened up a wide lead in market share, but it hasn’t made the same inroads with a lucrative niche: businesspeople.

While Android is expected to grab 68 percent of the smartphone market this year, according to researcher IDC, only 22 percent of information workers say they want a smartphone based on Google’s software on the job, according to a survey of 9,766 people by Forrester Research. Here’s what the survey said:

• Apple — 26%
• Windows 8 — 20%
• I don’t plan to use a tablet for work — 17%
• Windows 7 or other Windows — 12%
• No preference/Don’t know — 11%
• Android — 11%
• Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook — 1%
• Blackberry Playbook — 1%
• Other — 1%

Why the disparity? Android has done very well with consumers, particularly more price-sensitive ones, Gillett said. Businesspeople can pay Apple’s prices for a premium product, and millions of them already own iPhones and other Apple products and aren’t likely to walk away from their investment, he said.

Those polled may have written off Android because their companies don’t support it beyond e-mail access. That’s because many chief information officers don’t like the fact that almost every model of Android phone uses a slightly different version of the software, which means more testing, security updates and support costs, according to Frank Gillett, a Forrester analyst.

“CIOs are worried that their employees will end up with malware that they’re not likely to get with iOS,” Gillett said. “Google is taking the approach of reacting to problems, while Microsoft and Apple are being more proactive.”

In tablets, Android has an even smaller share among the business crowd, despite its 42.7 percent share of the overall tablet market:

• Apple — 33%
• Android — 22%
• No plans to use  smartphone on corporate network —  16%
• No preference/Don’t know — 11%
• Windows — 10%
• Blackberry — 7%
• Other — 1%

Android’s poor showing is not for lack of trying. Dozens of Android tablets have come to market since the iPad was introduced in 2010. Even more notable is how poorly Android scored relative to Microsoft, which has been a no-show in the tablet market and hadn’t even begun selling its Surface tablet until October.

Original post is Android Is Red Hot, Except With the Business Crowd by Tech Blog.

World Conference on Internet Telecommunications in Dubai — Proportion of posts (Opinion Analysis) from 12/1/12 to 12/12/12

When it comes to Internet outrage, this was no SOPA.

For the past couple of weeks, Google and other Internet companies have protested a United Nations conference over concerns that a new treaty will lead to censorship of the Web. Despite their campaigns, they weren’t able to drum up the kind of widespread indignation that elevated the Stop Online Piracy Act to national prominence earlier this year, according to studies of online discussions commissioned by Bloomberg.com.

For the SOPA blackout on Jan. 18, as any proud netizen will recall, Google self-censored its logo, and Wikipedia obscured its encyclopedic entries. Other companies published blog posts opposing the proposed anti-piracy legislation. The gestures resulted in a firestorm that included 5.1 million Twitter messages during the week of the blackout, according to Topsy, a social-media research firm.

Compare that to the 65,300 tweets — containing terms related to the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai — posted during the first week or so of the UN event. Even SOPA, nearly a year after the protests, is getting more attention, with 87,073 tweets during the same time period, according to Topsy.

Discussions about the UN treaty were less polarizing because they are at a very early stage and don’t currently present a direct threat to tech companies, said Mike McGeary, a senior strategist for Engine Advocacy, a group that represents tech startups in Washington. The “naked alarmism” from some opponents was met with a “nonevent,” he said.

“It’s not like we’re looking down the barrel of a gun,” McGeary said. “SOPA was an instance where it was ‘an all hands on deck; we’ve got to do this; let me help you find your pitchforks and torches.’ There will be fewer of those.”

Online discussions have increased this week but not substantially. As of Wednesday, a total of about 100,000 English-language tweets referenced the UN event, according to Crimson Hexagon, another research firm. Early last week, the discussions were largely driven by Google and its executives, the research firm said. The conference ends today.

Google and Mozilla didn’t veer far from the SOPA playbook in their protests of the conference. A coveted spot on Google.com’s home page below the search box linked to a page urging visitors to “pledge to support a free and open Internet,” and Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet” and a Google executive, wrote a blog post. Mozilla put up a post of its own calling UN governance a “bad idea.”

Google declined to comment on the effectiveness of its campaign. Harvey Anderson, Mozilla’s general counsel, said the campaign successfully affected the discussions in Dubai.

“Mozilla joined a coalition of organizations from around the world who want citizens to have a say in the future of the Web,” Anderson said in an e-mailed statement. “Our shared campaign put a spotlight on the ITU and its proceedings. As a result, the debate has changed and a growing number of member states now stand behind the notion that the ITU is not the right place for Internet governance.”

The Internet giants did win a partial victory as several major nations, including the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, declined to sign the treaty, which would allow governments the right to access Internet infrastructure and block spam.

“We stand with the countries who refuse to sign this treaty and also with the millions of voices who have joined us to support a free and open web,” Google said in a statement.

Original post is UN Internet Conference: The SOPA That Wasn’t by Tech Blog.

Courtesy Google Inc.

The listing for Google Maps in Apple's App Store contains a plug for the San Francisco Italian restaurant Delfina.

When the Google Maps app for the iPhone arrived last night, it was greeted with cheers by those who were literally lost without it. But perhaps no one was more excited about the new application than the staff of an Italian restaurant in San Francisco.

Featured prominently in the listing for Google Maps in Apple’s App Store and on Google’s website is Delfina, the only restaurant shown in the promotional materials. The listing displays its 27/30 rating from Google’s Zagat review.

“Seeing us in the App Store this morning was a great surprise,” Ashley Bellview, a spokeswoman for Delfina, wrote in an e-mail. Google had sought the restaurant’s permission to include it, without explicitly saying what the promotion would be, she said.

Located in the city’s hipster-friendly Mission District, Delfina and its pizzeria next door are popular among the tech crowd. The two places combined have more than 2,900 reviews on Yelp and more than 8,400 check-ins on Foursquare. Craig and Annie Stoll opened Delfina 14 years ago near the height of the dot-com bubble.

“We feed a lot of the bay area tech world,” Bellview wrote.

And now, Google Maps may be feeding it some new business.

Original post is Nice Location: Italian Restaurant Promoted on Google Maps App by Tech Blog.

Courtesy of Barnes & Noble

The Nook HD competes with the Kindle Fire HD, Nexus 7 and iPad mini.

In the tablet wars, Barnes & Noble is the scrappy underdog. Lacking the development resources, vast content stores and marketing muscle of deep-pocketed rivals like Apple and Amazon, it still somehow manages to remain competitive.

The latest example is the new Nook HD, B&N’s entry into an increasingly crowded market of similarly sized compact color devices that includes Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD, Google’s Nexus 7 and Apple’s somewhat larger iPad mini. Measured against them, the Nook doesn’t excel, but does at least hold its own.

Its biggest asset is its display, which is a pleasure to behold. The 7-inch-diagonal screen has a resolution of 1440 by 900 pixels, putting it first in its class. E-book text was sharp and crisp, while the movie “The Dark Knight,” with its deep blacks, was appropriately creepy.

At 11.1 ounces, the Nook is also lighter than either the Kindle or Nexus 7 — and nearly as light as the iPad mini. Its starting price, $199, matches those of the Nexus and the ad-supported version of the Kindle, and is $130 cheaper than the iPad mini.

Barnes & Noble has also improved the user interface, making it easy to create new accounts and set parental controls so family members can share a device without worrying that the kids might access unsuitable content. B&N says the Nook HD delivers up to nine hours of video or 10.5 hours of reading between charges; I found the battery life decent if not spectacular, depending on what I was doing and whether I had the Wi-Fi on or off.

But the Nook HD has a significant set of shortcomings as well.

Unlike the other contenders in this class, there’s no camera, front or back, so forget about using it for Skype. The base model also comes with only 8 gigabytes of storage, less than the others (though you can expand it at extra cost using its SD storage slot). And while its book selection is very good, Barnes & Noble is only just starting to build out its stores for movies and TV shows. Music? Forget about it.

Apps are another weakness. The Nook HD, like the Kindle Fire HD, runs a tweaked version of Google’s Android operating system. But also like the Kindle, you can’t install garden-variety Android apps on it.

Instead, you’re limited to ones that are approved by B&N and available only through the on-board store. It’s got some of the biggies — Netflix, Angry Birds, Evernote — but is lacking the depth and richness of Apple’s ecosystem, or even Google’s library of blown-up smartphone apps.

In short, the Nook HD has a beautiful screen, but not many other compelling reasons to choose it over the competition. Unless, that is, you like rooting for the underdog.

Then again, don’t we all?

Original post is Nook HD Hangs In as Tablet Wars Grow Hotter: Rich Jaroslovsky by Tech Blog.

Matt Riese is looking for a job at a technology company. His resume includes crab fisherman and maker of a hovercraft that looks like the car from “Back to the Future.”

His aquatic vehicle, designed to look like a DeLorean with its silver body and gull-wing doors that were so awesome in the 1980s, is nearly finished. Riese, 29, is making some last-minute adjustments to the craft’s mechanism, which pushes down air to keep the contraption floating above water. The San Francisco resident wants to take it out tonight during the second game of the World Series between the Giants and the Detroit Tigers, but he’s not sure it will be ready.

(Update: Reise wasn’t able to finish the hovercraft in time for last night’s game. He hopes to take it for a spin if the series returns to San Francisco next week, but because the Giants have won both games so far, that’s no certainty.)

Giants fans may recognize the vehicle from appearances on television earlier this year when Riese took it for a spin in McCovey Cove, the area behind AT&T Park where people in kayaks try to catch home-run balls. Cameras had caught Riese and his hovercraft, made out of Styrofoam and fiberglass, stalling and taking on water. Making something that withstands saltwater has proven to be difficult, but he wants to be out there to support his favorite team.

One of Riese’s motivations for building the hovercraft was to get his friends on the stadium’s Jumbotron, but by the time he finished, they were “busy having kids and getting married and stuff,” he said in an interview. While studying political science for his master’s degree from San Francisco State University, Riese started working on this project as part of a film he planned to shoot.

“I just wanted to do something big, something that would be kind of unbelievable,” Riese said. “It was just going to be a prop in this movie I wanted to make. It was like a surrealistic version of the end of my college career.”

In June 2010, he posted his plan for a hovercraft, along with a video of the prototype, on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. He raised $5,644. For Riese, the project wasn’t completely radical, considering his dad used to build cars from scratch. But not all of his friends and family could understand Riese’s ambitions.

“A lot of people don’t know what a hovercraft is,” he said. “My sister thought I was trying to build a spaceship.”

Crab fishing pays well, as he learned a year ago, but it’s not a pleasant life, Riese said. Google would be a nice place to work, he said. The company is developing self-driving cars, but Riese said he’s not particularly interested in building another vehicle. He expected the hovercraft project to take three months. Instead, it took two years.

“It’s really stressful making stuff like this because you never know if it’s going to work or when it’s going to work,” he said. “Now, I’m looking for a real job.”

Original post is Fisherman Builds DeLorean-Like Hovercraft, Hopes for Job at Google by Tech Blog.