In Google’s Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Thursday, August 23, 2012

In Google’s Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — At Google, data is king. Now the company is using data to figure out if it can anoint a few queens.

The company hopes its famous algorithms can solve one of the most vexing problems facing Silicon Valley: how to recruit and retain more women. Google has generally been considered a place where women have thrived, but it wants to figure out how to compete even more vigorously for the relatively few women working in technology.

Executives had been concerned that too many women dropped out in the interviewing process or were not promoted at the same rate as men, so they created algorithms to pinpoint exactly when the company lost women and to figure out how to keep them. Simple steps like making sure prospective hires meet other women during their interviews and extending maternity leaves seem to be producing results — at least among the rank and file.

Still, senior women at the company are losing ground. Since Larry Page became chief executive and reorganized Google last year, women have been pushed out of his inner circle and passed over for promotions. They include Marissa Mayer, who left last month to run Yahoo after being sidelined at Google.

“There was a point at Google when the cadre of women leadership was pretty strong,” said a former Google executive who would speak only anonymously to preserve business relationships. “That has changed.”

The valley’s longtime image as unwelcoming to women became a topic of conversation recently when Ellen Pao, a junior partner in the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, filed a sexual discrimination suit against her employer. And it persists even though more women than ever are leading or in top positions at technology companies — including Yahoo, I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and Facebook.

Ms. Mayer, 37, was the first woman to be an engineer at Google and ran its most profitable business, search, for years. But in 2010, she was given a new assignment that many at Google considered a demotion, and then Mr. Page removed her from his committee of close advisers.

That committee shrank from about 15 people, four of whom were women, under Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s previous chief executive, to 11 with just one woman, under Mr. Page.

Also removed from the L Team, for Larry Page, were Rachel Whetstone, who oversees communications, and Shona Brown, who oversaw business operations and now leads Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, a lower-profile job. Only one woman remains — Susan Wojcicki, who oversees advertising. Several men were also removed in the shuffle.

Of the seven people Mr. Page appointed to lead product areas when he reorganized the company last year, just one, Ms. Wojcicki, was a woman.

People familiar with Mr. Page’s management style and the company’s reorganization said gender played no role in his decisions.

“Larry focused on certain products, and the people who happened to lead those products and became his direct reports were men,” said Laszlo Bock, who oversees people operations at Google.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Google Plans to Buy Frommer's Travel Guides

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Google Plans to Buy Frommer's Travel Guides

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SAN FRANCISCO - Google made another foray into producing original content Monday when it announced its plans to buy the Frommer's brand of travel guides from John Wiley & Sons to augment its local and travel search results.

Google will pay about $23 million for the brand, according to a person close to the deal who was not authorized to speak publicly about the terms. The companies declined to comment on the purchase price. It is a small acquisition for Google, but important for several of Google's up-and-coming businesses.

The deal shows how crucial a business local search and reviews are for Google. It is also the latest evidence that Google is trying to transform itself into a media company - making its mission not just to show the most relevant links from around the Web, but to produce that information as well.

"In certain key areas now, they've seen the value of having content and how important it is to consumers," said Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence, who studies local online media. "Frommer's is even more content-rich" than previous acquisitions by Google, he said.

Google has long insisted that it would not create content but simply be a conduit for it. In a 2010 interview, Eric E. Schmidt, who was Google's chief executive then but is now chairman, said the company was "careful to define a line where we don't cross into content" and wanted to remain a "neutral platform for content and applications."

But Google started chipping away at that line as early as 2008, when it started Knol, a Wikipedia competitor it has since closed. Google's YouTube division has acquired and financed producers of original video content, and last year Google bought Zagat, which publishes restaurant reviews.

Google is not the only technology company trying to expand its reach in this way. Yahoo, AOL, Amazon.com, Apple and Netflix have all shown signs of wanting to become media companies to varying degrees.

But Google is walking a tricky line, which antitrust regulators are watching closely. When it produces its own content, it competes with other Web sites instead of being just a neutral organizer of information. Search for what to do in Hawaii, for instance, and Google could show results from Frommer's ahead of TripAdvisor links.

"Google is perceived as this competitor that has the potential to favor its own search results," Mr. Sterling said. "That remains very much to be seen, but that's the narrative they continue to play into."

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Motorola to Cut 20% of Work Force, Part of Sweeping Change

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Monday, August 13, 2012

Motorola to Cut 20% of Work Force, Part of Sweeping Change

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Motorola Mobility, the ailing cellphone maker that Google bought in May, told employees Sunday that it would lay off 20 percent of its work force and close a third of its 94 offices worldwide.

The cuts are the first step in Google’s plan to reinvent Motorola, which has fallen far behind its biggest competitors, Apple and Samsung, and to shore up its Android mobile business and expand beyond search and software into the manufacture of hardware.

The turnaround effort will also be a referendum on the management of Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, whose boldest move has been the $12.5 billion acquisition.

Though Google bought Motorola partly because of its more than 17,000 patents, which can help defend against challenges to the Android operating system, it also planned to use Motorola to make its own, better smartphones and tablets.

One-third of the 4,000 jobs lost will be in the United States. The company plans to leave unprofitable markets, stop making low-end devices and focus on a few cellphones instead of dozens, said Dennis Woodside, Motorola’s new chief executive, in a rare interview.

“We’re excited about the smartphone business,” said Mr. Woodside, who previously led Google’s sales and operations for the Americas. “The Google business is built on a wired model, and as the world moves to a pretty much completely wireless model over time, it’s really going to be important for Google to understand everything about the mobile consumer.”

But some analysts wonder whether Google can succeed in the brutally competitive, low-margin cellphone business.

“Ninety percent of the profits in the smartphone space are going to Apple and Samsung, and everyone else from Motorola to RIM to LG to Nokia are picking up the scraps of that 10 percent,” said Charlie Kindel, a former manager at Microsoft who writes about the mobile industry. “There’s no real sign that’s changing anytime soon.”

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Factual’s Gil Elbaz Wants to Gather the Data Universe

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times (Business)

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Factual’s Gil Elbaz Wants to Gather the Data Universe

By QUENTIN HARDY

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. AT 7 years old, Gilad Elbaz wrote, “I want to be a rich mathematician and very smart.” That, he figured, would help him “discover things like time machines, robots and machines that can answer any question.”

In the 34 years since, Mr. Elbaz has accomplished big chunks of these goals. He has built Web-traversing software robots and answered some very big questions for Google, along the way becoming a millionaire several hundred times over.

His time-machine plans, however, have been ditched for something he finds more important: trying to identify every fact in the world, and to hold them all in a company he calls Factual.

“The world is one big data problem,” Mr. Elbaz says from his headquarters, a quiet office 14 floors above the Los Angeles Country Club. He is a slim, soft-spoken man who weaves in his chair when an idea excites him. “What if you could spot any error, as soon as you wrote it? Factual is definitely a new thing that will change business, and a valuable new tool for computing.”

In the booming world of Big Data, where once-unimaginably huge amounts of information are scoured for world-changing discoveries, Mr. Elbaz may be the most influential inventor and investor. Besides Factual, he has interests in 30 start-ups, including an incubator in San Francisco dedicated to Big Data. Factual’s headquarters, in a high-rise on the Avenue of the Stars, hosts seminars for a data community he hopes to foster in the Los Angeles area.

Mr. Elbaz also serves on the boards of the California Institute of Technology, his alma mater, and the X Prize Foundation, which offers cash prizes to teams that meet challenges in space flight, medicine and genomics. The company he sold to Google, Applied Semantics, is the basis of Google’s AdSense business, which brings Google close to $10 billion in revenue annually.

While valued for his investments and guidance, Mr. Elbaz remains relatively little-known. He is so self-effacing that he recently walked through a conference of 3,000 data scientists, recognized only by the staff members of one of his investments. He lives quietly with his wife, a former federal prosecutor, and his three children in a modest ranch house in West Hollywood. For fun, he plays basketball at a local sports club.

His mental and financial assets, he says, are like gifts he needs to deploy so the world works better.

“If all data was clear, a lot fewer people would subtract value from the world,” he says. “A lot more people would add value.”

Creating clear, reliable data could also make Factual a very big company.

“Gil is pretty far ahead of the rest of us, the one entrepreneur where it takes a few meetings before I really understand everything he is talking about,” says Ben Horowitz, a venture capitalist who backed Factual through his firm, Andreessen Horowitz. “Three years ago, he thought Factual was his biggest chance to change the world. Over time, the world has moved his way.”

Google, Oracle to Hold Last-minute Settlement Talks

Oracle and Google will hold another round of settlement talks as the trial date nears in their high-stakes court battle over Google's alleged misuse of Java in Android.

For more, click the link below:


http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/252495/google_oracle_to_hold_lastminute_settlement_talks.html#tk.nl_bdx_h_crawl

Google Faces Class-Action Lawsuits Over New Privacy Policy

Google faces consumer complaints in federal courts in New York and California that claim that its new privacy policy violates the company's earlier policies which promised that information provided by a user for one service would not be used by another service without the consumer's consent.

The Internet company is being charged in both lawsuits for violation of the Federal Wiretap Act, for wilful interception of communications and aggregation of personal information of its consumers for financial benefit, and the Stored Electronic Communications Act for exceeding its authorized access to consumer communications stored on its systems. Google is also charged with violation of the Computer Fraud Abuse Act, and other counts including state laws.

The plaintiffs in both suits seek to bring nationwide class action on behalf of holders of Google accounts and owners of Android devices from Aug. 19, 2004 to Feb. 29, 2012, who continued to maintain the Google accounts and own the devices after the new privacy policy came into effect on March 1 this year.

For more, click the link below:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/252332/google_faces_classaction_lawsuits_over_new_privacy_policy.html#tk.nl_bdx_h_crawl

Many Sites Chart a New Course as Google Expands Fees

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Many Sites Chart a New Course as Google Expands Fees

By QUENTIN HARDY

SAN FRANCISCO — When it comes to offering online maps to their users, some companies have been leaving Google Maps and setting out for less familiar territory.

In the seven years since it was introduced, Google’s offering of street maps, satellite photos and street-level views has become the dominant player in the world of online mapping, displacing earlier entrants like AOL’s MapQuest. According to comScore, 71 percent of the 91.7 million people in the United States who looked at maps online in February used Google Maps.

There are signs, however, that Google’s dominance is under assault — and the company’s own moves may have something to do with this.

Many sites incorporate Google Maps into their own pages, whether to pinpoint real estate listings or pothole problems. Google was already charging the biggest users of the service fees that could run into six figures a year. But last October it announced that it would start charging smaller Web sites when their users started generating an average of 25,000 map views a day over a quarter. Many independent Web developers, upon whom Google relies to make its products popular, rebelled at the change.

“If you are a site just looking to put a pizzeria on a map, it’s no big deal, but if you are trying to put a brand around your mapping, it’s a big deal,” said James Fee, chief evangelist at WeoGeo, which provides location data. “Google says it will affect a very small number of users, but I have heard it will touch 30 or 40 percent of people who really depend on maps for their business. It could cost you tens of thousands of dollars a month.”

In late February, Foursquare, the social media location service, said that on its Web site it would move from Google Maps to data from OpenStreetMap, a user-contributed map service that is created and managed much like Wikipedia. In a blog post, Foursquare said Google’s price increases had prompted the change.

Apple’s new version of its iPhoto application for the iPhone and the iPad also uses data from OpenStreetMap, though Apple uses many mapping sources, particularly Google, in its other products. Nestoria, a real estate search engine, also said it was leaving Google for OpenStreetMap because of the prices.

According to comScore, OpenStreetMap itself still has a minuscule amount of Web traffic. Google Maps had 65 million users in February, a 16 percent increase from a year earlier. MapQuest had 35 million, a 13 percent drop. Microsoft’s Bing Maps came in third with nine million users, an 18 percent gain.

Micros and Pinkberry initiate Rollout of Google Wallet

MICROS AND PINKBERRY INITIATE ROLLOUT OF GOOGLE WALLET

Innovative yogurt retailer partners with MICROS to implement Google Wallet, a mobile application allowing customers to pay using a smartphone, redeem coupons and receive discounts

Columbia, MD – March 19, 2012—MICROS Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:MCRS), a leading provider of information technology solutions for the hospitality and retail industries, is pleased to announce that it has partnered with global yogurt retailer, Pinkberry, to implement Google Wallet.  When used with MICROS POS, Google Wallet allows Pinkberry customers to tap their device on an NFC (Near Field Communications) reader to quickly make their purchase and simultaneously redeem coupons and receive discounts. Google Wallet is now live in 69 Pinkberry locations in the U.S. 

In addition to Google Wallet, MICROS’s other technology solutions that are installed at all of Pinkberry’s US locations  include the fully integrated MICROS point-of-sale solution and the MICROS PCWS 2010 state-of-the-art POS terminals. 

The implementation of Google Wallet is an example of how MICROS has adapted its solutions to support Pinkberry’s use of innovative technology to provide customers with exceptional service and offer instant savings and rewards.

“At the core of everything we do is our commitment to exceptional customer service,” said Tony DiCenzo, Sr. Vice President of IT, Pinkberry. “The rollout of Google Wallet underscores our goal of using innovative technology to enhance our customers’ experience. Now, with just a swipe of a smartphone, consumers can purchase Pinkberry products.”

“We are thrilled to have been selected as Pinkberry’s preferred POS technology partner and are greatly pleased to have watched Pinkberry expand and grow its concept so rapidly,” stated Ed Chapel, Senior Vice President of MICROS North America Distribution.  “MICROS understands Pinkberry’s need to provide superior service with highly efficient operations.  We have worked together to create solutions that will benefit both Pinkberry as an organization as well as its customer base.”

Google Wallet is currently available on the Nexus S from Sprint. To learn more, please visit:www.google.com/wallet.

Enthusiastic About Car Sharing? Your Insurer Isn’t

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Enthusiastic About Car Sharing? Your Insurer Isn’t

By RON LIEBER

At first glance, the idea of person-to-person car sharing appears to be the perfect solution to any number of problems.  

People with idle cars (and most cars are idle most of the time) can make some money by renting them out to others who need a car sometimes but not often enough to own one. At some point, the world would ultimately need fewer cars and places to park them. It feels greener, and sharing is polite and all that.  

But then the grown-ups show up, in the form of insurance companies. I called them this week in the wake of an announcement by RelayRides, a company with venture capital backing from both Google Ventures and General Motors, that it was taking its car-sharing service national.

And the grown-ups are not pleased. They want you to know that RelayRides insurance won’t be adequate in the event of a catastrophic accident and that your own insurance company may take away your insurance if it even hears that you are lending your car to someone in exchange for a few dollars an hour.

So anyone considering this sort of thing has to ask: Is the insurance industry overstating the risk of playing along with this cutting-edge idea, is RelayRides underestimating your exposure, or both?

RelayRides is one of several car-sharing services to arrive on the scene in recent years. Getaround is another start-up, as are JustShareIt and Wheelz, a company that the car-sharing giant Zipcar invested in last month.

They’re all part of a larger “collaborative consumption” movement that has captured the imagination of a growing number of civic-minded, Web-addicted people who want to both save some money and use a bit less of the world’s resources. This includes home-sharing services like Airbnb, office-sharing services like Loosecubes and general sharing sites like NeighborGoods and Rentabilities. 

Et Tu, Google?

The New York Times
Friday, March 02, 2012

Et Tu, Google? Android Apps Can Also Secretly Copy Photos 

By BRIAN X. CHEN and NICK BILTON

It's not just Apple. Photos are vulnerable on Android phones, too.

As Bits reported this week, developers who make applications for Apple iOS devices have access to a person's entire photo library as long as that person allows the app to use location data.

It turns out that Google, maker of the Android mobile operating system, takes it one step further. Android apps do not need permission to get a user's photos, and as long as an app has the right to go to the Internet, it can copy those photos to a remote server without any notice, according to developers and mobile security experts. It is not clear whether any apps that are available for Android devices are actually doing this.

The Apple and Android problems are a reminder of how hard it can be to ensure security on complex mobile devices that can run a vast array of apps. Android apps are required to alert users when they want to retrieve other kinds of personal data - like e-mail, address book contacts or a phone's location - so the lack of protection for photos came as a surprise to some experts.

"We can confirm that there is no special permission required for an app to read pictures," said Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer of Lookout, a company that makes Android security software. "This is based on Lookout's findings on all devices we've tested."

In response to questions, Google acknowledged this and said it would consider changing its approach.