Apple is yet again pursuing patent infringement claims against Samsung (and Samsung is counter-suing Apple too). The pair’s newest patent battle is happening in the US District Court of Northern California and it’s a similar lawsuit to the infringement case heard last year that resulted in a $1.05 billion verdict in favor of Apple. However, this time around Apple and Samsung are pursuing claims against the latest generation of products.
Last week, Apple added a footnote to a filing, saying it hoped to include Samsung’s Galaxy S4 in its infringement suit. Now, the company has filed a motion to include not only the S4 but also a wide array of Google services. According to Apple lawyers, the Google “Quick Search Box,” and the later Google Now function, infringes two Apple patents.
The Cupertino company went on to say that Samsung’s latest iterations of Google’s operating system infringe upon two patents—numbers 8,086,604 and 6,847,959—in ways that satisfied a Federal Circuit’s narrowed definitions of Apple’s claims. Both the ’604 and ’959 patents deal with selectively presenting information from a search to suit the user’s most relevant needs.
On the heels of the Syrian Electronic Army compromising a number of high-profile accounts—including those of the Associated Press, The Guardian, and The Onion—Twitter has introduced a two-factor authentication feature that should make such attacks more difficult. In a blog post today, Jim O’Leary of Twitter’s security team announced the release of “login verification,” an optional security measure that requires a verified phone number and e-mail address.
Twitter is a bit late to the two-factor authentication party. Word first spread that Twitter was working on a two-factor authentication scheme in February when the company advertised job openings for security engineers to develop “user-facing security features, such as multi-factor authentication and fraudulent login detection.” Google has offered two-factor authentication since February of 2011, and Facebook introduced two-step login approval in May of 2011.
Like Google’s two-factor authentication, Twitter’s login verification sends a code via SMS to be entered to confirm login. But unlike Google’s system, the code will be sent every time users sign into Twitter through its website. This is the case even if it’s from a computer or device that they’ve logged in from before. The phone has to be enrolled through Twitter’s existing SMS service first—you have to text a code to Twitter to verify the phone first, which may not work with some phone carriers. The relationship between phones and accounts is also strictly one-to-one: if you have a shared business account, you’re going to need to share a phone number too. If you have multiple accounts and only one phone number, then you can only secure a single account.
Users can swipe between files to see quick previews and download a copy for offline viewing. The update also includes a “scan” function, which uses the camera to snap photos of receipts and important documents and then converts them into PDFs. After you snap the photo, you can adjust the crop or select whether or not you want to leave it as a color document or convert it to black or white. Drive can also recognize the text in scanned documents with Optical Character Recognition, so you can search for keywords and phrases within those files.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gave up on its plan to sue piracy out of existence years ago. Instead of mass-copyright lawsuits, the group is embracing a mass-takedown strategy, sending notices to both infringing sites and the sites that link to them, such as Google. These notices are issued constantly and involve thousands of URLs that the RIAA wants taken down. It has become a giant-sized game of whack-a-mole and the record industry group is seriously tired of it.
The RIAA put a blog post up today complaining that it sent 20 million takedown notices to Google last year. The group has sent almost the same number to the infringing sites themselves. Nevertheless, pirated content keeps appearing in Google searches, often on the same websites. Brad Buckles, an RIAA VP, writes in today’s post:
Every day produces more results and there is no end in sight. Importantly, the targets of our notices don’t even pretend to be innovators constructing new and better ways to legally enjoy music—they have simply created business models that allow them to profit from giving someone else’s property away for free. So while 20 million might sound impressive, the problem we face with illegal downloading on the Internet is immeasurably larger. And that is just for music.
Buckles goes on to suggest that Google doesn’t do anything to punish pirate sites, even when it receives hundreds of notices about a site. He even discusses the idea that the RIAA needs to send a full URL, calling it a “controversial interpretation” of copyright law by a tech company.
Chrome 27 for the desktop arrived yesterday and today, Google updated Chrome for Android to version 27 as well. While the desktop update mostly focused on improved speed, the Android version actually includes a number of new features. The most important of these is probably the new fullscreen mode for phones. Just like in the iPhone app (or in the old stock Android browser), the toolbar will now disappear as you scroll down.
Also new in this version is a somewhat simplified search experience: searching from the omnibox, Google says, will “keep your search query visible in the omnibox, making it easier to edit, and show more on your search result page.”
The company has been experimenting with a similar feature in the desktop version of Chrome. It essentially turns the omnibox into the Google.com search form instead of switching to the URL for your search and then replicating the search interface it on the search results page. On the desktop, this always takes me for a loop, but given the space constraints on a smaller screen, this will probably allow for a few more lines of search results to show without the need to scroll down.
Other new features in this update include support for client-side certificates (something that’s often needed to connect to enterprise intranets) and tab history support for tablets (so you can use a long press on the back button to bring up your tab history.
Google Checkout is being sunsetted as the company focuses on shaping Google Wallet into a viable PayPal rival. Google Commerce announced today that Google Checkouts will be retired on November 20.
Google suggests that merchants who do not have their own payment processing transition to Braintree, Shopify or Freshbooks, which are offering discounted rates for Google Checkout users. U.S. merchants who do have their own payment processing can apply for Google Wallet Instant Buy. Developers selling through Google properties will automatically transition to the Google Wallet Merchant Center in the next few weeks.
News of Google Checkout’s demise comes a week after several major updates to Google Wallet, all designed to attack PayPal’s dominance from different angles by leveraging several of Google’s properties.
These include storing payment credentials in Chrome to make it easier for consumers to checkout and reduce shopping cart abandonment; making Google Wallet available in the desktop version of Gmail; the Instant Buy API, which is designed to streamline transactions for merchants selling physical goods and services; and the Wallet Objects API for merchants offering loyalty programs.
The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section.
Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool.
To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it seamless:
Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, it’s easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare.
The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The auto hashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun.
We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complementary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of us who have tried Google+ already have our minds made up as to whether it’s useful or not. It’s the stragglers who haven’t seen it from the beginning that need to be wowed.
There is a misperception about the new Google Cloud Platform that the company put into general availability last week at Google I/O. It’s not a brand new platform. It’s what Google has used for years. It is Google’s foundation. It is what makes Google, Google. And now it’s open for the first time to developers and businesses.
Google Platform is new in the sense that anyone can now use it. But until now only a relative few number of people have had access to the platform.
Google Cloud Platform officially launched at last year’s Google I/O. So it still has a lot of hype that comes with a new Google service, especially at an event like Google I/O. It does not have the full set of features that comes with Amazon Web Services (AWS). A customer can get a much deeper service level agreement (SLA) from Windows Azure. Customers can use a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) like Openshift and leverage the Red Hat infrastructure. OpenStack is an option for companies that want to build out their own open cloud environment. Go that route and a customer has a host of vendors to choose from. Red Hat, IBM and HP are just a few to choose from for any number of software and services.
The Power Is In The Network
But there is one thing in particular that sets the Google Cloud Platform apart. And that’s the network that connects the company’s data centers so questions can be answered in milliseconds. It’s what makes it possible for Google to offer 3D maps, translation APIs and Google Glass.
“It is blazing fast,” said Will Shulman, co-founder of MongoLab about the network in a panel at Google I/O about distributed databases. “The other thing – it has a private distributed backbone between all the data centers.You are talking over Google’s backbone, not over the Internet.”
The network speed makes a difference in a few ways. The compute and storage in Google Compute Engine are separated but for the user it appears as if it is all together because it is so fast. It’s like having one giant, programmable super computer that in reality is distributed across thousands of servers.
The network speed also helps make a difference in cost. With the speed, comes the ability to process more data in less time.
Google factors its network into its pricing, much like cloud provider ProfitBricks does. ProfitBricks uses InfniBand, which offers more bandwidth capably than Google’s 10 gigabyte network. Regardless, Google’s fiber network and data center optimization provides the opportunity to offer sub-hour pricing, down to the minute.
On the Google platform, a customer can double the cores and do a data job in 30 minutes at the cost that it would normally take an hour to do.
Google views data centers as living things. They are not islands but exist in a connected world, connected to devices, other services and other data centers.
It’s this view that shows why Google has to be so considerate of its own network. The world is becoming a vast data fabric. But networking is expensive. Compute and storage costs continue to decrease but networking has not gone down at the same pace as CPU and storage, said Google Product Maanger Amit Argawal in a presentation at the Open Network Summit last June.
What it costs to connect a 10 gigabyte pipe between two regions in the United States is different from connecting different countries in Asia, where the markets are emerging fastest, In the video, Argawal says in the video. Devices are ubiquitous and disposable. Someone can lose a smartphone, buy a new one and be back up in a half-hour. The data is in the cloud not on the device. The services in turn are populating across the network. Put together it’s a virtuous circle. The network needs to be fast and interactive. If not, user engagement will slow. High availability needs to be built into all layers of the stack.
Why Developers Play A Crucial Role
To allay networking and other costs, Google has to continually keep its operations running optimally. The Internet business model means services have to be free or for a small fee. That means Google has to make sure developers are building apps on services that will help Google extend its advertising products and low-cost cost subscription services such as Google Apps.
And that’s why Google Cloud Platform plays an important role in attracting more developers, who in turn help extend Google’s properties.
For example, Google talked at Google I/O about how it offers tools to help developers integrate into the Google back-end. Google Maps, Chrome. Android and BigQuery all have these integrations. Google Glass will get integrated but for now it is not the number one focus.
AWS has a rich developer ecosystem and has a deep selection of services to offer. But Amazon is not an identity and services provider like Google is. Google has more data to offer developers so that will also be a strong selling point going forward for the company with developers.
For Cloudant, a distributed database company, it’s the fact that there is now another community outside AWS that it can tap. “There are a large and growing number of developers on Google,” said Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Mike Miller, who also sat on the distributed database panel.
Google App Engine symbolizes some of the differences that may attract developers. Google announced at Google I/O that PHP would be offered on Google AppEngine. This will make Google available to the scores of web developers who have built their web sites with the programming language. In March Google acquired Taleria, showing its continued emphasis on building out support for dynamic programming languages and need for systems that scale out efficiently. From Frederic Lardinois post about the acquisition:
The company claimed that its technology allowed developers to “handle more users with fewer boxes, without changing a line of code.” Talaria also claimed its ” server lets you keep your favorite high-productivity languages, but with the scalability and performance you’d expect from a compiled language.”
And then there is the ease of use that Google is trying to offer with Google App Engine. These include back-end as a service tools and more management features that allow developers to focus more on the code then the back-end.
That’s important for companies such as OrangeScape, a “visual PaaS,” for non-developers to build apps. CEO Suresh Sambandam said that means the company can keep its IT team relatively tight.
Google has a network that makes it arguably one of the largest carriers in the world. But it’s the cost of these data centers that will be its biggest challenge going forward. It’s almost as if Google had to open its infrastructure to extend its distributed network as efficiently as possible while continually attracting developers to scale its business model.
