Currently browsing Posts Tagged “google”

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International Google Voice Users Beware: Don’t Upgrade!

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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If you are an international Google Voice user then beware of clicking the little “upgrade your account” button from within Google Voice. Doing so may render your ability to access the Google Voice web site obsolete.

If you’re not in the US and you want to add credit to your account, make sure that you DON’T CLICK the “Upgrade your account” button from Google Voice. This feature is only useful if you are in the US, since it lets you get a Google Voice number. Unfortunately, if you click on that button and you’re not in the US, you’ll no longer be able to buy credit.

There does not appear to be an easy way to downgrade your account once you have opted for the upgrade. The Google Operating System article does mention the upgrade may be cancelled by using a U.S. based web proxy server but that is a little cumbersome for the average non-techie internet user.

All is not totally lost however. Although the Google Voice web site itself becomes inaccessible, phone calls initiated from within Gmail still appear to function. Hopefully Google will fix this and simply hide the “upgrade your account” button from international users. Doing so will create less confusion and not cause users to inadvertently prohibit access to their own accounts.

YouTube Content Reviewers Require Professional Psychological Assistance

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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Apparently the idea of being able to sit on ones fat ass and ostensibly get paid to “surf porn” for YouTube is not the dream job that it’s all cracked up to be:

“You have 20-year-old kids who get hired to do content review, and who get excited because they think they are going to see adult porn,” said Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer at MySpace. “They have no idea that some of the despicable and illegal images they will see can haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

What is it that is so despicable about the imagery submitted to YouTube? Our always-connected culture has turned to uploading photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse, twisted forms of pornography (although “twisted” is quite subjective) and intense bullying. Videos containing this content are flagged, which is where the reviewers come in to play. They attempt to determine whether the material is safe for public consumption on Google’s flagship video sharing site.

Being constantly bombarded with such horrific imagery is taking its toll on the content screening team members, who are increasingly turning to professional psychological assistance to help them deal with problems associated with the evil content they are subjected to daily.

One major outsourcing firm with staff in the Philippines was aware of the risks of this type of work and hired a local psychologist to assess how it was affecting its 500 content moderators. The psychologist, Patricia M. Laperal of Behavioral Dynamics, said she had developed a screening test so the company could evaluate potential employees, and helped its supervisors identify signals that the work was taking a toll on employees.

Ms. Laperal also reached some unsettling conclusions in her interviews with content moderators. She said they were likely to become depressed or angry, have trouble forming relationships and suffer from decreased sexual appetites. Small percentages said they had reacted to unpleasant images by vomiting or crying.

It sure sounds like working as a content reviewer is not the glamorous job you might think it to be. While some folks are sure to be more sensitive to the imagery, as a whole it appears to be pretty tough to be constantly subjected to malicious content.

With video sharing being so pervasive young folks have this idea that all they need to do to become famous on the internets is create the next greatest viral video. A small percentage of folks appear to be taking that to the extreme, using the opportunity to take advantage of people.

If you believe that your ticket to stardom is hurting someone on a video submitted to YouTube then you are sadly mistaken – do something more constructive with your time and – here’s a novel idea – work for the fame.

Jackasses at NTP Sue Google, Apple and Others for Email Patent Infringement

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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Those jackasses at patent holding company NTP once again have opted to use the courtroom to attempt to generate revenue rather than innovating in the technology space. This time they are suing Google, Apple, HTC, LG, Microsoft and Motorola for allegedly violating eight of their patents covering wireless email delivery.

In 2001, NTP filed a similar suit against Research In Motion, and in 2006, the suit was dismissed after RIM paid $612 million in a settlement. As a result of that arrangement, RIM is not named in the new suit, nor is Nokia — the world’s largest smartphone maker — since both companies have licensing agreements with the patent company.

I find the timing quite interesting. The NTP vs. RIM lawsuit concluded in 2006, yet it took NTP four additional years before deciding to sue these companies. Here in 2010 Apple and HTC own the smartphone market with their iPhone and Android products respectively. Could this suit have anything to do with the extreme popularity of those devices?

Surely there is a relationship otherwise, for example, why not sue Apple upon the release of the first iPhone since its email capabilities have virtually remained the same?

Either way, patent holding companies like NTP – companies which purchase patents rather than innovating themselves – which do not produce any types of products but opt to use the courts for profit only end up hurting the technology sector as a whole. As long as there are greedy bastards like NTP running around suing companies on baseless grounds then many corporations will be afraid to take risks for fear of being in the crosshairs of some pointless, faceless, product-less lawsuit machine.

Rumor: Google to Take On Facebook With “Google Me”

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Articles, Features

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The internets is abuzz this morning after Kevin Rose dropped a potential bombshell rumor on twitter. According to Rose, Google is positioned to enter the social networking space very soon to compete against Facebook with a new service potentially called “Google Me.”

Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch facebook competitor very soon “Google Me”, very credible source

For those who do not know, Kevin Rose is the founder of popular social news site digg. He has a somewhat spotty track record when it comes to rumors, so it may be worth taking his tweet with a grain of salt even though the idea may initially appear to be plausible.

While many would argue that Google is already competing in the social networking space with Orkut, the reality of the situation is not quite so black-and-white. Unlike Facebook, Orkut is not very popular in the United States, mostly having been adopted by South American internet users for whatever reason. A lot of the interactivity on Orkut is overrun by “brazilian mobs” on a frequent basis, causing people to feel uncomfortable with the service. The somewhat lawlessness of Orkut generally scares people away, in addition to the lack of truly compelling, unique features.

If Google really is launching a home-grown social network – Google Me – then it will be quite interesting to see how they pull it off. Would such an application make use features seen in other already-released Google products, such as Gmail, Google Profiles Wave, Buzz and Picasa?

What I would expect, and even hope for, is to see Google marry its many disparate services in to a single, unified social networking application. Rather than having yet another inbox – like on Facebook – integrate Gmail for such functionality. Use Buzz for the activity streams, synonymous with the Facebook news feed, offering both posting and mere reading. Wave could be adopted to be similar to groups while Picasa could be used for sharing photos. Google Profiles could be the very foundation for building a profile on Google Me. Google already has the making of the fundamental social networking building blocks but has not coupled the features into one application.

If packaged together in a unified, simplistic, intuitive interface these seemingly distinct applications could be forged in to one and work together as a true social networking platform similar to Facebook.

“Google Me” is an intriguing idea, and if executed correctly could be a very cool product. I look forward to this rumor turning out to be true. If it is true, expect the times to be quite interesting, especially if Google has been courting online social game companies like Zynga whose relationship with Facebook is on the verge of disaster as these companies seek less reliance on Facebook.

Are you interested in the prospect of yet another social networking site?

Google Voice for everyone

Posted by Rich Chuckrey in Shorts

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Google Voice, known previously as GrandCentral, has finally gone live and is accepting sign-ups, but with one caveat: Google Voice is still limited to folks in the USA.

Google Voice Product Managers, Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet:

Over the past year, we’ve introduced a mobile web app, an integrated voicemail player in Gmail, the ability to use Google Voice with your existing number and more. Over a million of you are now actively using Google Voice, and many of the features released over the past year (like SMS to email and our Chrome extension) came as a result of your suggestions, so thanks!

Google Voice is just a great straightforward move by Google that plugs in yet another valuable piece to their unified communications suite. It’s interesting as well to note that in Google’s infographic , Google Voice shows up as a milestone separate from and ‘following’ a VoIP milestone. What’s the message there?

Google Defeats Viacom in Landmark Lawsuit

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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In a pleasant surprised, federal Judge Louis Stanton ruled in favor of Google in the landmark $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit Viacom had brought against the company.

The judge granted Google’s motion for summary judgment, saying that the company was shielded from Viacom’s copyright claims by “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law generally protects user-generated sites from liability for copyrighted material uploaded by users as long as the operator of the site takes down the material when notified by its rightful owner that it was uploaded without permission.

The ruling dismisses the 3 year old case, awarding summary judgement to Google. In his ruling, Judge Stanton stated the YouTube owner performed the required actions Congress had intended when enacting the DMCA. The “safe harbor” provisions were included in the law specifically for situations like this.

TechDirt has one of the more comprehensive write-ups about the ruling, so if you are itching for more details then head on over to their coverage. Bottom line: this is good news and a huge victory for fair use and the DMCA safe harbor provisions. I do not feel for Viacom whatsoever and believe they were doomed from the start, deserving to lose this lawsuit.

Google Docs adds OCR, converts images and PDFs to text

Posted by Rich Chuckrey in Shorts

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Jay Hathaway from DOWNLOADSQUAD:

Google Docs continues to make the case for dumping your desktop work apps, this time with a useful new text recognition feature that converts PDFs or images into plain, editable text. This new OCR feature — that’s optical character recognition — is quite accurate, and worked pretty well on some old college textbooks scans I had laying around on my hard drive.

Google just simply will not relent in their pursuit of taking over office productivity via the web. This new OCR gem is not just another nice-to-have option you might find lurking around the Google Labs. This is nothing shy of a must-have office productivity power tool. How about Scanning, forwarding, storing and manipulating all that paper in your filing cabinets? Or those office policy documents from pre-Commodore 64 era that you are looking to upgrade the letterhead on?

Well now is your chance.

Introducing the Google Command Line Tool

Posted by Rich Chuckrey in Shorts

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Google has taken yet another bold step in opening up their services with GoogleCL.

GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs.

Not quite sure if GoogleCL streamlines Google services for the novice user, but it certainly brings significant advantages to the intermediate and advanced folks.

Here are some example scripts from Google Code:

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Google Chrome Offers Extension Sync

Posted by Scott Jarkoff in Shorts

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Not content to offer mere bookmark, preferences and theme synchronization between browsers, Google Chrome has upped the ante by now offering to sync installed extensions as well:

Extension sync has landed in the Google Chrome dev channel build.

It’s not enabled by default, so you won’t see it in your sync options menu unless you activate the feature via a command line switch. –enable-sync-extensions –sync-url=https://clients4.google.com/chrome-sync/dev turns it on.

Sync in and of itself is a pretty standard feature, as most browsers offer some form of synchronization through the use of third-party plug-ins or extensions. However, adding extension sync is pretty killer because there is no need to remember to download, install and configure an extension on multiple computers – do it once and its taken care of everywhere else you use that same browser.

I have been sold on Google Chrome for quite some time now, having migrated away from Firefox on OS X. I find the latter to be bloated, slow and largely unresponsive compared to Chrome, which feels lightweight and speedy. Chrome does everything I need it to do, and just as good, if not better, than Firefox.

Plus Chrome has the one feature I adore the most – a combination search and address bar. No need for the multiple input boxes, one for the address bar and one for search, like what Firefox and IE offer. Chrome does it better. Period.

10 Websites To Bury BP With

Posted by Haslina Ali in Articles, Features

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In case you’ve been living under a rock or in an alternate universe, BP plc has screwed up royally (again, but we’ll get to that later) due to the explosion of their oil rig, the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico causing the unrestricted release of thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf. Sadly, eleven people died in the tragedy.

Also in case you thought that the Gulf of Mexico is in Mexico and thusly is of no concern to you, it’s not. Well, it is, but it’s also partially in the good old USA. Specifically, it’s off the coast of Florida and Louisiana. Of course, since it’s in USA waters, the result is a global public uproar placing BP under the intense scrutiny of the global media and population. Everyone in the world thinks that BP has screwed them over and now feels that BP owes them something, meaning everyone has BP under a magnifying glass.

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