Monday, September 1, 2008

Microsoft Buys Ciao.Com for a Better Search


Microsoft has agreed to buy Greenfield Online, owner of popular European price comparison website ciao.com, for about $486 million to boost its Internet search and e-commerce business in Europe.

Microsoft, whose $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo earlier this year failed after a long battle, said on Friday the acquisition -- the latest in a series -- should help it build a more consumer-friendly, results-oriented search engine.

"We call it 'instant answers'," said John Mangelaars, head of Microsoft's consumer and online business in Europe. "I hope it's getting very clear that we've very serious about EMEA," he added, speaking to Reuters by telephone.

Internet search is dominated by Google, which has 62 percent of the global search market and 79 percent in Europe, according to Web usage tracker ComScore.

Microsoft has a 2 percent market share in Europe and 9 percent worldwide, behind both Google and Yahoo. In Europe, Microsoft is also outranked by online auction site eBay and Russia's Yandex.

But Mangelaars said buying ciao.com was an important step in Microsoft's attempt to distinguish itself by providing search results more useful to consumers, particularly shoppers, than those thrown up by a Google search.

For example, results of a Microsoft search for a particular camera model could include which prices were available from which retailers, and maps of where those retailers were, rather than just links to the manufacturer's and retailers' websites.

The acquisition follows those of Norwegian enterprise search company Fast for about $1.2 billion early this year and shopping-and-auction site jellyfish.com for an undisclosed sum last year.

Getting Sirius About Hurricane Gustav

I admit it. I am obsessed with Hurricane Gustav. I clearly remember the destruction and the loss of life of a few years ago. The destruction was not just physical. Families were torn apart, uprooted and many were further victimized following the largest natural disaster in U.S. history. No matter what you may feel about an individual's choice to live there, children who had no choice died.

Saturday, Sirius XM (SIRI) issued a press release that they had activated the emergency channels on both Sirius 184 and XM 247. I thought an act of this magnitude was important enough to warrant an immediate posting of the company’s press release, as the potential to perhaps not only help save lives but to ease the burden of those being evacuated existed.

As I jumped into my car Sunday night to head out to the store, I decided to tune my own receiver to Sirius 184 to see exactly how satellite radio might benefit people, including myself and my family, in the event of an emergency.

I expected to hear some generic news regarding the hurricane; its intensity, its path, etc. What I found was much, much more. Being broadcast are actual shelter locations such as schools by names and addresses, as well as telephone numbers for those in need of evacuation assistance and local curfew information. Tips for not only riding out the storm but checklists of items to pack were also offered. Airport information was made available for Louisiana and Alabama as well. This information was given out for several states in the affected area, in a clear and precise manner.

Of course detailed weather information is being given along with broadcasts from government officials, including interstate contraflow information by highway number. I know they have local radio stations there, yet the potential exists that those radio stations may be unable to broadcast very soon or that the evacuees will be out of range to pick up their signals.

I also heard a Sirius commercial. It seems that any and all radios have been activated, and Sirius is reaching out to those people to subscribe. I know that no channels work including channel 184 if the subscription has not been activated. The commercial tells me that Sirius XM has done the right thing by activating this channel on all radios, subscribed or not.

I imagined myself and my family being stuck in 14 hours of traffic as we fled for our lives and immediately realized the benefit that satellite radio provides in these situations. Chances are I would have checked up on the current situation when the family took a break at a rest stop, and we would have listened to the commercial free music or comedy channels, just to keep upbeat. I’ve yet to see an iPod do any of this.

Ancient Urban Communities Discovered in the Amazon

Anthropologists from Brazil and the US have uncovered Amazonian settlements in Brazil dating from about 1250 to 1650, before European colonists came in. The findings, reported in the journal Science, show that these towns were more developed than previously thought, making up actual networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organized around a central plaza.

The urban communities were discovered at the headwaters of the Xingu River, in an area previously buried beneath the dense foliage in what is now Xingu National Park. This means that the Amazon rainforest, previously thought of as pristine, was actually heavily influenced by human activities.

The team was led by anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida, whose team collaborated tightly with the local Kuikuro people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. They went to uncover 28 towns, villages and hamlets that may have supported as many as 50,000 people within roughly 7,700 square miles of forest. Each road was pointing north-east to south-west in order to keep with the mid-year summer solstice. Researchers also found a series of dams and artificial ponds which the dwellers used for fish farming.

The researchers also discovered signs of farming, wetland management and fish farms in the ancient settlements that are now almost completely covered by rainforest. The remains are hardly visible, but they could be identified by members of the Kuikuro tribe, who apparently are the direct descendants of those ancient tribes. The scientists used both satellite imagery and GPS navigation in order to uncover the towns, which used to be surrounded by large walls, similar to the ones encountered in medieval European and ancient Greek towns.

The tribes living in the newly found settlements, which date back to before the first Europeans arrived in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon in the 15th Century, don’t seem to be as sophisticated as well-known cultures like the Maya to the north, but still, their culture was much more complex that anthropologists had believed.

Heckenberger and his colleagues first announced the discovery of the settlements in a 2003 Science paper.

Farewell, Yahoo Mash

They say that things go wrong because people build walls instead of brigdes. Still, what happens when there are too many bridges to choose from? Recently, Yahoo has learned the answer to this question. And it did so the hard way.

With a “Yahoo 360” striving to keep afloat and a failed attempt to purchase Facebook - which, truth be told, would have been quite a feather in its cap - Yahoo has recently announced that, on September 29, it will be shutting down Yahoo Mash, a tool designed for social networking.

Having MySpace and Facebook as competitors in the field, Yahoo couldn’t get around to figuring out a way to offer users original features, the only thing that could help one make their mark in a saturated market.

MySpace and Facebook pride in the advantage of having initially offered people unprecedented incentives to sign-up: the opportunity for bands to make their music known to the public and the fact that it first very much resembled a college directory, respectively.

Launched in September 2007, Yahoo Mash was a private beta-and has remained a private beta to this very day-whose most notable feature was that, instead of creating your own profile, you could create profiles for your friends and afterwards invite them to adopt, customize or update them to their liking. Unfortunately, many found this a bit too intrusive for their taste.

This failure is the second major one for Yahoo where social networking is concerned. In 2007, the company had to shut down “Mixd”, a social networking site which only lived to be a few months old.

Google Earth to license new satellite imagery

Google has agreed to license imagery for their mapping products from a satellite due to launch on September 4th. This new satellite can take detailed imagery for an area the size of New Mexico in one day. What does that mean? Well, you could get high resolution pan-sharpened imagery for the entire country in around 30 days. Impressive.

The level of detail will be approximately 50cm per pixel — that’s just under 20 inches. If you want to see what that looks like, take a look at this. Imagine having a Google Maps/Earth content that is this detailed, 100% complete and updated once a month — that’s powerful stuff.

“The GeoEye-1 satellite has the highest ground resolution color imagery available in the commercial marketplace and will produce high-quality imagery with a very accurate geolocation. It is our goal to display high-resolution imagery for as much of the world as possible, and GeoEye-1 will help further that goal.” — Kate Hurowitz (Google)

And for bragging rights, Google’s even got their logo on the side of the rocket as pictured above.

Internet traffic begins to bypass the U.S.

The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network's first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence--and conceivably military--consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. "Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge," Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. "We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us."

Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States.

"Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches."

But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. "It's no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs," said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. "You wouldn't want someone owning your roads either."

Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international Internet service providers.

This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which traffic between two cites in one country will flow through other nations. In January, when a cable was cut in the Mediterranean, Egyptian Internet traffic was nearly paralyzed because it was not being shared by local Internet service providers but instead was routed through European operators.

The issue was driven home this month when hackers attacked and immobilized several Georgian government Web sites during the country's fighting with Russia. Most of Georgia's access to the global network flowed through Russia and Turkey. A third route through an undersea cable linking Georgia to Bulgaria is scheduled for completion in September.

Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited to developing countries. The Japanese "are on a rampage to build out across India and China so they have alternative routes and so they don't have to route through the U.S."

Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet, added, "We discovered the Internet, but we couldn't keep it a secret." While the United States carried 70 percent of the world's Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent.

Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business.

That lack of investment mirrors a pattern that has taken place elsewhere in the high-technology industry, from semiconductors to personal computers.

The risk, Internet technologists say, is that upstarts like China and India are making larger investments in next-generation Internet technology that is likely to be crucial in determining the future of the network, with investment, innovation and profits going first to overseas companies.

"Whether it's a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand," said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Google's Internet evangelist and who, with Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early 1970s. "Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it once was? That wasn't helpful."

International networks that carry data into and out of the United States are still being expanded at a sharp rate, but the Internet infrastructure in many other regions of the world is growing even more quickly.

While there has been some concern over a looming Internet traffic jam because of the rise in Internet use worldwide, the congestion is generally not on the Internet's main trunk lines, but on neighborhood switches, routers and the wires into a house.

As Internet traffic moves offshore, it may complicate the task of American intelligence gathering agencies, but would not make Internet surveillance impossible.

"We're probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit harder," said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who said the United States had invested far too little in collecting intelligence via the Internet. "We've given terrorists a free ride in cyberspace," he said.

Others say the eclipse of the United States as the central point in cyberspace is one of many indicators that the world is becoming a more level playing field both economically and politically.

"This is one of many dimensions on which we'll have to adjust to a reduction in American ability to dictate terms of core interests of ours," said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. "We are, by comparison, militarily weaker, economically poorer and technologically less unique than we were then. We are still a very big player, but not in control."

China, for instance, surpassed the United States in the number of Internet users in June. Over all, Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the world's Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market research organization.

By contrast, there were about 237 million Internet users in North America and the growth has nearly peaked; penetration of the Internet in the region has reached about 71 percent.

The increasing role of new competitors has shown up in data collected annually by Renesys, a firm in Manchester, N.H., that monitors the connections between Internet providers. The Renesys rankings of Internet connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the last three years have been the Italian Internet provider Tiscali, China Telecom and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI.

Firms that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet.

"The U.S. telecommunications firms haven't invested," said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager for Internet data services at Renesys. "The rest of the world has caught up. I don't see the AT&Ts and Sprints making the investments because they see Internet service as a commodity."

Internet traffic begins to bypass the U.S.

The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network's first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence--and conceivably military--consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. "Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge," Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. "We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us."

Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States.

"Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches."

But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. "It's no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs," said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. "You wouldn't want someone owning your roads either."

Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international Internet service providers.

This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which traffic between two cites in one country will flow through other nations. In January, when a cable was cut in the Mediterranean, Egyptian Internet traffic was nearly paralyzed because it was not being shared by local Internet service providers but instead was routed through European operators.

The issue was driven home this month when hackers attacked and immobilized several Georgian government Web sites during the country's fighting with Russia. Most of Georgia's access to the global network flowed through Russia and Turkey. A third route through an undersea cable linking Georgia to Bulgaria is scheduled for completion in September.

Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited to developing countries. The Japanese "are on a rampage to build out across India and China so they have alternative routes and so they don't have to route through the U.S."

Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet, added, "We discovered the Internet, but we couldn't keep it a secret." While the United States carried 70 percent of the world's Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent.

Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business.

That lack of investment mirrors a pattern that has taken place elsewhere in the high-technology industry, from semiconductors to personal computers.

The risk, Internet technologists say, is that upstarts like China and India are making larger investments in next-generation Internet technology that is likely to be crucial in determining the future of the network, with investment, innovation and profits going first to overseas companies.

"Whether it's a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand," said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Google's Internet evangelist and who, with Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early 1970s. "Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it once was? That wasn't helpful."

International networks that carry data into and out of the United States are still being expanded at a sharp rate, but the Internet infrastructure in many other regions of the world is growing even more quickly.

While there has been some concern over a looming Internet traffic jam because of the rise in Internet use worldwide, the congestion is generally not on the Internet's main trunk lines, but on neighborhood switches, routers and the wires into a house.

As Internet traffic moves offshore, it may complicate the task of American intelligence gathering agencies, but would not make Internet surveillance impossible.

"We're probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit harder," said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who said the United States had invested far too little in collecting intelligence via the Internet. "We've given terrorists a free ride in cyberspace," he said.

Others say the eclipse of the United States as the central point in cyberspace is one of many indicators that the world is becoming a more level playing field both economically and politically.

"This is one of many dimensions on which we'll have to adjust to a reduction in American ability to dictate terms of core interests of ours," said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. "We are, by comparison, militarily weaker, economically poorer and technologically less unique than we were then. We are still a very big player, but not in control."

China, for instance, surpassed the United States in the number of Internet users in June. Over all, Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the world's Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market research organization.

By contrast, there were about 237 million Internet users in North America and the growth has nearly peaked; penetration of the Internet in the region has reached about 71 percent.

The increasing role of new competitors has shown up in data collected annually by Renesys, a firm in Manchester, N.H., that monitors the connections between Internet providers. The Renesys rankings of Internet connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the last three years have been the Italian Internet provider Tiscali, China Telecom and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI.

Firms that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet.

"The U.S. telecommunications firms haven't invested," said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager for Internet data services at Renesys. "The rest of the world has caught up. I don't see the AT&Ts and Sprints making the investments because they see Internet service as a commodity."

Microsoft Launches New Shopping Site

Microsoft is working on a new shopping Web site for software, hardware, and peripherals that it plans to advertise in the Windows XP Start Menu and the Internet Explorer Web browser.

Called "Windows Marketplace," the Web site is slated to go live for U.S. Windows users by year's end, according to Microsoft, which plans to officially announce the online store on Monday at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto.

The Windows Marketplace will be a way for Microsoft partners to peddle their wares to the millions of Windows users, the Redmond, Washington-based software vendor says in a statement.

Providers that are expected to sell their products through the store include Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Circuit City Stores, Buy.com, and Best Buy Company, according to Microsoft. Products that have gained a "Designed for Windows" logo will be easier to find on the Web store through a special search filter, the software maker says.

Built-In Links

Aside from advertising the online store in Windows, Microsoft plans to link to the site from its online properties. The link in Internet Explorer will be made through Windows XP Service Pack 2, which is expected out in the coming weeks. Also, the Start Menu link that currently points to the Windows Catalog will likely redirect to the Windows Marketplace in the future, a Microsoft spokesperson says.

The U.S. version of the Windows Marketplace will be maintained by online publishing company CNet Networks, which will provide product and pricing information for over 100,000 products. Software downloads will be offered through CNet's Download.com Web site, according to Microsoft.

Vendors who currently have a merchant relationship with CNet will be automatically included on the Windows Marketplace, as will products with that have been granted the designed for Windows logo, Microsoft said. Details on the relationship between Microsoft and CNet were not released.

Windows Marketplace is a U.S.-only initiative for now, however plans for international expansion are in the works, the spokesperson says.

Arctic Ice Melts Away Due To Impact Of Global Warming


Washington (ChattahBox) - A report released by the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado has revealed that the Arctic ice is at its second-lowest level in history, and is melting because of the impact of global warming.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center put out the report late last week, confirming that the Arctic sea ice is melting away.

It is at its second-lowest point in recorded history. The lowest-point in recorded history was in 2007.

The report stated that “We could very well be in that quick slide downward in terms of passing a tipping point.”

That tipping point has to do with global warming, and is causing major problems for the Arctic sea ice, and endangered species such as the polar bear.

The level of Artic sea ice in 2008 is at 2.03 million square miles, compared to 1.59 million square miles in 2007.

Report: NASA Looks Into Extending Shuttle Service Until 2015


An e-mail obtained by The Orlando Sentinel reveals NASA is looking into the plausibility of postponing the retirement of its current fleet of three space shuttles until 2015, when the Orion is scheduled to be completed.

"We want to focus on helping bridge the gap of U.S. vehicles traveling to the ISS as efficiently as possible," Manager of manifest and schedules of Johnson Space Center John Coggeshall said in the e-mail.

In 2004, President Bush urged NASA to try and complete the ISS and retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, with the next aim to create a new shuttle and return to the moon by 2020.

NASA is preparing for Congress and the new President of the United States to discuss how viable it would be to extend the current generation of space shuttles rotation an additional five years. Assuming NASA retires the shuttles in 2010 as planned, the U.S. space agency will be forced to rely on the Russian space agency to get astronauts and supplies to the ISS.

In addition to relying on Russia, thousands of jobs and billions of dollars will be lost in Florida's Space Coast, Houston and similar locations where shuttle development and rocket launches take place.

But NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and other high-ranking space officials are concerned that both the economic and political issues outweigh the necessity of the fleet's retirement. Griffin expects the study to be finished by the end of September.

Both presidential candidates have discussed NASA funding and the problems it could face in the future if the shuttle is retired and Orion isn't done as planned. Democratic nominee Barack Obama (D, IL) pledged monetary support for the Constellation program, along with $2 billion for additional launches past the 2010 deadline. Republican candidate John McCain (R, AZ) was one of a handful of senators who officially asked for the shuttle retirement to be delayed at least one year, and he also offered more monetary support for the U.S. space agency.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Olympic Logos Since 1896, till 2012

A Rare Collection of Olympic Logos Since 1896.
A Collection worth Keeping.