A judge has temporarily barred a former Microsoft executive hired by Google from performing any duties at the search giant similar to those he performed at Microsoft. Washington state Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez on Thursday granted Microsoft's request for a temporary restraining order to prevent Kai-Fu Lee from violating his noncompete agreement.
Google announced on July 19 that it had hired Lee to lead a new research and development center in China and serve as president of its Chinese operations. Lee was previously a vice president at Microsoft and played a key role in its operations in China. He also led development of some of its search technologies, Microsoft's lawsuit claims.
Google and Lee claim that Lee would not be doing anything at Google that would compete with work he did at Microsoft, and Lee says he contacted Google and was not recruited. Google and Lee were also barred from disclosing or misappropriating any trade secrets or proprietary information obtained while Lee worked at Microsoft and from destroying any documents or data that relate to Lee's employment at the companies.
Gonzalez also barred Microsoft from destroying relevant documents and ordered the company to post $1 million security to be used to pay for Google and Lee's costs and damages if it is determined the temporary restraining order was wrongfully granted.
Separately from the restraining order, the judge scheduled a trial date of Jan. 9, a Microsoft spokeswoman said.
This isn't the only legal headache for Google. A former Google sales executive has sued the company, alleging that it engaged in job discrimination while she was pregnant with quadruplets.
Resource:
News.com
Less than 24 hours after Microsoft announced the release of Windows Vista Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 to testers and MSDN subscribers, both betas have leaked to Internet sites and newsgroups along with a crack for Windows Product Activation, according to BetaNews sources.The Vista download weighs in at close to 2.5GB, but the operating system's heft did not keep the pirates away. The next-generation Windows beta likely uses the same activation technology found in Windows XP, which was compromised long ago.
Alpha builds of the operating system, then code-named Longhorn, have frequently leaked from Microsoft labs during development. And Microsoft encountered the same problems with Windows Whistler, which later became Windows XP.Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, which is available within Windows Vista and on its own, requires Windows Genuine Advantage verification to install, sources said. Microsoft opted not to make the first beta publicly available, and has not set a timeline for the final release of its long-awaited new Web browser.
Microsoft representatives were not available to comment on the leaks by press time.Resource:
BetaNews
Photo of Apple HQ shows single warehouse, empty parking lotWith Microsoft's new Web service for satellite photographs, the world's largest software company has sort of achieved its goal.
Internet sleuths discovered that anyone using Microsoft's new "Virtual Earth" Web site for a bird's-eye view of Apple's corporate headquarters saw only a grainy overhead photograph of a single warehouse and a deserted parking lot.
Apple's sprawling campus and eleven modern buildings -- nowhere to be seen.
Microsoft is blaming an outdated photograph for the oversight.
Resource:
CNN.com
One of Russia’s most notorious spammers, Vardan Kushnir, was found dead in his apartment.
According to Russia’s Interfax news agency a well known spammer Vardan Kushnir an American was brutally murdered. His body was found in his apartment yesterday. Interfax sources say the man was discovered with multiple blows to his head.The spammer, Vardan Kushnir, may have had connections to the Russian Mob, whether good or bad, it is a good possbility that they were the murderers.
His spam angered many in Russia. People bombared his phone lines with calls others posted fake escort ads with the companies phone number listed. The companies website was often hacked and Russian ISPs denied to host them.
Kushnir ran the English Language Center, which, was famous for sending out unbelievable amounts of spam, getting an email to “every Russian who appeared to have an email address”.
Another attack involved hundreds of people making phone calls to the American English Center and sending it numerous e-mails back, but Vardan Kushnir remained sure of his right to spam, saying it was what e-mails were for.
“In the past angry Internet users have targeted the American English centre by publishing the Center’s telephone numbers anywhere on the Web to provoke telephone calls. The Center’s telephone was advertised as a contact number for cheap sex services, or bargain real estate sales.”
Under Russian law, spamming is not considered illegal, although lawmakers are working on legal projects that could protect Russian Internet users like they do in Europe and the U.S.The company managed to successfully defeat anti-spam filtering for a long time by applying the latest tricks (garbled words to defeat filtering, text in image to defeat smart filtering, deformed images to defeat OCR).
Seeking a stronger presence on computers and other devices, Yahoo has acquired a Palo Alto company that enables users to run little programs called ``widgets'' on their desktops that can do anything from monitoring stock quotes and lottery results to displaying random poetry passages.A four-person company started in 2002, Pixoria makes and sells a small JavaScript engine called Konfabulator. Once it's installed on either Windows or Mac computers, users can place one or more of the widgets on their desktops.
Widgets are becoming an increasingly popular way for computer users to quickly perform simple tasks or access Internet content such as online dictionaries or TV schedules without having to use a Web browser.Apple Computer significantly boosted the popularity of widgets earlier this year by making them a feature of its new Tiger operating system.
For Yahoo, widgets provide a new way for the Internet giant to push its content out to users.
Although the widgets could theoretically allow Yahoo to display advertising on computer desktops, Rose said ``that is something I'm particularly opposed to.''
Resource:
Mercury News
This is the year that online maps and Web search come together. Microsoft's Virtual Earth latest to connect map and searchMicrosoft is launching an early version of MSN Virtual Earth, a mapping service that closely ties to its Web search engine and its Web log program. The release, at 9 p.m. yesterday, is the company's answer to a mapping service from search-sector leader Google that debuted earlier this year.
The team behind it previously developed Microsoft's MapPoint technology, which helped people find locations and directions online.
Virtual Earth, at
virtualearth.msn.com, offers aerial views of cities overlaid with road networks and other information. It has new navigation tools that allow users to pan and drag maps.
The search results can also be posted on a blog in the MSN Spaces service.The application won't have pinpoint accuracy, but its results should be within 250 meters of a user's location, said Tom Bailey, a director of marketing with the Virtual Earth team.
Google took a significant step in making maps more useful, Stein added. The company launched its satellite mapping site in February at maps.google.com.
The site also offers driving directions and markers that point to locations of search results.
MSN's Virtual Earth is a direct competitor to Google Maps.Last month, Google released Google Earth, a free downloadable application based on technology from Keyhole, a company it acquired last year.
Google has allowed Web enthusiasts to use its mapping technology on their own sites, as long as the sites are freely available online. Numerous homegrown efforts have sprung up on the Web as a result.
Microsoft said it will make the same allowances with Virtual Earth, and has set up a how-to Web site for developers at www.viavirtualearth.com.
Resource:
Seattle Times
While investors were busy unloading Google Inc.'s stock after the company warned Thursday of slowing third-quarter sales growth, Prudential Equity Group LLC analyst Mark Rowen went the other way, raising his price target for the world's biggest media company to $400 (U.S.), the highest of any analyst.Mr. Rowen said he expects Google to continue posting “hyper-growth rates.”
For the fourth straight quarter, Google beat analyst earnings estimates. Excluding traffic acquisition costs, the company posted $890-million in net revenue, a 110-per-cent growth rate year-over-year. Analysts expected $842-million.
The news sparked a selling frenzy that slashed more than 10 per cent off Google's share price after hours. Company shares continued to lose value in early Friday trading, dropping more than 2.5 per cent to $305.76. At one point Thursday, the share price rose to a record high of $317.80 before closing at $306.37.
Mr. Rowen's price target is nearly quintuple Google's initial public offering price.He said Google managed to improve its quarterly performance even though the second quarter is considered seasonally weak because internet usage and advertising dollars spent both drop.
See also
TheGlobleandMail
Microsoft has decided on an official name for Longhorn: Windows Vista. That's according to sources close to the company who requested anonymity. They said Microsoft unveiled the name Thursday in Atlanta at the company's internal sales event, known as the Microsoft Global Sales Briefing, or MGB."
Windows Vista, formerly known by its code-name Longhorn, is scheduled to launch in 2006, five years after Windows XP, the longest time lag between releases of the Windows operating system.
A beta, or test version, of Windows Vista will be released, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said in a statement.
One Windows site discovered that Microsoft registered the WindowsVista.US domain name. Microsoft has relied primarily on date-oriented names for many of its products, although it has shied away from those on occasion.
Longhorn Beta 1 is widely expected to be unveiled next week. Beta 2 is due in the first half of 2006. Microsoft officials confirmed on Thursday the final release is still on track for the latter half of 2006.
Search company Blinkx launched a new service on Tuesday that lets consumers receive RSS alerts from a bevy of TV, radio and other broadcasters with which the company has partnered. The service lets people type in a search term and choose from more than 30 broadcast channels to receive notifications on that topic. For example, users can create a "SmartFeed" button on weather in San Francisco and receive RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, alerts whenever that topic comes up in the broadcast channels the person selected.
Blinkx's Broadcast Web site uses voice recognition software to transcribe video and audio data into text for full-text searching. Blinkx recently unveiled a way to search inside podcasts and video blogs, which are blogs that use video as their primary presentation format.
The privately held company also offers software for searching all kinds of data on desktops and the Web using contextual search technology, rather than keywords like other search engines use.
Resource:
ZDNet
WORM WRITERS ARE piggy-backing on the success of Apple’s iTunes digital juke box according to an anti-virus software firm.Trend Micro says that a worm, WORM_OPANKI.Y, spreading though the AOL instant messaging program is using the name iTunes to trick users into keeping its poisoned payload on their machines. The big idea is that people who suspect they have loaded spyware will look on windows task manager, see that iTunes is running, and assume that all is well in the state of Denmark.
It uses an infected PC’s contacts list to send out a message saying "this picture never gets old." Each message has a link to what appears to be a .JPG.
If you are daft enough to click on it, a file called iTunes.exe will be downloaded.
It also keeps track of sites visited by the user. A third bit of the program monitors sites visited using Internet Explorer and sends logs to create a user profile that triggers pop-up ads based on the user's surfing habits.
Resource:
TheInquirer
Microsoft opened a lawsuit Tuesday against Google and a former Microsoft executive that the search giant had hired to run its China operations. "Today Microsoft filed a lawsuit against a former executive and Google regarding breach of Microsoft's employee confidentiality and non-compete agreement," Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said in an e-mail. "We are asking the court to require Dr. Lee and Google to honor the confidentiality and non-competition agreements he signed when he began working for Microsoft."
Google has emerged as a top rival for Microsoft, and several notable employees have left the software giant for Google in recent months.
Lee, an expert in speech-recognition technology, founded Microsoft's China research lab in the late 1990s and worked at Silicon Graphics Inc. and Apple Computer before joining Microsoft.
Though workers leave tech companies for rivals all the time, it's not uncommon for a dispute to end up in court, particularly when an executive has a contract with a noncompete clause.
A Microsoft lawyer said in an interview that Lee's move to join Google was a "particularly egregious" violation of the non-compete agreement that he had signed when he joined Microsoft.Lee had been working most recently at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash.
The combination of those factors meant that we really had no choice but to file this suit to protect our confidential information."
Resource:
ZDNet
Alternative browser continues to grow its market share at the expense of Internet Explorer.The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser nibbled off a small market-share portion from Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) in June, continuing a consistent monthly trend this year.
Firefox increased its market share to 8.71 percent, up from 8 percent in May, while IE's share shrank to 86.56 percent from 87.23 percent.
Since the beginning of the year, Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5 percent and 1 percent, mostly at the expense of IE.As Firefox approaches the 10 percent market share milestone, it is expected to gain "significant traction" once its acceptance grows among corporations.
Resource:
PCWorld
WebMarketWeek is a Internet Marketing Journal with various topics Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Web Page Optimization articles. Written by internet marketing experts who have proven to be on top of the Internet Industry.
WebMarktetWeek.com your online internet marketing resource. Articles for Search Engine Optimalization by Marketing Experts. Find articles about Internet Marketing on WebMarketWeek.
Resource:
Internet Marketing
As from today July 15th 2005 google has updated the toolbar again. With little than 3 months in between the green bar shows new information.
Web Directory
dirSpace had a pr4 and went up to a pr5 with over 200 bl's in google. Marketleap total score of 14,494. The site is now about 7 months old. Ready to take it to the next level.
The Seocompany keep records of pagerank lists, they were pretty close predicting this update see also this list:
PageRank History listYou can check the pagerank for the various datacenters at
mcdar.net here you can check for pr and bl's for your website.
Up to the next update in about 3 months!
Tuesday, a Dutch judge decided that Internet service providers would not have to hand over names or addresses of customers who may be illegally swapping films, music and other copyright-protected files.Brein, the Dutch organization that filed the lawsuit, represents 52 media and entertainment companies and had acquired unique computer identification numbers, so-called IP addresses, of file swappers and requested personal details behind these IP addresses from five large Internet service providers: UPC, Essent, Tiscali, Wanadoo and KPN.
It seems the Dutch judges are not as ruthless against illegal file swappers as their American counterparts. The court ruled that BREIN made a crucial mistake in collecting evidence against the individuals. Apparently the company only looked at shared folders of Kazaa, but these folders may also have contained files for personal use, the court argues. There is not enough proof that these particular files were uploaded.
"The judge does not deem this correct, because according to Dutch law, privacy is insufficiently protected in the United States," the ruling said.Resource:
SoftPedia
A web directory is a directory on the World Wide Web that specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. Web directories often allow site owners to submit their site for inclusion. Human editors review submissions for fitness.
An alternative portal to the web is using search engines, web sites that index other sites based on keywords.
Famous web directories are Yahoo! Directory, LookSmart, and the Open Directory Project. ODP is an important player in the directory market, perhaps because of its open content approach to editorial review and its use by Google. Zeal, also open to contributions from volunteers, is the non-commercial side of LookSmart's directory, and its material is reused on various sites.
You can always check another great web directory if you cannot find your listing.
dirSpace Web Directory,
Site-Sift Web DirectoryA debate over quality in directories and databases continues, as search engines use ODP's content without real integration, and some experiment using clustering. There have been many attempts to make directory development easier, whether using a "links for all" type link submission site using a script, or any number of available PHP portals and programs. Recently, social software techniques have spawned new efforts of categorization, with Amazon.com adding tagging to their product pages.
Human-edited directories are often targeted as part of a strategy for being indexed in the major search engines. The idea being that a new site needs to quickly build inbound links from reputable sources in order to have higher rankings within search engine results.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_directory
A joint venture of mobile technology companies next year will start issuing Internet domain names under a new.mobi top-level domain name, the company said Monday.The.mobi domain is intended for sites that are designed to be used on cell phones and other mobile devices. The company hopes to foster more mobile use of the Internet, said Rick Fant, a member of the board of mTLD.
As part of its contracts with companies that use the domain names, mTLD will require they follow a style guide that includes requirements such as the ability to use a site on a low-bandwidth connection, Fant said. Those requirements will be largely self-policed, but it will be in the best interests of all parties for site operators to follow the guidelines, Fant said. The style guide should include rules about flagging adult content, he said.
Domain names will cost about $26 per year, according to Fant. For the first three months after they become available, there will be a "sunrise" period in which trademark owners can reserve their names.
Resource:
Yahoo Tech News
Hardly a week goes by, it seems, when the folks at Google aren't kicking out some nifty, cool, or seriously useful new service or digital gadget. Last week, it was Google Earth.It's essentially an easy-to-navigate local interface for the Google Maps 3-D satellite imagery already available on the Web.
Type your address into the search box to zoom from outer space into your city or neighborhood, then go to the "layers" box in the application's left rail and you can overlay all sorts of useful information.
The biggest fun came from experimenting with the "3d Buildings" check box in the "layers" pallet. It caused the software to download and overlay 3-D wire-frame images of a city's major buildings. You can spin and rotate around the buildings, pan and tilt the landscape, or "fly" between structures.
Download at
earth.google.com
Microsoft plans to ship its next version of Windows in the fall of 2006, but executives acknowledge that it could slip into the following year.Microsoft plans to ship its next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, in the fall of 2006, but executives acknowledged that it could slip into the following year.
At the company's annual Worldwide Partner Conference, one Microsoft executive said the company will provide the first beta of Longhorn aimed at IT professionals this summer, but the "cool new UI" with visualization, organization and search capabilities won't be included in the Longhorn code until beta 2, which is due next year.
Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., has said it will ship the Longhorn client in 2006 and server in 2007. At the partner conference, the Microsoft developer executive told partners that those product releases will afford them many new application development and customization possibilities.
Complete article:
Information Week
Microsoft will address two vulnerabilities in Windows, at least one of which is rated with the most severe classification of critical. The Office productivity suite will get one patch which is also rated critical. Microsoft has announced in a security bulletin on its Web site that it expects to release three software patches on Tuesday July 12.
The software vendor will address two vulnerabilities in Windows, at least one of which is rated with the most severe classification of critical. The Office productivity suite will get one patch which is also rated critical.
Microsoft is also slated to unveil an update for Office that is not security related but is nonetheless ranked high priority. The company provides the advance warning in an effort to help I.T. organizations plan for the monthly patch releases, but does not provide any information other than the software titles that will be fixed.
Microsoft has scheduled a webcast to provide additional information on the fixes on Wednesday July 13 at 11 a.m. PDT (7 p.m. GMT).
In common with previous updates, the patches will coincide with an updated version of Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool.
Resource:
NewsFactor
GOOGLE WILL release a new version of its tool bar for the Firefox browser later today.The Firefox toolbar will have all of the features found on the IE toolbar except a pop-up blocker and browse-by-name functionality, which Firefox already has and doesn’t need.
Among the features in the new Firefox toolbar is a box for conducting Google searches and an "auto-fill" button that fills in a Web form with the user's address and credit card information. There is also a spell chuker and a word translator.
The Google toolbar for Firefox is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.Google is also releasing two new extensions for Firefox. The first lets users highlight text on a Web page and coverts it to an SMS. The other adds the Google Suggest capability to the Firefox search box.
Download the toolbar from
google
Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the science of producing web pages that are attractive to the search engines.The better optimized the page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in major search engine results. This is especially critical because most people who use search engines, such as Google or Yahoo, only look at the first page of the search results. For a page to get high traffic from a search engine, it has to be listed in that first page.
Redline SEO Service is committed to achieving top rankings in the major search engines (Google and Yahoo).Redline SEO is a full service Search Engine Optimization firm based in Miami, Florida. The focus of Redline SEO has always been on staying at the forefront of the search engine optimization world by consulting with our industry peers, studying and assimilating the latest techniques, and maintaining professional integrity when dealing with our clients.
Whether you have an existing site or your plan to create a new one, count on Redline SEO service to bring you to the forefront of the search engine arena.
Resource:
Redline SEO
Google has decided to provide programmers with Google Maps API and the example was shortly followed by Yahoo, which also announced that it plans to do the same with SmartView. The decision to offer access to these technologies is somehow tardive, considering that there are already sites which have developed interesting applications using these services.
From now on, programmers will be able to integrate Google Maps and Yahoo Maps in their applications, provided that they mention the names of the technologies.
Both Google and Yahoo hope that programmers will find new usages for their map services, for example, to create maps of industries for certain regions.
Google, on the other hand, encourages programmers to host their applications wherever they desire, the company being also able to offer ads for them.
Aside from the new development possibilities, both Google and Yahoo, hope that in this way, more and more users will use their maps.
Resource:
Softpedia
Security researchers have discovered a bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser that can cause the software to crash, and which could possibly be used to let an attacker run unauthorized software on the IE user's machine.The bug, which was first discovered by researchers at Austrian security consulting firm SEC Consult Unternehmensberatung and reported to Microsoft several weeks ago, concerns the way IE handles certain software modules.
By loading HTML pages that make use of certain ActiveX components, researchers were able to overwrite registers on the computer's processor, says Martin Eisner, chief technical officer with SEC Consult.
"It's possible to crash Internet Explorer"Eisner expects Microsoft to patch the bug within a few weeks. "Right now it's not that dangerous," he says. "But of course within a couple of weeks there will be somebody who has a little bit more time than we have and there will be an exploit then."
Resouce:
PCWorld
