Thursday, October 15, 2009
AT&T, Google: Nuns on the Run
In the rhetorical battle over net neutrality, Google may have regulatory capitalism with which to bludgeon and batter AT&T, but AT&T has Benedictine nuns, an entire convent of them. In a 13-page letter to the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday, the carrier took issue with Google’s claim that its Google Voice service only blocks calls to adult sex chat lines, asserting that it also blocks calls to small businesses and Benedictine nuns.
As launch dates go, the timing could not be better. Less than a week after Google’s Gmail suffered its fourth service disruption this year, IBM announced a competing Web mail service intended to undercut it. Called LotusLive iNotes, it’s an email, calendaring, and contact management system aimed squarely at the enterprise space Google has been so diligently courting.
Wise is the investor holding shares in Apple, Research in Motion and/or Palm, because these companies are the triumvirate of tech’s new world order. This according to RBC analyst Mike Abramsky, who in a research note today says all three are positioned for leadership in the “huge, nascent and underpenetrated” smartphone market.
Sued by Visto in 2006 for allegedly infringing its patents, Research in Motion denied having done so. It countersued, claiming the disputed patents, which relate to accessing and synchronization of information over a network, should not have been granted because they contain new inventions. RIM petitioned to have them invalidated. But in the end, the BlackBerry maker ended up licensing them anyway.
It was more than a decade ago that Microsoft’s Outlook email client first became accessible over the Web. Now the rest of the company’s flagship Office suite is following suit. At the opening of its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans this morning, Microsoft announced a “technical preview” of Office 2010 and revealed that some of its key applications–Word, Excel and PowerPoint–will be available over the Web in 2010. For free.
Tagged.com claims it is the third-largest social network in the U.S., in terms of total monthly visits. And now, perhaps, we know why: Tagged lured new members to its site by tricking users into providing it with access to their personal email contacts. The company then spammed those contacts with promotional emails disguised as invitations to view personal photos. And when they registered with Tagged to view those photos, the company spammed their contacts as well. An interesting variation on the “membership drive” and one that’s gotten Tagged in hot water with New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, who intends to sue the company.
So Google has finally copped to developing an operating system–Chrome OS, a software platform “created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and…designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google, which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience. The privacy implications of that are, of course, horrendous. 
Gmail is finally out of beta. Five years after it was launched, Google’s email service has gone gold and shed the beta label, having met whatever mysterious criteria the company uses to assess final-release software. 
Google’s mission, to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, has once again run afoul of the Chinese government, which has a similar goal, but would much prefer that certain information stay inaccessible. And so, on Wednesday evening, Chinese citizens found themselves once again unable to use Google, Gmail, and YouTube as their government condemned Google as a purveyor of porn. 
Yahoo announced some updates to its homepages today–mobile and Web both. Designed to make them more personally relevant to their users, the pages are more customizable than they’ve been before. The release in full, after the jump.
