Archive for May, 2008

Mozilla Aims For Firefox 3.0 Download Record (TechWeb)

May 30th, 2008 | Category: privacy

For the upcoming release of Firefox 3, Mozilla aims to set a new world record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours.

The company has put out a call to its global community of users to pledge to download the new 3.0 version of Firefox on the day the browser is made available to the public.

Given that there's no established Guinness World Record for software downloads, Mozilla is destined for the record book no matter what happens. A Mozilla spokesperson said the company is working with the Guinness Book Of World Records to verify the record essay and will be furnishing 10% of the company's download logs for an extrapolated final download count.

Justin Fitzhugh, director of IT for Mozilla, is confident that Mozilla volition be able to handle the bandwidth surge, which he said is likely to be a fraction of the load Mozilla bears when it releases automated browser updates to its installed base of users. "We've scaled for this already," he said, noting that in addition to the servers in its own premises center, Mozilla relies on donated server capacity around the world.

Mozilla claims that it has 175 million users in more than 230 countries. The United Nations recognizes 192 member states. Presumably, Mozilla is counting perhaps a dozen countries with limited or substantial between nations recognition (Taiwan), several would-be countries not recognized by the agency of other nations (Abkhazia), and a variety of territories (Norfolk Island).

Over at SpreadFirefox.com, there's an interactive map that lists by country those who have pledged to download Firefox 3.0 on the designated day. At the time this article was filed, the United States had the lead, with almost 38,000 promising to participate in the download event. In Turkmenistan, only six people have committed. Enthusiasm for the download record attempt is clearly higher in neighboring Uzbekistan, to what 50 people have pledged to participate.

About two weeks ago, Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 RC1, a version of the new browser deemed stable enough for public testing. Mozilla says the official 3.0 release will occur in June.

Firefox 3.0 RC1 is noticeably faster than version 2.0. It also handles memory better.

As of May 29, Firefox has 17.76% of the global browser market share, according to Net Applications. Microsoft Internet Explorer accounts for 74.83%, and Apple's Safari accounts for 5.81%.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

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Yahoo’s BrowserPlus to Boost Web App Platform (PC World)

May 30th, 2008 | Category: privacy

Yahoo this week announced it is working on BrowserPlus, a development platform for creating Web applications that contain desktop capabilities.

BrowserPlus joins similar projects, including Google's Gears, Adobe's AIR, Mozilla's XUL, Microsoft's Silverlight and others, designed to let developers make applications that leverage the best of the desktop and Web environments.

up to the present time questions abound regarding these competing efforts, such as whether they will create confusion among users, and about BrowserPlus itself, which developers can download and examine but cannot currently build anything with.

On Thursday, IDG News Service had a chance to pose these and other questions to Skylar Woodward, principal software engineer at Yahoo's Brickhouse division, and to Cody Simms, senior director of product dealing for the company's Yahoo Open Strategy effort.

An edited version of the interview follows:

IDGNS: What is the status of BrowserPlus?

Cody Simms: The version out there is production ready, so we'll be pleasing with partners to start getting BrowserPlus supported on sites around the Web. Then we plan a broader, fuller, self-service release later this year.

Today, developers can't build it into their sites. They can download it to their desktops and play with it and see what services it can make available to them as though they were an end-user looking at it. They can get in and look at the code they'd be able to integrate with their site, but they can't build their site around it just yet, except for a select set of partners we're going to be working with.

Skylar Woodward: It's production ready today to use it on any partner site. In terms of everything being baked and ready, so developers don't have to change [their applications] too much later, the reason why we're putting it out now is because we want this to be an open community discussion on the eve what things should be in here and how it should work. We want people to contemplate at our APIs [application programming interfaces] and be critical and evaluate them. So in that sense, [regarding] the most tractable part of the system, which are the services, we'd love to get community feedback thus this isn't event that's already set and won't change. We want to respond to the community, and listen to what they want and need, so that when we [release it into general availability], there doesn't have to be a lot of changing [of applications.]

IDGNS: BrowserPlus sounds similar to Google's Gears and other initiatives like Adobe's AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight. Is it?

Simms: You're seeing a strong trend toward people realizing that there can be a bridge between the browser and the desktop. So there are a number of different technologies out there playing in that arena. Each one of the technologies that has been announced or released recently has fairly divergent use cases about how you can bridge those two things and tackle the problem. Some of them are more focused on bringing Web functionality to the desktop, while others are more focused on bringing desktop functionality to the browser.

BrowserPlus is uniquely focused on making the browser richer with all these kinds of pieces of functionality that normally would be reserved for desktop clients. BrowserPlus has some strengths related to how easily and quickly we can deploy new services. We're not focused on one monolithic use case. BrowserPlus is very focused on being an open platform that can be extended with new types of services and thus enable new, interesting functionality. We don't yet know what will be the killer app that will be built on BrowserPlus, no more than we want to enable the development community to discover that by using it.

Woodward: The key differentiator here is that the system is able to bring down new services and features and capabilities, not necessarily to the browser, but to applications written for browsers: things like Yahoo Mail and Facebook or a Web site. Normally when you want to get new features like these, you have to do a monolithic download, whether it's a whole new browser or you have to download plug-ins to get new capabilities. further with BrowserPlus, once it's there, the user has this very seamless experience that doesn't restart the browser, you don't have to go through this complex install process; a simple dialog comes up saying a thing like 'The person who wrote this site requires you to have these extra features in order to employment this. Do you want to want to activate them?' If you say 'yes', the process is usually very quick. The features are activated immediately and the page comes alive.

IDGNS: Won't end-users get confused with the different options out there?

Simms: There are a handful of [technologies] and each does a different part, to an extent. There will be overlap between them, but this is the early days of experimentation, so it will be interesting to see which ones emerge strongest for which use cases, and which use cases end [up] being the ones that both developers and users [are most interested in].

It's a development platform, so it's up to the Web developers to build support for it into their sites. It's not the user who will decide to use BrowserPlus or this or that service. It's up to the developer to saw, 'I need this piece of functionality to make my site chief, and it's supported by BrowserPlus or service A or service B and, anything soever it is, I'll build support for it into my site.'

As the user goes to that site, if they want that enhanced functionality, the site will prompt them to download it from the platform the developer chose to build on cap of. It's not something the user would proactively seek to download.

IDGNS: Is there a new set of security concerns tied to this type of technology?

Simms: BrowserPlus enables the browser to do things that it couldn't do before in a secure way. Instead of sites trying to hack X or Y feature, Yahoo has now invested time and energy and resources into building a technology that does these functions securely. That's one of the guiding principles behind BrowserPlus: to make those interactions secure.

IDGNS: Have you had talks and/or actually had hands-on collaborations with any of the leading browser makers yet?

Simms: We haven't been talking to the browser makers yet but would welcome dialogue with them, as well as with any potential partners and developers interested in BrowserPlus.

IDGNS: How integrated is this today with other Yahoo Open Strategy projects?

Simms: Right now it's developed as its acknowledge platform and has been focused on just being a platform [and] getting its capabilities delivered. If, as developers start to build applications with the Yahoo application platform, or if they start to use our social APIs that we'll be launching, they tell us they'd like to visit those things integrated with BrowserPlus, our job is to make that available.

IDGNS: decision developers need to be pre-approved through Yahoo to use BrowserPlus? Also, will the BrowserPlus licensing terms allow for commercial uses so developers can generate revenue from its use?

Simms: Today it's restricted: We're only working with some select partners. But over the coming months, we plan to open up the distribution channels conducive to BrowserPlus in like manner any site can build on top of it. It'll be a self-service capability. In terms of commercial use, the point of this service is to influence sites on the Web so sites can use the functionality how they would like.

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Redlasso continues service, hires ex-CBS CEO (Reuters)

May 30th, 2008 | Category: privacy

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Redlasso, a video-sharing site for bloggers, has hired former CBS Corp Chief Executive Michael Jordan to help it smooth relations by the media industry after broadcast programmers sought to shut down its practices.

General Electric Co's NBC Universal, News Corp's Fox News and Fox Television Stations, CBS and Allbritton Communications Co in May demanded Redlasso stop violating their copyrights by streaming video clips of their news, sports and TV shows without warrant.

In a response delivered Thursday afternoon to lawyers representing the five broadcast programmers, Redlasso said it would continue business since usual fabrication clips of news broadcasts available to bloggers.

"We've been in conversation with them all along," Redlasso CEO Al McGowan told Reuters in a phone interview. "We were not surprised, but disappointed we received the letter."

McGowan said his company had been in talks with the broadcasters on how to design a service that would be useful to bloggers searching for news clips, while building a business model that ensured these clips are protected.

Like users of Google Inc's YouTube, Redlasso users can embed clips, or place them on their Web page. The clips and any associated advertising are controlled by Redlasso, McGowan said. Clips typically run under 2.5 minutes.

Unlike YouTube, which has taken down clips identified by content owners as having been uploaded without their permission, Redlasso said on Thursday it will continue with its practice.

McGowan said he hoped hiring a media industry adept like Jordan could help rekindle discussions to license the content for a pursuit that could help media companies make money off news videos that typically have a shorter shelf life compared to entertainment.

"I have joined forces with Redlasso because I have the greatest belief in the solution offered by the company and its long-term viability," Jordan, former CEO of CBS and Westinghouse Corp, said in a statement.

"Redlasso is converting a marketplace challenge into an opportunity during the term of content providers, advertisers and the online community, creating a new value for traditional dying content."

The service, which has been in a password-protected test stage since November 2007, has proven popular with bloggers, including the Huffington Post, Perez Hilton and Politico.com.

In April, the site received 24 million unique visits and 10 million video plays, the company said.

A representative for NBC Universal was not immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Kenneth Li, editing by Richard Chang)

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Intel, Micron Launch High-Density Storage Chip (TechWeb)

May 30th, 2008 | Category: privacy

Intel and Micron Technology on Thursday introduced a high-density chip that the companies say can pack 32 GB of storage on a smaller footprint than other similar devices.

The NAND device is aimed at solid-state drives, which are increasingly being offered at a premium in notebooks to deliver faster boot times and more durability and reliability than traditional hard disk drives. The new product was manufactured by the companies' joint venture, IM Flash Technologies.

In building the chip, the partners used a 34-nanometer manufacturing process that increases the density of the device in order to cram more memory in a smaller space, which is of moment for ultraportable notebooks and other mobile PCs. "This new 32-GB device provides the best bit storage density use in the industry," Brian Shirley, VP of Micron's Memory Group, said in a statement.

The new devices are smaller than the size of a thumbnail but can store more than 2,000 digital photos or up to 1,000 songs. The chips are also available in a two eight-die stacked package to deliver 64 GB of storage.

The companies claim their latest product can drive capacities beyond 256 GB in a standard 1.8-inch form factor for solid-state drives. Intel and Micron also plan to introduce lower-density products by dint of. the end of the year.

The companies expect to ship samples of the latest chip to customers in June. Volume extension is expected in the second half this year.

While solid-state drives have a number of advantages over hard disk drives, the biggest disadvantage is price. SSDs are multiple times more expensive than HDDs and are improbable to replace the latter anytime soon in most applications. However, SSDs are finding a place among businesses looking in quest of rugged notebooks for field workers and in mini-notebooks with screen sizes inferior than 10 inches. Besides weight, SSDs also use up less batter power than HDDs.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

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Comcast.net site is hacked briefly (AP)

May 30th, 2008 | Category: privacy

NEW YORK - Hackers took over Comcast Corp.’s Web portal for several hours overnight, denying 14.1 million subscribers access to the cable company’s site for e-mail, news and technical support.

The front page of Comcast.net went down shortly before 11 p.m. EDT Wednesday and was replaced with a note saying the hackers had “RoXed” Comcast, according to postings at BroadbandReports.com.

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said Thursday that the hijacking had been reversed in the morning, goal that it was possible some users were still unable to access Comcast.net and Web-based e-mail.

There was no indication that e-mail or other private information was compromised by the attack, Comcast said. It didn’t stop customers from getting their e-mail from one side programs like Outlook.

The hackers appeared to have seized control of the Comcast.net domain name at keeper of a record Network Solutions Inc. and redirected it to other servers, Khoury said.

“We have alerted law enforcement precedents and are working in conjunction with them,” Khoury said.

___

On the Net:

http://www.comcast.net

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Local credit card fraud tops $100m

May 30th, 2008 | Category: privacy

FRAUD on locally issued credit cards jumped to $111.5 million last year, up from $85 million in 2006, according to the Australian Payments Clearing Association.

There were 1.76 billion credit card transactions on credit cards issued in Australia, with a total estimation of $251 billion.

"The rate of fraud on credit and charge cards increased to 44.5 cents in every $1000, up from 36.9 cents the previous year," APCA chief executive Chris Hamilton said. "The largest component of this relates to card not present fraud and cross-border fraud activity."

Card not present fraud (CNP) - involving online, phone or mail transactions - reached $53.5 million, up from $32 million.

Overseas CNP fraud on Australian-issued credit cards doubled to $34 million, up from $16.5 million, while CNP fraud on local cards within Australia rose from $15 million to $20 million.

Skimmed and counterfeit credit cards accounted for a further $32.7 million (up from $28.7 million); the overseas tally was $18 million (up from $17 million), while local skimming activity rose from $12 million to $14.5 million.

Fraud in the limits of Australia on overseas-issued credit cards also rocketed, from $49 million to $92 million. Skimming and counterfeit fraud on foreign cards doubled from $28 million to $58.6 million; card not present fraud went from $12 million to $22.4 million.

Meanwhile, overall fraud on debit cards remained steady at $14.3 million, with increases in some areas offset by reductions in others. There were almost 2 billion debit card transactions, valued at $201 billion.

Interestingly, debit card skimming (with PIN) rose to $4 the masses, from $2.6 million last year, while there where nearly twice as many incidents - 11,400 compared with 5850 in 2006.

But debit card skimming without the use of a PIN declined from $1.4 million in 2006 to $1.2 million; the number of incidents also dropped, from 3340 in 2006 to 2800 last year.

At the same time, "other debit card fraud" - involving identity takeover and sham applications - also changed channels. Other fraud not using a PIN rose to $1.8 million from $840,000, while the number of incidents jumped by 4800 to 8700.

In contrast, other debit card fraud (with PIN) declined to $2 million from $3 million the former year.

Mr Hamilton said stratagem remained a fraction of the growing transaction numbers, with the total rate of payment card fraud rising to 28 cents in every $1000, up from 24 cents - consistent with trends in Asia-Pacific and Britain - and was still low by global standards. In the UK, the payment fraud rate is around $1.18 in every $1000.

"The statistics are telling us that even as today’s technology makes it possible to buy anything from anywhere, it’s also making it possible in opposition to fraudsters to operate globally," he said in a statement.

"It’s no surprise that Australian consumers and retailers need to take particular care when not dealing face to face."

Australian Bankers’ Association chief executive David Bell said fraud on cards used within the country was low, but rates had increased on transactions made overseas.

"Customers are shopping online by retailers overseas, and unfortunately more of these outlets may not possess strong protections in place," Mr Bell said.

"Our banks have systems to monitor transactions on a customer’s account, and if a transaction is identified as suspicious, it will be investigated. Occasionally when this happens, your bank may contact you to verify a transaction."

Christopher Zinn, spokesman for consumer group Choice, said that while the overall rate was low, there was no cause for complacency.

"As they have identified, there are significant rises in the reliance and charge card area, as one would expect due to the growth in e-commerce," he said.

"Consumers still have to be very alert as to who they give their credit card and any other identifying details to, whether it’s over the internet or over the phone.

"And you should really only deal on the net with people who have adequate security to protect your minutiae, and who are known to be reliable providers."

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Alleged ID thief charged in NSW

May 29th, 2008 | Category: privacy

A SYDNEY man linked to an identity theft gang has been charged by laundering more than $1 million, federal police say.

A 41-year-old Stanhope Gardens man was arrested yesterday following raids on his home in Sydney’s north-west and a property in Haymarket in central Sydney.

Police allege he worked for a Sydney-based crime syndicate in 2006 and helped transfer more than $1.1 million in fraudulently obtained funds.

He has been charged with four counts of dealing with the proceeds of crime and granted conditional bail to appear at the Downing Centre Local Court on June 18.

If convicted, he faces up to 20 years’ jail.

The man is the 20th person charged as part of Operation Hickey targeting identity theft gangs in Australia for more than a year.

Officers of the Australian Federal Police, NSW Police Force, Australian Crime Commission, NSW Crime Commission and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship are involved in the operation.

AAP


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VMware To Acquire B-hive Virtual Application Performance Monitoring (TechWeb)

May 29th, 2008 | Category: privacy

VMware is acquiring an application performance transactions firm, B-hive Networks, in order to inject better application management into virtual machine operations. The terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter, were not disclosed.

B-hive is a privately held company founded in 2005 and based in San Mateo, Calif., and Herzliya, Israel. Acquiring the firm will allow VMware to keep the B-hive engineering team in place and open a development readiness in Israel, "giving us a foothold to access Israeli software development talent," said Bogomil Balkansky, VMware's senior director.

B-hive's flagship product, B-hive Conductor, monitors an application from the network, measuring the response time between a user deed and an application rejoinder. Such monitoring watches the close attention from an end-user point of view instead of a systems management point of view, with emphasis on responsiveness. Monitoring from the network requires no agent to be placed on the application, minimizing the overhead of the performance measurement process.

B-hive's monitoring can be applied to unvirtualized or virtualized applications, but VMware is clearly interested in what the product brings to a virtualized infrastructure. Balkansky said a B-hive can not only conviction when an application is slowing down but, in VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3 setting, can take action to remedy it.

The B-hive alert that an exercise run by a particular virtual machine is slowing down will trigger a reaction from VMware Infrastructure 3's Distributed Resource Scheduler. It may decide to move the virtual machine to a less-trafficked server, or it may decide to allocate more of the resources on the existing server to the virtual machine. It could also decide to clone additional virtual machines with the same application to start handling some of the incoming traffic.

"We're talking about a groundbreaking capability in managing data center servers. It's only possible if you've got a virtualized infrastructure," Balkansky said in an interview.

B-hive not only watches application responses times between users and virtual machines on a given server but also response times among the application and related databases, Web servers, and other interdependent software parts operating in virtual machines under VMware's ESX hypervisor. If the problem lies with one of them, it can pinpoint it, Balkansky said.

It's too early to say whether VMware testament do honor to B-hive as a separate product after the acquisition is completed or integrate it into its Virtual Center and Virtual Infrastructure 3 management tools. But Balkansky claimed B-hive will one day represent "the power of virtualization to render capable new management capabilities in the data center."

See original article on InformationWeek.com

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BlackBerry’s Security On India’s Agenda (TechWeb)

May 29th, 2008 | Category: privacy

NEW DELHI/OTTAWA, May 28 - Research in Motion's boast of rock solid security is set to haunt it in negotiations with Indian officials this week, as India worries that messages sent on the Blackberry cannot have being traced.

A telecoms ministry official said the two sides devise meet on Thursday to discuss Indian concerns that e-mail sent by BlackBerry devices pose a risk because the messages cannot be intercepted.

Wary of attacks by militants, the command wants RIM to install servers in India.

A spokesman for RIM in India declined to comment, but analysts said it could be ungraceful to reach an amicable solution.

"My reading and signification of the story is what the Indian government wants to be versed to do is tap into RIM's network operation center and be able to intercept and probably do keyword searches," said Sean Ryan, a mobile enterprise analyst with research group IDC.

"RIM is not posture up like that and that's the security model… It's not the type of thing where they can actually view the messages themselves. They're just really passing this through."

The Indian government has already held a course of meetings with domestic movable operators and with Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM, which has some 114,000 BlackBerry subscribers in India.

Telecoms administrator Andimuthu Raja reported last week that RIM had promised to arrange a solution in two months.

But RIM told Indian customers in a May 23 letter that it could not make comfortable any request for a copy of a customer's encryption guide because it does not have a "master key" and its system does not allow "back door" entry.

RIM said its security system was designed to bestow customers confidence that no one, including RIM, could access the data transmitted wirelessly.

"Governments have a wide range of resources and methodologies to satisfy national security and law enforcement needs without compromising commercial security requirements," the company said in its letter.

RIM's sturdy data encryption is a elucidation attraction for customers, but it has already caused concern for the sake of some governments, most vocally India and France.

Avi Greegart, mobile devices research director from market research firm Current Analysis said it was unclear what tight-lipped RIM has done to ease government concerns. "I'm very curious to see the resolution here," he said.

T.V. Ramachandran, director general of Cellular Operators' Association of India, before-mentioned RIM could consider putting servers in India, while Internet security expert Vijay Mukhi said it is hard to believe that no one has a key to encrypt and decrypt messages.

"America has spent billions of dollars for monitoring the cyberspace. I don't believe they would allow BlackBerry to operate if nobody has the encryption key," he said, arguing that RIM could give certainty agencies rights to monitor e-mails. "Not real-time admitting, and not a blanket access," he added.

India has been touchy about Internet services, including Google and Yahoo, according to media reports. Google has allowed Indian government access to decipher information from its social networking site Orkut.

"There is actually a concern," said Mukhi. "Terrorists do use technology and they would some day or haply they are already using BlackBerry services. So how do you stop them?"

Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Vodafone-controlled Vodafone Essar and BPL Mobile offer BlackBerry services in India. (Editing by Janet Guttsman)


By: Devidutta Tripathy and Susan Taylor

Copyright 2008 Reuters. See original article on InformationWeek.com

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Google’s Developer Strategy Rests On The Cloud (TechWeb)

May 29th, 2008 | Category: privacy

If it all sounds a bit like what Amazon has been doing with Amazon Web Services, Google thinks so too. Gundotra acknowledged a debt to Amazon for developing the rent-a-cloud business shape.

Gibb also announced the imminent release of two new Google App Engine APIs: an imagine-manipulation API and the memcache API, for making application Web pages render more quickly.

Mark Lucovsky, technical director at Google, came to urge the use of Google's GData and Ajax APIs. Google in fact is now hosting a calculate of AJAX Libraries, so developers looking since the performance improvements these libraries can provide can just insert JavaScript tags that point to the libraries on Google.

Bruce Johnson, engineering manager for Google Web Toolkit, arrived on stage to announce that Google Web Toolkit 1.5 Release Candidate (GWT) would be available later this week. GWT is an open-source suite of programming tools and libraries that allows developers to write applications in Java — Java 5 language support is a new addition — and then cross-compile into equivalent standalone JavaScript that's compatible with a variety of Web browsers.

Finally, Google engineering director David Glazer, touted Google's OpenSocial API, now at version 0.8. "Things are coming together beautifully," he said, noting that killer apps like e-mail have traditionally been social applications.

Google may have been defeated temporarily by the unexpected number of developers drawn to its vision, but it nonetheless sees itself on the winning side, on the side of the Web.

"After years of rivalship among platforms, the Web has won because it's accessible, because it's ubiquitous, and because there's a passionate community laboring together to move it forward," said Gundotra in a statement. "Openness is great for developers and for users because it knocks down hurdles to building great applications, and because it speeds the next wave of innovation by means of letting good ideas be shared. The Web doesn't depend on any one API or tool or product, from Google or anyone else. What makes the real difference is the aggregate effect of us all working together, with open standards and open source."

In a landscape littered with potential Google rivals, it seems premature to declare victory. But as Google and the Web become ever more interdependent, it becomes harder and harder to lay a wager on another horse.

Google on Wednesday outlined its faculty of seeing for the Internet, which will include a broad scope of technical ambitions using the collective power of developers, the Web, and cloud computing as its base.

"At a very high level, Google cares about moving the Web forward," said Vic Gundotra, engineering VP at Google during the company's I/O developer's conference in San Francisco. "The Web has become the dominant platform of our era."

Gundotra outlined the issues faced in the mainframe era, the personal computer era, and the Internet era. In the mainframe era, he said, computing power was not very accessible, but software was relatively easy to deploy. That changed in the PC era, when we gave up power and ease of software management as antidote to accessibility. by the rise of the Internet, the browser again made online software easy to deal with, but the browser lacks the power and flexibility of desktop applications.

"At Google, we believe we can solve these problems by making the cloud more accessible and by making the person represented more powerful," related Gundotra.

Gundotra repeated Google's mantra that making the Web better benefits Web users and Google. "We probably are the company that's most incented to move the Internet forward," he said.

And for those developers weaving tomorrow's Web line by line, Gundotra, his colleagues, and Google-allied partners showed what could be done with Google's latest programming tools.

There was Allen Hurff, senior VP of engineering at MySpace, who showed how the popular convivial network had employed Google Gears to enhance the search function in MySpace mail. Google Gears, introduced a year ago, provides a way for online applications to function offline by providing persistent storage and synchronization.

Steve Horowtiz, engineering director for Google's Android mobile phone platform, demonstrated that you don't strait an iPhone to have an appealing mobile interface and compelling mobile applications. When he showed how an Android phone, using an internal compass, could dynamically adjust Google Street View images to match the facing of the phone user, there was a collective gasp and applause.

Kevin Gibb, technical lead for the Google App Engine, declared that Google wants make it as easy as possible to constitute and scale Web applications. That's why Google exposed its infrastructure to developers with the limited release of Google App Engine about a month and a half ago. And that's why Gibb declared that the Google App Engine is at that time open to everyone.

Gibb said that use of Google's infrastructure would remain free for applications that generate up to 5 the multitude views per month and require less than 500 MB of storage. After that, pricing is as follows: $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour; $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage; $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth; and $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

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