The War has moved to Europe , The 2 Juggernauts Colliding head 2 head

Google has never had to endure much hard, formal EU antitrust scrutiny -- its purchase of DoubleClick two years ago received a relatively painless waive-through. That may soon change, according to Microsoft's top lawyer. Brad Smith said Google's dominant position in the online ad sector will inevitably lead to some hard questions soon, adding that Microsoft has some experience in the EU antitrust game.

Microsoft's top lawyer said Monday that Google will inevitably have to answer questions about its huge market share in selling advertisements linked to results from its search engine.

Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith said the search advertising market has become "the fundamental economic engine for content online" and "the gateway to content on the Internet.

"Whenever you have a company that has more than a 90 percent market share in a key market, it is inevitable that people will have questions to ask. We say that with some experience,"

Butting Heads

Unlike Microsoft, Google has never been formally investigated by the European Union executive and the only EU scrutiny of its advertising business came when it asked regulators to approve its US$3.1 billion purchase of online ad tracker DoubleClick. The EU waved through the deal in March 2008.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said earlier this month that French antitrust regulators should look at Google's dominant position in the online ad sector.
However, the European Commission, which would deal with any Europe-wide competition problem, has said it sees no issue with Google's dominant position in advertising unless there is "any implication or suspicion" that it is abusing its near-monopoly to hike prices or squeeze rivals and suppliers.
Smith confirmed that Microsoft sees Google as a direct rival, saying they were both active in some of the same product markets.
Microsoft trails Google in search, with a European market share of 2 percent.

Microsoft also advocates a federal privacy law in the United States, he said, and is concerned about different laws emerging at state level.

The Power to Bust Hackers

Smith said security concerns may require giving the right to cloud service providers -- such as Microsoft -- to take legal action to sue hackers or others who try to hack into data hosted in "the cloud."
He said Microsoft's vision of cloud computing saw its own proprietary software in use alongside open source programs -- with both using "open formats" to allow different software to work smoothly together.
EU regulators fined Microsoft in 2004 for not providing technical information to rivals that wanted to make software compatible with Microsoft's servers. The company last year promised changes to share some data on its products with others.he most-used Web browser, Internet Explorer, which competes with Google's Chrome and others.


Source : ECT New Network

Managing Disaster like everything else, The MS Way

REDMOND, Wash.--The ground-level conference room in Building 25 doesn't look much different than many others in buildings across Microsoft's sprawling campus.

It has a window, though most of the view is obscured by a large bush. It has the usual array of outlets and Ethernet jacks, screens, and projectors. During earthquakes and floods, hurricanes and tsunamis, though, this room is ground zero for Microsoft's emergency response effort.
Even then though, it can be hard to tell that somewhere halfway around the world, disaster has struck. That's because Microsoft's disaster team is a virtual one, with much of the action taking place online. Even those working together in Redmond are often glued to their laptops, rather than communicating with nearby colleagues.

"It will look like a bunch of people just sending e-mail," said Claire Bonilla, the senior director of disaster response for Microsoft.

There are about 65 lead members of Microsoft's emergency response effort--and perhaps 160 dedicated people overall--but even at its busiest there might only be fewer than two dozen people in the main disaster response room.
When disaster hits, Bonilla and team activate, reaching out to the nearest Microsoft subsidiary. The company tries to simultaneously make sure its own workers are accounted for, check in with partners and customers, and offer immediate assistance to international aid workers.
The company works with those aid groups to quickly establish a portal called OneResponse, which relief workers can use to coordinate their efforts. That, too is understated, looking like a Web site from a decade ago with little more than a bunch of text links on the main page.
Although it is built on modern SharePoint technology, the design of OneResponse is deliberately spartan, aiming to work on even the poorest of Internet connections--the only kind often available in the wake of natural disaster.
In the case of Haiti, Microsoft's disaster effort was up and running by 6 p.m. on the day of the quake. In addition to conference calls with aid groups, Microsoft had the added insight of Gisli Olafsson, who works in Microsoft's disaster efforts but was quickly on the ground in Haiti as part of his volunteer gig as a member of Iceland's search and rescue team. Olafsson's firsthand knowledge helped give Microsoft an early sense of what the situation was like on the ground.
Microsoft, of course, is far from alone in pitching in during times of disaster. Many companies have offered their cash, services, products, and know-how in the wake of the Haiti quake.
A number of tech companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, and Google are supporters of NetHope, an organization that helps establish emergency, temporary, and permanent communications following a disaster. That has been an especially acute need in Haiti, said NetHope CEO Bill Brindley.

"The communications infrastructure in Haiti has been virtually demolished," said Brindley, whose group has worked to bring in portable satellite units that aid groups can use to provide voice communication and Internet access.

Among those pitching in is San Francisco-based Inveneo, which has specialized in setting up off-the-grid networks in rural Africa. That know-how has come in handy in setting up Wi-Fi in Haiti, which is still without widespread power.
Inveneo CIO Mark Summer, who has been helping set-up portable Wi-Fi units for NetHope, said that the devastation is intense.
"In the hills the damage is significantly less then down in the center of Port-Au-Prince where in it seems that in many areas more then 50 percent of the buildings are gone or beyond repair," he said in an e-mail statement. "We've seen buildings that have had two or three stories and now no higher then 5 feet of the ground--it seems as if walls just turned into sand..."
Each disaster brings its own set of needs and challenges. The fact Haiti was so impoverished even before the quake, plus the fact it struck the capital, has posed a big challenge for aid groups. In the early days, it was a challenge getting supplies into the country, Bonilla said.
"Planes circled for three hours and sometimes had to go back to the Dominican Republic because they couldn't land," Bonilla said.

Keeping aid workers safe is also an issue.

"People are desperate for anything they can do to provide food and water to their families and that can breed security issues," Bonilla said.

By last Thursday afternoon, only Bonilla and one colleague were in the disaster room. One person did wander into the room, though he was looking for one of the many Microsoft partners that occupy the bulk of Building 25's ground floor.
MSNBC streamed in the background, though coverage had switched from Haiti to live footage of a car chase here in the U.S.
"I don't think that classifies as even a minor disaster," Bonilla jokes, going back to her work. As with many responses, Bonilla has been working for 18 to 20 hours a day. Bonilla said her job makes her glad she works in the Seattle area, known for its good coffee. Even that, she said, only carries her so far. "After awhile, caffeine loses its impact," she said. "Then it's just adrenaline."

Source : CNET News

As Social as ever, Just Googling Through

Web users with Google profiles will now be able to use a beta version of Social Search, a Google application that recently graduated out of "Labs" status. The utility opens new categories of content when users conduct a search, displaying information and images from users' public pages to those users' contacts. As always, users should be aware of what they're posting and who can access it.

Google promoted its Social Search experiment to beta status on Wednesday.

Social Search adds information and images from users' public pages to the results of online searches conducted by members of their social network.
Users need a Google profile to get results from Social Search.

Circles of Friends and Content

Social has been added to other Google applications like Google Images, so when people with a Google profile conduct a search on images, they may get pictures their friends and other online contacts have published publicly on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr.
Online searches for answers to questions will also pull in public content from friends and contacts on the Web such as blog pages.
Links labeled "My social circle" and "My social content" will appear together with results of online searches. The first lets users check out their social circles; the second lets users see the connections and content behind social search results.
Social Search provides transparency about connections by showing users the other individuals with whom they are connected -- and through which services -- every time query results show information from people in their social circle, Google spokesperson Jake Hubert told TechNewsWorld.
Google is labeling its social search feature a beta version because it expects to expand those capabilities. "We're leaving a 'beta' label on social results because there's a lot more we can do," Social Search project staffers Maureen Heymans and Terran Melconian wrote in the Google blog post announcing the feature's beta release Wednesday.

Getting to Know You

Could this new social dimension impact users' privacy? People tend to have friends with different degrees of closeness, from those with whom we are merely civil to those with whom we share much of our lives. Could social search blur those lines and create unlooked-for intimacy with people we only consider acquaintances or business contacts?
Google's party line boils down to what boxers hear from referees in the ring: Keep your guard up and protect yourself at all times.
"All the content that shows up as part of Social Search is already publicly available through Google.com and other search engines today," Google's Hubert pointed out. "Social Search simply makes it easier to find relevant information from your social circle.
"If you don't want this content to be surfaced as part of Social Search, you can remove it from your Google profile, your other online social services, or from the Internet entirely," Hubert said. "You can always add or remove links on your Google profile, and can also block their Gmail chat contacts or remove contacts from their friends, family and coworker groups in Gmail."



 Source : ECT News Network

The Window is Shrinking, while linux opening all the doors

Linux inched ahead in the operating-system arena during the final month of 2009, even as Windows and Mac gave up some ground.
That's according to research firm Net Applications, which recently released its Market Share report covering operating systems in December.
Linux accounted for 1.02 percent of the market in December, up from an even 1 percent the month before, Net Applications reported.

A Peak in May

Windows, meanwhile, fell from 92.52 percent in November to 92.21 percent in December, while Mac fell from 5.12 percent to 5.11 percent during the same time, the company found.
Linux's market share was 0.98 percent in February 2009, peaking for the year at 1.17 percent in May, according to Net Applications' data.
Windows was at 94.74 percent in February, while Mac was at 4.55 percent.
Also tracked by Net Applications are Java ME, iPhone, Symbian, iPod touch, Windows Mobile, Android and a variety of other systems.

Rival Data

Of course, estimates for Linux's market share are notoriously variable and controversial, given that -- unlike other operating systems -- there is very little sales data.
Rival tracking site W3Counter, in fact, puts Linux's market share at a significantly higher 2.14 percent for the month of December, up from 1.8 percent the month before.
Windows -- including XP, Vista, 7, 2003, 2000 and 98 versions -- went from 85.69 percent in November to 86.43 percent in December, while Mac fell from 7.46 percent to 7.44 percent, according to W3Counter.
Advocates of free and open source software, meanwhile, estimate that Linux's share may even be in the double digits.

'A Very Quiet Creep'

Finally, "the idea of a computer OS is no longer limited to desktop and notebook PCs, so as convergence continues to blur the line between the PC and the smartphone, Linux is well-positioned to grow because of its flexibility, cost and other advantages," Lyman noted.
Whether or not these "more indirect and discreet gains will be measurable or noticed," of course, is another question, he added.
Still, "I expect a very quiet creep for Linux in the OS market," Lyman concluded, "particularly in desktop and consumer devices."

Amity Microsoft Tech Club Registration Procedure

Amity Microsoft Tech Club (AMTC)

AmityMicrosoft Tech Club is a step taken by the Microsoft Student Partners present at Amity School of Engineering and Technology (A.S.E.T) to make students aware of the different Academic Programs started by Microsoft India.AMTC would make its members aware of the different technologies made available to them by Microsoft, directly as well as indirectly. The AMTC members would be provided with resources which would help them get more familiar with the upcoming technology.

The Microsoft Student Partner Programme is an initiative taken by Microsoft to recognize all of them who have a passion for the technological developments taking place all around the globe.

Objectives of AMTC would include:

• Clearing Some Myths about Microsoft: One of the prime goals of the AMTC would be to tell its members that not only Microsoft has revolutionalized the IT industry by windows but has also given aspiring developers a lot of tools to test their skills and showcase their talent in this exponentially growing industry

• Providing Resources To its Members: A lot of resources would be provided by the Microsoft Student Partners to the members of AMTC as per the interest shown by them. A lot of reading material would be provided to the members to help them learn various Microsoft Technologies like Visual Studio, Expression Studio etc.

• Organizing Various Sessions: A number of sessions about various Microsoft Products would be conducted by the Student Partners which would help the members of the club to choose from a number of fields available to them. The Microsoft Student Partners would share the information (provided to them by Microsoft itself) with the club members as to keep them up to date.

• Spreading Awareness About Microsoft India Academic Programs: Microsoft has a number of Academic programs running all over the world. Club members would be given information related to different Microsoft India Academic Programs like Microsoft Student Partner Programme ,Microsoft Dreamspark , Imagine Cup .Members would be encouraged to become Microsoft Student Partner and would be told the benefits of the programme and also AMTC would keep track of the MSP selection procedure and would keep its Members informed about the same

• Organizing Various Technical Events: AMTC would also be organizing various technical events at the college annual fest and also Members of the AMTC would regularly be informed about any Microsoft Event Organized in the City and would also encourage them to attend these events.

• Going Online with The Club: An online Blog would also be maintained so as to make the members aware of various events organized by the club. Discussions & queries on various technical topics would also be entertained regularly. Videos of the all sessions conducted as an AMTC activity would be posted on the blog so as to help the members who were not able to attend the sessions.

Frequently Asked Questions(FAQ’s)

Q.1. Would only Microsoft Technologies be discussed?

A.1. Not Necessarily, discussions on any technology would be welcomed.

Q.2. What would the sessions consist of?

A.2 The primary goal of the sessions would be to make members aware of the different development tools created and made available by Microsoft so as to help the members understand the application of these tools. Demos of the tools would be given so as help the members start of.

Q.3. Will you teach different computer launguages?

A.3. We are going to provide basic knowledge of the different technologies or languages. We’ll also be providing reading materials related to these technologies.If any member gets interested in any of the technologies then he/she is free to ask for any material required by him/her.

Q.4.Would AMTC provide us with the Microsoft Tools?

A.4. The tools made available to the Microsoft Student Partners would be provided to all the AMTC members who are interested.

Q.5. What if any club member has any information which he wants to share with the club?

A.5. Such information would be welcomed.Any club member is free to share any information he has but has to do it in an organized manner.After every sessions the club members would be free to tell us whatever they have or feel.

Application Procedure

1. A Registration fees of Rs 300/- has to be paid to any of the below mentioned personnel
   
2. The application form can be downloaded from http://www.mediafire.com/?2nzgeoeminj
3. The Form can be mailed to any of the undersigned
4. The Registration fees is mandatory
   

For Further Queries Contact:

Vedant Arora(CS III Year) ,MSP,President AMTC
9999893681, vedant.arora@gmail.com

Vibhav Garg(CS III Year) , MSP, Secretary AMTC
9899555330 , garg.vibhav@gmail.com

Vivek Kr Bajpai(CS III Year) , Treasurer
9873415724, vivek_bajpai52@yahoo.com

Design Your world, Design Your Space

The world is yours, or at least that's the promise e-commerce offers. Get your products, services or information online, and you can gain customers anywhere. It can be challenging, though, to build an active worldwide customer base that buys and comes back for more.

It's a competitive world, and studies have shown over and over that people prefer to buy in the ways they are accustomed to, especially with information in their native language.
The first obvious customization is to provide translation of your e-commerce site, but this doesn't happen with the wave of a magic wand. There are steps that must be followed, from business planning to technical adaptation to facilitating the localization process and streamlining updates. This article provides an overview of these considerations, and suggests logical steps to help you move forward.

Business Case

While this article primarily addresses issues regarding site creation and adaptation, it's important to discuss the business drivers as well, as they strongly impact cost and time considerations.
Whether you work at a large or small company, your business case leads your budget and resource allocation in creating sites for global audiences. In most cases, this globalization strategy involves high-level management visibility and strategic commitment. There are revenue expectations and distribution issues to sort out, possibly local in-country representation to support, and a host of other logistics.
All that adds up to plenty of expectations for a return on investment. Getting a good plan in place -- including a strong understanding of the scope of implementation efforts, a technical and process road map, and some kind of measurement metrics -- helps you get the right funding and resources to be successful.
The costs of poorly globalizing your e-commerce site certainly include building expensive systems that don't have the needed functionality for an international customer base. Even worse are the delays in deployment that have rather painful and visible effects on your company's revenue stream, global aspiration objectives and, ultimately, the bottom line.


Internationalization: One Site, Many Adaptations

To the outside observer, internationalization (i18n) remains a hidden and often unknown attribute, but it is critical to leveraging your success from market to market.
When you internationalize your site, you adapt its technology to be capable not only of supporting any language, but also of supporting local formats and ways of doing business. Translators and regional stakeholders can alter content and more, but the site itself -- what presents and processes information -- remains consistent and leveraged for each market.
We often counsel our clients to think in terms of locales, and not languages. That's because you can't assign local purchasing behaviors to a language. It's more the other way around; a locale includes the language of the region as well as numerous other issues, such as character set support, date/time formatting, forms of payment, data/product sorting, phone/address formatting and more.
If you are using another company's e-commerce platform technology for your site, then you must find out exactly how it supports internationalization. If you are building a new site, be aware that some technologies adapt to internationalization and localization demands better than others. The technologies you choose should tread the balance of your current organization requirements and your business objectives.

If you are adapting your current site to support internationalization, consider these areas in your migration:


•Architecture -- The structure of your e-commerce system, including the software itself, the externally visible properties of the user interface, and the relationships between them. Consider your new requirements for international markets, finding the balance of what is not in your e-commerce site that needs to be added. Likewise, examine what is in your site's code that needs to be changed to support the markets.

•Code refactoring -- Unless you are developing a new e-commerce site with support for international markets planned from the beginning, it is likely that the internal structure of your e-commerce site will require modification to improve or change the code to better support international functionality. Typical code refactoring on internationalization projects includes the following:


◦Extract embedded strings from the code so that they can be easily accessed for translation;

◦Change locale-limiting functions, methods and classes;

◦Mark relevant business logic object-based, so it can be affected by locale requirements;

◦Enable character set support (Unicode) so that extended characters display properly;

◦Ensure that character encoding changes to pages, database and individual coding elements are implemented; and

◦Abstract transaction workflow on the site that may need to be dynamically customized to support locale requirements.


Content Management Systems

Another thing to take into account during the internationalization phase is the type of tools you are using for developing your content. For Web sites, there are plenty of good content management systems (CMS) that are available; however, there are differences among them that affect the support for international markets.
If you use one, you want make sure it is localization-friendly. It must have a way to export the translatable content in some kind of file format that translation tools can use. XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) or other variations of XML-based formats are good choices. The tool must also be able to merge back the translated exported data into the right places in the localized content.
Generating "delta" files -- which contain only the content "chunks" that need to go through the localization process for translation -- is a very efficient way to reduce the costs for localizing updates as your site is modified. It is often helpful to the linguists, though, to provide reference materials or to include the already-translated content around the new translatable chunks, so the translation can be done within a meaningful context.
Some content management systems also allow you to control the granularity of the chunks you create, and to re-use them across the whole published Web site. This allows for even more cost savings in localization.

Content Creation

Whether you are using a content management system or not, how you write the content and design your icons and graphics affects the ultimate localizability of the site. Taking into consideration the way the content is developed saves money during the localization process and results in better international sites.
Ultimately, it is much cheaper to create content correctly in the source language before translating the content into many languages for the target markets and having to address content issues for each market:


•Write in simplified English. In creating the source content, write in the active voice, avoiding complex sentence structures. Avoid the use of slang, colloquial expressions, and cultural references. This is even more important if you anticipate having some users from markets that are not covered by your globalization plan. They may end up using machine translation engines to get a gist of the content of your Web site.

•Reuse text. If you say the same thing at different places, then say it the same way, so the translation of the first occurrence can be used for the second one. This leveraging of text can significantly reduce the linguistic fees through the reuse of previously translated content. By all means, avoid minor wording changes as that just means more costs. Content management systems can help you to parse your content into "chunks" that are easily translated while facilitating the reuse of content throughout the site.

•Icons. Make sure all icons are understandable by your target markets. It is cheaper to have icons that "work everywhere" than to customize icons for each market. Identifying culturally acceptable icons can require a bit of up-front cost in assessing them for your target markets, but it avoids confusing (or worse, offending) your customers. Alternatively, you can design your Web site to easily substitute icons according to the market (e.g. by using style-sheets instead of hard-coding style changes in your pages).

•Graphics. While it is tempting to have complex graphics with layered text, remember that all text has to be translated. Translating text that is embedded into graphics is more expensive. If you have to use call outs on your graphics, then use numbers or letters that are then referenced in the text of the page rather than on the graphic itself. Whatever you do, make sure that you keep the graphic source files for your localization team (not just the collapsed JPG or GIF files).

•Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In creating the source e-commerce site, great care must be taken to optimize search terms so that the site appears readily in search engine matches. Extend your efforts to include SEO for each of your target markets, using appropriate search terms in the metadata as well as the content itself.

Ensuring Internationalization Success

A good internationalization effort should be validated with a careful review of the source site:

•Consider using pseudo-translation (where the content is passed through a small program to convert the text into extended characters so that display can be verified) of the content to verify that all modifiable elements of the site are indeed accessible and can be changed for the various translated versions.

•Verify that locale-sensitive data can be processed accordingly (date/time/numbers format, currency issues, measurement units, etc.) and that when needed, locale-specific content can be provided as well (end-user license agreements, privacy and confidentiality statements, 800-type numbers, part numbers, etc.)

To recap, the success of your site on the international scene comes from a combination of

•good development practices,

•well-adapted tools used during the development and the maintenance of the site, and

•content that is ready for localization, taking into account cultural differences as appropriate.

You can learn more by collaborating with industry colleagues (from your industry and the language services industry) through an impartial trade association, such as the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA).
Following these high-level guidelines will better prepare you for the localization and translation of your e-commerce site for each of your target markets

Palm Pixi : Quite a Palmfull

Palm is expanding its line of WebOS smartphones -- and ratcheting up competition with Apple -- with the introduction of a new mobile device called the "Pixi."
The phone, meant to supplement the more serious Pre smartphone, will be available during the holiday seaon through its exclusive carrier, Sprint .
A lighter weight and thinner phone with a visible full keyboard, the Pixi is a natural mobile conduit for social networking sites and activities, according to Palm.
Palm Synergy lets users arrange information from Google , Facebook , Yahoo , LinkedIn and Exchange ActiveSync in a single view. There are also new integration capabilities for Facebook's contacts, phone, calendar and photo apps.
Pixi users can download applications from the Palm Beta App Catalog and use Palm media sync to customize the device with music, photos and videos from iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store.

Pricing Confusion
The Pixi's price hasn't been announced yet, but it's expected to come in around US$99. Here's why: Palm also announced that it is cutting the price of the Pre to $149, after rebates, with a two-year Sprint contract. That's essentially a $50 price cut.
Prior to the Pixi's unveiling, Sprint advertised a special offer for the Pre: For a just few hours, new customers were able to get a $100 service credit. However, Sprint yanked the promotion before the ink was dry.
It is unclear how the credit was to be applied to the Pre's final price for a consumer -- which after $350 in instant and mail-in rebates settled at approximately $200. It was widely assumed that the special offer was for a $99 Pre. Sprint reportedly said it would honor the deal for customers who signed new contracts during the promotion's brief window of opportunity.