Author: Serkadis

Today’s buzz among Chromebook aficionados and wannabes is a leaked video for a model supposedly being developed by Google with high resolution, touchscreen display — that’s 2560 x 1700, baby. The vid went up on YouTube, then mysteriously came down, but went back up virally, adding to the intrigue that maybe, just maybe, the touchy-feely Chromebook is real. In your dreams.

Who doesn’t love a good mystery, particularly gadget freaks desperate for something more and bloggers clawing over one another for greater pageviews. Conspiracy is an Internet meme that never grows old. But there’s something oh-so wrong with the Chromebook Pixel shown in the video. Doesn’t the computer look a whole lot like Apple MacBook Pro? Similarities are striking, which makes me wonder whether Google imitates art or this video isn’t for a real product. Perhaps it’s just pitch for one.

Magical Mystery Tour

For sure, a Google-designed Chromebook would be timely. Just two days ago I griped about OEMs releasing new models based on existing Windows machines stripped to the bones. Manufacturers need a good swift kick in the ass, and Google should start by doing what it did with smartphones and tablets: Co-develop reference designs that run stock software — hence the Nexus line of smartphones.

So, yeah, Google leadership is needed so the Chromebook wave rises rather than falls off once the geek market loses the “next big thing” glow.

But pardon my skepticism Chromebook Pixel is for real, given the paucity of rumors that turn into reality and the marked MacBook Pro resemblance. Look at the video! It’s stylized like a MacBook Pro commercial minus Jeff Goldblum narration. Isn’t that reason enough to wonder about this thing?

Russell Holly shares my skepticism:

Chrome OS has had the nuts and bolts for touch support since the CR-48, and when you consider the resolution in the Samsung Nexus 10 it seems plausible that Google would look in this direction for Chrome OS at some point.

This video, though? This video has all markers for an intentional viral prank. For starters, it’s a crappy render of a crappy laptop. Next, it’s using the wrong Google logo at the end. Finally, the video was pulled from YouTube, and then pops back up on DailyMotion courtesy of an Android blog.

Another tell is “Chrome” without the logo 43 seconds into the video. Still, if you closely examine describable keys, they are right for Chromebook.

She Loves You

Developer François Beaufort, who ignited fierce fires of hope across Google+ today, calls Pixel a “concept” being “actually tested at Google right now”. But concept doesn’t mean real product, certainly not looking this much like an Apple laptop — or are Google lawyers that audacious? Besides, companies test all kinds of prototypes and produce marketing mockups during the development process.

The collective Chromebook community is near fatal heart attack over this thing. I have visions of screaming teenage girls, some with arm outstretched, waiting for the Beatles. “Wow, I think I just found my next laptop”, Andrew Brown chimes.

Jeff Jarvis: “I want one. Now that Google has done a good job testing the low-cost end of the market with its Chromebooks, now it needs to test the sleek end”.

“Shut up and take my money!” Lee Grupsmith exclaims.

Mac Morrison: “Chromebook Pixel marks the end of apple lust”.

Oh, you screaming school girls! Aren’t we all?

As previously reported, Twitter has launched some new search-related changes for its iOS and Android apps.

Here’s what Twitter said about search in the announcement: “Search results now surface the most relevant mix of Tweets, photos, and accounts, all in one stream (similar to the stream in Discover). We’ve also added a new search button to Twitter for iPhone, letting you search from anywhere within the app. (This button was already available in the Android and iPad apps.) Look for the magnifying glass icon next to the button you use to compose a Tweet.”

In a separate blog post on the company’s engineering blog, Twitter talks a bit about how it ranks search results.

Youngin Shin of Twitter’s search quality team (Twitter has a search quality team) explains, “When a user searches, different types of content are searched separately, returning a sequence of candidate results for each content type with a type-specific score for each. For certain content types that are displayed as a single group or gallery unit, such as users or images, we assign the maximum score of results as the representative score of this content type. The result sequences for some content types may be trimmed or discarded entirely at this point.”

“Once results of different content types are prepared, each type-specific score is converted into a universally compatible score, called a ‘uniscore’,” adds Shin. “Uniscores of different modules are used as a means to blend content types as in a merge-sort, except for the penalization of content type transition. This is to avoid over-diversification of content types in the blended result.”

As Shin explains, all pieces of individual content are assigned type-specific scores called “raw” scores by their corresponding services. Raw scores are then converted into uniscores using type-specific log-linear score conversion functions. According to Shin, the chance of a converted score taking its value in [0, 1] is at least 95%.

Read the full post here. It’s an interesting look into the back end of Twitter Search.

Yelp announced today that it surpassed 100 million unique vistors on its site in January, marking the first time in Yelp history it has had that many uniques in a month.

“That’s an all-time high for traffic to the desktop and mobile site and a clear indication that people are looking for local businesses and finding them on Yelp,” said CEO Jeremy Stoppelman in a blog post. “While that number is huge, it doesn’t even include the 9.4 million unique mobile devices that used the Yelp mobile app in January alone.”

“Even more staggering than 100 million unique visitors using Yelp.com in January are the millions of contributions Yelpers made to the community in the same time frame,” he added. “The 4.6 million calls and 5.7 million directions generated through the Yelp mobile app and nearly 2 million bookmarks created by Yelpers are the connection between searching for a specific local business and making a spending decision.”

According to Stoppelman, who cites a recent survey, business owners on Yelp report that the average customer across all categories spends $101.59 in their first visit.

The company has put out this infographic to accompany its impressive traffic news:

Google announced that it has integrated new input tools into Google Translate. When you choose an input language, you should see the input tools icon at the bottom of the text area. Click on this to turn on the input tool, or switch to another one in the drop-down menu.

The tools are also available in Gmail, Google Drive, Chrome, Android, and as software for Windows.

“We have always allowed you to choose among alternative input methods, but your choice was limited,”Google says in a blog post. “For example, only one of four popular input methods for Chinese was previously available. Our new input tools greatly expand the set of available input methods for many languages.”

“We believe that your choice of input tools is important, because the best way to input text with a keyboard varies from language to language, and even from person to person,” the company continues. “Every language has its own set of popular input methods, each familiar to its own subset of users. For example, the Portuguese keyboard has two common layouts, one popular in Brazil and another in Portugal. In addition, given the popularity of Latin-alphabet keyboards, a transliteration input tool is often the preferred input method for many languages, allowing users to convert Latin-alphabet input into the proper written script. (Chinese has over 80,000 characters. Try fitting them all on a keyboard.) With the right transliteration input tools turned on, you can simply type “privet” to input привет, “tieng chao” for tiếng chào, and “nihao” for 你好.

Google Translate supports 65 different languages.

Got your grains of salt at the ready? Good. Rumors of a more extravagant Chromebook have been making the rounds for months now, but the new, supposedly leaked video the new touch-friendly Chromebook Pixel may provide the first real glance at what Google has been working on behind closed doors.

The video was spotted by Chrome buff François Beaufort, and it certainly looks flashy enough — it exhibits and level of polish and clarity of message that’s notably absent in most fan-made mockups (though some of them are getting very good). The video doesn’t offer much in the way of hardware specifics aside from noting that the display plays home to 4 million pixels, which Beaufort believes means a screen resolution of 2560 x 1700.

For what it’s worth, the information laid out in the leaked video jibes with some earlier reports of a touch-enabled Chromebook. Last November, the China Times claimed that Google was planning to launch a Chromebook with a 12.85-inch touch display, and noted that the search giant (and not a hardware partner like Samsung or Acer) had placed orders with ODMs Compal and Wintek.

The implication at the time was that Google would be bypassing its usual slew of hardware collaborators completely in favor of crafting and selling its own gadgets. Interestingly enough, the Chromebook Pixel video states that it’s a new kind of computer “designed entirely by Google,” suggesting that Google may have done just that. Naturally, Google declined to comment when asked if the Chromebook Pixel was indeed a real product.

The story behind how this video came to light is perhaps just as outrageous as the product being shown off. It was found on a YouTube channel owned by Slinky.Me, a Mountain View company whose states mission is to build the “world’s largest visual guide” — whatever that means. Slinky.Me was apparently was hacked a few hours ago, and the secretive Chromebook video was posted to the company’s YouTube account shortly afterward.

But why would a company working on what appears to be a fairly static visual guide have access to a promo video for unreleased Google hardware? Well, it would seem that part of the team’s work also involves crafting promo videos like these pro-Google ads that were uploaded to their collective Vimeo account this past week. None of them seem all that high-brow — not nearly as much as curious Chromebook Pixel promo anyway — but they hint at some sort of working relationship between Google and Slinky.me.

Adding fuel to the fire is Slinky.me’s CEO, one Victor Koch who claims on his LinkedIn account that he is (or was, if he’s not the type to update regularly) a software engineer at — you guessed it — Google. A quick look at his Facebook profile seems to shed a bit more light on the situation, as he refers to himself there as an “ex-Googler.” We have been unable to confirm with Google that Victor Koch was a former employee, and Mr. Koch wouldn’t respond to the Facebook messages I’ve sent him so for now this facet of the story is still a bit murky.

Naturally, someone attempted to clean up this leak as best they could as soon as the supposed hack went down. The video no longer exists on YouTube, and the elusive Mr. Koch issued a public apology (and tagged Google co-founder Sergey Brin) on his Google+ account for the video’s sudden exposure. This case has many of the earmarks of your typical botched release, but I imagine we’ll soon get official word on the Chromebook Pixel’s veracity — Google I/O is just a few months away, after all.

Google just announced the launch of enhanced campaigns for AdWords, which it says will help advertisers better manage their campaigns in a multi-device world.

One key feature is bid adjustments to help advertisers manage bids across devices, locations, time of day, etc. from a single campaign. Google shares an example.

“A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for ‘coffee’ or ‘breakfast’ on a smartphone,” says SVP of engineering, Sridhar Ramaswamy. “Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.”

Enhanced campaigns will show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without advertisers having to edit each campaign for every combination of devices, location and time of day.

“A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC — all within a single campaign,” explains Ramaswamy.

The enhanced campaigns also come with advanced reports to measure new conversion types. For example, you can count calls and app downloads as conversions in your AdWords reports.

“You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads,” suggests Ramaswamy.

Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the coming weeks. All campaigns will be upgraded in mid-2013.

I’ll be frank: Causata’s marketing software is a little creepy in the level of personal data it collects and analyzes, but it also seems very good at what it does. Good enough for the company to close a $7.5 million Series C round from Accel Partners in December, bringing its total funding to $23 million (all from Accel) since launching in 2009. It’s latest wrinkle: machine-learning algorithms that automatically figure out which campaigns are most likely to work on what customers.

If you’re not familiar with Causata, it’s a true big-data application dedicated solely to stitching together customer identities so marketers know what they want. It collects first-party data — cookies, email addresses, usernames, site activity, customer service phone calls and everything it can, really — and stuffs it into an event store, from where users can run predictive algorithms against the data. Because it takes in such a wide variety of data, Causata stores everything in HBase, the NoSQL database that sits atop the Hadoop Distributed File System and is designed with such unstructured or semi-structured data in mind.

Previously, though, as VP of Marketing Brian Stone explained to me, analytics and predictive modeling within Causata were solely an offline function. Analysts used R, Tableau, Qliktech, plain SQL or their data-analysis tool of choice in order to work thr0ugh data, learn who’s who among customers and then ultimately build their models. With the new machine-learning capabilities, the system is always looking at how companies are targeting consumers and how those consumers are behaving, and then generating models to predict how certain actions might influence behavior one or even many steps down the line.

Once the data analysts figure out who’s who and how particular microsegments are likely to respond to particular actions, the marketing team can put these models to work in their existing platforms for placing advertising, surfacing offers or whatever other methods they might use to try and reach consumers.

About that personal data …

Any time we’re talking about personal data, though, a certain subset of consumers is likely to get creeped out — and rightfully so. It comes down to that now well-known tradeoff between how much we value personalization and how much we value privacy. Not surprisingly, Stone says he’s open to advertising when it’s “personalized, timely, relevant and intelligent.” If his bank didn’t “continually misfire” in trying to make him loan offers that don’t match his situation — something they should know based on his account information, online banking and site activity — he might actually be willing to take it up on an offer.

Besides, he noted, the only time a human being (at least using Causata’s software) would ever really have reason to look at personal-level data is during troubleshooting or when trying to figure out better methods for segmenting customers. Ideally, this is by activity-based data such as price-consciousness or loyalty rather than classical demographic data such as age, sex or race. But in terms of actual ads or offers served, the system clocks your activity, runs a predictive analysis against your identity profile and returns a result in well under a second.

This happens to be the same method, or at least a similar method, undertaken every time we see personalized ads online: No human being is sitting around, looking at our data and deciding we need hemorrhoid cream.

Given the amount of digital data we’re contractually giving away every time we use surf the web or use our smartphones, combined with the number of companies out there trying to help marketers make sense of it, the personalization genie probably isn’t going back into its bottle. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with IBM Fellow and overall identity-data genius Jeff Jonas nearly three years ago. He explained his theory on how extensive data tracking will ultimately lead to a surveillance society but we’ll love it because we love optimization. “It’s seemingly irresistible to us,” he said.

When someone actually gets targeted advertising right, maybe it will be.

To learn more about machine learning, privacy, Hadoop and everything else driving the discussion around big data, come to our Structure: Data event March 20-21 in New York.

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Now that Google’s Matt Cutts is back online, he’s been steadily putting out new Webmaster Help videos on a daily basis. It will be interesting to see how long this continues.

Today’s is particularly timely considering Google just pushed out a toolbar PageRank update (the first of the year).

Cutts responds to the following user-submitted question:

Why don’t you switch off the PageRank Toolbar feature? It is widely used by link sellers as a link grading system. Why do you continue to display PageRank publicly? It appears to have little relevance, except to spammers.

“My rough answer is: there are a lot of SEOs and people in search who look at the PageRank toolbar, but there are a ton of regular users as well,” says Cutts. “You would be really surprised at how many just regular people have the Google Toolbar, and user PageRank as a way to figure out…how reputable at something…I know it seems kind of strange, but it also seems strange that nofollow is only a single digit percentage of links on the web. We get into our tunnel vision, and we sort of say, ‘Oh, well no one else uses the PageRank toolbar,’ but the fact is a lot of people do.”

He continues, “Now, one interesting twist is Chrome doesn’t really have a PageRank toolbar feature built in, and Internet Explorer 10, as I understand it, doesn’t allow toolbars or add-ins, or as Microsoft calls it, it provides an ‘add-in free experience,’ so if IE 10 becomes more popular, eventually it might be the case that the Google Toolbar is not as commonly used, and in that case, it might be the case that, it might be such that over time, maybe the PageRank feature is not used by as many people, and so maybe it will go away on its own or eventually we’ll reach the point where we say, ‘Okay, maintaining this is not worth the amount of work.’”

He says Google will probably continue to support the feature as long as people are using it. With IE 10, however, he says, “the writing is on the wall,” so they’ll see how that affects things in the future (particularly for Windows users).

Google announced today that it has added 38 run and lift maps for some of the most popular ski resorts in the U.S. and Canada to Google Maps.

The maps show blue, green, and black runs as solid colored lines. Ski lifts are red dotted lines.

“Whether you’re shredding Squaw Valley, Big Sky, or Okemo, Google Maps are a comprehensive, accurate and easy way to find the best route down the hill,” says Google Maps strategic partner manager Ryan Poscharsky.

Here’s the full list of maps:

Alpine Meadows – CO
Alyeska Resort – AK
Aspen Highlands – CO
Aspen Mountain – CO
Attitash Mountain Resort – NH
Big Sky Resort – MT
Big White Ski Resort – BC
Breckenridge Ski Resort – CO
Brighton – UT
Buttermilk – CO
Copper Mountain – CO
Crested Butte Mountain Resort – CO
Deer Valley Resort – UT
Granite Gorge – NH
Heavenly Mountain Resort – CA
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort – WY
Lake Louise Ski Area – AB
Mammoth Mountain – CA
Mount Bachelor – OR
Mount Shasta – CA
Okemo Mountain Resort – VT
Panorama Mountain Village – BC
Park City Mountain Resort – UT
Revelstoke Mountain Resort – BC
Schweitzer Mountain Resort – ID
Sierra-at-Tahoe Resort – CA
Snowbasin – UT
Snowmass – CO
Squaw Valley – CA
Steamboat Ski Resort – CO
Stowe Mountain Resort – VT
Sugar Bowl Resort – CA
Sun Valley Resort – ID
Telluride Ski Resort – CO
Vail Mountain – CO
Whistler Blackcomb – BC
Wildcat Mountain – NH
Winter Park Resort – CO

The maps are available on Android and iPhone.

A few weeks ago the Crazyflie Nano captured our collective imaginations by winging its way around an open plan office and looking like a cross between a hummingbird and the robotic butterfly that steals things in Dora the Explorer. The tiny quadrotor robot is now available for pre-order for $173 for the multi-sensor version and $143 for a basic version with position sensors. The product should ship in April.

The project is completely open source and requires a soldering iron and some smarts to complete. The $173 version includes an altimeter and magnetometer so you can tell your height and direction. You can control it with a standard gaming joystick connected to a PC. It weighs 19 grams and is about four inches long and wide. It can fly for 7 minutes on one 20 minute charge, which is about on par for most flying toys.

The creators, Marcus Eliasson, Arnaud Taffanel, and Tobias Antonsson, built the project over the past three years while holding down day jobs. They’re already running into the hurdles of Internet popularity. In response to a potential buyer asking about the need for a soldering iron, Antonsson writes:

via Wired

Just got the iPhone 5, and don’t know what to do with your perfectly fine iPhone 4? (Jerk). Well, there’s a growing amount of cell phone recycling kiosks coming to malls near you that will pay you cash for your discarded gadgets. ecoATM, a startup that is building out these networks, has just raised $41 million in debt and options, according to a filing, which could help it start pushing out a much higher volume of these kiosks.

Five-year-old ecoATM’s kiosks use technology to identify the recycled item (like your basically new iPhone), quantify its condition and worth, and offer you compensation in cash or coupons. The company has about 300 kiosks across 20 states as of now, spokeswoman Anita Giani tells me, which is up from the 50 kiosks they had installed about a year ago.

That’s steady growth, though a bit slower ramp up than they had expected a few years ago. But Giani says that ecoATM is looking to install hundreds of kiosks more this year, and has also expanded the types of devices it can accept to recently to include tablets.

ecoATM’s kiosks also have wireless connections, and the boxes use software from startup Axeda to run diagnostics and do remote management. The company can do remote software refreshes on its kiosks, and it can also fix any problems with the kiosks without having to send a technician in person out to each kiosk.

This debt round is separate from the company’s previous equity rounds. Before that Series B, ecoATM had also raised $14.4 million Series A round in early 2011. The company has a set of strategic backers that could be a strong asset to get its kiosks into more stores, including change kiosk giant Coinstar, Oakland venture firm Claremont Creek Ventures, Tao Ventures, and Singapore billionaire Koh Boon Hwee.

I’ve been watching the company’s site for a few years, and it’s now added a lot more information about the technology and methods they are using to combat theft. The problem with the kiosks is that if someone steals a new iPhone, and takes it to the kiosk, it could provide an easy way to get cash for the stolen device. After a friend’s phone was stolen recently in San Francisco, the police actually told her to go down to check an area that had recycling options, as it wasn’t uncommon for phones to end up there.

ecoATM says to fight theft, they have established methods like: requiring a drivers license to recycle goods, the recycler has to be 18 or over, the recycler gives a thumbprint, the devices are kept for 14 days as a precaution, the kiosks use remote cameras to take photos of and monitor the recycler, and serial numbers are kept of the devices to check against reported stolen goods.

This story was updated at 9:308AM to confirm that ecoATM’s debt round was separate from its former equity rounds.

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Back in October, Google announced some changes to AdSense performance reports to improve usability and make the reports more visually compelling. One of the changes involved the ability to view changes to an account in more detail with the “Show events” checkbox or a separate event report.

“Change events are automatically generated and are shown as small flags on your reporting graphs,” explains AdSense product manager Matt Goodridge. “Those annotations help you keep track of the actions you’ve taken in your account, like adding a new ad unit or blocking an additional category, and help you determine the impact of your changes.”

Based on user feedback, Google has made some further changes.

“In addition to these automatically generated events, you can now also manually add notes you want to keep track of,” says Goodridge. “This will allow you to find out whether actions which aren’t directly related to your AdSense account, like a website redesign or an advertising campaign for your site, may have had an impact on your earnings. Every user can see all the notes which have been added to an account by other users and can add, edit, and delete their own customized notes.”

Users can add personalized annotations by going to “Performance reports,” and viewing the changes as an overlay or a separate event report. From there, click “Add note” and you’re all set.

Thanks to our need to constantly connect to the Internet, we all want more juice — aka: battery power — for our smartphones. And while the whiz kids work on new battery technologies to change our world, we are all relegated to using battery packs. As an iPhone user, I often carry two or three of these battery packs in my bag, just in case I run out of power – which I usually do.

Most of these battery packs are quite unattractive, to put it mildly. However, I like this new one from Mophie – the Juice Pack Helium – which is specially designed for the iPhone 5 and is quite thin and svelte. Well, it is 13 percent thinner than the previous Juice Packs, but as someone who struggles to lose weight, I know even a few millimeters are important.

At $80, it is not cheap, but if it gets me six extra hours of LTE time, I will take it. I am heading to the Apple store today. Who would have thought that we would lust for a battery pack?

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Salesforce has acquired EntropySoft, a French content integration solutions company. VentureBeat says Salesforce confirmed the deal (the value of which is unknown), but that it will not be making a formal announcement.

The EntropySoft home page is displaying the following image, but not much else:

From the looks of things, any products EntropySoft offered are not going to continue to operate independently, as all links to the site (at least those listed as Google sitelinks) simply redirect to the home page announcement. That includes the Products page.

As VentureBeat points out, EntropySoft’s sales executive Serge Guillerme recently updated his LinkedIn profile to show that he’s a customer success strategy manager at Salesforce.

Salesforce will hold its fourth quarter earnings call on February 28th.

In a blog post on the RP website, Liz Upton is showing off the new Raspberry Pi video camera, a tiny, single-lens unit that weighs “naff all” and will cost $25 when it is released this year.

The camera will connect directly to the Pi and offer hobbyists the opportunity to build vision-based applications. The camera is an OV5647 with a fixed-focus 5 megapixel sensor. It can also take HD video. It’s attached to a nice long ribbon that connects directly to the Raspberry Pi mainboard.

You can learn a little bit more about the project right here. Given the popularity of the Raspberry Pi so far, however, expect this thing to be sold out in seconds even if it is just a tiny camera on a PCB. Raspberry Pis are the new Beanie Babies.

Rumor has it that Google may invest as much as $50 in Vevo, the music video property founded by Universal and Sony.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek is reporting that the company is in talks to do so, citing two people with knowledge with the situation. This would reportedly put Google owning less than 10% of the company, and give Vevo a $500 valuation.

Of course, the deal would keep Vevo, an important YouTube partner, pumping music videos into Google’s major video site (which has become a more important property for the company than ever in recent years).

As reported in December, the contract between YouTube and Vevo was set to expire, but the contract also had some kind of four-month extension clause, which would really push the deadline a bit further in the future. Either way, it’s still looming.

Bloomberg shares a statement from YouTube’s Chris Dale, who says, “While we don’t comment on individual negotiations, we always hope to renew our relationships with valuable partners so we can continue to provide YouTube users with the best possible music experience,” Chris Dale, spokesman for Google, said in an e-mailed statement.”

Earlier this week, Vevo announced a new partnership with Disney, which will see Disney curating family-friendly music video content on Vevo, and Vevo providing music videos to Disney.com. The two will also collaborate on original programming.

Google has won a legal battle against the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) after six years in court. The ACCC had alleged that Google enaged in “misleading and deceptive” practices, when displaying ads for a company called CarSales for search results related to Honda Australia. The group believed this to be a violation of Australia’s Trade Practices Act 1974.

The Federal Court had ruled against Google last spring, but Google appealed, and on Wednesday, five judges in Australia’s High Court unanimously ruled that Google was not in violation. CNET shares a quote from the court:

“At first instance, the primary judge found that although the impugned representations were misleading and deceptive, those representations had not been made by Google,” the court said. “Ordinary and reasonable members of the relevant class of consumers who might be affected by the alleged conduct would have understood that sponsored links were advertisements and would not have understood Google to have endorsed or to have been responsible in any meaningful way for the content of those advertisements.”

ACCC Chairman Rod Sims had this to say:

“The ACCC took these proceedings to clarify the law relating to advertising practices in the internet age. Specifically, we considered that providers of online content should be accountable for misleading or deceptive conduct when they have significant control over what is delivered.”

“The High Court’s decision focused only on Google’s conduct. In the facts and circumstances of this case the High Court has determined that Google did not itself engage in misleading or deceptive conduct. It was not disputed in the High Court that the representations made in sponsored links by advertisers were misleading or deceptive. It remains the case that all businesses involved in placing advertisements on search engines must take care not to mislead or deceive consumers.”

As Reuters reports, a search for “Honda Australia” on Wednesday returned ads for Honda Australia’s site.

Google put to a bed a similar case with Rosetta Stone a few months ago, after three years in court. However, that did not come down to a ruling, but an agreement between Rosetta Stone and Google to dismiss the suit and collaborate to combat ads that abuse trademark.

Channel Intelligence says it has been acquired by Google. The company announced it on its blog, and ICG Group, which reportedly backs Channel Intelligence has posted a press release. Some publications (like Business Insider and TechCrunch) are reporting the acquisition as fact, but we have yet to see confirmation from Google.

We’re going to tread cautiously, as we’ve seen bogus Google acquisition announcements in recent memory. This may very well be a real deal, but we’ve reached out to Google for confirmation, and will update accordingly.

“Building upon the perseverance and strong foundation laid by CI’s founder Rob Wight, I am extremely proud of the work we accomplished at CI,” said Doug Alexander, CEO of CI and President of ICG. “With the talent and hard work of the entire CI team, we successfully navigated a very complex marketplace, ending a record year that culminated in this very exciting acquisition.”

The Channel Intelligence team posted the announcement on its blog:

We are pleased to announce that Channel Intelligence (CI) has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google!

For over ten years, we have focused on making it easy for consumers to find and buy products online and help our clients grow their business. We’ve worked with Google for years, and look forward to the great things we will be able to do together.

All CI services will continue to offer the excellent client service and great performance that our clients have come to expect over the years.

Again, we’ll keep you posted if we get confirmation from Google.