Author: Serkadis

Hortonworks isn’t about to get off the Apache Hadoop elephant just because everyone around it is now trying to ride impalas. The company released version 1.3 of its Hortonworks Data Platform on Wednesday, a major aspect of which is an improved iteration of Apache Hive that the company claims runs 50 times faster the previous version. Over the next year or so, Hortonworks expects to improve the speed of Hive by 100x its previous limits — this while its competitors are all but leaving Hive in the dust in favor of newer, faster analytic systems.

If you’re unfamiliar with Hive, it’s a project that Facebook developed in 2008 to make Hadoop function more like a traditional enterprise data warehouse. Hive stores data inside the Hadoop Distributed File System in structured format, and then allows users to query it using a language very similar to SQL. Until very recently, Hive has been the de facto method for querying (in a traditional sense) data stored in Hadoop, and it has proven immensely popular as more companies have begun tackling their big data woes with Hadoop.

Hive wasn’t built for speed

However, as more companies got used to Hadoop, they also began to notice its shortcomings. One of them is around MapReduce, a powerful but not-exactly-speedy method of processing data that requires running the job across every node in the cluster in order to find the right data. Although the Hive interface is that of a SQL query, it relies on on MapReduce as the processing engine.

(For more on how Hadoop and its flavor of MapReduce came to be, read this post on the history of Hadoop. To see me speak with Google Fellow and MapReduce creator Jeff Dean about how far Google has moved from a MapReduce-centric computing model, come to Structure next month.)

Users wanted faster, more-interactive query processing on top of Hadoop, similar to what they had grown accustomed to with data warehouse systems such as Teradata, Greenplum and Netezza. Hadoop vendors such as Cloudera (with Impala), MapR (with Drill), IBM (with Big SQL) — as well as a spate of startups — have obliged with their own new technologies that in various ways blend the familiarity of SQL with the scalability of Hadoop. EMC Greenplum, now Pivotal, has transplanted its existing database system inside of Hadoop.

Even Qubole, a cloud-based startup from Hive creators Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma, is keeping an eye on how projects such as Impala and Shark (from the University of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab) might factor into its plans.

Giving Hive a better “Stinger”

Hortonworks, the Yahoo spinoff dedicated to driving the Apache Hadoop bus, is sticking with Hive. But is has a plan, and a point.

Essentially, VP of Products Bob Page told me during a recent briefing, “It just makes more sense from our view to have everything done in one place.” He means that Hive is already the method by which most people are already comfortable using SQL to access Hadoop data, so there’s no use rocking the boat by adding yet another technology into the mix. Hortonworks will just make Hive faster to the point (100x) where it’s at least in the ballpark of what these entirely new systems are capable of doing, but where users still use the same tools for interactive and batch queries.

It has in place a three-phase plan, under the “Stinger” codename, in order to make this happen. The first phase, now available as part of the Hive 0.11 release, is a new set of analytic functions and a columnar file format that Page says has resulted in a 50x performance increase over the previous version. The next phase is to move YARN off of MapReduce and onto a still-under-development processing framework called Tez.

“You’ll see phase two come to bear later this year,” Page said, once YARN — a new resource manager that lets Hadoop clusters run multiple processing engines simultaneously — is ready for production.

The third phase is a whole new vector query engine for Hive and new tools for intelligent query planning. Page didn’t have a target date in mind for that phase, except to note that “we’re not talking about a five-year cycle.”

SQL isn’t the end game for Hadoop

It would be easy to dismiss Page’s and Hortonworks’ optimism about Stinger as a sweet lemons type of rationalization — the company was founded around Apache Hadoop and can’t really go about developing entirely new products outside that foundation — but they also appear to have their eyes focused on a future where SQL isn’t too big a differentiator.

SQL is the way folks used to data for the last 30 years can see how Hadoop fits in their environment, Page said, but the compelling thing about Hadoop “is it really unlocks a new way about how one thinks about storing and processing data.” Once YARN is ready to go, he added, there will be new avenues of innovation in areas like graph analysis and stream processing.

Page comes from a place of credibility when he talks about this evolution in thinking. Before coming to Hortonworks in March, he was vice president of analytics platform and delivery at eBay, a company that knows its way around big data. When people get all their data in one place, they want to do more things with it, he explained. The thinking becomes less about using Hadoop to lower cost and more about “How do I use Hadoop to increase my top line?”.

Besides, Page noted (echoing the sentiment of just about everybody else in the Hadoop space, including Cloudera CEO Mike Olson), even as companies turn Hadoop into their primary data store, it’s difficult to see Hadoop ever entirely replacing high-value relational data warehouse systems like Teradata. One could argue, then, that there’s no real purpose in trying too hard to match those systems in terms of capabilities.

At eBay, he said, they ran an in-depth analysis to see if it was economically or technologically feasible to collapse its big data workloads onto a single system. eBay has dozens of petabytes stored in Hadoop and possibly more within various Teradata appliances. The result: “We just couldn’t find a way in which we could justify collapsing everything we do into one system.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user vblinov.

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There is nothing that hardware nerds love than a good old-fashioned standards battle. LTE versus WiMAX, VHS versus Betamax, Ethernet versus InfiniBand … the list goes on. The internet of things is another battleground with different factions fighting over protocols for sending wireless signals, sending data between points, security and a variety of other standards. But when it comes to the wireless technology of choice for connecting consumer gadgets, Broadcom has chosen its winners: Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Brian Bedrosian, Broadcom’s Senior Director, Embedded Wireless and Jeff Baer, Broadcom’s Business Development Director, Embedded Wireless — both in Broadcom’s Wireless Connectivity Combo Group — explained their thinking to me on a call related to the launch of a new all-in-one Wi-Fi module that contains a Wi-Fi radio and a microcontroller that will handle all the on-boarding of the device and communication to the network.

From Broadcom’s perspective, other protocols are either closed or the standard is so open to interpretation (Zigbee) that it might as well be closed. For example, there’s no guarantee that Zigbee devices will work with other Zigbee devices, and for Z-Wave, the chips are more expensive. Plus, neither Zigbee or Z-Wave are regulars in the smartphone radio stack. I’ve discussed this with the CEO of Securifi, the maker of the Almond + router, on one of my podcasts, if you want to learn more.

Thus, Broadcom has made its bets on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (and Bluetooth Low Energy). That means we can expect more modules from Broadcom that make it easier to build connected devices, something the Bluetooth Special Interest Group is also pushing hard. For example, the latest chip, the BCM4390, is designed with a Wi-Fi radio and a communications processor so the whole package can go into existing devices like washing machines or dishwashers without requiring a separate microcontrollers to handle the additional burden of networking. That means devices can be retro-fitted for connectivity without swapping out other parts.

Broadcom was coy on the subject, but I imagine a Bluetooth and a Bluetooth Low Energy module that can handle the networking on-boarding isn’t too far behind. It did launch a Bluetooth system on a chip today as well, that offers much lower power consumption so people can go a year without needing to replace the battery in connected device like a pedometer or door lock. And by the way, this isn’t all just to boost the consumer experience. As more and more businesses are realizing, adding connectivity can help them, even if that connectivity isn’t exposed to consumers through fancy apps or whiz-bang refrigerators that tell you when the milk is expired.

Baer explained that businesses want connectivity so they can track data on how products are used, or update features over the air. So even if the microwave doesn’t need an app, it may need Wi-Fi. And Broadcom really wants to sell that Wi-Fi chip.

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The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the addition of a new Nearby feature designed to help users discover articles about subjects relevant to their location. It’s available for both mobile and desktop.

The feature not only will help users discover interesting things about the area around them, however. It will also help the foundation improve Wikipedia, by calling on those most familiar with particular subjects to add to the articles.

“Along with the goal of bringing awareness of the surrounding areas to our existing readers, we hope that this simple tool can attract new editors to these articles, whether it is to update the information on the exhibits in a local museum, or simply to add a photo of a nearby park that is in severe need of a properly licensed lead image,” says Wikimedia Foundation mobile software engineer Jon Robson. “As a first pass, the mobile team has focused on using the Nearby page to surfaces articles in close proximity that lack images, inviting users to add one. Upon visiting those pages, the user will be prompted to illustrate the article, which they can do quickly and easily if they’re on a mobile device that supports taking and uploading photos.”

“In the future, we envision this as a useful step in the editing onboarding process, helping new users learn about editing by encouraging them to improve an article on a topic nearby,” says Robson.

This follows a feature released earlier this year, which lets you upload photos from your mobile device, as well as the separate launch of a Wikimedia Commons app for Android and iOS.

The Nearby feature is in beta.

Google announced the launch of the new Google Admin app for Android today, making it easier for Google Apps administrators to control things on the go.

“The Admin app makes it easy for admins to use their Android phone or tablet to accomplish the most common tasks—such as quickly adding or suspending users, resetting passwords, managing group memberships, and directly calling or emailing specific users,” explains Google Apps Product Manager Muzammil Esmail.

Here are the features listed in the documentation:

• Create and manage users, reset passwords, edit profiles, upload profile photos, and suspend users
• Manage groups, add users to groups, edit user roles, list group members
• Contact Support for Google Apps for Business with Customer and Support PINs
• Review account activities in the audit log, and filter events by event type or admin/date ranges

The Admin app comes on the heels of the recently redesigned Admin Console, as well as the launch of a new Admin SDK Google made available to developers.

The new app is available in Google Play. It requires API access to be enabled.

Google announced bulk uploads for ads and ad groups in AdWords today.

“Imagine you download a report from the Ads tab and want to test different creatives in ad groups that are underperforming,” writes AdWords Product Manager Prashant Baheti. ” You might also want to turn off certain ad groups, or change the budget for others. Instead of toggling back and forth between AdWords and your spreadsheets, you can now download reports from the Ads and Ad Groups tabs, make changes directly in your spreadsheet, and upload them directly to your account.”

“Uploading changes to your ads and ad groups is simple,” adds Baheti. “Just like with keywords, when you download a report you will be prompted to make the report ‘editable.’”

After making changes, you can save in CSV, TSV and Excel formats. To upload ,click Reports and Uploads on the left side, and then select Uploads. From there, you will see the Upload Type column. You can only upload one report type at a time. If you want to make bulk changes to both keywords and ad creatives, this must be done separately.

Once you bulk upload, there’s no way to cancel the automatically reverse the changes. Something to keep in mind.

Netflix has been helping cord-cutters save money for years, offering unlimited movie and TV show streaming for just $7.99 per month. Just because the service is affordable doesn’t mean it is immune to digital piracy, however, and newly available data shows that the service took a pretty big hit earlier this week. Early on Sunday morning, Netflix released the complete fourth season of cult comedy “Arrested Development,” the latest show in Netflix’s original programming lineup. Netflix has begun to develop its own shows in an effort to attract new subscribers of course, but according to paidContent, around 100,000 people downloaded season 4 illegally within the first 24 hours alone. Many of the downloads are said to have come from markets where Netflix is currently unavailable, though firm geographical data is not available.

It was a long time ago when I started my love affair with optical networks and broadband. It started with covering long-forgotten companies such as UUNet Technologies and PSINet. It involved long-forgotten names such as Northern Telecom long before it become Nortel. So perhaps, you can’t fault me for feeling excited about reading the news that Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs identified an optical networking breakthrough that would theoretically allow sending 400 gigabits of data over a distance of 7,900 miles.

While the news of 400G didn’t excite me as much, the distance over which they could send the data impressed me, as it had implications that go beyond the oohs-and-aahs of raw speed. And what more, if this breakthrough can be commercialized — say in five to 10 years (considering companies like JDS Uniphase would have to make components) — we could see a big improvement in not only our long-haul networks, giving them more oomph and making them more efficient, but it could also have a profound impact on our cloud future.

We certainly have come a long way

Back in 1995, I remember the excitement around Ciena’s DWDM system. That same year, Nortel, the Canadian giant that at the time ruled the optical landscape, came out with a 10 Gbps offering. And then the bubble burst. Things slowed a little and we kept waiting for the long promised 40 Gbps technologies. In 2006, we saw the 40 Gbps speeds come to market, and by 2008 it was getting traction. In 2009, 100 Gbps gear came to market from Ciena.

To recap, here is the timeline of progress with optical networking technologies

• 1990: The first commercial 2.5G optical system was deployed.
• 1995: The first 10G optical system was introduced.
• 2006: The first 40G solution was introduced to the market.
• 2008: The first coherent 40G solution for plug-and-play, four-fold increase of traffic was introduced
• 2009: And, the first operational 100G solution was introduced.

400G and beyond

Since then, the attention has focused on the 400G systems. A lot has to do with marketing, but as my friend Andrew Schmitt, research analyst at Infonetics, points out: Anytime we have a 4x improvement in networking gear, things get interesting.

And so there’s no surprise why that is where all the attention is focused. In 2012 we saw a new software-programmable approach to network that upped the speeds to 400 Gbps. British Telecom and Ciena recently showed off an experimental 800 Gbps network. Alcatel-Lucent and Telefonica have been working on their own high-capacity network experiments as well.

The latest development at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs is yet another example of continuous progress in the optical fiber technologies, especially over long distances. This improvement is one of the reasons we have seen an explosion in the bandwidth on the long-haul networks. According to Telegeography, a market research firm, the world saw an addition of 54 Tbps of capacity last year alone.

The irony of optics

But after my initial excitement had worn off, I was left asking myself the question: How much should we care about these breakthroughs? I mean it is not that we are bandwidth limited on these backhaul networks. We are doing really well in terms of transmission rates and have steadily boosted our ability to send signals over long distances. Sure, most optical networks in operation are either at 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps, but we are only a couple years from getting 100 Gbps everywhere. What is most amazing is that this 40x improvement on optical networks has resulted in sharp declines in bandwidth prices on the networks that connect data centers, office buildings, cities and countries.

A good proxy for the long haul and metro networking business is Cogent Communications, which operates one of the biggest networks on the Internet. The company claims that about 18 percent of the Internet traffic runs over Cogent’s pipes and that it has 28 percent of the market by bits and 12 percent of the market in terms of dollars.

At a Merrill Lynch conference, Cogent Communication CEO David Schaeffer pointed out that the “average price per megabit in the market has fallen at a rate of about 40% per year for a dozen years” even as the number of players has gone from 200 to 12. The prices on Cogent’s network during “period has fallen from $10 a megabit to the most recent quarter at $3.05 a megabit.”

He is not alone. Here is a little chart from 2012 about IP Transit prices that tells the story of falling prices.

Schaeffer estimates that the core internet transit business is about 400 petabytes a day of bandwidth and is “purchased at the core of the internet out of the 650 data centers is a $1.5 billion addressable market and it’s been flat at that level for a dozen years.”

I am guessing David won’t be struggling for business in coming years. The state of connectedness is going to create much stronger demand for a much beefier cloud-based infrastructure. And as everything in the world is digitized through sensors and embedded compute devices, we are going to see an explosion in ambient data that would travel between machines. These machines that sit in data centers will need big fat pipes.

We are in the early innings here but the idea of distributed processing and storage over these big fat pipes is something that should provide an exciting prospect for companies with big fiber pipes. Infonetics’ Schmitt argued that as optical bandwidth at the non-consumer level starts to become even more plentiful and prices start to stumble, we can start to learn to waste it. Instead of networks that use routers to shuttle data, we could start to build point-to-point connections, which are certainly more useful when doing high-level distributed computing.

The financial industry has already shown us the way — many hedge funds use special low-latency networks to process data and stay competitive. I wouldn’t be surprised if that becomes standard practice with all major businesses.

Last mile conundrum

Maybe I am being child-like in my thinking, but when I see the long-haul networks, I see technology and the free market trying to figure things out and in the end bringing bandwidth online at an unprecedented scale. And sure we are all benefiting from the dumb, crooked and complete craziness that went on during the boom that led to overbuilding of fiber networks, but it has been more than a decade and the dark fiber is being put to good use. (Just ask Google!)

In comparison to the long-haul and intra-city networks, the world of last-mile connections has moved at a somewhat glacial speed. Here in the U.S., while we have seen rapid improvements in speeds (from a 1 Mbps connection at the turn of the century to about 25 Mbps (average) from cable and phone companies,) they are not as astounding. A lot of that is due to the lack of competition in our access networks — controlled primarily by oligopolies such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

Across the world things are different. The Chinese are starting afresh. The Japanese and the Koreans went for the fiber early and Europeans have the advantage of the short loops, which allows them to milk the copper and make 100 Mbps connections a reality. The European competitive landscape is such that fiber to the home is becoming less of a rarity.

But let’s just face it, when it comes to the U.S., the last mile is less about the technology and more about politics and lack of competition. Whenever there is competition — Chattanooga (TN), Kansas City (KS), Austin (TX) and Vermont — things start to change. Speeds go up. Service improves and incumbents are hustling for business. Unfortunately those pockets of competition are way too rare.

In the U.S., we have never had real competition — the 1996 Telecommunication Act was a mirage and faulty from the outset. It never allowed anyone with a real chance to compete and disrupt. Thankfully, it is a distant memory, and a reminder of how Washington really works (by not working.) And that’s our broadband future — held hostage by a political and regulatory system that is in bed with those it is supposed to regulate.

That sense of disillusionment, however isn’t going to stop me from getting excited about the new optical breakthroughs. Who knows…!

P.S.: My colleague Stacey Higginbotham wrote about the need for different thinking from ISPs. Hope you get a chance to read it.

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Although many were disappointed that no new hardware debuted at Google I/O — unless you count the Samsung Galaxy S 4 “Google Edition” — there’s more evidence that a new Nexus 7 is on the way. Liliputing notes that the Bluetooth SIG certified a device on May 27 and the corresponding data indicates it is a refreshed Google tablet.

There isn’t much to go on outside of the tested device, but it has a product design name of ME370T — the same as the original Nexus 7 tablet built by Asus. Another key clue? The software build for the certification is JWR11, which is similar to the JWR42 build spotted last week on a Nexus 4 device running Android 4.3. Based on that information, I wouldn’t expect a refresh to the Nexus 7 until Google officially introduces the next version of Android, rumored to be in June or July. Prior to the back-to-school season sounds about right to me.

The Bluetooth SIG data indicates that the certified tablet will still use Bluetooth 3.0, so it doesn’t appear that a new Nexus will gain Bluetooth 4.0 or be Bluetooth Smart Ready. So what might the new tablet gain? I’m still standing behind most of my thoughts from earlier this year:

• The same 7-inch screen size, but a higher-resolution panel of 1920 x 1080 for a pixel density of 315 pixels per inch (ppi). The current device uses a 1280 x 800 resolution display at 216 ppi.
• It’s possible that Google keeps an improved 1280 x 800 model at $199 and offers the higher-resolution panel as a more expensive option; say $249.
• Google opts for Qualcomm’s new quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset. The company often switches hardware components between manufacturing partners on Nexus devices, but if this happens, it’s certainly not good for Nvidia and its Tegra 4 chip.
• With a Qualcomm chip inside, it’s highly likely the Nexus 7 gets an LTE option due to the chipmaker’s solid modem integration on its silicon.
• The new Nexus 7 will get a memory boost: 2 GB of RAM up from the current 1 GB.
• A rear camera is added, but it won’t be a top-of-the-line sensor: Just good enough for Google+ photos and such.
• I expect the current metal pins to be in the same place on a new tablet model; this would keep the new device compatible with the Nexus 7 dock which only arrived on the market recently.

I’d keep an eye on the retailers that sell Nexus 7 tablets: WalMart, RadioShack and the like. If you see price drops across all of them at once, it’s a tell-tale sign that a new and improved Nexus 7 is on the way.

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I like to at least try to offer a balanced view on broadband policies. So I’ve been hoping to see something positive about the change in Minnesota’s telecommunications equipment sales tax but haven’t seen anything. In fairness, I suspect that the people who are intended to benefit aren’t keeping an eye on the issue. It will mean more money for the State in terms of tax revenue; I guess the question is will the tax prevent revenue by pricing projects out of budget?

The Minnesota Telecom Alliance has been keeping an eye on the issue – as obviously their members are on the frontlines of such purchases. They posted the following in a recent newsletter…

For many years Central Office Equipment has been exempt from State sales tax.  This is no longer the case.  While the legislation expanded sales tax exemptions for other items, it removed this important tool for telcos.  Repealing the COE sales tax exemption was originally proposed by the Governor in his first budget in February.  It was taken out of his revised budget later in the session.  As a result, it was taken out of the House’s tax bill but not the Senate’s bill.  As the bill went through the conference committee process, the MTA and other industry segments lobbied hard to keep the exemption.  A special thank you to Gene Wenstrom (Hanson Communications) and Dave Schornack (Arvig) for their many calls and text messages to Senators Skoe and Koenen.  It should be noted that repealing this sales tax exemption is completely opposite of the Governor’s own Broadband Task Force, which had recommended expanding the exemption to include all Broadband equipment purchases.

David C. Olson, president of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce followed up the sentiment in a recent letter to the editor in the Duluth News Tribune…

The telecommunications equipment sales tax will make it more expensive to supply broadband and technology that is critical for rural areas in Northeastern Minnesota and elsewhere in the state to compete and thrive. The tax on storage and warehousing could devastate this industry’s ability to compete in Minnesota and will result in sales tax on storage of agricultural inputs, too.

Somehow, Facebook is just getting round to this, but today, the company announced that it is launching verified Pages and Profiles.

“Today we’re launching verified Pages to help people find the authentic accounts of celebrities and other high-profile people and businesses on Facebook,” the company says. “Verified Pages have a small, blue check mark beside their name on timelines, in search results, and elsewhere on Facebook.”

Specifically, the badges will appear next to the name of a Page, when hovering over the name of Page, in Graph Search queries, in stories about people liking a page, and in News Feed ads on a Page.

It looks pretty similar to Twitter’s version.

Facebook is offering the feature to “a small group” of prominent public figures, including celebrities, journalists, government officials, popular brands and businesses, who have large audiences.

Facebook says it proactively verifies authentic Pages and profiles, but if you believe you’re being impersonated, you can report a fake account.

No action by Page admins is needed to obtain a verification badge. Facebook is simply verifying the largest Pages on the social network, and is not accepting requests. At least not for now.

Humanoid robots. Useful in theory, not so much in practice. They’re kind of creepy, too. But if you’re desperate to have a silicon-powered helper pour your beer, have no fear — that day might be closer than you think.

Scientists are hard at work creating robots that are able to sense and predict human actions, which should make them better performing tasks and look more natural while doing it. Researchers at Cornell University have trained a robot that to recognize objects in its line of sight, as well as certain human actions, and then assign probabilities to the next set of possible actions. The video below (ignore the campiness of it) shows the robot in action trying to refill a cup of coffee — it must recognize the book and coffee cup on a person’s desk, predict which one he’s going to pick up, predict him taking a drink, then predict him setting the cup down for long enough for a pour to occur.

It’s kind of like IBM’s Watson system, only it’s predicting human actions instead of the correct answers to questions. In fact, both rely on databases full of relevant information — human movements and objects in the case of the robot — in order to make their predictions. And instead of accepting natural-language queries like Watson does, the Cornell robot uses a Microsoft Kinect camera to visually detect what’s going on. (Interesting side note: Microsoft researchers used a Kinect and machine learning to train an elevator in the company’s research building to detect the difference between someone who intends to get on and someone who’s stopping to chat in front of it.)

Teaching robots to predict human gestures isn’t just about saving us a trip to the coffee pot, refrigerator or elevator control panel, though. As Stacey Higginbotham explained last week when covering a similar experiment by Disney Research, the more human-like the robot, the more comfortable people will be interacting with it. Important if you’re in the theme-park business, yes, but also if you’re trying to automate some of the caregiving functions that aging baby boomers will require in the next couple decades.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Ociacia.

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Google released a new Webmaster Help video today featuring Matt Cutts discussing Google’s policies on advertorials and native advertising.

“Well, it’s advertising, but it’s often the sort of advertising that looks a little closer to editorial, but it basically means that someone gave you some money, rather than you writing about this naturally because you thought it was interesting or because you wanted to,” says Cutts. “So why do I care about this? Why are we making a video about this at all? Well, the reason is, certainly within the webspam team, we’ve seen a little bit of problems where there’s been advertorial or native advertising content or paid content, that hasn’t really been disclosed adequately, so that people realize that what they’re looking at was paid. So that’s a problem. We’ve had longstanding guidance since at least 2005 I think that says, ‘Look, if you pay for links, those links should not pass PageRank,’ and the reason is that Google, for a very long time, in fact, everywhere on the web, people have mostly treated links as editorial votes.”

The video links to this.

“Well, there’s two-fold things that you should think about,” says Cutts. “The first is on the search engine side of things, and search engine wise, you should make sure that if links are paid – that is if money changed hands in order for a link to be placed on a website – that it should not flow PageRank. In essence, it shouldn’t affect search engines’ rankings. That’s no different than the guidance we’ve had for years, and years, and years.”

The video suggests using rel=”nofollow”.

“Likewise, if you are doing disclosure, you need to make sure that it’s clear to people,” adds Cutts. “A good rule of thumb is that there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure. It shouldn’t be the case that people have to dig around, buried in small print or have to click and look around a long time to find out, ‘Oh, this content that I’m reading was actually paid.’”

The video suggests using text like “Advertisement” or “Sponsored”.

“So why are we talking about this now?” Cutts continues. “This isn’t a change in our search engine policy. Certainly not in the webspam team. Well, the reason is that we’ve seen some people who have not been doing it correctly. So we’ve seen, for example, in the United Kingdom, a few sites that have been taking money, and writing articles that were paid, and including keyword-rich anchor text in those articles that flowed PageRank, and then not telling anybody that those were paid articles. And that’s the sort of thing where if a regular user happened to be reading your website, and didn’t know that it was paid, they’d really be pretty frustrated and pretty angry when they found out that it was paid.”

“So, we’ve taken action on this sort of thing for years and years, and we’re going to keep taking strong action,” says Cutts. “We do think it’s important to be able to figure out whether something is paid or not on the web, and it’s not just the webspam team. It’s not just search quality and web search results. The Google News team recently published on their blog, and said that if you don’t provide adequate disclosure of paid content – whether it be native advertising, advertorials – whenever there’s money changing hand, if users don’t realize that sufficiently because there’s not adequate disclosure, the Google News team mentioned that they might not only remove the paid content, but we’re willing to go up to and including removing the publication from Google News.”

We covered what the Google News team had to say about it here.

In that big video Cutts put out a while back talking about all of the changes coming over the next several months (which included the most recent Penguin update), he also said Google would be “looking at some efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement” on advertorials.

A couple weeks ago, Cutts tweeted that Google had just took action on thousands of linksellers.

HTC’s latest flagship Android phone, the HTC One, has been a big success for the struggling smartphone vendor. The company confirmed recently that it had sold approximately 5 million units into sales channels as of last week, and if it hadn’t been for component shortages, HTC likely would have sold even more handsets. Regarding component shortages, it’s not always a production issue that causes problems in HTC’s supply chain and an interesting tidbit emerged earlier this week as HTC president for the North Asian region, Jack Tong, spoke to members of the press in Taiwan.

Continue reading…

Google unveiled a new inbox for Gmail on both desktop and mobile today, saying it “puts you back in control” thanks to “simple” and “easy” organization.

It separates your incoming messages into categories by tabs: Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates.

“On the desktop, the new inbox groups your mail into categories which appear as different tabs,” explains Itamar Gilad, Product Manager. “You simply choose which categories you want and voilà! Your inbox is organized in a way that lets you see what’s new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read when.”

“You can easily customize the new inbox – select the tabs you want from all five to none, drag-and-drop to move messages between tabs, set certain senders to always appear in a particular tab and star messages so that they also appear in the Primary tab,” says Gilad.

The Gmail apps for iPhone, iPad and Android (4.0+) will show you the Primary mail when you open the app, and you can navigate to other tabs to see the rest.

If you don’t like the new style, you can switch off all optional tabs, and go back to classic view.

The new inbox is rolling out across desktop and mobile apps over the course of the next few weeks. If you want to try it sooner, you can click “Configure Inbox” when it appears in your settings.

Email marketers who have had difficulties reaching Gmail users since Google launched the “priority inbox” have some new stuff to take into account.

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