Author: Frederic Lardinois

Are you involved in a non-profit in the Bay Area that could use a spruced up website? Given that a lot of these organizations are run by volunteers and have to be very careful about how they spent their money, it doesn’t come as a surprise that web design isn’t always a priority for a lot of non-profits. Web design firm ZURB, which has done design work for companies like Facebook, Yahoo, eBay and the New York Stock Exchange, is giving away a full redesign (or a completely new design) to a deserving Bay Area non-profit.

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How To Apply

While ZURB is announcing this competition today, submissions won’t officially open until March 4th – though the company told us that they would be more than happy to look at early submissions, too. Non-profits will be able to submit their proposals until March 18th and the actual redesign will happen during a 24-hour design marathon on April 8th. The only requirement for applying is that the non-profit has enough passionate volunteers and employees who are willing to help out on April 8th.

If you want to submit a proposal, here is what you need to do:

Email [email protected] with the following info:

• The project you need design help with
• Details about the team that’s going to be at ZURB’s office for 24 hours on April 8th
• Why your organization is a fit for ZURBwired

Previous winners include the Pie Ranch and Second Harvest Food Bank.

The company is also looking for additional volunteers to help out during the 24-hour marathon session. You can find additional videos from last year’s event here.

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Earlier this morning, we heard rumors that Google was in the process of acquiring Q&A service Aardvark for around $50 million. Aardvark, which was founded by ex-Google employees, was one of our favorite Web services of 2010, but the company still remains relatively small.

Aardvark had around 100,000 users in October 2009. Aardvark co-founder Max Ventilla just confirmed with us that the company has indeed signed a deal with Google, though he didn’t disclose any details.

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Why would Google be interested in this company? For one, Aardvark’s team has created a very smart algorithm that can route questions to just the right people. On average, almost 90% of all the questions on Aardvark got answered in October 2009, and the quality of these answers was generally very high.

Maybe Google is also interested in hiring back some of the engineers that left Google for Aardvark. Among them are Ventilla, who used to focus on “strategy for Google’s marketing and monetization initiatives around Adsense and web applications,” co-founder Nathan Still, who was the head of Google News for three years, Javascript specialist Fritz Scheider, and Bill MacCartney, who designed a Q&A system for Google Research before he joined Aardvark.

This is not the first time that we’ve heard rumors of an Aardvark acquisition, but in the past the deal either fell through or was nothing more than a rumor. Now, however, we have confirmation that Aardvark has indeed signed with Google. We don’t expect the companies to disclose the exact price of the acquisition, but we expect to see official statements from both of them soon.

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Google Buzz isn’t even available to all Gmail users yet, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t already have some ideas for how Google could improve the service. Given how similar Buzz and FriendFeed are, a lot of the current discussion around Buzz feels like déjà vu to old FriendFeed users. In the early days of FriendFeed, for example, we used to have long discussions over how to increase the signal to noise ratio on the service and why FriendFeed should implement a lists feature. Buzz can still learn a lot from FriendFeed.

Here are a few of our ideas for how to make Buzz even more interesting and useful.

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• Make it easier to find friends and interesting people and don’t assume that my Google Contacts are the people I want to follow: Google assumes that your social network is easily accessible from your Google Contacts, but for a lot of people who use their Gmail account mostly for work or to talk to their families, Google Contacts isn’t representative of who they would want to follow on a FriendFeed/Facebook-like service. Google says that it plans to surface items from outside of your contacts that it thinks will be interesting to you, but we have yet to see these on Buzz.

• Lists: Twitter has lists, Facebook has lists, FriendFeed has lists and Buzz should have lists, too. Sometimes, you just want to see updates from your family and sometimes you just want to see what the bloggers you follow on Buzz are saying. Google could just integrate with with Google Contacts (though maybe that just leads to other problems).

• Better Filters: Some people love to share Google Reader posts, others tweet like there is no tomorrow. Google will pull all of these messages into your stream and as of now, you can’t tell Buzz to just selectively ignore all Google Reader posts from one person or all the tweets of another without unfollowing all the messages from this person. According to Google, Buzz will automatically weed out posts you are likely to skip. For now, it doesn’t seem like it is doing this yet.

• Speed up imports from third-party services: Currently, it can take quite a while before buzz pulls in tweets and shared items from Google Reader. Given how much emphasis Google is putting on the real-time aspect of Buzz, it would be nice if these updates came in a lot faster. Also, because Google seems to import updates in batches, you often get a huge number of tweets or Google Reader shares from one person that takes up most of the space on Buzz.

• Support more third-party services: You can only connect Buzz to a handful of third-party services like Flickr, Twitter and Google Reader. If your Google Profile contains the right links to other services like Yelp, it can also pull this data in as well if you follow these directions. It would also be nice if Google detected more video services when you attach a link to a post. Right now, it will show YouTube videos (and also Flickr photos) when you attach a link, but not videos from DailyMotion or Vimeo.

• Don’t clutter our inboxes with new buzzes: By default, Buzz puts notifications about updates and new messages into your Gmail inbox. By the time you follow more than 20 active Buzz users, this can quickly clog up your inbox and drown out your regular email conversations. We shouldn’t have to create a special filter with a relatively arcane command (label:buzz) to banish these messages.

• Allow mobile users to set fuzzy locations: As of now, you can either give your followers access to your exact location or not attach any location data to your messages at all. It would be nice if you could just set a town or neighborhood as your location so that you can share where you are, while still keeping your precise location private.

What Else is Missing?

Obviously, Google Buzz is just a day old, so it’s only normal that there are still some bugs in the system and that the user experience could use some polishing. If you have used Buzz already, what features do you miss? Let us know in the comments.

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Google just announced that it will beginning to build and test an ultra high-speed broadband network in a small number of locations in the United States. The company wants to offer fiber-to-the-home connections that will reach 1 gigabit per second. For now, Google plans to first roll out these connections to around 50,000 people, with the potential to reach over 500,000 people at a later stage.

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According to Google, this will be an experiment. The company hasn’t decided on where to build this network yet, but you can nominate your own neighborhood here. The nomination process will end on March 26 and Google plans to announce where it will deploy this network by the end of the year.

According to today’s announcement, Google plans to offer these connections at “competitive prices” and wants the networks to be open to competitors. Google current operates a free WiFi network in its hometown of Mountain View.

Finding Killer Apps

According to Google, this effort will help the company to experiment with “new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone.” Specifically, Google wants to see what the “killer apps” for these kind of connections are and test how to build better fiber networks.

U.S. is Lagging Behind – Will this Help?

The U.S. has been lagging behind with regards too broadband speeds and adoption. Just last year, the average broadband speed in the U.S. actually declined. With Chrome and the Chrome OS, Google has recently tackled a number of problems where it feels like the company is more interested in pushing technology forward than becoming a market leader. Nobody has really pushed broadband speeds in the U.S. forward and given that there are a lot of places where the incumbent cable providers don’t even have competition, there has been relatively little incentive for these ISPs to provide higher speeds.

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Opera just announced that it plans to bring its mobile browser, Opera Mini, to the iPhone. The Norwegian company will give the press and its partners a sneak peek of the application during next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Opera Mini on the iPhone will include all of Opera’s default features like Speed Dial, tabs and a password manager. Opera Mini for the iPhone will also feature Opera’s compression technology, which compresses text and images on Opera’s servers before they get sent to the phone. The question, however, is whether Apple will allow the application into the App Store.

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For now, this announcement is a great PR move by Opera. It certainly looks like Opera wants to put some pressure on Apple to allow the app – and maybe other browsers too – into the store.

Opera Mini is already available on a large number of platforms, including Symbian and Android. The iPhone, however, has remained off-limits for any browser besides Apple’s own Safari. There are a few apps that use Safari’s rendering engine to create new browser experiences, but we haven’t seen any browsers that use alternative rendering engines on the iPhone yet.

While Mozilla is moving forward with its mobile projects for Windows Mobile, Android and Maemo, there are no current plans to port Firefox to the iPhone yet.

This will be an interesting test case. Opera, of course, can show any demo it wants to – but until the company submits the app to Apple, we won’t know how Apple will react. Or perhaps this is just a publicity stunt by Opera.

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Google Buzz could quickly become the most popular location-based service on the Internet. Not only does Buzz integrate itself into Gmail, which will give it a large mainstream user base, but Buzz also puts geolocation front and center on its mobile sites. In addition, the new Buzz layer in the Google Maps mobile interface makes it incredibly easy to find geotagged Buzz messages around you.

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Nobody is Geotagging Tweets – So Can Buzz Geolocation Succeed?

Twitter introduced its own geolocation API in August 2009, but while we were very excited about the possible applications of this API, very few users and developers actually use it today.

While location-based apps and services like Foursquare and Gowalla (which launched its own API today) have quickly grown in popularity, only 0.23% tweets currently include location data. Unlike Buzz, however, neither Twitter itself nor any of the popular Twitter client really put geolocation at the center of their applications.

Buzz’s Advantage: It Already has the Users

Now, however, Google is releasing a product to millions of people that makes geolocation a major focus of the service. Already, you can bring up the Google Maps layer and find buzz messages in virtually every location. This quick adoption makes sense, given that Google is putting the colorful Buzz logo in a prominent place on its mobile interface.

The Google Buzz mobile site also makes it very easy to see messages from nearby users (including those you don’t follow). The “nearby” button is very prominent and takes you right to a list of nearby messages, which feels a bit like BlockChalk (though without the anonymity of that service). Thanks to this, you can even get good use out of the service if none of your friends are Gmail users. You can, for example, just ask a Twitter-like question that’s related to your location (“Where can I find good pizza around here?”) and anybody on Buzz can see your message and post an answer.

Worries about Privacy.

By default, location sharing is turned on in Buzz, which raises concerns about privacy. Just today, as the European Union celebrates “Internet Safety Day,” the E.U. warned users to turn off geolocation services whenever possible. Clearly, we do feel a lot more comfortable with sharing what we had for lunch than where we are right now. It would be nice, though, if Google allowed users to easily control the precision of this location data. A lot of people would be very comfortable with sharing what city they are in, for example, but don’t necessarily want to disclose the exact coffee shop they are sitting in right now. On the other hand, that would also dilute the value of the information and it looks like Google opted to go for precise locations that are couple to Place Pages for this exact reason.

Geolocation: The Killer Feature for Buzz

By connecting Buzz to Google Maps Place Pages and by having a huge built-in user base, Google will be able to deliver a better location-aware social networking experience than any of its competitors. The question, of course, is if users are actually looking for this. The early reactions to Buzz are mostly positive, but we still have to wait and see if this will be another failed attempt by Google to create a social networking service, or if the tight Gmail integrations and Google’s aggressive push to put Buzz front and center on its mobile services will be enough to convince users to use Buzz regularly.

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Google just launched Google Buzz, the company’s new social networking service which will be tightly integrated with Gmail. There can be little doubt that Google Buzz looks a lot like FriendFeed, the social aggregation service that was acquired by Facebook in August 2009. Today, FriendFeed’s developers are Facebook employees and aren’t likely to continue to improve the service in any meaningful way, while the active user community on FriendFeed continues to shrink rapidly. Given the similarities between the two services, we can’t help but wonder if Google Buzz will be able to succeed where FriendFeed couldn’t.

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As Louis Gray points out, Google Buzz validates FriendFeed’s ideas, but it also marginalizes the service even more. While some will look at Buzz as a Facebook/Twitter competitor, it also represents the final nail in FriendFeed’s coffin. We will surely see a lot of FriendFeed’s features appear on Facebook in the future, but FriendFeed as a stand-alone service has now lost its relevancy before it ever got a chance to go mainstream.

The real question, though, is whether Google Buzz will be able to succeed where FriendFeed couldn’t. FriendFeed never made it out of the early-adopter phase and slowly became a self-referential community that was never quite accessible enough for a larger audience.

Looks Familiar?

If you are not familiar with FriendFeed, just have a look at these two screenshots:

Google’s Advantage: Lifting FriendFeed’s Best Ideas and a Huge Built-In User Base

Google Buzz has a number of advantages over FriendFeed. While FriendFeed tried to attract early adopters and mostly catered to their tastes, Buzz has a built-in audience already. While FriendFeed had to work hard on building a thriving community and never managed to attract a large mainstream audience, Gmail is one of the world’s most popular email services and thanks to this, Buzz has millions of potential users from day one.

Also, while FriendFeed tried to allow users to connect to as many social services as possible, Google Buzz is just starting out with a few core Google and third-party services for now (Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader and Twitter). This will make it far more accessible than FriendFeed ever was.

Google is also putting a lot of emphasis on location-based and mobile services here, which is something FriendFeed never did. FriendFeed, for example, never offered a mobile app, while mobile apps and sites are one of the areas where Google is focusing on with Buzz.

The Buzz team has also been able to lift some of the best ideas from FriendFeed. You can “like” items, comment on them, you can see who liked a post (which looks identical to FriendFeed’s implementation of this feature) and Buzz will recommend items that it thinks will be interesting to you because your friends also liked them or commented on them.

What do you Think?

Do you think Buzz’s built-in mainstream user base help it to succeed where FriendFeed failed?

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Are you using your real name on your social network profiles? According to the European Union’s Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), that’s a big mistake. A new report, published to coincide with Europe’s Safer Internet Day, details the dangers of using social networks and lays out 17 “golden rules” for keeping safe on social networks. The report’s authors are especially worried about the proliferation of mobile social networks and, among other things, recommend that users turn off all location-based services whenever they are not absolutely needed.

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The report argues that you should always protect your social networking accounts by using a pseudonym. After all, the authors say, your real friends will know who is hiding behind your nickname and will still be able to find you easily. We are not quite sure if this is a very realistic proposition, though some of the ENISA’s “Golden Rules” are quite reasonable.

17 Golden Rules

Here are the rules:

Pay Attention to What You Post and Upload:

• Consider carefully which images, videos and information you choose to publish
• Never post sensitive information
• Use a pseudonym

Choose Your Friends with Care:

• Do not accept friend requests from people you do not know
• Verify all your contacts

Protect Your Work Environment and Avoid Reputation Risk:

• When joining a social networking site use your personal e-mail address (not your company e-maill address)
• Be careful how you portray your company or organization online
• Do not mix your business contacts with your friend contacts
• Do not let anyone see your profile or personal information without your consent
• Do not leave your mobile phone unattended
• Do not save your password on your mobile phone
• Use the security features available on your mobile phone

Protect Your Mobile Phone and the Information Saved on It:

• Be careful what you publish about someone else

Inform Yourself:

• Read carefully and in full the privacy policy and the condition and terms of use of the social network you choose

Protect Your Privacy With the Privacy Settings:

• Use privacy-oriented settings (check who can see your pictures, who can contact you and who can add comments)

Report Stolen Phones Immediately:

• Be careful when using your mobile phone and pay attention to where you put it

Pay Attention to Location Based Services and Information of Your Mobile Phone:

• Deactivate location based services when not using them

What do You Think?

Most of these rules seem quite reasonable, but are you really going to use a nickname for your social network profile? Do you find it hard to keep your private life and work life separate on Facebook? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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RIM’s BlackBerry platform is still the most popular mobile smartphone platform in the US, but Google’s Android was the big winner in the last quarter of 2009. According to comScore, Android’s share of the US mobile market more than doubled from 2.5% in September 2009 to 5.2% in December. While the Nexus One might not be a bestseller just yet, it’s clear that the Android platform is poised for rapid growth in the next few months as more and more manufactures continue to release Android-based phones.

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Good News for Android – More Bad News for Palm

Among the top five mobile platforms (RIM, Apple, Microsoft, Palm and Google), Palm lost the largest amount of market share in the last few months. Palm, the current number four, now owns 6.1% of the US mobile market (down from 8.3% in September). With Google’s Android rapidly growing in popularity, it’s only a matter of time before Google will overtake Palm in the United States.

As we reported in January, according to ChangeWave Research, a growing number of US consumers plans to buy an Android device in the next few months. In September, Android was still tied with Palm as the least-preferred mobile platform. Today, Palm remains in last place, with Android now being the second-most preferred platform – right behind Apple.

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Lately, quite a few TV channels – like CNN – have replaced their man-on-the-street interviews with the cheaper solution of just doing a Twitter search and displaying the results on TV. Curatorr‘s mission is to help these media companies make the process of finding tweets to put on air even easier. Developed by Wiredset, the company behind Trendrr, Curatorr gives media companies, brands and publishers an easy way to find tweets and put the best of them on air.

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Curatorr offers a very streamlined workflow. First, you create a folder for your tweets. Then you perform a Twitter search and pick out the tweets you want to put into these folders. Curatorr offers a number of advanced search options that make it easy to filter tweets by sentiment and location, for example. From there, users can easily export the curated tweets as CSV files for further use and analysis. Curatorr also offers companies the ability to skin their Curatorr pages so that they can just put the actual site on air if they want to.

One of the first broadcast companies to use this tool was MTV, which used the Curatorr platform to identify and publish tweets during the Hope for Haiti Concert.

For the time being, Wiredset will only offer Curatorr to on a limited basis and the company is mostly targeting TV networks and other media businesses. Pricing will depend on usage and scope.

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Last September, Google launched Sidewiki, a Web annotation service that makes it easy to annotate any page on the Internet. Sidewiki, however, hasn’t attracted a lot of users yet and the public discussion about online content continues to happen in comments and on Twitter.

While it’s easy to browse comments, finding Twitter mentions of a specific article can be hard. With the Twitter Reactions Chrome extension, however, you can see quickly see what Twitter is saying about a given page without every having to leave the site.

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Sadly, Twitter Reactions doesn’t apply any filters to the tweets it displays, so you often end up with long lists of retweeted links. Twitter Reactions uses the BackTweets API to aggregate messages. The extension would be even more useful if it used a service like BackType, which does a good job at filtering out the most boring tweets.

Unlike similar projects like Arc90’s TBuzz bookmarklet, the extension doesn’t connect to your own Twitter account, so you can’t tweet and retweet from within the extension.

While it doesn’t offer any advanced features, Twitter Reactions is a quick and easy way to see what the twittersphere is saying about any site. If you are not using Chrome, also give TBuzz a try.

[via Lifehacker]

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AT&T just launched FamilyMap, the company’s newest iPhone app, which allows you to track the location of your family members directly on your iPhone. The app (iTunes link) allows you to see the exact location of your cellphone toting family members. You can also set up recurring alerts, which allows you to check if your child arrived at school in the morning, for example. Given that this is an AT&T app, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the service is only available if you pay a monthly subscription fee. Tracking the location of two phones costs $9.99 per month. For $14.99 per month, you can track up to five phones.

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While AT&T already offered this service, you were only able to see your family member’s location by using a desktop computer. Now, you can just use your iPhone to see a map with your family member’s location. Your family members don’t need to have an iPhone for this service to work. Most AT&T phones now support this feature. If your phone doesn’t have a built-in GPS chip, AT&T will estimate a phone’s location based on data from nearby cellphone towers.

Interestingly, this launch comes just one day after Apple itself got a patent for a method of sharing location data during a phone call. While Apple’s method is completely permission-based, though, AT&T’s system isn’t. Instead, any FamilyMap enabled phone – once you activate the service – will send location data back when requested, without prompting the receiver for confirmation. Given that AT&T is mostly marketing this service to parents, this makes sense, though some people (including children and teenagers) will surely feel a bit uneasy about this feature.

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We are still in the early days of location-based apps, but according to new data from Skyhook, there are now over 6,000 location-based iPhone apps, 900 Android apps and 300 BlackBerry apps. Skyhook, the company that allows non-GPS enabled devices to triangulate locations by using nearby WiFi signals, also found that only a small number of these location-based apps are currently available across the three major app stores. There are currently only 43 cross-platform location apps.

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Social networking and lifestyle apps make up the majority of these cross-platform apps, though in general, most location-based apps are travel apps, followed by social networking services and sports and fitness apps.

Skyhook’s report also highlights the differences in how app developers price their apps in different stores. Wikango, for example, is free for iPhone users, while the Android app costs $14.73 and the BlackBerry app is $19.99. Even though the iPhone platform has a reputation for driving the price of apps down, about 75% of all location-aware apps in the App Store are paid apps. On the BlackBerry platform, half of the apps are paid apps while less than 20% of the location apps on Android are paid apps.

It’s interesting to see that such a small number of apps are currently available across the major platforms. Chances are, though, that a lot of these apps come from smaller development shops that simply don’t have the resources to port their apps to every platform. As the market for location-aware apps matures, we will surely see that a lot of the more successful players will offer cross-platforms apps. Until then, the iPhone is the natural proving ground for these apps, especially given that it has the largest developer and user community at this point.

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According to a new rumor, Google could soon take Street View indoors and allow its users to walk into virtual stores. Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land just received information from a retailer in New York that Google came to their store to take pictures of the inside of the store.

Update: We just received confirmation from an anonymous source that Google is indeed working on this project.

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We just heard from a retailer in San Francisco that Google also photographed the inside of their store about 2 weeks ago – after seeking permission to do so, of course. According to our source, the Google employee used a “specialized camera which he rotated to take the 360 degree shot.” In addition, he also took shots “looking out of the store as if exiting.” This last part makes sense if Google wants to use this sequence of images to simulate the process of entering and exiting the store.

Of course, scaling up a program like this would be a lot harder to do than having a fleet of cars drive around the country and take photos in what is now a mostly automated process.

Here is the image that Search Engine Land received from the New York-based retailer:

Given that Google is already using its Street View trikes in parks, university campuses and zoos, locations like large malls would seem like a more reasonable area to expand Street View to first. Taking Street View indoors does make a lot of sense, however. Stores and malls are the obvious example that Google could monetize, but the company could also use the same technology in museums or public buildings.

The problem with these locations, though, is that Google can’t rely solely on GPS to create these indoor views. Maybe that’s why the company decided to work with smaller locations first to try out different methods for creating reliable indoor maps efficiently. It is worth noting that there are currently only a handful of mobile apps that offer indoor maps.

We asked Google for a comment about this rumor and will update the story once we hear back from them.

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Apple just received a very interesting patent for a method of sharing location data during a phone call. Assuming that Apple implements this idea in its phones, you could soon press a button during a phone call on your iPhone and request location data

from the person you are talking to. Judging from the description of this new feature in the patent, the receiver would always have to give permission before the data is sent back to you.

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In the graphs that accompany Apple’s patent, buttons to request and release location info can be found right underneath the standard iPhone phone interface. If Apple decides to implement this, the feature would work like this:

During a call, you send out a request to get your friend’s exact location by pressing a button on the phone interface. Your friend would get an alert and gets the choice to send his location data back to you or to ignore your request. Assuming your friend wants to share his location with you, you will then get an alert with your friend’s location.

Thanks to this, you wouldn’t have to try to give long-winded and error-prone descriptions of where you are when you plan to meet up with a friend in the city, for example.

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Reading through the patent, it quickly becomes clear that Apple is quite concerned with the privacy aspects of sharing location data. This makes sense, given that sharing location data has privacy implications that go far beyond just sharing what you had for lunch.

It is worth noting that MobileMe users can already check where their phones are at any given point and that all the necessary hardware to implement this feature is already available in every iPhone.

We also couldn’t help be feel reminded of Echoecho, an iPhone app for sharing location data we profiled just about a week ago. Echoecho allows users to share location data on a one-on-one basis. Unlike Apple’s patent, Echoecho’s permission-based location sharing system isn’t based solely around sharing this data in the context of a phone call, but otherwise, the two seems quite similar.

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The Italian government is moving ahead with its plans to hold YouTube accountable for its users’ copyright infringements. According to new regulations that have recently been proposed by the Italian government, YouTube would have to get a TV license to operate in Italy. Should Italy move ahead with this regulation, YouTube would have to follow the same rules and regulations as traditional broadcast channels. These new rules would eliminate the “safe harbor” rules that currently shield services like YouTube.

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According to Nicola D’Angelo, a commissioner in Italy’s Communications Authority, these new rules would make Italy “the only Western country in which it is necessary to have prior government permission to operate this kind of service. This aspect reveals a democratic risk, regardless of who happens to be in power."

Update: We just heard back from Google. Here is the company’s official statement, courtesy of Marco Pancini, Google’s senior policy counsel for Italy:

“When this Directive was debated at length in Brussels, it was clearly decided that user-generated video content should not be regulated in the same way as traditional TV content. If it was then people would find it far more difficult to use video sites to share their videos. So we hope that Italy does not go down a different path and start to regulate videos that people upload to the internet in the same way as they regulate TV.”

A “Mere Conduit”

As Nate Anderson notes, the EU passed an electronic commerce directive in 2000 that clearly states that whenever a service only provides a transmission service, “the service provider is not liable for the information transmitted.” The EU considers these services “mere conduits,” as long as the “do not initiate the transmission, do not select the receiver of the transmission and do not select or modify the information contained in the transmission.” The EU directive, however, leaves it up to the EU’s member states to require service providers to prevent infringement.

How Will Google React?

Should Italy’s deputy minister of communications Paolo Romani decide to forge ahead with these new regulations, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and any other company that offers services similar to YouTube would face substantial legal risks if they continued to operate in Italy.

Google, of course, is already embroiled in a legal conflict with Italy. We asked Google for a statement about the current situation in Italy and will update this post once we hear more.

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Just a few days after releasing Firefox for the Nokia N900 handset, Mozilla just announced that it is also making good progress on an Android version of Firefox. According to Firefox developer Vladimir Vukićević, development of Android for Firefox is progressing quickly. While there are no plans for the release of an official alpha version just yet, Vukićević has already managed to compile and install an early version of Firefox for Android.

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Currently, the Android version is still running the standard Firefox desktop user interface and not the Firefox Mobile/Fennec interface. According to Vukićević, this is meant to ensure that Firefox will work on any Android device, including those with larger screens.

Here is the first screenshot of Firefox running on Android (in an emulator):

Currently, the Android version is still missing a number of core features and Vukićević still has to work out quite a few bugs (the keyboard doesn’t work, for example). Now that the team has managed to create a working prototype, however, Vukićević expects the development process to speed up significantly.

Mozilla is Taking Aim at the Mobile Browser Market

Firefox is clearly working at creating a stronger presence on mobile platforms like Maemo, Windows Mobile, and Android. For now, however, Opera still has a stronger presence in the mobile market, with apps for Windows Mobile, Android and virtually every other major mobile platform. Mozilla is still a step behind here, but hopefully we will soon see a lot more competition in the mobile browser market. Mozilla doesn’t currently have any plans to develop a browser for the BlackBerry, Symbian or iPhone platforms.

[via Android Central]

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SlideShare just announced that it now offers businesses the ability to create their own custom channels on the popular document sharing service. These channels allow businesses and enterprises to share their presentations, e-books and whitepapers with a wider audience. Microsoft, Ogilvy, Adobe and Razorfish Marketing are among today’s launch partners. The White House also now uses a SlideShare channel to share over 1,000 documents with the public. In addition, you can also find a our own custom ReadWriteWeb channel here.

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According to SlideShare’s CEO and co-founder Rashmi Sinha, SlideShare current gets over 25 million unique visitors per month.

For now, SlideShare is only offering these new channels to larger businesses. This is clearly part of SlideShare’s monetization strategy and fits in well with SlideShare’s other business-oriented products like AdShare and LeadShare, both of which are part of SlideShare’s strategy to position itself as a site where professionals can share their content and connect with potential customers.

According to Sinha, these custom channels – which include all of the standard social networking features of SlideShare – will allow businesses to create communities around their content and help these companies to engage their customers. Besides sharing slides, these companies will also be able to aggregate content from their blogs or their Twitter feeds on their SlideShare pages.

In addition to offering branded channels with company logos and a custom look and feel, SlideShare now also offers enterprises the ability to sponsor topical channels.

Sadly, though, it doesn’t look like the company plans to give regular users the ability to create and curate their own channels anytime soon. Being able to curate topical channels would be a nice feature, but for now, if you want to do this, you will have to resort to embedding SlideShare files on your own site.

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When Google launched the Nexus One Android phone a few weeks ago, support for multitouch gestures like pinch-to-zoom was mysteriously missing from the phone’s feature set in the United States. Starting today, however, Google will begin to ship an over-the-air software update to all Nexus One phones in the U.S. that will enable multitouch pinch-and-zoom functionality in the browser, gallery and maps application. Until now, Nexus One owners had to resort to a hack to enable multitouch on their phones.

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Google plans to roll this update out slowly. All Nexus One owners should receive a notification about the availability of the update for their phone by the end of the week.

Why Now?

Oddly enough, Nexus One (and Motorola Droid) users outside of the U.S. have always been able to make use of these multitouch features by default. It’s not clear why Google decided to enable multitouch on the Nexus One now, but we have asked Google for a statement and will update this post once we hear from them.

Looking around the mobile industry, from Apple to Palm to HTC and Motorola – it’s clear that pinch-to-zoom technology has become a standard and popular way for users to interact with their mobile phones. Likewise, Android users can now truly benefit from this capability with the availability of Android 2.1, which powers a new class of devices with larger touchscreens and more interactive features. Unlike past devices, these phones have the processing power to deliver pinch-to-zoom, while still providing a great user experience. Based on these new capabilities and numerous requests from Android users, we decided to provide pinch-to-zoom capabilities with this new over-the-air software update for Nexus One devices.

More Updates: Google Navigation, Google Goggles, Fix for 3G Connectivity

In addition to the new multitouch functionality, this update will also bring significant new features to the Google Maps application. Starred items and search suggestions will now be synchronized with maps.google.com, for example. In addition, Google Navigation – Google’s turn-by-turn GPS app – will now get a night mode that automatically changes the colors on your screen at night to make the screen easier to read.

Google will also now ship Google Goggles as a default application on the Nexus One. Google Goggles is a surprisingly useful tool that allows you to take pictures of landmarks to initiate a search, for example, or to scan business cards and automatically populate Google Contacts with this data.

Early adopters of the Nexus One often complained about issues with 3G connectivity. According to Google, this new update should improve 3G connectivity on the phone.

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Back in April 2009, Google introduced Google Search, a little-known feature in Gmail labs that allows users to search Google without ever leaving the Gmail interface. Today, Google announced that it is improving this feature with a number of useful new functions. Google Search in Gmail can now access most of the more advanced features of Google Search, including dictionary definitions, spelling corrections, calculations, weather and local search. In addition, Google is now also highlighting these new features through an additional button in the Gmail toolbar.

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While this might look like a very minor new feature, Google Search in Gmail actually turns out to be quite useful. Being able to search Google’s index directly from Gmail without having to leave the site is nice, but what makes this feature work is the ability to quickly copy and paste the search results into your email. You can choose to copy the full search result (including the description of the site) or just the link. Sadly, though, Google Search in Gmail doesn’t allow you to search Google Maps and easily copy and paste a map into an email message.

To enable Google Search in Gmail, go to Gmail Labs and look for “Google Search” (around the middle of the page).

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