Category: News

LinkedIn announced the new LinkedIn Contacts today. This is described as a way to bring all your contacts into one place.

Specifically, LinkedIn Contacts brings contacts from your address books, email accounts, and calendars together with your LinkedIn network.

“From these sources, we’ll automatically pull in the details of your past conversations and meetings, and bring these details directly onto your contact’s profile,” says LinkedIn’s Sachin Rekhi.

Introducing the New LinkedIn Contacts from LinkedIn

LinkedIn Contacts is available on LinkedIn.com, and has a standalone app for the iPhone. Stilly, you have to get an invite, and the company will start sending them to a limited number of users in the U.S. over the coming weeks.

While LinkedIn does not mention Android or other mobile platforms, one can only assume that the app will broaden its audience at some point.

A North Carolina man has been arrested on charges of murder and assault with a deadly weapon after stabbing a friend and the friend’s wife, who died from her wounds.

Jonathan Broyhill, who was best man in the couple’s wedding in 2009, attacked Nation Hahn and Jamie Kirk Hahn in their home on Monday night before turning the knife on himself. He was treated for his wounds and now faces serious charges, and police are investigating a possible motive.

Broyhill worked with Jamie Hahn at her company, Sky Blue Strategies, which dealt with high-profile Democratic candidates. Investigators say they’ve found large discrepancies in the amounts of funds paid out to donors in the form of refunds; $8,250 was given by those donors in 2012 but a document shows they allegedly received $15,900 in return. Whether that money ever made it back to them is under investigation.

“Some of the things that Jonathan said about the campaign finances were inconsistent with other information,” former Democratic Rep. Brad Miller said. “It’s probably the case that Jamie was asking questions on behalf of the campaign about campaign finances. I think it’s bound to be part of the investigation of Jon’s motive.”

Jamie’s family released a statement regarding her death:

“It is our fervent hope that an even larger community will be inspired now by the way she lived her life,” the family said. “She dedicated her life and her work to the ideal that we were put on this earth to care for those who need an extra measure of care. She believed in justice, opportunity and fairness for all. She loved politics and she saw the Democratic Party as the path to realize her ideals. She had a gift for bringing us together – black and white, young and old, gay and straight. She challenged us to work together for a better world. Her light will shine on in all of us who knew and loved her.”

Think some cloud-storage options are no good for privacy-sensitive applications like health care? Box wants you to think again.  Keen on boosting its enterprise customer base and prepping for an IPO, the company said Wednesday it’s now HIPAA-compliant, enabling Box to handle personal health information.

Compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act means that Box provides file redundancy to prevent data loss in a disaster, restrictions on employees’ access to documents, a breach-notification policy, data encryption and other features.

Beyond talking about meeting regulatory standards, Box is also promoting 10 new partner applications in its marketplace, including the drchrono iPad application for viewing electronic health records and the TigerText Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for texting and sharing documents among health care providers.

It’s not as though Box has yet to take on business from health care companies, though. It’s got hundreds of paying health care customers, said Whitney Bouck, general manager of Box Enterprise. Customers include the Garden City Hospital and the Henry Ford Health System, both in Michigan, according to a Box statement. Still, Bouck said that because of the HIPAA compliance and application partnerships, the company expects a much higher annual revenue growth rate in the health care area than the companywide figure, which stands at 160 percent.

Adding creature comforts to entice customers in health care and other sectors is important for the cloud-storage contenders such as Box, Dropbox and at least a dozen other storage providers, all of which want to become the Dropbox of the enterprise. Box is following Salesforce.com, Microsoft and other cloud collaboration providers by connecting with apps catering to industries. At the same time, those software giants are adding Box-like cloud storage capabilities of their own.

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Managing subcontractors can be a draining, thankless task. How many times have you had to adjust project plans or schedules because a sub failed to deliver?

We used to burn a lot of valuable time babysitting our subs through projects. Sometimes we had to practically take over managing their tasks for them in order to prevent them from crashing the whole project.

But then, on a job that required us to use a small subcontractor we’ll call Quantum Robotics, we figured out how we could solve that problem. Roger managed the project, so we’ll let him tell it in his own words:

I knew from experience that Quantum required intense supervision to make schedule. I was also worried that the company might lose money on the project. When you contract with small subs, you need to concern yourself with their financial situation. If they go belly-up before they deliver their work, things can get messy for the whole project.

Midway through our project Quantum ran into issues that I thought might compromise their profitability. So I asked the owner, “Dave, are you making money on this project?” He said, “Relax. We’ll make up for the problems.”

At first I figured Dave was just being his usual closed-mouth self. Then I got a sinking feeling: He didn’t know the answer to my question. When I asked again, he sighed. “Honestly, I won’t know how profitable this project is until we can crunch the final numbers.”

I had grown accustomed to the weekly financial updates we do on our own projects, including metrics such as gross profit per hour. Quantum had nothing like that, which meant I’d have to babysit the company every step of the way. And then it dawned on me: If I could teach Dave a few of the methods we use to generate and track project metrics, he’d have similar data at his fingertips. So would I.

It took some coaxing, but I managed to convince him to give our metrics a shot. We took his project budget, added up hours spent and materials costs, and came up with a forecast of remaining expenditures. That allowed us to estimate his gross profit per hour for the entire project. We could see he had some challenges — but if he met them, he’d be OK. The key was for him to keep a close watch on performance so he could correct course immediately when the project metrics showed a dip in the profitability of his team’s efforts.

For the rest of the project I eased off on the babysitting. Quantum now had metrics that would highlight critical issues, so the folks there could oversee their own progress. Eventually, they completed the project on time and everyone profited from the job.

No PM likes interfering with a sub’s business, and the sub usually likes it even less. But if you can help them monitor their work accurately early on — in a way that makes sense to both parties — you won’t have to intervene nearly as much later to keep things on track.

This is the fourth post in the authors’ blog series on project management. The series draws on advice from their book Project Management for Profit.

Post #1: The Dirty Little Secret of Project Management

Post #2: When Tracking Projects, Ignore Your Accountants

Post #3: Project Managers Should Share Their Stress

Dallas-based startup BookShout, which aims to promote social reading and aid book discovery, has raised $6 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Thursday. But the company is, at least temporarily, no longer permitting users to import their Kindle and Nook books onto the platform — the feature that it showed off as the main perk of its platform at the Frankfurt Book Fair last fall.

That hasn’t stopped Ambassador Enterprises, a Fort Wayne, Ind.-based venture firm, from investing again. “By serving authors and publishers in a process-oriented, measurable way, BookShout is eliminating the guesswork and building tools that let content creators take control of their audience,” Ambassador CEO Daryle Doden said in a statement.

BookShout, which is available on the web and for Android and iOS, recently rolled out tools for digital bulk sales and promotions. It offers gift cards and promo codes and added an “author circles” feature that lets authors communicate with their fans. The company says it is working with 250 publishers and sells over 100,000 ebooks on its platform. But it would not reveal how many users it has.

As for the Kindle and Nook importation — which seemed suspect at the time it was launched, even though CEO Jason Illian said the company wasn’t breaking Amazon or Barnes & Noble’s terms of service — the feature is turned off for now but could return, Illian told me. “We’ll see if we do [turn it back on] or not based on our relationships and partnerships with publishers,” he said. “We are here to serve them.”

BookShout was founded in 2010 and has gone through a number of incarnations before its current model. It has also received backing from Ingram Content Group CEO John Ingram. Including the newest round of funding, the company has raised $8.75 million in total.

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A man accused of housing child pornography on multiple hard drives will not be forced to give authorities access, after a Wisconsin judge rules that doing so would violate his 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

The case involves Jeffrey Feldman, a software engineer with a degree in computer science from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Suspected of possessing child pornography, FBI agents raided his home and seized 16 storage devices, 9 of which were encrypted.

The FBI filed an order to compel Feldman to decrypt his devices, and order which has been shot down by Judge William Callahan.

“This is a close call, but I conclude that Feldman’s act of production, which would necessarily require his using a password of some type to decrypt the storage device, would be tantamount to telling the government something it does not already know with “reasonably particularity” – namely, that Feldman has personal access to and control over the encrypted storage devices. Accordingly, in my opinion, Fifth Amendment protection is available to Feldman. Stated another way, ordering Feldman to decrypt the storage devices would be in violation of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination,” said Judge William E. Callahan Jr.

The Judge concedes that the state knows the encrypted devices contain data, and that they already know the names of the files and that they probably exist on said devices. He also concedes that the state has shown that Feldman is surely capable of decrypting the devices.

But the following question remains: Is it reasonably clear, in the absence of compelled decryption, that Feldman actually has access to and control over the encrypted storage devices and, therefore, the files contained therein? To be sure, the storage devices were all found in Feldman’s residence, where he has admittedly lived alone for the past 15 years. In addition, the unencrypted Dell computer, which showed connections to the encrypted storage devices, has a login screen with only one username, “Jeff.” Nevertheless, unlike in Boucher and Fricosu, here, Feldman has not admitted access and control.

It’s clear that the Judge thinks that this is a very tricky case, and his decision toes the line.

In the end, however, the conclusion is that the state simply doesn’t know enough already about the contents of the drives and the defendant’s ties to them to compel him to access them.

An attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Wired that “this isn’t just about child porn. It’s about anything on your computer that prosecutors or government officials may want.”

Don’t think that encrypting your data shields you from the long reach of the law, however. Not only is encryption less than 100% effective, but this is simply one ruling. In the past, we’ve seen courts compel decryption – for instance in the aforementioned Boucher case, where a man was forced to unlock like laptop after authorities suspected it contained child pornography.

The DualShock design has remained fairly consistent since its introduction in 1997. Even the DualShock 3, with its motion controls and curved analog triggers, looked almost just like previous incarnations. Sony is changing all that with the PlayStation 4, and (Sony’s) developers couldn’t be happier.

Sony released a new video detailing the DualShock 4 and what developers think about it. Those speaking are internal Sony developers so they are somewhat obligated to love the new controller. That being said, there does seem to be a lot of love that went into the controller, and Sony says that it was designed with input from studios around the world.

While it’s nice to know a bit more about the controller, gamers are eager to get a look at the actual PlayStation 4 hardware itself. We probably won’t be able to see that until E3 in June though. Until then, we’ll just have to make due with more videos about the DualShock 4 and other PS4 services.

Microsoft has big plans for this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. Following its unveiling of the next-generation Xbox video game console on May 21st, the company plans to “continue the conversation” at the annual gaming convention. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Polygon that the company will “showcase the new console’s software line-up” and a “full line-up of blockbuster gaming experiences” for the next-generation Xbox.

Continue reading…

Yesterday, Nintendo posted its annual earnings, which were a bit disappointing due to slow sales of its newest console, the Wii U.

Buried inside Nintendo President Satoru Iwata’s statements about Nintendo’s financial standing is something of great intrest to gamers who are looking forward to this year’s E3. It turns out that Nintendo will not be hosting a huge press conference at the event, which is common for console makers and large publishers.

Since Nintendo does not have a new console to launch the way Microsoft and Sony do, the company will use its presence at E3 to show off upcoming Wii U games. Iwata stated that the company will be working on a “new presentation style for E3″ that includes smaller events focused on Nintendo’s U.S. software lineup. For Japan and the rest of the world, Nintendo will be releasing Nintendo Direct presentations to show off its software.

Iwata’s statement on E3:

In the past we invited reporters, investors and analysts, industry partners, such as software publishers, and distributors who attended E3 to our large-scale presentations. We also used them as a communication tool in which we broadcast our presentations on the Internet to reach out to video game fans around the globe. I believe that many are expecting us to host a similar event this year.

On the other hand, since we set out on new endeavors such as Nintendo Direct two years ago in October, we have been paying special attention to the fact that different people demand different types of information from us. For example, as video game fans are looking for information about games, it seems that they are less interested in sales figures that investors and analysts on the other hand attach much greater importance to, and distribution partners are looking for information on how we are going to market our products in the immediate future. At previous financial briefing sessions we announced information about our products, showed videos and even uploaded the recording of these events onto our website, but given that we now have an established method such as Nintendo Direct, we feel that we will be able to deliver our messages more appropriately and effectively by doing so individually based on the various needs of different groups of people.

At E3 this year, we are not planning to launch new hardware, and our main activity at E3 will be to announce and have people experience our software. Many people are certainly very interested in learning more about the Wii U titles that we are going to announce. We will use E3 as an ideal opportunity to talk in detail mainly about the Wii U titles that we are going to launch this year, and we also plan to make it possible for visitors to try the games immediately. As a brand new challenge, we are working to establish a new presentation style for E3.

First, we decided not to host a large-scale presentation targeted at everyone in the international audience where we announce new information as we did in the past.

Instead, at the E3 show this year, we are planning to host a few smaller events that are specifically focused on our software lineup for the U.S. market. There will be one closed event for American distributors, and we will hold another closed hands-on experience event, for mainly the Western gaming media. Also, I did not speak at last year’s presentation, and I am not planning to speak at these events at the E3 show this year either. Apart from these exclusive events for visitors, we are continuing to investigate ways to deliver information about our games directly to our home audience around the time of E3. We will share more information about them once they have officially been decided.

During the E3 period, we will utilize our direct communication tools, such as Nintendo Direct, to deliver information to our Japanese audience, including those who are at this financial briefing, mainly focusing on the software that we are going to launch in Japan, and we will take the same approach outside Japan for the overseas fans as well.

(via Endless)

“M*A*S*H” actor Allan Arbus, who played psychiatrist Sidney Freedman on the show, has died. He was 95.

Arbus was a film actor who appeared in “Coffy” and “Damien: Omen II”, but he was best known for his work on television. Throughout the ’70s, he appeared on many of the most popular shows, including “Mod Squad”, “The Odd Couple”, and “Hawaii 5-0″. But it was his portrayal of Major Sidney Freedman on “M*A*S*H” which won him favor with audiences. It would become his most famous role.

“I was so convinced that he was a psychiatrist I used to sit and talk with him between scenes,” co-star Alan Alda said. “After a couple months of that I noticed he was giving me these strange looks, like ‘How would I know the answer to that?’ ”

Before his acting career took off, Arbus worked with his wife, Diane, as a photographer. He also snapped photos for the Army during WWII, but he would make a name for himself later with Diane when they discovered a gift for fashion photography. The couple made huge names for themselves in the fashion world, shooting for Vogue and Glamour before Diane decided to take her own creative path.

Diane and Allan divorced in 1969, and she took her own life in 1971. Many who knew Allan believed such a tragic loss helped him put a believable spin on his “M*A*S*H” character.

“He brought a depth … to what he faced as a psychiatrist on the show,” said Alan Alda. “It helped the audience and … actors believe some of the stresses our characters were under.”

HTC is clearing the air in regards to the injunction that was ordered in the Netherlands on Nokia’s behalf. They want to make it clear the injunction wasn’t on the HTC one, but it was on STM, manufacturers of the microphone on the HTC One. Nokia had an exclusive arrangement with STM for these microphones and HTC bought them in good faith. In fact, HTC was found to be blameless in the case. Regardless, HTC can’t buy microphones from STM anymore, but HTC wanted to make it clear that they are still able to utilize the microphones they bought before the injunction was granted. HTC is already working on an improved design and will transition to it when the current STM supply runs out. Hit the break for HTC’s full statement.

In light of several misleading stories regarding a recent injunction obtained by Nokia against STM (a supplier of components to HTC in The Netherlands) HTC looks to clarify the following points:

• Nokia has NOT obtained an injunction in The Netherlands, or anywhere else, against the HTC One.
• The Dutch proceedings were brought by Nokia solely against STM. HTC was not sued by Nokia in the Netherlands.
• The Dutch injunction prohibits STM from selling certain microphones to any company other than Nokia for a limited period.
• The judgment against STM states that HTC can continue to use microphones already purchased from STM in its products, because they were purchased in good-faith. Nokia’s attempt to obtain a recall of microphones already sold to HTC failed.
• HTC will transition to improved microphone designs once its inventory of STM microphones is exhausted.

Come comment on this article: HTC makes statement regarding injunction, will transition to improved microphones

Pro-touring is the art of taking and old car and fitting it with modern components so as to give it the performance to be able to run head-to-head with today’s modern sports cars. Now when most people think of this, they immediately think of modernized muscle cars. But what about taking vintage imports and doing the same thing. MotorTrend recently got two amazing Nissan Z cars together for an all-out track comparison. Car 1 was a modern day 370z fitted with just about every bolt-on you could possibly purchase over the parts counter. Car 2 was a vintage 1970 Datsun 240z with an RB26 engine transplant that was built by Gordon MacSwain of Ohio. Both cars are fast, nimble and have serious track cred, but at days end, who will be the victor? Click through to find out.

Source: MotorTrend.com

I was actually wondering if it would ever happen, but it looks like the Jelly Bean update is officially rolling for the T-Mobile HTC One S. Of course it isn’t the latest version of Jelly Bean, but Android 4.1.1 still brings a lot of new features such as Google Now. The file size is pretty high at 675.49MB so you need to be connected to WiFI for this one. You should receive your update automatically, but you can always check to see if you can manually pull it by going to Settings/About/Software Updates. Let us know if you received your update yet.

source: TmoNews

Come comment on this article: T-Mobile HTC One S gets Jelly Bean

Topless photos of Kate Middleton which showed up in a French magazine last year are at the center of some trouble for two people, who have now had charges filed against them.

Ernesto Mauri, the chief executive of the company that owns Closer Magazine, has been charged with invasion of privacy. A photographer, Valerie Suau, has been charged as well for taking the photos and publishing them in her newspaper, La Provence; however, Suau claims she didn’t take the topless photos, only snapping Kate in her bikini. An investigation has been launched to determine whether she took the photos that appeared in Closer.

The Duchess was photographed while sunbathing on vacation at a private residence in France last September, causing a huge uproar in Britain and launching a crusade by Middleton and Prince William against paparazzi being so intrusive. However, Closer editor Laurence Pieau claimed that Middleton was doing what millions of other European women do, and that the photos shouldn’t have come as such a shock to people.

“These photos are not in the least shocking. They show a young woman sunbathing topless, like the millions of women you see on beaches,” he said.

Perhaps what was most unsettling to many was not the fact that Middleton was sunbathing topless, but that she was doing it at a private residence in front of a secret audience with a long lens. Prince William made the decision to sue Closer after the photos were published and compared the invasion of his wife’s privacy to the behavior of the media towards his mother, Princess Diana, who died tragically in a car accident in France while allegedly trying to outrun photographers.

Apple has been hit with a fine in China after being found to have illegally distributed copywrited materials. China Daily reports that the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court ruled against Apple in a case brought by book writers claiming their works were being sold in Apple’s eBook store without their permission. The court determined that it was indeed Apple’s job to verify that works uploaded to its iOS book store for the iPhone and iPad were the property of the parties uploading them, and it fined Apple 730,000 yuan, or approximately $118,000, for its irresponsible verification policies.

Continue reading…

Rayman Legends was supposed to be a Wii U-exclusive title, launching sometime during Nintendo’s “extended launch window.” In February, however, Ubisoft announced that the game would be ported to all consoles, and delayed the near-complete Wii U version so as to launch the game simultaneously on all platforms.

Early adopters of the Wii U were, understandably, upset. Ubisoft responded to the severe criticism, but only by releasing a new demo for the game on Wii U.

This week, the final release date for the game has been set. Rayman Legends will launch on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii U on September 3 (August 30 in Europe), putting the game’s launch just weeks before the release of Grand Theft Auto V.

In the meantime, Ubisoft is still trying to make things right with Wii U owners. The publisher has launched a new Rayman Legends Challenges app for the Wii U. The app is free and includes different challenge modes and randomly-generated levels that allow players to earn “cups,” which unlock daily an weekly challenges.

A new class of entrepreneurs is getting ready to take on the Windy City. On Thursday, TechStars Chicago, which was formed earlier this year when the Boulder, Colo.-based TechStars program joined forces with the local Excelerate Labs, announced its first cohort of startups.

Troy Henikoff, the program’s managing director, said the 10 startups were selected from an applicant pool of 904, which was double the size of the applicant pool last year. The 10 companies not only reflect a range of industries, he said, the new cohort is geographically diverse, with just three startups from Chicago and a couple from outside the U.S.

Launched three years ago, Excelerate Labs was led by a group of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, including Henikoff (founder of SurePayroll), OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, Sandbox Industries’ Nick Rosa and New World Ventures’ Adam Koopersmith. Its 30 companies have raised a total of $30 million, the group said. But teaming up with TechStars elevates the program and gives startups access to a national network of mentors and investors.

Here are the program’s 10 new startups:

CaptureProof (www.captureproof.com) – Currently in beta, CaptureProof gives patients a secure site for tracking their health with photos and video and then sharing them with their doctors. Through the site, doctors can monitor patients’ health trends and progress remotely.

HIPOM (www.myHIPOM.com) – For parents who want to limit their kids’ access to the internet, HIPOM provides a cloud-based solution for controlling any individual device in the home.

Nexercise (www.nexercise.com) – Nexercise is an iPhone and Android app that helps people lose weight and improve their fitness through competitions with friends, alerts and rewards.

Pathful (www.pathful.com) – A web analytics service, Pathful says it tracks all kinds of visitor interactions and doesn’t require tagging.

Peoplematics (www.peoplematics.com) – Peoplematics is a service that enables employees to find and share information across their personal cloud.

Project Fixup (www.projectfixup.com) – A matchmaking service, Project Fixup pairs up people for one-on-one dates based on their schedules and interests.

SimpleRelevance (www.simplerelevance.com) – An email marketing platform, SimpleRelevance says its analytics-driven approach can improve revenue per message by 30-300 percent.

SocialCrunch (http://about.socialcrunch.com) – SocialCrunch says it builds a “behavior graph” of internet users to help marketers learn about and reach a target audience.

Sqord (www.sqord.com) – A “Fitbit for kids” (see disclosure), Sqord’s watch-like fitness tracking device promotes activity through friendly competition.

TradingView (www.tradingview.com) – An online community of investors and traders, TradingView aggregates web stock charts and enables investors to share their ideas.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The EU has finally come out with a public document discussing Google’s proposal to end a lengthy antitrust investigation, and addressing the previously reported “market test,” which will give competitors and all those concerned a chance to offer feedback.

Should Google be required to change its search results? Let us know what you think in the comments.

The Commission is seeking feedback on the commitments Google has offered to address concerns.

On why it feels the need to intervene, the Commission says, “In high-tech markets in particular, network effects may lead to entrenched market positions. Google has had a strong position in web search in most European countries for a number of years now. It does not seem likely that another web search service will replace it as European users’ web search service of choice.”

“In this context, it is important for the Commission to intervene in order to ensure that Google’s prominent market position in web search does not affect the possibility for other competitors to innovate in neighbouring markets, including in the long-term,” it adds.

The Commission views Google as dominant in search and search advertising, and says it is abusing its dominant position in four areas: specialized search, content usage, exclusivity agreements with publishers for the provision of online search advertising on their sites, and contractual restrictions on the portability and management of online search advertising campaigns across AdWords and competing platforms.

Google has, of course, settled similar concerns here in the U.S. with the Federal Trade Commission, where it agreed to let sites remove content from specialized search results pages while allowing them to keep results in regular Google results (they recently released a tool for this), and to enable advertisers to “mix and copy ad campaign data” within third-party services that use the AdWords API.

Some competitors felt that the settlement did not go far enough. The proposal in Europe goes further. Here is the list of Google’s proposals verbatim (per the EU’s announcement):

Google offers for a period of 5 years to:

(i) – label promoted links to its own specialised search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results,

– clearly separate these promoted links from other web search results by clear graphical features (such as a frame), and

– display links to three rival specialised search services close to its own services, in a place that is clearly visible to users,

(ii) – offer all websites the option to opt-out from the use of all their content in Google’s specialised search services, while ensuring that any opt-out does not unduly affect the ranking of those web sites in Google’s general web search results,

– offer all specialised search web sites that focus on product search or local search the option to mark certain categories of information in such a way that such information is not indexed or used by Google,

– provide newspaper publishers with a mechanism allowing them to control on a web page per web page basis the display of their content in Google News,

(iii) no longer include in its agreements with publishers any written or unwritten obligations that would require them to source online search advertisements exclusively from Google, and

(iv) no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.

A third party would be required to monitor Google’s implementation of its commitments.

Already, despite the increased responsibilities on Google’s part, competitors don’t think the proposals go far enough this time either.

Interestingly, FairSearch, the group of Google competitors, which has been most vocal about its opposition to Google’s practices since its incarnation when Google announced its intent to acquire ITA software three years ago, issued a statement on the market test before the EU’s document came out.

“The most important remedy to Google’s abuse of dominance is to require the search monopoly, which controls 94 percent of the market in Europe, to subject its own products and services to the same policy it uses to rank and display all other Websites,” the group said. “Since it has taken a year to extract a final proposal from Google, FairSearch believes the ‘market test’ should last three months to ensure that interested parties have enough time to carefully provide the European Commission with their expertise on the effectiveness of Google’s proposal. As we have said, we will comment on Google’s proposed remedies after the Commission shares them.”

FairSearch intends to study the “effects” of Google’s proposal, and has implied that it will have more suggestions for how to make things better.

Separately, FairSearch recently filed a complaint with the EU saying that Google is using its Android operating system to give it an additional unfair advantage in search. This is not addressed in Google’s current proposals, but the EU isn’t ignoring it. Here’s what the commission had to say about “other Google-related allegations”:

This process covers the four competition concerns that have been investigated as a matter of priority. The Commission is, however, thoroughly examining all other allegations brought to its attention by different market players with a view to deciding whether or not a further investigation of those issues is warranted. Google’s Android related business practices are part of those issues.

To be continued…

All those concerned with Google’s current proposals have a month to submit their feedback to the EU.

Do Google’s proposals go far enough? Should Google even be required to do all of what it has proposed? Will this help competitors significantly? Will it hurt Google significantly? We want to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Opscode’s been on a bit of a roll. The devops fan favorite is the foundation of Amazon Web Services new Opsworks application lifecycle management capability and now it’s being embraced and integrated into IBM’s SmartCloud and will work with Microsoft Azure, via a collaboration with Microsoft Open Technologies. The news comes out of Opscode’s ChefConf, kicking off Thursday in San Francisco.

Opscode, the name behind the Chef tools that many developers use to automate the configuration and deployment of IT, has got more than a toehold in the cloud landscape. Earlier this week Joyent, another cloud provider, said it was integrating Chef into the Joyent cloud.

As I wrote at that time, tools like Chef, CFEngine and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) ease the creation and management of system configurations. A key benefit is that, once the associated scripts of a deployment are created, they can be deployed regardless of the underlying operating system or, in this case, cloud.

Opscode VP of marketing Jay Wampold says IBM and Microsoft’s moves show that enterprise customers are ready for cloud-type deployments. “If you look back over a decade, you see that Google, Facebook and Amazon figured out how to leverage large-scale infrastructure to deliver to consumers built from the ground up on code. Now you’re seeing major [older] enterprises moving IT from a back-office support function for internal operations into a front-office effort that is a touch point for consumers.”

As part of this deal, Opscode has agreed to support IBM’s AIX Unix operating system.

That means they need to develop, configure, test, deploy and monitor applications in web time and at web scale, which is where the devops movement and tools like Chef and Puppet come in. The devops school pushes developers and IT people to work together on fast, incremental tech deployments rather than at cross-purposes. Where Chef and Puppet differ is that Chef focuses more on developers while Puppet concentrates on admins — the “ops” side of devops.

The news of the past few months seems to indicate that Chef has momentum  – although one IT person who watches this space would not give Chef the edge, necessarily. “Chef and Puppet both seem to be doing great. The push by AWS and Joyent is probably more a function of the fact that Chef is easier to stand up as a hosted service than Puppet,” he said.

Another factor could be that VMware recently invested $30 million more in Puppet, something that makes some businesses wary> The fear is that Puppet won’t be totally dedicated to heterogeneous environments, a worry that Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies denies. The VMware relationship does help Puppet in the private cloud market  but “we’re not changing our roadmap for VMware, and they don’t have anything resembling a controlling stake,” Kanies said via email.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Today is the biggest day of the off-season for NFL fans. We all wait to see who our favorite team selects when the pick rolls around. We wonder if the player will be boon or bust. After all, the Draft is little more than a crap shoot — ask the San Diego Chargers how that Ryan Leaf kid worked out. On the other hand, there are late round gems to be found — Terrell Davis was a sixth round pick and Davone Bess went undrafted.

Either way, the whole show, live from Radio City in New York, will go down beginning tonight at 8pm ET and the spectacle can be watched on the NFL Network.

What if you are not near a TV or simply do not get the channel in your subscription package? The league wants you to be able to watch the Draft anyway, and of course, the ads as well.

The show, in its entirety, can be seen live on the NFL Draft website. If you are out and about then you can catch the action on your mobile device via the NFL app, but if you want to actually see the streaming video then you’d better be a Verizon customer because the league has an exclusive deal with the mobile carrier. Alternatively, you can follow the NFL on Twitter to keep up on the happenings.

The Kansas City Chiefs are now on the clock. Will it be Luke Joeckel or Eric Fisher? What will your team do? All of these questions are about to be answered.