Category: News

Mailbox, the popular email app that got so much attention before getting acquired by Dropbox in March, announced Tuesday that it has dropped the waiting list that users previously had to endure before gaining access to the app.

Mailbox is now delivering more than 100 million messages per day, and the app is now ready to handle the traffic of opening the app to everyone, the company said in a release. “We believe we can now confidently handle new users as they sign up, so we’ve pulled down the reservation system.”

Waiting in a virtual line to get access to Mailbox seemed like part of the company’s strategy around gathering attention, so it will be interesting to see if customers are still enamored with Mailbox if anyone can sign up.

The company provides an email client that is focused on different gestures that allow users to manage and sort email. The company has also released a few updates to the app, which is available in the iTunes store. Om Malik’s sources put the pricetag on the Mailbox acquisition north of $50 million and one person put it closer to $100 million.

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President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the explosions that occurred in Boston, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, April 16, 2013.

(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Following a briefing from FBI Director Mueller, Attorney General Holder, Secretary Napolitano, and homeland security advisor Lisa Monaco, President Obama went to the Brady Press Briefing Room to update Americans on developments in Boston, following two explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday afternoon. 

"We continue to mobilize and deploy all appropriate law enforcement resources to protect our citizens, and to investigate and to respond to this attack," the President said in a televised address. "Obviously our first thoughts this morning are with the victims, their families, and the city of Boston. We know that two explosions gravely wounded dozens of Americans, and took the lives of others, including a 8-year-old boy.

"This was a heinous and cowardly act. And given what we now know about what took place, the FBI is investigating it as an act of terrorism.  Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror. What we don’t yet know, however, is who carried out this attack, or why; whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organization, foreign or domestic, or was the act of a malevolent individual."

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Big data isn’t just about Hadoop distributions and analytics software — you also need servers to process it and disks on which to store it. On Tuesday, research firm IDC quantified the market for the latter aspect, predicting that the business of selling storage into big data deployments will be worth nearly $6 billion in 2016, up from just $379.9 million in 2011.

However, as a press release explaining the new report highlighted, defining “storage” for the purposes of big data is an exercise in subjectivity. There are systems for archiving data, and systems for storing post-processed data and systems — like the Hadoop Distributed File System — that put storage on the same servers that process data. There also are storage systems designed for operational data and those designed for transactional data, and very likely something in between.

Presumably, these numbers don’t account for the amount of storage baked into analytic database appliances like those from Teradata and Netezza. And, although the report doesn’t appear to address it, there also will be a market for storing data in the cloud — both provider-side and user-side. Even here, there are a variety of options from Hadoop services to data warehouse services to software-as-a-service applications.

The storage research is just IDC’s latest attempt at quantifying a big data movement that spans a wide section of individual markets. On Monday, for example, the firm predicted the market for analytics services would reach $70.8 billion by 2016. In January, it said big-data-specific servers, storage, networking, software and services will create a $23.8 billion market by 2016.

As we’ve said time and time again, though, trying to put a dollar value on the big data market is in many cases akin to herding cats (that we might also shear for fur and that might provide a valuable service killing off crop-damaging varmints). There are so many disparate facets and delivery models that touch so many different business uses and revenue sources that it’s difficult to capture big data, or any of its individual components, into a single market. But however IDC and other research firms define it, the only thing that matters in the end is probably the ever-rising revenue arrow.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Mmaxer.

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With the release of Google Glass on the near horizon, we have more news about the forthcoming wearable computing device. Earlier we reported on Google releasing the Mirror API that will enable developers to create apps for use on the the Glass devices. Following up on that, Google has released their own app, MyGlass. The app will be used to configure and manage a Google Glass device. It should be pretty obvious that the app is of no use to anyone unless they have a Google Glass device, but Google makes that abundantly clear with their description:

If you don’t have Glass, then downloading this will be a waste of time. Sorry about that. But if you swipe the screenshots to the right you’ll see there’s a picture of a puppy in pajamas. So not a total waste of time after all.

You can check out the puppy in the photo gallery below. If you are interested in installing the app just to check out the look and feel, use one of the Google Play links below. If you have your order in for a new Google Glass device, you will definitely want to hit the download link.

Google Play Download Link

Come comment on this article: Companion app for Google Glass, “MyGlass” arrives in Google Play Store

Eighteen months ago I attended the first Open Networking Summit at Stanford’s campus. The event was billed as a place to learn what people were doing with the OpenFlow protocol as well as a primer on software defined networking. The event aimed to attract about 200 people, but around 600 signed up (half of those were shunted to the wait list).

Last night I attended the opening cocktail reception for a radically different ONS and had the chance to reflect on how rapidly the once-staid field of networking is changing. There were about 1,500 people registered, which was the limit of the venue. The event had grown to the Santa Clara Convention Center and attendees were a fairly even mix of suits and engineers.

The biggest change was the exhibitor section. Where in 2011 the exhibitor hall was a narrow corridor at the Stanford conference center where a little more than a dozen students, companies and non profits had set up “booths” to showcase their ideas for Open Flow, there was now a few rows of booths — most of which were quite professional.

In October 2011, I attended the show for one day and moderated a panel where I recall asking Dave Ward, who was then CTO and Chief Architect of the Platform Systems Division at Juniper, what he would do if Stuart Elby, the VP of digital architecture at Verizon, a Juniper customer, got so excited about the promise of OpenFlow and SDN that it stopped buying expensive Juniper gear.

Ward danced a bit but essentially said that Juniper had the features and expertise to pull networking gear together that Verizon would pay for. The subtext (and knowing Ward, it may have been directly stated) was that he wasn’t an idiot and he was well aware that the networking industry was shifting. But his company would figure it out.

Six months later, the same conference had grown to 700 people and had Google showing off its own networking coup — it had built a software defined network using OpenFlow that connected its data centers. And Ward was still on a panel I moderated, only now he was at Cisco: preaching the same ideas but now at a company with the resources to carry it through.

Fast forward to the opening of the summit this year on Tuesday, and I’m eager to see what awaits. All I can tell is that so far the industry has moved from the excitement of translating a new technology into a commercial endeavor — one that scored a $1.26 billion transaction when VMware purchased Nicira — to one where use cases are more common and vendor fighting has started capturing a bit of the event conversation.

Indeed, mixed among the many case studies I’ve heard so far is speculation about the vendor-led Open Daylight Foundation that includes IBM, Cisco and VMware as strange bedfellows trying to build an open source controller for the software defined data center.

Just eighteen months removed from its inaugural event, software-defined networking has clearly learned to walk — if not run.

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Back before the big Spotify launch in Canada, it was rumored that the streaming music platform would also break into Asia and parts of Latin America.

Today, many months later, Spotify has finally made it official.

“Exciting times! Today we’re thrilled to announce that we’re bringing a new world of music to eight new markets across the globe,” says Spotify.

Four of the eight new countries come from these regions: Mexico, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. The other four are Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland.

With the addition of these eight countries, Spotify is now available in 28 markets.

In March, we learned that Spotify had tacked on a million paid users in just three months. That brings the total to 6 million paid subscribers worldwide, out of 24 million total users. It took Spotify nearly a year to go from 3 million to 5 million piad subscribers, but just three months to go from 5 to 6. That’s the goal with these big expansions – to bring those paid subscribers even higher, even faster.

Spotify just launched its first ever ad campaign and updated their logo, too.

After a closed door markup, CISPA emerged from the House Intelligence Committee with some new amendments. Rep. Mike Rogers, the author of the bill, said the amendments would address concerns from civil liberty groups. Those same groups could not be in more disagreement as they are still saying that CISPA needs to be changed, or just ditched altogether.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation alongside 33 other civil liberty groups, including the ACLU and Fight for the Future, have sent an open letter Congress urging members of the House to reject CISPA during its vote this week.

Earlier this year, many of our organizations wrote to state our opposition to H.R. 624, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2013 (CISPA). We write today to express our continued opposition to this bill following its markup by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Although some amendments were adopted in markup to improve the bill’s privacy safeguards, these amendments were woefully inadequate to cure the civil liberties threats posed by this bill. In particular, we remain gravely concerned that despite the amendments, this bill will allow companies that hold very sensitive and personal information to liberally share it with the government, including with military agencies.

It’s the idea of sharing information with military agencies that has these groups so concerned. They feel that CISPA would be much more effective if any information sharing was narrowly defined as between companies and civilian agencies:

CISPA creates an exception to all privacy laws to permit companies to share our information with each other and with the government in the name of cybersecurity. Although a carefully-crafted information sharing program that strictly limits the information to be shared and includes robust privacy safeguards could be an effective approach to cybersecurity, CISPA lacks such protections for individual rights. CISPA’s information sharing regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like Internet records or the content of emails to any agency in the government including military and intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency or the Department of Defense Cyber Command.

Finally, the letter questions the need for CISPA at all after President Obama’s cybersecurity executive order, and other laws already on the books, do what CISPA does minus the massive privacy infringement:

Developments over the last year make CISPA’s approach even more questionable than before. First, the President recently signed Executive Order 13636, which will increase information sharing from the government to the private sector. Information sharing in this direction is often cited as a substantial justification for CISPA and will proceed without legislation. Second, the cybersecurity legislation the Senate considered last year, S. 3414, included privacy protections for information sharing that are entirely absent from CISPA, and the Obama administration, including the intelligence community, has confirmed that those protections would not inhibit cybersecurity programs. These included provisions to ensure that private companies send cyber threat information only to civilian agencies, and a requirement that companies make “reasonable efforts” to remove personal information that is unrelated to the cyber threat when sharing data with the government. Finally, witnesses at a hearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed earlier this year that companies can strip out personally identifiably information that is not necessary to address cyber threats, and CISPA omits any requirement that reasonable efforts be undertaken to do so.

These groups represent a pretty formidable opposition, but they have their work cut out for them. TechDirt reported on Monday that IBM will be sending 200 executives to Washington as part of a lobbying effort to see CISPA passed. Why does IBM want to see CISPA passed so badly? The official line is that it wants information sharing between corporations and government to be easier, but the company’s president has also flat out admitted that he wants to be able to send personal information to the NSA because the agency “know[s] the most” about cyber threats.

IBM and other companies that are pushing for CISPA could have nothing but admirable intentions, but it’s hard to believe that when they’re all pushing for a law that would give them complete immunity when sharing your private information with the government.

We’ll continue to follow CISPA as it heads to the House floor for a vote later this week. Don’t get your hopes up though – it passed the House with flying colors last year. We can only assume that the House will do so again this year.

J.C. Penney today announced that it has borrowed $850 million from a revolving credit fund of $1.85 billion. The company stated that the money will be used to ensure the company’s liquidity and replenish inventory levels.

“Earlier this year, we increased our revolving credit facility in anticipation of operating, working capital and capital expenditure needs, especially during the first half of the year,” said Ken Hannah, CFO for J.C. Penney. “As we near completion of the home department transformation in over 500 stores, we have been undertaking and will continue to experience a significant inventory build and increase in capital expenditures.”

J.C. Penney CEO Ron Johnson stepped down last week after just over one year with the company. Johnson had attempted to move the retail company away from the modern department store strategies of constant sales and coupons. The strategy did not succeed, and J.C. Penney stock and revenue fell while debt rose. The company is now estimated to be more than $3.5 billion in debt.

“While jcpenney has faced a difficult period, its legacy as a leader in American retailing is an asset that can be built upon and leveraged,” said Mike Ullman, who replaced Johnson as acting CEO. “To that end, my plan is to immediately engage with the Company’s customers, team members, vendors and shareholders, to understand their needs, views and insights. With that knowledge, I will work with the leadership team and the Board to develop and clearly articulate a game plan to establish a foundation for future success.”

J.C. Penney’s pricing strategy has already begun to shift. The retailer is issuing coupons, and clothing prices are expected to rise in preparation for sales.

See update at the end of this post.

One of the core features of Facebook Home for Android, Chat Heads, is coming to iOS. Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said Tuesday that Facebook’s iOS app is being updated with the messaging feature and pushed to the iOS App Store “this week.”

Chat Heads is a feature that allows persistent pop-up messaging so users can chat with Facebook friends even when they’re not in the Messenger part of the app. Chat Heads is just one feature of Facebook Home, a launcher introduced on a few flagship Android phones earlier this month by Facebook as part of its larger mobile ambitions.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it clear at the introduction of the Android service that he wants to see Facebook Home on other platforms. However, the way the service takes over a smartphone’s home screen makes it almost 100 percent unlikely Apple would allow such an app to come to the iPhone, which it strictly controls the user experience on.

“The goal from the beginning was to get this experience in everyone’s hands no matter what device you choose to use,” said Schroepfer. Bringing just Chat Heads is just one piece of Facebook Home to those iOS users.

Update 9:35 a.m. PT: Facebook just sent a press release saying the iOS update is now available. In addition to adding Chat Heads, the update also includes Stickers for messaging, small News Feed adjustments and a slightly tweaked look for the iPad version of the app.

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Evernote is launching an accelerator program for companies that want to build products using the Evernote platform. Beginning in October, teams that are accepted for Evernote Accelerator will participate in a month-long mentorship program at Evernote’s headquarters.

The program’s first class members will be selected from among the participants in Evernote Devcup 2013, which started March 10 and runs through June 29 in San Francisco. Rafe Needleman, Evernote’s platform advocate and a former tech journalist, is leading Evernote Accelerator.

Honda Silicon Valley Lab and DOCOMO Innovation Ventures are partnering with Evernote on the Devcup and accelerator programs. Honda Silicon Valley Lab is sponsoring a “transportation-focused prize… for the best enhancements to the in-vehicle experience,” while DOCOMO is sponsoring a “Mobile Magic Award.”

Evernote Trunk contains dozens of Evernote-related products, including those developed for Evernote Devcup 2012. The winner last year was an iOS app called EverClip, which lets users save items from their iPhones and iPads to Evernote.

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Idibon, an ambitious stealth-mode startup, has closed on $1.4 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures to keep building out natural-language-processing software. The software helps enterprises get insight into sentiments expressed in text on the internet in any language you can think of — with a small role reserved for human beings.

The San Francisco company doesn’t want to reveal how everything works yet. But previous work from Idibon CEO Rob Munro provides hints of what’s possible. In his 2012 Stanford Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Processing Short Message Communications in Low-Resource Languages,” Munro explained that it was possible to build natural-language-processing systems that could handle many variations in word spelling in text messages and tweets in Chichewa, Haitian Krèyol and Urdu when classifying, even when the systems had little time to train and get better and no previous familiarity with the languages. In the case of the texts in Haitian Krèyol that were sent following the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, prioritizing helped quickly sift out the genuine emergencies. The question is whether a tool could be developed to pick up patterns in text in any language. Such a system, if combined with a powerful translation tool, could be deployed for a wide variety of applications, from sentiment analysis to intelligence gathering.

Rather than leave machines to bear the burden of figuring out what people mean when they communicate in obscure languages, Idibon wants humans to play a role, such as verifying that data is correct. That sort of work could be crowdsourced. “Machines are never going to be 100 percent accurate,” Munro said. The idea of bringing together humans and algorithms to solve problems has come up in other applications, and several came up in on-stage conversation at GigaOM’s Structure:Data 2013 conference in New York last month.

How could enterprises use Idibon? Half a dozen customers are using the beta version of the software in different ways. One is relying on Idibon to run a medical question-and-answer system that can spit out an answer or possible answers. And “a sales organization” is using Idibon to rifle through news articles, blogs and other documents to document relationships among people and organizations and point to past acquisitions, Munro said. It’s also possible for Idibon to process information from multiple languages to serve up data for business-intelligence applications.

For now, Idibon is “just a simple API service,” Munro said. Some direct integration of the Idibon data is happening, too. The software takes in unstructured data — from tweets, instant messages, emails and so on — processes it and responds with structured data, he said. Ultimately, though, “we want to become the leading organization for scalable cloud-based natural-language processing,” Munro said.

English comprises a small fraction of all communication — roughly 375 million people call English their first language, out of more than 7 billion people in the world — and that’s why a tool with more universal linguistic powers sounds so appealing. While not many enterprises might be looking to capture data in little-known languages now, it could become essential in the coming years. If Idibon can come out with a product soon, it could be the beneficiary of a sort of international arms race for truly global understanding.

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Business leaders often express frustration with what they see as a disconnect between their company’s perceived value and its true value — a disconnect that’s impeding growth. They’ve got great people, great products and services, they say, but their organizations aren’t selling as much as they should, and aren’t appropriately valued.

Many think that if they just increase awareness or brand “visibility,” that will unlock their organization’s real growth potential. But in my experience, visibility is rarely the real issue (especially with B2B companies selling bigger-ticket, complex services and products). Far more often, the problem has to do with clarity of communication.

To find out if this is the case, a good place to start is with what I call the True Value Test:

• Take a representative sample of your organization’s priority target customers.
• Provide them with any of the organization’s communications vehicles — sales collateral, website, a press release, an investor presentation, an ad, or even a tweet — and ask two simple questions based solely on that communication:

1. Who does this organization serve?
2. What distinct value do its customers or clients get from it?

If the answers are inconsistent, or don’t reflect leadership’s intended positioning strategy, that can indicate one of two issues. Either there’s a bottom-up communications problem where the messages aren’t connecting with their targets, or there’s a top-down problem where management isn’t clear on what its message is.

You’ll often find this top-down problem in decentralized matrix organizations where business unit heads have different and sometimes competing agendas. One unit may be less discriminating and chase any revenue, whereas another might focus on higher-value, relationship-based business. Such organizations send mixed messages to the market, muddying their value proposition. Here, what might seem like a communications exercise can serve as a catalyst to help leadership commit to a refined positioning strategy, and then prioritize resources and collaborate in customers’ — and the organization’s — best interests.

For now, though, let’s assume that there’s just a bottom-up issue — the business strategy is clearly defined and understood within the organization, but isn’t connecting to drive the desired transactional behavior. This suggests that the organization isn’t successfully making its value case — it needs different, more compelling evidence communicated more effectively.

Here are three steps toward building a better value case:

1. Lead with Issues
Research a representative sample of aspirational, “sweet spot” clients — the best customer relationships you can credibly win and maintain. Identify their greatest areas of pain and/or opportunity where your company offers relevant solutions. Determine what these clients value most (speed, cost, etc.) and how they measure the impact — tangible and intangible — of their service providers/partners.

For example, take an IT security firm targeting the CEOs, CIOs, and general counsels of small healthcare providers. By researching these individuals, the firm determines:

• Targets’ pain — The organizational and individual burdens associated with regulatory compliance in the face of increasing threats to data security; the costs (money and time) related to mitigating and managing breaches.
• Issues-based platform — Prioritizing and making prudent investments with limited resources to address IT security issues effectively.

2. Build a Value Narrative
Issues-based platforms serve as the foundation for a value narrative, a statement defining whom the organization serves and the particular value these constituencies (customers, investors, employees, etc.) achieve as a result. The most effective value narratives are “trued up” — genuine, aligned, full, compelling, and up-to-date.

This is not about providing a laundry list of capabilities and products, or making broad statements about quality, innovation or customer focus. It’s about leading with the issues most salient to your customers and how your organization has been able to address them.

Consider the IT security firm above. Its issues-based platform focuses on cost-effective IT solutions that take into account targets’ limited resources. The firm’s true value narrative could be: “Executives at smaller healthcare providers can focus on their core responsibilities and growing the business rather than on IT security with our balanced, cost-effective approach that mitigates risk and minimizes loss in the event of an incident.”

Value narratives are dynamic, and should be “trued up” continually to remain relevant in the wake of economic, regulatory and other changes.

3. Create a Sense of Urgency
The goal of communications is to create a sense of urgency and provoke a target to pick up the phone or be more receptive in a selling conversation. Once you have a true value narrative, it needs to be translated into high-impact messages that accelerate these desired behaviors.

For the IT security firm above, a high-impact message could be a new business presentation that leads with two contrasting scenarios:

• First, a small healthcare provider that did not invest in effective IT security and then suffered a breach, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to attorneys, investigators and media consultants, as well as loss of business and hundreds of hours of management’s time.
• Then, a case study focusing on how the firm helped a similar company in a similar situation, quantifying the amount of money and time saved and demonstrating that a relatively small investment had a sizable impact for the company and, critically, for the leaders responsible.

Accelerating growth and enhancing long-term equity value all comes down to a tight connection between perceived and true value — a connection forged by developing and maintaining a clear, compelling value narrative that is aligned and consistently translated into communications across the organization.

Android is used by over 50 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers, and according to co-founder Andy Rubin, it may not have been that way. Andy spoke at an economic summit in Tokyo, and revealed that Android was originally intended for cameras. The idea was to create smart cameras that easily connected to PCs. However, once the smartphone market started to grow exponentially, the OS was rebuilt to work on mobile phones. In April 2004, Andy pitched the idea of  ”a camera connected “wired or wireless” to a home computer, which then linked to an “Android Datacenter”, to investors. Just five months later due to declining growth in digital cameras, Android was reborn as an “open-source handset solution”.

“We decided digital cameras wasn’t actually a big enough market. I was worried about Microsoft and I was worried about Symbian, I wasn’t worried about iPhone yet. We wanted as many cellphones to use Android as possible. So instead of charging $99, or $59, or $69, to Android, we gave it away for free, because we knew the industry was price sensitive.”

Fast forward to August 2005, Google acquires Android, hires Andy as the SVP of Mobile, and the rest is history.

Source: PCWorld

Come comment on this article: Android Originally Built For Cameras, Says Co-Founder Andy Rubin

Live webinar (April 30, 2013)

“Hadoop and the Enterprise Data Warehouse: When to Use Which”
Teradata will bring together two of the most trusted experts in their fields to examine how big data technologies are being used today by practical big data practitioners…

About the speakers
Eric Baldeschwieler (aka “E14”), CTO and Founder of Hortonworks, and Hadoop luminary will provide perspective on the role of Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Relational Databases in the modern data platform architecture. Eric previously served as VP Hadoop Software Engineering for Yahoo! where he led the evolution of Apache Hadoop from a 20 node prototype to a 42,000 node service that is behind every click at Yahoo!.

Stephen Brobst, CTO of teradata, and leading expert in parallel computing architectures will share insights on how large enterprises can effectively complement their existing data warehouses with Hadoop to drive optimal value. Stephen Brobst is the chief technology officer for Teradata Corporation. He is widely regarded as a leading expert in data warehousing and in 2012, Brobst was rated the number 14 CTO out of 15,000 CTOs in the United States.

You will learn:
• How to determine when to use Hadoop, and when to use an MPP Relational Database
• Real world customer cases on big data applications from the Silicon Valley
• What to expect from Hadoop in the future, and what not to expect

Join the discussion on April 30th

Register now for this live webinar!

Earlier this year, Google launched a new design for its image search, and ever since, there has been a substantial amount of backlash from webmasters claiming that the changes have decreased the amount of traffic they get to their sites.

Have you seen less traffic from Google Image Search since the redesign? Let us know in the comments.

Webmasters complaining about changes made by Google is nothing new. Every time Google releases a major algorithm update like Penguin or Panda, the outcry is everywhere. But, like it or not, that’s Google trying to better its algorithm, and ultimately improve its search results. You could also argue that any traffic one site loses, another gains. Somebody wins.

The Image Search story is a bit different, however. This is not an algorithmic change designed to point users to higher quality images or more relevant image results. It’s a cosmetic change, and while some users may find the experience to be an upgrade, it’s clear that many webmasters have not welcomed the redesign.

We got over seventy comments about the changes on a previous article we published. Not many were positive. In fact, most were from webmasters talking about the traffic they lost almost instantly. Here are a few examples:

“55% dropped for websites with images…”

“Google image traffic has dropped by 50-70% on my site…”

We could go on. See for yourself.

That was back in January. It doesn’t appear that things have gotten much better.

Define Media Group published some findings from a recent study on Monday (hat tip to Search Engine Land). According to the firm, you might as well spend your time in other areas of search engine optimization and online marketing, and not worry so much about optimizing for image search anymore.

“We analyzed the image search traffic of 87 domains and found a 63% decrease in image search referrals after Google’s new image search UI was released,” explains Shahzad Abbas. “Publishers that had previously benefitted the most from their image optimization efforts suffered the greatest losses after the image search update, experiencing declines nearing 80%.”

“In the eleven weeks after Google’s new image search was released, there has been no recovery – which means for image search, the significantly reduced traffic levels we’re seeing is the new normal,” he adds. “In the aftermath of the new image search experience, image SEO has been severely compromised, and we have no choice but to recommend deprioritizing image SEO when weighed against other search traffic initiatives.”

Of course, there’s always the chance that your images could turn up in universal search results on Google’s web results pages, but even then, personalized “Search Plus Your World” results tend to get the emphasis when applicable.

It’s all made even more interesting due to the fact that Google pitched the changes as good for webmasters, indicating that they would actually drive more traffic to sites.

“The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on,” wrote associate product manager Hongyi Li in the announcement. “This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.”

“The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view,” Li added. “This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers, and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews. As usual, image search query data is available in Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.”

It’s possible that some sites are seeing more traffic from the Image Search changes, and just aren’t being as vocal, but there has been an overwhelming amount of complaints since the redesign, and this new study is not doing anything to defend Google’s case.

Of course, Google is all about placing users first (even over webmasters), and they’ll continue to do what they think is best for them. From a user experience perspective, the changes aren’t bad. But that’s little consolation for those who now have to find other ways to get their content in front of an audience.

Do you see Google’s recent Image Search changes as a positive or a negative? Let us know in the comments.

Racks of servers housed inside the Microsoft data center supporting Windows Azure cloud services. (Photo: Microsoft).

Taking clear aim at cloud computing leader Amazon Web Services, Microsoft announced the general availability of its Windows Azure Infrastructure Services (IaaS), the final piece of the puzzle in Microsoft’s cloud portfolio, and committed to match Amazon Web Services on pricing.

Microsoft now offers customers a comprehensive hybrid cloud solution that integrates existing IT infrastructure with all the benefits of the public cloud. “Customers don’t want to rip and replace their current infrastructure to benefit from the cloud; they want the strengths of their on-premises investments and the flexibility of the cloud,” writes Bill Hilf, General Manager, Windows Azure Product Management, on the Azure blog. “It’s not only about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS), it’s about Infrastructure Services and Platform Services and hybrid scenarios. The cloud should be an enabler for innovation, and an extension of your organization’s IT fabric, not just a fancier way to describe cheap infrastructure and application hosting.”

Additionally, Microsoft is announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services’ prices for commodity services like compute, storage and bandwidth. This starts with reducing GA prices on Virtual Machines and Cloud Services by 21-33 percent. “If you had concerns that Windows Azure was more expensive, we’re putting those concerns to rest today,” GM Steven Martin said. It’s worth noting that in matching Amazon’s pricing, Microsoft actually appears to have raised prices on some virtual machine instance types that were discounted during the trial period.

Rightscale’s recent survey of cloud providers found a trend of aggressive price cutting on the part of cloud providers.

Broadening the Cloud

Microsoft has added in new high memory VM instances (28GB/4 core and 56 GB/8 core) to run demanding workloads.  Based on customer feedback, it has also added in a number of new Microsoft validated instances to its list including SQL Server, SharePoint, BizTalk Server, and Dynamics NAV to name a few.

The broader cloud strategy is enabling hybrid solutions. Customers will now be able to use Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to preserve existing on-premise investments, and as a result, will reap the benefits of greater speed, scale and economics – three key drivers for enterprise companies.

Hilf gives an example of one of these hybrid strategies. Automotive marketing and social media firm Digital Air Strike is using Windows Azure’s Infrastructure Services and Platform Services to create an instant feedback mechanism for all car purchases and service transactions for automotive giant General Motors. This enables GM to monitor the health of their customer relationships in near real time, providing deep and valuable business insights.

Another example is Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company that needed to upgrade to the latest SharePoint solution across 13 business units and 12 countries.  It spun up their SharePoint 2013 farms and reduced their set-up time from 3 months to two weeks, and saved 70 percent in costs on their test environment, according to a Microsoft blog post.

This example is used to highlight Microsoft’s commitment to avoiding vendor lock-in. Ultimately for production, Telenor is leveraging VM portability available between Windows Azure and Windows Server to move their final production deployment to their existing third-party hosting provider. So again, cloud is being used as a complement, not a threat to existing infrastructure in many cases, with the tech giants focusing on enabling hybrid plays rather than a “move everything to the cloud” sentiment that was once persistent throughout the industry.

Global smartphone messaging service WhatsApp confirmed on Tuesday that it has more than 200 million active users of its service every month.  CEO Jan Koum refused to be more specific than that, but he did brag that his company has more monthly users than another prominent mobile company.

“We’re bigger than Twitter today,” he said at Dive into Mobile. “More than 200 million active users monthly.”

Those people are also sending a lot of messages: WhatsApp users get 8 billion inbound messages per day and receive over 12 billion per day.

The app, which is on iOS and Android, came to prominence because it allows cross-platform messaging; like if you could send an iMessage to anyone regardless of the mobile operating system they are using.

Koum said WhatsApp has a global focus and that the app is big everywhere, but he said that it is most popular in Germany, Spain, the Latin America region, Mexico, Singapore and Hong Kong.

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