<IT WORLD> Google and the dragon
By Martin J Young
HUA HIN, Thailand - Google seems to be losing its battle with the great red
dragon as the People’s Republic has made it very clear that it is not willing
to budge an inch on its Internet censorship policies.
This leaves Chinese outfits that sell advertising on Google.cn search pages in
a quandary over their future should the Internet giant go through with its
threat to pull the plug on its Chinese unit. Google may announce on Monday that
it will pull out of China on April 10, Bloomberg reported, citing an item in
Shanghai-based China Business News.
Google partners have demanded more clarity on the situation, which has dragged
on for two months with neither the search engine nor the Chinese government
revealing any details about talks. According to Reuters, a letter from 27
Google-authorized
sales representative companies was sent to the company claiming that the
situation is causing business to slide, jeopardizing investments and scaring
employees.
The letter also demands a plan whereby Google informs pre-paid advertisers,
employees and companies of compensation contingencies should Google.cn close.
If the closure does proceed it will spell good times for Chinese search engine
Baidu, as it is likely to mop up the remainder of Google's one third share of
the market. The final outcome, though, could spell hard times for any other
foreign Internet company looking to do business with the world's largest
Internet population.
Google is getting into more battles elsewhere as a long-running copyright
dispute with Viacom resurfaced this week. In 2007, Viacom issued the equivalent
of a digital fatwa on Google for publishing on YouTube more than 100,000 video
clips from Viacom's TV networks. Court documents and e-mail exchanges released
this week revealed a number of twists and allegations made in the case.
Viacom had tried to buy a then-independent YouTube in 2006, but was outbid by
Google, which acquired the site for US$1.65 billion in October that year.
Google has claimed that Viacom employees and marketing partners purposely
posted a host of clips onto YouTube while publicly complaining about their
appearance.
Viacom has retorted with statements that claim YouTube intentionally operated
as a haven for copyrighted material in order to boost its traffic.
The likely out come will be a long drawn out battle, a lot of attorneys getting
richer, and a possible revenue-sharing agreement between the two companies.
Software
Microsoft has been touting the latest version of its market-dominant web
browser, Internet Explorer, at the company's developer conference in Las Vegas
this week. In an effort to shake off a constant stream of bad press about
security flaws, and a plummeting market share, it is pinning its hopes on IE9
to save the day.
The new browser will have a number of features, such as better web standards
support, that really should have been mandatory in previous versions. The new
HTML5 standard will, among other things, allow video to be played directly in
the browser without the need for annoying plug-ins such as Adobe's constantly
updating Flash Player.
Performance is also a big issue, with increased speed in graphics, text and
Javascript. The new browser will make use of multi-core processors in order to
compile code faster; it will also take advantage of the graphics processing
unit in ways that will yield faster and smoother video and image load times.
This will be good news for Google Maps and other image-heavy websites.
The current demo version, called Platform Preview, lacks basic features such as
a back button, but it has been released for users to test performance
capabilities. A release candidate is expected in around six months, and the
final product some time after that. By that time, rivals Mozilla, Google and
Apple are likely to have fuel-injected their own browsers.
Hardware
The battle for processor supremacy continued this week with chipmakers Intel
and AMD releasing new top-end CPUs. In preparation for an expected rise in
demand, Intel has launched new Xeon and Core i7 microprocessors for servers and
high-end desktop PCs. The six-core Xeon 5600 CPU, known as Westmere-EP, has
been manufactured with 32 nanometer technology and runs at 3.33GHz. The company
has boasted of more power efficiency and a performance increase of up to 60%
over its current 45nm Xeon 5500 CPU. An eight-core chip known as Nehalem-EX has
been slated for release later this month.
AMD has also been busy with new offerings, its six-core chip, named Istanbul,
has been on the market since June last year and a new chip, dubbed Magny-Cours,
with up to 12 cores, is due for release this quarter. Servers are likely to
benefit from multi-core processing as by nature they handle a lot more
simultaneous requests than desktop computers.
Internet
The social network that is gradually taking over the web is set to expand its
reach even further into the fabric of the Internet. Twitter has announced
technology, called@anywhere, that will enable the service to be accessed from
anywhere on the web. Developers can already add Twitter functionality to their
websites by using an application programming interface (API). However, the new
system will be much simpler to implement, according to the company.
Twitter has partnered with Amazon, Bing - which reached a new high of 12.5% of
global Internet searches last month - eBay, Yahoo and YouTube among others to
push the service, which will allow anyone to follow feeds from anywhere; they
are implemented in a similar way to Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect.
No launch date was given by co-founder Ev Williams this week, but it is not
likely to be long before we see tweets on every website out there, much as we
see Google's ever-present Adsense, especially if the company decides to launch
its own advertising platform.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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