Business, Financial & Legal - Page 241

It looks as though the Austin, Texas could be getting Google Fiber. Google and the City of Austin have an announcement planned for this Tuesday, April 9. Sources in the city seem to think that the announcement relates to broadband, most likely meaning Austin will be getting Google Fiber.

There are definitely other explanations than Google Fiber. Google could be planning to test out same-day delivery, open a new office, or any number of things. But Google Fiber is somewhat likely. Austin did fairly well in the original contest for Google Fiber and Google has contemplated expanding outside of Kansas City.

Every now and then a story comes along that makes you laugh out loud. For me, this is certainly one of those stories. Google has started receiving takedown requests of pages that contain a copyright holder's original takedown request. These robotically-generated requests are submitted because the original takedown request features the URL that was originally taken down.

It's rather hilarious and also ironic. In the picture above, you can see one of the takedown requests submitted by Fox asking for a ChillingEffects.org link to be removed. That link points to a previous Fox takedown request.

The system is clearly broken. Google is now handling over 20 million takedown requests per month and it shows no sign of slowing down. But just how we fix the DMCA isn't clear. Both Google and the movie studios have their own ideas and they are, of course, mostly contrary to each other.

AMD's representitive believes that NVIDIA may be bitter over Sony's choice to go with AMD in the PlayStation 4. His reasoning? A statement by NVIDIA's Tony Tamasi saying how the GTX 680 outperforms the PlayStation 4. He added that the 680 had been out for a year and a half.

AMD's director of ISV relations Neal Robinson responded:

Dan Porter, the former CEO of OMGPOP before it was bought out by Zynga for a rumored $210 million, is leaving Zynga, the company has announced today. Zynga is currently in the process of building Draw Something 2 and Zynga's COO David Ko has acknowledged Porter worked on the sequel.

Porter is just the latest in what seems to be a never ending stream of employees leaving Zynga after it went public in 2011. Zynga has appointed VP Sean Kelly to take over as head of the New York office. Kelly has been with the company since 2009.

Google's privacy director has announced internally that she is stepping down from her post with intentions to retire. Alma Whitten became Google's first director of privacy in 2010 after being an engineer with the company. Her job was to oversee future products and prevent the release of products that invaded privacy too much.

Whitten will remain with the privacy team for a few more months as Lawrence You transitions to her position. You is based in Mountain View, California and has been a Google engineer for eight years.

Google said in a statement:

eBay started off as something small, but has grown into something incredibly powerful and profitable. So much so that the Internet auction site is estimated that their total volume of merchandise sold will reach $110 billion by 2015.

The Internet auction site also sees a very large portion of their growth from developing markets, which will see a nice injection of both consumers and profits in the coming years. Bloomberg have noted that they estimate eBay to pull in between $21.5 billion and $23.5 billion in the year 2015 with their current business model.

eBay's continued success is thanks to current CEO John Donahue, who pushed for new features like mobile applications and local shopping tools. These goals have seen eBay's shares surge 75% since he took over from Meg Whitman in 2008. Just last year, eBay's sales grew 21%.

Bitcoins have slowly but surely been plowing their way into the market, where they represent a billion dollar market. Bitcoins are an open source, unregulated peer-to-peer currency, with around 10.9 million bitcoins in circulation on a single marketplace.

Bitcoins, at the moment, have a value of around $90, with the 10.9 million of them creating the billion dollar market. Bitcoins have stayed mostly away from the media's attention, but with the digital currency continuing to grow at breakneck speeds, I'm sure we're going to see some intervention soon enough. This rings especially true as bitcoins are used regularly as the currency of choice for the black market, assassins and drug dealers.

The digital currency does have a big upside, in the way that governments in economic troubles freeze citizens' bank accounts - bitcoins are safe from that. They're also easy to transfer between people without requiring citizens' personal information. There are of course downsides, with the growth of the digital currency possibly creating a bubble which will eventually pop, with people losing hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Google have begun their pilot scheme for a same-day delivery service in the San Francisco Bay Area, where it will potentially open up to other areas in the near future.

The Mountain View-based search giant are offering testers a six-month period of deliveries from retailers in the area, free to the consumer, with all of the shopping taking place in a single online store. Testers of the same-day delivery service will be able to select from a number of local stores, including the big ones like Target, Staples and more.

The deliveries are then dispatched for a specific time, based upon the consumers' delivery instructions. Google are still reportedly working on a pricing scheme, but this could cost below $70 per year in order to compete with Amazon Prime.

Businessweek have a very interesting piece on Samsung, which goes right into the heart and soul of the South Korean company. We know Samsung are willing to try anything and everything when it comes to smartphone form factors, where we see anything from smaller displays (under 4-inch) right up to the 5.5-inch Galaxy Note II.

But on the flip side, it's not just about offering a multitude of devices, it's about knowing when and how to play them out. It was only a couple of years ago that Android didn't exist, and now we have around one billion Android-based devices in the wild.

One of the parts of Businessweek's article is quite interesting, in that they state that Samsung executives are paranoid - but not in a bad way. Being paranoid means you never stop, like other companies I won't mention, and you continue to innovate in the hopes of keeping your existing customer base, and securing more.

Finally a patent judge making some sense. A federal judge has ruled that mathematical algorithms can not be patented, meaning that the lawsuit against Rackspace is no longer valid. Uniloc USA sued Rackspace saying that the processing of floating point numbers via the Linux operating system violated their patent.

Chief Judge Leonard Davis cited a ruling by the US Supreme Court in which they determined that mathematical algorithms cannot be patented.

Rob Tiller, Red Hat's Assistant General Counsel for IP: