2010년 10월 21일 목요일

Google Won't Resume Its Street View Wi-Fi Collection

google_logo2.jpgGoogle won't be resuming its use of Street View cars to collect information about Wi-Fi networks. So says the fine print of the Canadian Office of Privacy Commissioner's statement today, that as we reported earlier, found that Google had violated Canadians' privacy.

Google's Street View project has raised a number of privacy concerns, most notably in May when the company announced that it had mistakenly included code in its Street View software that collected Wi-Fi payload data. Google halted the Wi-Fi data collection, but it was unclear if this was a permanent decision.

In the report issued today, Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said that the "collection is discontinued and Google has no plans to resume it." The plans, according to Stoddart, are to rely on users' smartphones to collect the information on the location of Wi-Fi networks. Google uses this to build out its location-based services database, particularly in those areas with limited celltower strength.

The report does add that "although it has no tracking tool to keep records of a customer's locations (and does not intend to create one), Google acknowledges that it does need to examine the potential privacy concerns of this method of collection."

Currently, Google's mobile privacy policy reads that "If you use location-enabled products and services, such as Google Maps for mobile, you may be sending us location information. This information may reveal your actual location, such as GPS data, or it may not, such as when you submit a partial address to look at a map of the area."

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New MacBook Air Is the Future of Notebooks

Beginning his presentation by waxing philosophical on the impact of iOS devices on Apple industrial design, Jobs rhetorically asked what would happen if an iPad and a MacBook Air “hooked up?” The result is the new MacBook Air. Proving the rumormongers right, the new MacBook Air will come in two distinct models, with screen sizes of 13.3 inches and 11.6 inches respectively.

Both models will share the aluminum unibody construction design, and a number of features, including Core 2 Duo CPUs, NVIDIA GeForce 320M GPUs, full-size keyboards, multi-touch trackpads (no button) and a FaceTime (not iSight any longer) camera.

The biggest internal change will be the use of solid-state storage across the lineup, which was a major rumor circulating about the new MacBook Air. The new storage system, which doesn’t appear to be upgradable, will have “instant on” capabilities similar to iOS devices, and be up to twice as fast as standard hard drives. This will also allow for a standby time of 30-freaking-amazing days.

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Back to the Mac: FaceTime on the Mac

Jobs started the announcement of the feature by talking about the number of users who already have a FaceTime enabled device: already 19 million since debut of the iPhone 4, the first with the feature, four months ago.

He then went on to demo the new Mac application. Note that this isn’t built into iChat; it’s a standalone app. Sitting down at the demo Mac, he fired up the program and initiated a FaceTime call to Phil Schiller. During this call, he demonstrated a couple of great features.

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Do iPhone or Android Users Watch More Video? (And Other Video Trends)

Mobile video optimization firm Bytemobile has just released its most recent "Mobile Minute Metrics" report, a look at wireless users' video consumption trends and behavior based on metrics from a cross-section of nearly 2 billion Bytemobile customers in 58 countries around the world.

According to the new report, which focuses on Q3 2010 mobile traffic, mobile operators are seeing "unprecedented" levels of mobile data traffic, an increase heavily impacted by increased demand for video. Some interesting stats were revealed, too - like whether it's Android or iPhone users who watch more video, what sites get the most views and more.

Bytemobile found that, on a per-user average, it's iPhone users generating the most video traffic. 42% of total data traffic generated by the iPhone is video, while only 32% on Android is video.

bytemobile_chart1_android_iphone.png

The most popular and most watched videos are still those coming from user-generated content sites like YouTube and Google Video, which account for 48% of total network video traffic. The second-largest category of video is adult content, accounting for 30% of total traffic. Combined, these two categories - user-gen and adult - make up nearly 80% of total video traffic.

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Read Their Lips: Steve Jobs, and Measuring CEO Truthiness

jobs_102010.jpgBefore today's Apple press event and all its announcements, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the opportunity at Apple's earnings call yesterday to quell rumors that a 7" iPad was on the way. What Jobs said was true: so why are some people still calling Jobs a liar?

Perhaps it's the usual mistrust people assign to corporate executives. Yet Jobs is no stranger to controversy around saying one thing - and then announcing another. As it turns out, two Stanford researchers have recently been studying the truthiness of CEOs and devised a formula for red-flagging deceptive CEO statements. Jobs seems to get a mixed score.

We can evaluate online debate about what Jobs says and what he means, and then what Apple does, until we're weary. Lucky for us, someone else has done this work on a much wider scale. Stanford University researchers Anastasia Zakolyukina and David Larcker set out to find a way to tell when CEO's are lying, and studied thousands of earnings calls for definitive patterns.

In How Can You Tell When A CEO Is Lying? the researchers present us with a few indicators:

  • Lying executives tend to overuse words like "we" and "our team" when they talk about their company and avoid saying "I"
  • Overuse of words that express positive emotion ('fantastic,' 'superb,' 'outstanding,' 'excellent')
  • When the CEO does not answer the question directly; refers to others
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