Google fixes privacy-related issues in 'Buzz'
February 15, 2010
Source: TNN

It has been quite a Buzz for Google during the past week, ever since they unveiled the new social networking platform on February 9. Some of the features - that Google introduced with the good intent of helping prospective users - backfired forcing it to launch a damage-limiting exercise. After poring over a barrage of criticism accusing Google of not taking care of privacy issues, it is now rolling out a number of changes in the settings.

Google has acknowledged that they "didn't get everything quite right". On the Gmail blog, it said, "We're sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard to improve things based on your feedback."

But to begin with, when Buzz was launched on February 9, among the first to hop on were the many who had been weighed down by the "heaviness" of Facebook or the "strangeness" of Twitter. One of them was Karthik Nagesh, a 35-year-old English lecturer, who has been shunning social network sites. "When I logged on to Gmail, I saw this Buzz thing. I just read the introduction, and said ok, and bingo, all the guys I was chatting with were right there on Buzz."

What sets Buzz apart from sites like Twitter or Facebook is that it's right inside Gmail, like chat. That Google thought of embedding Buzz within Gmail, is not surprise considering the fact that for most people email is the primary mode of communication and thereby they keep their Gmail open most of the time. And that has helped Buzz get a lot of users like Nagesh who were anyway using Gmail and chat a lot.

But just a few days into the launch, it turns out that most people who signed up were not like Nagesh. Ironically, it's the feature of "followers", made popular by Twitter, that has given Google the biggest headache. (Your X number of followers gets updates about you, and you get the updates of the Y number of people you follow.)

Buzz was built in such a way that the moment you set it up, you had all the X number of people - you frequently emailed or chatted with - as your "followers" and they in turn were "following" you. Google didn't give you a choice, with the noble intention of sparing you the bother of finding people to follow. Google assumed that you would be interested in following everyone you frequently emailed or chatted with.

But most people felt outraged at the way Google took a decision on their behalf. Now onwards, Google said there would be no auto-following, but Google will merely suggest people you could follow, what it calls auto-suggest.

The second point that raised a lot of concern is that the names of your followers and people you follow were getting displayed for everyone to see on the public profile. And the option "not to display" was hard to find. Acknowledging the concerns of its users, Google has now made the options more visible. Moreover, all initial users will now get a second chance to review their followers, whether to keep following them or unfollow them.

Another important change Google effected was that users' public Picasa albums and shared content on Google Reader will no longer be automatically connected to Buzz.

A major complaint was that there was no link to make changes in the settings of Buzz. Google has fixed that now. It has provided a Buzz tab within the Gmail settings. To be fair to people who don't like Buzz, Google has also provided two alternatives: 'Do not show Buzz in Gmail', and 'Disable Google Buzz completely.'

Evidently, it has been a tumultuous first week for the web giant. Not all issues have been sorted out. Sandhya Rao, a software engineer, who has been "checking out Buzz", feels it's still not user-friendly. "Though it's a good idea to embed Buzz in Gmail and notify the new Buzz arrivals, it's difficult to locate the new comments. For example, a comment made today to yesterday's posting will lie way below the subsequent postings. So you need to scroll through old postings and comments to locate the new comment!'

As more people use it, and as Google fine-tunes it, we will know in the coming days if Buzz will become roar to scare others on the field.

Google, Apple to loom large at Barcelona mobile fair
February 15, 2010
Source: REUTERS

HELSINKI/LONDON: At next week’s mobile trade show in Barcelona you can find a software program that measures how high you can throw a Nokia smartphone, an apt metaphor for Nokia’s efforts to raise its game.

But gravity might not favour the world’s biggest maker of cellphones, as the focus of the $169 billion industry shifts to software and services, the “mindshare” that is lifting nimble competitors such as iPhone maker Apple and Google.

For the first time, Nokia has opted out of the Mobile World Congress this year, another trend set by Apple, which eschews industry get-togethers in favour of its own, carefully choreographed events.

Nokia will host some meetings nearby, but is reported not to be planning any new phone launches.

At the same time the fair will be flooded with new phones using Google’s Android platform. The other big names in the industry, Microsoft, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, have also been struggling with the pace set by Apple and Google, ever since the first iPhone took the world by storm in mid-2007.

Nokia is seen among the best positioned to cope with the onslaught thanks to its own operating system, investments in services, and huge scale benefits in phone production, but Apple already makes more profit from phones than Nokia.

Trying to replicate Apple’s success in selling mobile software through its App Store, Nokia, Microsoft and others have opened their own online stores, but with little success. “Everybody is struggling. There is a lot of hype, but there is not a lot of dollars,” said Dana Porter, vice president for strategy at phone-billing and customer-management software maker Amdocs.

ANDROID INVASION

Google’s high-profile presence at the show with a keynote speech from Chief Executive Eric Schmidt will remind the industry just how quickly relationships and revenue sources that once seemed assured can change.

The Web search giant last month started to sell the Nexus One, a touchscreen smartphone it sells directly to consumers, bypassing the operators who normally control the sale of phones in Europe and the US. Having seen the destruction Google has wrought in the media sphere to previously cosy relationships between publishers, advertisers and readers, the telecoms industry is nervous.

Google also said this week it planned to build a super-fast Internet network for up to half a million people in the U.S., a project that could loosen telecoms companies grip on Web access.

As well as potentially upsetting operators, Google’s open Android platform also presents a threat to makers of rival smartphone platforms, including Nokia and Microsoft.

“Android is a very large boulder rolling towards the mobile market,” said Fjord’s Lindholm. “I think what we will see is an Android invasion.”

The Nexus One, Google’s first own-brand device, is also the first concrete sign it is paying serious attention to hardware.

Although Google has built considerable loyalty and a huge advertising business around its search engine and gmail services, these are free to consumers.

Apple, on the other hand, has persuaded more than 100 million consumers to hand over hundreds of dollars apiece for its iPods and iPhones.

MORE TRAFFIC

Top hardware makers plan to roll out increasingly cheap smartphones in 2010 to battle the new rivals in the mass market.

“It seems that volume champions like Nokia and Samsung are opting to get down and dirty in 2010; we’ll likely see eye-poppingly cheap touch-screen devices this year,” said MKM Partners analyst Tero Kuittinen.

With average smartphone prices dropping sharply, the phones will reach a much wider audience, causing data traffic on operators’ networks to soar, especially as video sharing via mobile becomes more commonplace.

“This is a big challenge as it uses a huge amount of data bandwidth,” said Martin Garner, analyst at CCS Insight. Top telecom equipment vendors — Ericsson, Nokia Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent and others — will all demonstrate and sell their next-generation LTE equipment at the show, trying to convince operators to choose them to upgrade their networks and handle the data crush.

Till gadget do us part: Blackberry, laptops can change relationships
February 15, 2010
SOURCE: ET Bureau

There’s an anecdote about a middle-aged professional who sat his son down to break the bitter news that he and wife were going through a divorce. After a few minutes of explaining the details to his son, the father was left dumbfounded when the young man perked up “This is the first time Dad you’re actually talking and listening to me, without your phone or your laptop in tow.”

While it may not be exactly be a punishable offence to check e-mails via the phone or to spend some time after dinner finishing work on a laptop, it’s a visible addiction that professionals in India are fast falling prey to. Ergo, the men and women fidgeting with their phones, answering emails or taking calls - be it in a social gathering like a wedding or under the table during a private dinner. While being wired to the office on a 24/7 basis may bring the next promotion closer, it’s often at the cost of family and relationships.

Ask any psychologist or corporate counselor and they’d probably point out the increase in the number of those whose obsession with their black-beauties has led to ugly confrontations. In the rare occasion, even divorce. According to Monica Chib, senior consultant psychiatrist at the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, technologically charged couples have far less time for each other which has definitely had an impact on closeness and physical intimacy. Most often, because they are just too tired at the end of a long day to cater to the needs of a partner.

The problem is even more acute in the case of those who work in firms where the parent company or clients are overseas. It isn’t uncommon for employees to return home and then shut themselves in a room for hours to attend to conference calls. “These conference calls are often at “overseas office hours” which means that they will have to attend to it in their personal time. This has a negative impact on family life and members are beginning to drift apart,” points out Ranjana Rawat, regional manager-north of 1to1help.net which offers counseling and employee assistance programmes to organizations.

While children who grow up in such families tend to be extremely independent, experts feel that they lack bonding skills and find it difficult to develop a level of closeness with people. In extreme cases, they have made unsuitable alliances in the attempt to find some affection.

However, for a larger number of young families where both spouses lead extremely high powered lives, partners have come to the terms with the fact that their marriage is simply a convenient arrangement. “So while neither may be able to spare each other time for months on end, it’s convenient to have a husband or a wife who they can take to a social do,” says Dr. Chib.

Those who work in sectors with long work hours face the added challenge of having to explain their closeness with colleagues to spouses who feel threatened by the level of intimacy. Experts feel that this insecurity has broken up many a marriage.

But if the men have come to terms easily with working long hours or into the night, for the women, it’s often meant dealing with a sack-load of frustration and guilt. On one hand, they feel that if their jobs that require putting in extra-hours , their spouses should understand it and if necessary, just call for home-delivery for dinner. On the other hand, there is also the guilt associated with the fact that they are letting their family down.

Human resource experts, though, believe that it’s more a question of discipline given that devices like laptops and Blackberry’s have given employees a great deal of flexibility. Says Surbhi Mathur Gandhi, general manager, permanent staffing at TeamLease services, “While handing over a device like a laptop or a Blackberry comes with the expectation that the individual will be available for any situation, optimal utilization is the prerogative of the individual.”

Though company culture and the demands of customers account for some amount of an employee’s addiction to devices, Pramod Sadarjoshi, executive director of human resources at IDBI Bank feel that individuals always have the option of declaring themselves off-limits without having to face recrimination by their employers.

Sadarjoshi feels that as long as an individual has a genuine reason and has a credible reputation; it isn’t difficult to negotiate for some time off. He even insists that employees of the bank compulsorily take a few days off to rejuvenate and spend some time with their families.

Bangalore-based Anand Halankar, who was young Blackberry user, when he worked for an organization in Dubai, feels that an individual always has the option of replying to e-mails only if they are urgent. While the tendency is generally to respond to at least some mails to prevent them from piling up, Halankar says that in the two and a half years that he used it, it never affected his personal life. He adds that more people in India tend to work after work hours in comparison with Dubai where people took their after work time and holidays very seriously.

Closer home too, both individuals and corporates have increasingly begun touting the need for work-life balance as a priority issue. Infosys, for instance, has a Health Assessment and Life Enrichment (HALE) plan with a hotline aimed at helping individuals balance their professional lives with the personal. Other companies have chosen to have flexi-time or work-from-home options, childcare facilities at the workplace, concierge services for employees, periodic social gettogethers and so on.

Employees too seem to be placing more value on companies which allow them to strike the balances. Anuradha Oza, senior associate of the human capital team at the consultancy Mercer feels that while remuneration is a key factor, work-life balance has also become a primary driver influencing people in favour of certain jobs. In fact, Oza recollects a time in the US when Blackberry addicts were referred to as ‘Crackberry’ addicts.

The bottomline, however, seems to be the need for individual discipline with technology and the attempt ‘to be present entirely when you are present’. Frenny Bawa, VP-India of Research In Motion which offers the Blackberry smartphones , can vouch for this. In her view, her much-maligned product allows people to drive greater productivity out of their time.

For Frenny herself, who had begun to visit the office on a Sunday night to deal with the barrage of mail that would be awaiting her on a Monday morning, her Blackberry has been as a great way to get ahead of the curve without being chained to her desk. So after all, this may just be a question of personal choice.