Why are we writing about a new paper on search engines? Well, for starters, much of the work we and our readers do depends on understanding the organization, interpretation, and use of data. Also, in 1998, a couple of nobody’s published a paper titled Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Those guys were Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, and the company they founded is called Google.
“The paper describes the fundamental differences between the traditional “Library” paradigm of web search — in which answers are found in existing online content — and the new “Village” paradigm of social search — in which answers arise in conversation with the people in your network…”
So without further ado, here’s the new paper: Anatomy of a Large Scale Social Search Engine
For those who want the summary version, here’s the link to Aardvark’s blog and announcement: http://blog.vark.com/?p=352
Barnes & Noble said that it will offer more than 700,000 titles, including more than 500,000 public domain books from Google Inc., and that it expects to be able to offer more than one million titles within a year.
Book formats supported by the new Barnes & Noble e-bookstore include those that can be viewed on Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPod Touch, BlackBerry smartphones and most Windows and Mac computers. But William J. Lynch, president of Barnes & Noble’s BN.com, said that titles bought through Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore won’t be compatible with Sony’s Reader or Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader, the two dominant e-readers in the U.S. market.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124812243356966275.html#mod=testMod
READ through this entire article!
Many people consider this development to be as sensible and inevitable as the move from answering machines to voicemail. With your stuff in the cloud, it’s not a catastrophe tolose your laptop, any more than losing your glasses would permanently destroy your vision. In addition, as more and more of our inform ation is gathered from and shared with others — through Facebook, MySpace or Twitter — having it all online can make a lot of sense.
The cloud, however, comes with real dangers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20zittrain.html
With the broad markets rallying over 30% from the lows I find it interesting that MSFT has finally decided to participate. Since the end of May, MSFT has rallied 24% which clearly helped lift the index. 
TOKYO — Toyota Motor Corp. got 180,000 orders for the new Prius hybrid in Japan in just a month, far surpassing its target of 10,000 vehicles in monthly sales, the automaker said Friday.
The Prius was the No. 1 selling vehicle in Japan for May, clinching the top spot in the domestic market for the first time and overtaking Honda ( HMC – news – people )’s new hybrid, the Insight, which fell to third after taking the top spot in April.
In Japan, hybrids are now tax-free, delivering savings of about 150,000 yen ($1,500) for a Prius buyer. Other fuel-efficient models qualify for lower savings.
Also helping is a “cash-for-clunkers” program similar to the plan initiated by President Barack Obama, which offers vouchers worth up to $4,500 for a gas-guzzler turned in for a new car in the U.S.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/06/19/ap6563583.html
Lokanathan Mahalingam had access to some of the country’s most sensitive nuclear information and the government has ordered an inquiry into his disappearance.
Mr Mahalingam, 47, worked at the Kaiga Atomic Power Station in Karnataka, close to Project Seabird, a major military base.
He went for a walk early on Monday morning and has not been seen since.
Authorities are not yet sure whether his disappearance poses a security threat and the Indian Intelligence Bureau is investigating whether he has been eaten by leopards, committed suicide, disappeared wilfully or been kidnapped.
Colleagues said that Mr Mahalingam, who works in the simulator training division of the nuclear power plant, is an introvert with few friends but no enemies.
A manhunt is under way in the 1000 acres of dense forest of the Western Ghats that surrounds the Kaiga plant.
Police played down the threat to classified information, but they have not ruled out the possibility that Mr Mahalingam has been kidnapped by a group attempting to sabotage the plant.
Five years ago, a heavily armed gang attempted to kidnap an official from India’s Nuclear Power Corporation in the same forest, but he managed to escape.
“The investigation is being handled at a very high level due to the sensitive nature of the case,” an investigating officer said. “At the moment it is a complete mystery and we are looking at every possibility.
“There are man-eating leopards in the jungle so that is a possibility and we are of course looking into whether he has been kidnapped too. There are four separate teams searching for clues and we hope to make a breakthrough soon.”
This is a must read for those invovled in the tech sector. Read on….
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On a recent rainy evening in Brooklyn, I was at a friend’s house playing (a bit sheepishly, given my incipient middle age) Call of Duty: World at War. Scrolling through the game’s menus, I noticed a screen for Xbox Live, which allows you to play against remote users via broadband. The number of Call of Duty players online at that moment? More than 66,000.
Walking home, I ruminated on the number. Sixty-six thousand is the population of a small city — Muncie, Ind., for one. Who and where was this invisible metropolis? What infrastructure was needed to create this city of ether?
Small wonder that this vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric — and vaporous — metaphor: the cloud. Trying to chart the cloud’s geography can be daunting, a task that is further complicated by security concerns. “It’s like ‘Fight Club,’ ” says Rich Miller, whose Web site, Data Center Knowledge, tracks the industry. “The first rule of data centers is: Don’t talk about data centers.”
Yet as data centers increasingly become the nerve centers of business and society — even the storehouses of our fleeting cultural memory (that dancing cockatoo on YouTube!) — the demand for bigger and better ones increases: there is a growing need to produce the most computing power per square foot at the lowest possible cost in energy and resources. All of which is bringing a new level of attention, and challenges, to a once rather hidden phenomenon. Call it the architecture of search: the tens of thousands of square feet of machinery, humming away 24/7, 365 days a year — often built on, say, a former bean field — that lie behind your Internet queries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html?_r=1&hp
The deflationary trend in technology continues.
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Top global PC monitor maker TPV Technology on Wednesday said it is developing a low-cost, all-in-one desktop PC optimized for the Internet, in a bid to replicate the success of low-cost portable PCs known as netbooks.
But unlike most of those products, which typically cost more than $1,000 each, nettops would sell for $400 to $600, said Jason Hsuan, TPV’s chairman and chief executive. Models could eventually retail for as little as $300, he added.
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE5591XS20090610
PALO ALTO, California (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp’s chief software architect said on Thursday the profit margins on providing online services — broadly known as cloud computing — would likely yield a lower profit margin than the company’s existing software business.
“The margins on services are not like the margins on software, so it (cloud computing) will increase our profit and it will increase our revenue, but you won’t have that margin,” said Ray Ozzie on Thursday at a Silicon Valley technology event.
“The margins at the low level, at the Azure level, are going to be lower than the top level, where you’re delivering a solution or something like Exchange,” said Ozzie, referring to Microsoft’s popular e-mail and calendar application. “You’re pricing that solution around a business value more than cost so the margins are still very, very good.”
Early pioneers of cloud computing have been Amazon.com Inc, Google Inc and Salesforce.com Inc, which may eventually pose a threat to Microsoft, whose software is still chiefly run on local systems.
BEIJING – China plans to require that all personal computers sold in the country as of July 1 be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites, a move that could give government censors unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet.
A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard Co., which has the largest PC market share of any U.S. vendor in China, said the company is “working with the government authorities and evaluating the best way to approach this. Obviously we will focus on delivering the best customer experience while ensuring that we meet necessary regulatory requirements.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124440211524192081.html#mod=testMod
Another reason for taking physical delivery of GOLD.
OTTAWA — The Royal Canadian Mint is withholding employee bonus pay as special auditors enter a fourth month hunting for unaccounted gold that insiders say could be worth as much as several million dollars.
The Ottawa Citizen reported Wednesday that external auditors are investigating an “unreconciled difference” between the 2008 financial accounting of the mint’s precious-metals holdings and the physical stockpile of gold, silver and palladium at its Ottawa headquarters. The mystery raises possibilities from sloppy bookkeeping to a gold heist.
Stealing gold or other metals would be a considerable feat, one that would have to evade state-of-the-art security technology.
“We’re one of the most secure facilities in Canada,” Christine Aquino, mint spokeswoman, said Thursday. “Doing business with the mint is still safe, and this review will likely give us some suggestions on how to improve our processes.”
http://www.canada.com/Business/Mint+looks+gold+freezes+worker+bonuses/1663848/story.html
The reasons for having exposure to Utilities and Alternative Energy become more clear everyday.
http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=105781&videoChannel=-9991
This is an age old debate on Apple and other “gadget” stocks. But, the assumptions all point toward the ever continuing deflationary trend in tech.
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Apple plans to introduce a cheaper version of its popular iPhone as soon as Monday, in a move that could dramatically increase the company’s share of the market for web-surfing devices, people familiar with the initiative said on Thursday.
Citing a firm survey of consumers, she said that a $50 price cut could increase demand by 50 per cent and a $100 cut by 100 per cent.
Apple sells about 11 per cent of the world’s smart phones, trailing Nokia’s 41 per cent volume and Research in Motion’s 20 per cent, according to Gartner figures from the first quarter. Palm’s Pre was expected to go on sale later on Friday.
An even bigger impact on market share could come with new pricing from AT&T, which remains in an exclusive deal with Apple.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c9169840-5157-11de-84c3-00144feabdc0.html
I have a hard time thinking that the technology companies are going to allow another IPOD to occur without a fight.
—-Plastic Logic’s CEO Rich Archuleta previewed a prototype for their thin touchscreen e-reader targeting business readers.
http://online.wsj.com/video/d7-plastic-logic-previews-new-e-book-reader/121E22EA-F9B6-42DA-B9C8-17E24D290D0B.html
Alternative energy is going to gain importance in the years to come. Batteries and electricity will be at the forefront of this technology.
FRANKFURT — Volkswagen AG said it and Chinese battery and auto maker BYD Co. will explore options for teaming up on hybrid and electric vehicles powered by lithium batteries, a move that highlights global auto makers’ efforts to secure supplies of batteries for alternative vehicles.
In addition to Volkswagen, BYD is also talking to Ford Motor Co. and another European auto maker about similar arrangements, those people said
While lithium-ion batteries are seen as the technology that will ultimately power most plug-in cars, their successful use has been hindered by relatively high price, limited durability and safety concerns. BYD says it has largely resolved those issues by turning to a safer, more cost-effective technology called iron-phosphate-based lithium-ion technology.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124331239762553635.html#mod=testMod
General, Technology | Yaron Sadan | 
February 2, 2010 11:19 am | 
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