Microsoft fired a broadside at Google in a battle over a US government contract, accusing its rival of issuing misleading claims.

Google rejected the charges by the Seattle-based software giant in the legal tussle over a nearly $60 million contract with the US Department of Interior.

Microsoft said documents unsealed in the court case showed that “Google Apps for Government,” Google’s Internet-based suite of office tools, had not been certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

“Given the number of times that Google has touted this claim, this was no small development,” Microsoft deputy general counsel David Howard said in a blog post. “It’s time for Google to stop telling governments something that is not true.”

FISMA lays out the security standards for information management systems such as email.

Google and Onix Networking Corp., a reseller of Google products, filed suit against the US government last year claiming the terms for the Department of Interior contract favored Microsoft.

Google argued that the terms of the bid for an email, calendar and document collaboration system for some 88,000 Interior Department employees implicitly rule out a Google product and favored one from Microsoft.

Google was promoting Google Apps for Government for the contract over Microsoft’s solution.

Google said Monday in response to Microsoft’s accusations that a version of Google Apps has already received FISMA clearance.

“We did not mislead the court or our customers,” Google said in a statement. “Google Apps received a FISMA security authorization from the General Services Administration in July 2010.

“Google Apps for Government is the same system with enhanced security controls that go beyond FISMA requirements,” Google said.

Relations between the technology giants have become increasingly acrimonious of late and Microsoft last month joined an anti-trust complaint in Europe against Google over Internet search.

In February, Google accused Microsoft’s search engine Bing of copying its results.

“You may have participated in local or regional science fairs where you had to be in the same physical space to compete with kids in your area. Now any student with an idea can participate from anywhere, and share their idea with the world,” Google wrote in a blog post.

The Google Global Science Fair 2011 is open to students aged 13-18 years old, working solo or in groups of up to three. Applicants should come up with their own hypothesis, create an experiment to test it, and present the results and conclusion in either a two-minute video or a 20-slide presentation. Current entries from offline local science fairs will also be accepted when embedded into Google’s application. Registration is open through April 4, 2011.

In partnership with the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, Google is awarding 12 prizes, including the grand prize of a 10-day trip to the Galapagos with National Geographic Explorer and a Google scholarship worth $50,000. Select winners will also receive internship opportunities with the sponsors.

For more details on entry rules, judging criteria, and prizes, visit the Google Science Fair website.

Google’s pitch to students includes a feel-good little story about how Google co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (pictured), discovered Google through a simple science experiment as well: the two hypothesized that there was a better way to find information on the Web.

“They did their research, tested their theories and built a search engine which (eventually) changed the way people found information online,” the blog entry reads.

“Larry and Sergey were fortunate to be able to get their idea in front of lots of people. But how many ideas are lost because people don’t have the right forum for their talents to be discovered? We believe that science can change the world—and one way to encourage that is to celebrate and champion young scientific talent as we do athletes and pop idols.”

It looks like 2010 was indeed the year that Facebook’s success exploded.

For the first time ever, U.S. Web surfers visited the social networking site more than any other site in 2010, beating out Internet behemoth Google, according to a report from Hitwise, an Internet analytics firm.

Facebook, which had a flood of good and bad publicity last year, grabbed 8.93% of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010. Google, which had been in the top spot in 2009, slipped to the No. 2 position with 7.19% of all visits, Hitwise said.

The analytics firm also reported that Yahoo! Mail came ranked third with 3.52% of all visits, while the main Yahoo! site was fourth with 3.3%. YouTube rounded out the top five with 2.65% of all site visits.

Facebook had been creeping up on Google during the last several months.

While Google has long been at the top of the heap when it comes to grabbing the most visitors and time spent on a Web site Facebook began making its mark last summer.

In September, Online researcher comScore reported that for the month of August, Facebook edged out Google in terms of how much time U.S. users spent on a Web site. U.S. users spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook in August, compared with 39.8 million minutes on Google’s various sites, including Google News and YouTube.

And last March, Facebook hit another milestone when the social networking site replaced Google as the most visited Web site in the U.S. for a full week.

Hitwise reported over the weekend that Facebook marked another small victory for the year. After analyzing the top 1,000 search terms for 2010, Hitwise calculated that the word “Facebook” was the top search term for the year.

“This is the second year that the social networking Web site has been the top search term overall, accounting for 2.11% of all searches,” Hitwise reported. There actually were four variations of the term “Facebook” in the top 10 searched-for terms of 2010: facebook; facebook login; facebook.com, and www.facebook.com.

Other search terms making the top 10 include: Craigslist, Myspace, YouTube, eBay, Yahoo and Mapquest.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s firm Interval Licensing LLC has decided to re-launch a patent-infringement lawsuit against some of country’s biggest tech companies, including Apple and Google. That comes despite the original lawsuit’s dismissal earlier in December.

In the wake of that dismissal, Judge Marsha J. Pechman, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle, demanded that Allen’s legal counsel revise the lawsuit by Dec. 28. Specifically, Pechman asked for more detailed allegations; the new case (No. C10-1385 MJP) indeed seems to delve more deeply into the defendants’ supposed patent violations.

Allen’s original lawsuit, filed Aug. 27, claimed violations of patents developed by his Interval Research Corp., a technology incubator. In addition to Apple and Google, other companies in the crosshairs include AOL, eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, Office Depot, OfficeMax, YouTube and Staples. The four patents in question involve technologies related to e-commerce and online browsing, such as online user alerts and ways for drawing users’ attention to a nearby screen. Microsoft is not named in the lawsuit.

“Paul thinks this is important, not just to him but to the researchers at Interval who created this technology,” a spokesperson for Allen told The Wall Street Journal Aug. 27. “We recognize that innovation has a value, and patents are a way to reflect that.”

Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, after the two saw an article in Popular Electronics about the MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) Altair 8800 and decided to develop a programming language, Altair BASIC, which could operate on it. However, Allen resigned as a Microsoft executive in 1983 after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Following successful treatment for the disease, Allen invested in a number of ventures, including sports teams such as the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks, as well as Interval Research in 1992. Before shutting down in 2000, Interval managed to file some 300 patents, which Interval Licensing now owns.

Allen’s lawsuit argues that Interval Research, in addition to evolving “into one of the preeminent technology firms” with “over 110 of the world’s leading scientists, physicists, engineers, artists and journalists,” contributed materially to other projects. “Interval Research served as an outside collaborator to and provided research funding for Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page’s research that resulted in Google,” according to the suit.

In November 2009, Allen was again diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which targets the body’s network of lymph nodes. He underwent a course of chemotherapy after which a spokesperson reported he “currently has no medical issues.”

Hitwise reported four variations of the term “Facebook” were among the top 10 terms and accounted for nearly 3.5% of searches overall.

The term “Facebook login” moved up from the ninth spot in 2009 to the second spot this year, Hitwise said. YouTube was the third most-searched term this year, followed by Craigslist, Myspace and Facebook.com. Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.2% of the top 50 searches.

Facebook was the top-visited website for the first time in 2010, accounting for 8.9% of all U.S. visits between January and November. Google Inc.’s (GOOG) namesake website ranked second, followed by Yahoo Inc.’s (YHOO) Yahoo! Mail site, Yahoo, and Google’s YouTube.

Hitwise also reported Kim Kardashian was the personality that drew the most searches for the year, while Star Wars was the top movie draw and Lady Gaga was the most searched artist. In the sports category, Tiger Woods and the Dallas Cowboys topped the athlete and sports team searches, respectively.

“By the time Microsoft gets it figured out everybody will already own an iPad,” said Keith Goddard, CEO of Capital Advisors Inc. an investing firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that holds Apple shares. “That train has left the station.”

Microsoft will announce a full version of the Windows computer operating system that runs on ARM Holdings Plc technology at the show, which begins in Las Vegas on Jan. 6, two people familiar with Microsoft’s plans said last week.

Allying with ARM is Microsoft’s way of stepping up rivalry with Apple, which has garnered the largest share of the tablet market with its iPad, a touch-screen device introduced in April that handles video, music and computing tasks. The effort may falter unless Ballmer can match the features consumers have come to expect from the iPad, Goddard said.

The new Windows version would be tailored for battery- powered devices, such as tablets and wireless handsets, the people said. Chips based on ARM technology are made by Qualcomm Inc., Texas Instruments Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, declined to comment, pointing instead to remarks by Ballmer in July.

“We’re tuning Windows 7 to new slate hardware designs,” Ballmer told analysts then. He also said, Apple has “sold certainly more than I’d like them to sell.”

IPad Gains Share

Computer makers have unsuccessfully been trying to sell tablet-style computers based on Microsoft’s Windows for about a decade. Before the iPad, tablets made up only about 2 percent of the PC market. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, has sold 7.46 million iPads through September. According to analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., it may sell as many at 37.2 million iPads next year.

That indicates that the tablet computer’s share of the PC market may rise to 9.2 percent next year, based on a prediction by research firm IDC for 402.7 million PC shipments in 2011.

Microsoft dropped 23 cents to $28.07 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have declined 7.9 percent this year.

Besides gaining share, Apple has also redefined consumer expectations for what a tablet computer should do, says Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner Inc. Instead of requiring the use of a stylus pen to serve as a computer mouse, the iPad allows people to navigate using their fingers.

‘Square Peg’

“Apple did this year what no one had done in the previous 10 — crack that space between the PC and the phone,” said Gartenberg, who’s based in New York. “Microsoft has been working very hard at putting a square peg in a round hole.”

Still, an introduction at CES gives Microsoft a chance to win over some of the more than 100,000 people expected to attend the premier technology trade show, he said.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity for Microsoft and Ballmer to put a stake in the ground,” said Gartenberg. “Now that Apple cracked the market no one wants to get left behind.”

By adapting its computer operating system for a tablet, Microsoft is taking a different approach from Apple, which used a mobile-phone operating system as the basis for the iPad. Apple’s software enables instant startup, longer battery life, and access to the more than 300,000 applications already developed for the iPhone.

‘Frankentablets’

Microsoft is taking software designed for use with a mouse and keyboard and adapting it to a touch screen, according to the people familiar with the matter. That will require developers to rework PC programs to make them useful on a tablet.

Chips based on ARM technology are used in most smartphones, as well as Apple’s iPad. Still, they don’t crunch numbers and handle other computing tasks as quickly as Intel Corp. chips, which run the majority of PCs.

Loading a full version of Windows onto a tablet powered by a chip designed for mobile phones may result in an unresponsive or slow-moving machine, said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Seattle-based research firm. Existing tablets based on Windows are difficult to use, he said.

“Current Windows tablets are what I call Frankentablets — part laptop” and part tablet, he said. “They do neither role well.”

Microsoft should leave Windows in the PC environment, where it works best, and focus instead on scaling up its mobile-phone software to work on the bigger screen of a tablet, Cherry said.

Then There’s Google

Microsoft has sparred with Apple since the birth of the PC. Windows won early rounds, relegating Macintosh computers to less than 10 percent of the market.

Now, it’s also contending with Google Inc., the Mountain View, California-based Internet company behind the Android mobile-phone operating system. Earlier this year, Android surpassed Apple by number of devices running the software in the U.S., according to NPD Group.

Companies such as Dell Inc. and Samsung, which use Microsoft’s software in their PCs, are already working on tablets based on Android as they try to keep from losing ground to Apple.

The longer it takes Microsoft to get an operating system into tablets, the less likely the company can challenge Apple and Google, said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a research firm in Campbell, California.

“Given this late move by Microsoft, it would still be quite an uphill battle,” he said.

Sales will more than double from 2009, said the people, who declined to be identified because the privately held company doesn’t disclose revenue. Facebook had $700 million to $800 million in sales last year, and the 2010 figure was previously expected to be closer to $1.5 billion, according to two other people familiar with the matter earlier this year.

Facebook’s more than half a billion users have made it an attractive target for advertisers, including Coca-Cola Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Adidas AG. In October, Facebook surpassed Yahoo! Inc. when ranked by the number of global users, making it No. 3 behind Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., according to ComScore Inc., a research firm in Reston, Virginia.

“The love affair of consumers with social networks is an abiding one,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC in San Mateo, California. “All the big brands are there.”

Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, declined to comment.

Facebook, founded in 2004, would reach $2 billion faster than Yahoo and at almost the same pace as Google. Yahoo, founded in 1994, posted revenue of $1.6 billion in 2003 and $3.6 billion in 2004. Google, founded in 1998, reached $1.5 billion in 2003 and then $3.2 billion in 2004.

‘Person of Year’

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive officer, was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” yesterday. The publication noted his role in “creating a new system of exchanging information” and “changing how we all live our lives.”

Zuckerberg, 26, created Facebook for college students when he was a sophomore at Harvard University. After opening the site to people outside of higher education, the company surpassed News Corp.’s MySpace as the No. 1 social network two years ago. Facebook users now post a billion pieces of content, such as photos and messages, every day, Time said.

Facebook has maintained ad prices, even as its user growth creates a surge of space for commercial messages, the company said in August. Facebook also makes money from a credits program, which lets people buy virtual items in online games.

Figuring It Out

“People are learning and they’re figuring out how they can work with Facebook,” said Christian Juhl, a president at digital ad agency Razorfish, part of Paris-based Publicis Groupe SA. “You can prove success without a massive expenditure.”

Facebook is making gains in so-called display ads — the banners, videos and other graphical promotions that appear on websites. It may grab about 9.4 percent of that market in the U.S. this year, up from 6.6 percent in 2009, according to EMarketer Inc. in New York.

Yahoo, which leads the market, will have about 16.2 percent, down from 16.5 percent, the firm estimates. Google, which is stronger in Internet-search ads, may take 6.7 percent, up from 4.7 percent.

Facebook’s growth is also attracting investor interest. The company has a valuation of $43.1 billion, according to SharesPost Inc., an exchange for privately held stocks. That’s up more than 60 percent from three months ago and almost quadruple the level in March.

At the same time, Facebook’s expansion has increased concerns about privacy. After lawmakers and advocacy groups complained that it shares too much personal data, the company introduced simpler privacy controls in May and said it was reducing the amount of user information that’s publicly available.

“They’ve done a better job recently around privacy, which alleviates a lot of the concern,” Juhl said. “That’s something we’ll always have to keep watching. But that’s nothing new — whether it’s Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or Facebook.”
From:Bloomberg.com

Google’s Chrome Operating System isn’t yet ready for prime time on notebook computers, but the company has landed corporate remote access power Citrix Systems as a partner.

Google Dec. 7 said at an update event that it consumers would be able to purchase netbooks based on its Web operating system, which lets users run Web apps in the Chrome browser, from Samsung and Acer in mid-2011.

Concerns about bugs, performance tuning, and connecting digital cameras to the mix are a few of the reasons why Chrome OS had been delayed in the market.

While most enterprises wouldn’t dare to embrace such a nascent offering, Citrix plans to use Chrome OS in 2011 to support Citrix Receiver, a software client for application and desktop virtualization.

Citrix customer employees will be able to bring Chrome OS netbooks into their office and get immediate access to their enterprise apps through Receiver.

Gordon Payne, senior vice president of Citrix Systems, demonstrated Citrix Receiver running Microsoft Excel on Chrome OS, with the document actually hosted in the company’s data center. He also showed off a Solid Works CAD app and Hyperion business intelligence app running the same way.

Touting Citrix’ long track record of helping users shuttle business apps from their PCs to corporate data centers and running them on different computers inside and outside the central office, Payne said Chrome OS lends itself nicely to Citrix’ service delivery model.

“With that centralization and delivery of enterprise and business apps as a service, this is a natural partnership with Chrome OS and Chrome notebooks,” Payne said.

While the endorsement of such a fledgling product and an unproven computer paradigm should be enough to make Google executives blush, it’s Citrix’ install base of 250,000 global customers that should warm hearts.

That includes banks, retail and hospitals ranging from dozens to hundreds of thousands of workers, all prime targets for Chrome OS as it seeks to challenge the Microsoft Windows PC hegemony.

One solid enterprise player alone is not enough to put Chrome OS on the map in a PC-centric world, but it’s certainly a conversation starter.

Couple that with the dozen-plus Chrome OS pilot partners — Department of Defense, Kraft, American Airlines and Virgin — who agreed to test the unbranded Cr-48 netbook Google is offering, and Google is doing quite a bit to secure interest in the corporate sector.

Google is building Chrome OS. Will the businesses come?

“The level of partnership that Google has been able to muster up is quite impressive,” IDC analyst Al Hilwa told eWEEK.

“It is certainly the case that evolutionary technologies stand a much bigger chance of being adopted than revolutionary ones, and being able to run traditional apps designed for other platforms, such as Windows, is a clever way to roll out Chrome OS.”

Also with this latest version of Earth, Google has added a new character to the software’s repertoire, Pegman. Similar to the way Google Maps works, when looking at an aerial view of a location, areas with Street Views available are outlined in blue on the map. You can drag Pegman to any blue area and you’ll be immediately taken to a street level view of that location. Better yet, you can “walk” down streets by using the scroll wheel on a mouse or the cursor keys on a keyboard.

While in Street View, you can toggle to 3D view, which gives you a ground level view with 3D graphics buildings and now, 3D trees, too. “In Google Earth, while we and our users have been busy populating the globe with many thousands of 3D building models, trees have been rather hard to come by,” Google Product Manager Peter Birch explained today in the company’s Lat Long Blog. “All that is changing with Google Earth 6, which includes beautifully detailed, 3D models for dozens of species of trees, from the Japanese Maple to the East African Cordia to my personal favorite, the cacao tree.”

With 3D trees you can see tree species in places like parks, neighborhoods and forests. Some 80 million trees have been “planted” so far by Google Earth in places like San Francisco, Tokyo, Athens and Chicago, as well as the Surui Forest in South America and Kahigaini, Kenya.

Google has also added a time machine of sorts to the new version of Earth. If you view an area where historical imagery of it is available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. Click on that date and you’ll be transported back in time to see imagery about that place at that time.

Whether you’re using the desktop version of Google Earth or its browser plug-in, the new features add a personal dimension to viewing places both familiar and far away that’s the next best thing to being there.

Google released version 6 of its desktop-based 3D mapping tool, Google Earth. The update adds integrated Street View, 3D trees, and an easier way to access historical imagery.

The features, while not likely to matter in the short term to Google’s ad-driven revenues, signal the Web search giant’s intent to stay on the cutting edge of mapping technology as it expands into the potentially lucrative market for local, geographically targeted search.

Most notably, Google’s Street View, which looks to digitize much of the world’s accessible areas through photos from its 360-degree camera-equipped van, has been fully integrated in the new version and allows users to zoom-in from outer space right to someone’s door step in one swish. The feature previously required users to click on Street View icons in available regions.

Additionally, for nature-lovers among us, Earth 6 boasts the introduction of 80 million 3D trees in Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo, which have been “digitally planted” using models of dozens of species of trees. The company also plans to work with environmental outreach programs such as Africa’s Green Belt Movement, Brazil’s Amazon Conservation Team, and Mexico’s Conabio to help model the planet’s threatened forests.

The ability to browse historical imagery on a location has also been made more easily accessible. Whenever there is a historical image of a location — allowing you to see how it looked back in time — a status bar will now be shown at the bottom.

The tool was previously updated back in June with version 5.2, adding an integrated Web browser and visualization of walking and biking tracks.

Google today introduced its latest – and very souped-up – version of Google Earth, the company’s interactive digital atlas. According to the company, the next version will take “realism in the virtual globe to the next level with two new features: a truly integrated Street View experience and 3D trees. We’ve also made it even easier to browse historical imagery.”

According to Google, the new features will enhance your user experience, and allow you to “explore your childhood home, visit distant lands or scope out your next vacation spot with even more realistic tools.”

Wait…3D trees? Yes, 80 million little green trees, all created digitally by Google, just for you.

It’s hard to resist checking the new version out, and what you’ll find are “virtual world” images that begin to remind you of science fiction movies, or Star Trek’s “Holodeck,” as a New York Times blogger pointed out.

In addition to mixing up the images with enhancements from Google Street View and include those three-dimensional trees, the new Google Earth is also making it easier to browse historical images and maps on the platform. With the Street View photos layer added to the experience, users can sort of “fly into” 3-D version of Google Earth and find a more realistic depiction of locations near and far.

The “swooping in” feature is not new to Google Earth – that was added in 2008 – but the swooping into Street View is more than a little cool. “In Google Earth 6, the Street View experience is now fully integrated, so you can journey from outer space right to your doorstep in one seamless flight.”

There are apparently more new features to come with the new and improved Google Earth, but Google is releasing them slowly. Said the company on its blog, “Over the next several days on our LatLong blog, we’ll be digging deeper into these great new features, but here’s an overview to whet your appetite.”

And DO check out the 3-D trees.

The antitrust inquiry disclosed by Google late Friday is just the latest sign of the intensifying scrutiny facing the company as it enters its adolescence. Since its inception in a Silicon Valley garage 12 years ago, Google has gone from a quirky startup to one of the world’s most influential businesses with annual revenue approaching $30 billion.

A spokesman for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott confirmed the investigation, but declined further comment.

The review appears to be focused on whether Google is manipulating its search results to stifle competition.

The pecking order of those results can make or break websites because Google’s search engine processes about two-thirds of the search requests in the U.S. and handles even more volume in some parts of the world.

That dominance means a website ranking high on the first page of Google’s results will likely attract more traffic and generate more revenue, either from ads or merchandise sales.

On the flip side, being buried in the back pages of the results, or even at the bottom of the first page, can be financially devastating and, in extreme cases, has been blamed for ruining some Internet companies.

European regulators already have been investigating complaints alleging that Google has been favoring its own services in its results instead of rival websites.

Several lawsuits filed in the U.S. also have alleged Google’s search formula is biased. Google believes Abbott is the first state attorney general to open an antitrust review into the issue.

“We look forward to answering (Abbott’s) questions because we’re confident that Google operates in the best interests of our users,” Don Harrison, Google’s deputy general counsel, wrote in a Friday blog post.

Harrison said that Abbott has asked Google for information about several companies, including: Foundem, an online shopping comparison site in Britain; SourceTool, which runs an e-commerce site catering to businesses; and MyTriggers, another shopping comparison site.

All of those companies offer features that Google includes in its search engine or in other parts of its website. Foundem, SourceTool and MyTriggers have previously filed lawsuits or regulatory complaints against Google.

“Given that not every website can be at the top of the results, or even appear on the first page of our results, it’s unsurprising that some less relevant, lower quality websites will be unhappy with their ranking,” Harrison wrote.

Google says its closely guarded search formula strives to recommend websites that are most likely to satisfy the needs of each user’s request. If it didn’t keep its users happy, Google argues that people would become disgruntled and switch to other search engines offered by Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com.

Regulators and lawmakers in the U.S. and Europe also have been looking into Google’s privacy practices and its acquisitions as the company tries to fortify its power.
From:Associated Press