Even if the internet is down, people in Egypt can still use Twitter through a new service from Google and Twitter.

Google, in combination with Twitter and its recently acquired SayNow engineers, has released a service for tweeting without an internet connection.

Designed specifically for those on the ground in Egypt unable to communicate via the internet with the outside world, Speak to Tweet allows anyone with a voice connection to dial three international numbers and have their voice messages sent out as tweets with the #egypt hashtag added to those links.

"We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time," wrote Ujjwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, product manager, Middle East & North Africa at Google, in a blog post.

The numbers are +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855 and no internet connection is required. There are already dozens of messages on the Twitter profile.

The only remaining internet service provider in Egypt, The Noor Group, was taken offline on Monday, according to reports.

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Schmidt, who was hired by the co-founders to be Google’s CEO in 2001, will focus on external partnerships and business deals starting on 4 April, when Page will take over the day-to-day management role. Page was Google’s first CEO, and Schmidt said in a blog post that Page “in my clear opinion, is ready to lead”.

Brin will continue to focus on technology products, assuming the title of co-founder as opposed to his current role of president, Technology. “He’s an innovator and entrepreneur to the core, and this role suits him perfectly,” Schmidt wrote in his post.

“As Google has grown, managing the business has become more complicated. So Larry, Sergey, and I have been talking for a long time about how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making - and over the holidays we decided now was the right moment to make some changes to the way we are structured,” Schmidt wrote in his post.

Google dropped the news while announcing fourth-quarter earnings results. Revenue minus traffic acquisition costs was US$6.37 billion, ahead of analyst estimates. Net income for the quarter was US$2.54 billion, or US$2.85 billion excluding one-time charges. Analysts were expecting earnings per share excluding charges of US$8.09, and they got US$8.75 from Google.

More to come.

Via CNET

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• Google pulling H.264 video out of Chrome

(Credit: Google)

It was hard to miss the response that accompanied Google's announcement earlier this week that it no longer planned to support the H.264 codec for the HTML5 video tag in its Chrome browser in order to focus on the WebM technology. Depending on what you read, Google is either evil, brilliant, hypocritical, cunning, principled or confused in dropping support for H.264, a widely used technology for encoding and decoding video files so they are playable on PCs and mobile devices.

What's more possible is that Google is cutting off its nose to spite its face. Google's two-year plan for WebM supremacy rests on a complicated and shaky foundation of assumptions about how video producers, content creators, equipment makers and patent lawyers will behave during that period.

Google declined to comment for this story, but people familiar with its thinking said the company is aware of the backlash yet believes that painful steps are sometimes needed to make progress on the web. However, while many of the emotional responses to its announcement were absurdly over the top, plenty were pragmatic, producing another piece of evidence that the tech industry is getting a little tired of watching another episode of Google Knows Best.

Waiting for codec

First, a quick recap: the W3C standards body has been debating how to implement one of the holy grails of the HTML5 standards - a <video> tag designed to free the world of plug-ins - for several years at a snail's pace. Until recently, Google, Apple and Microsoft supported the use of H.264 files in the implementations of the <video> tag they planned to support in their browsers.

But Google also supported a rival codec called WebM, which it released to the open-source community last year after acquiring the technology behind the codec from a company called On2 Technologies. The problem with H.264, in Google's mind, is that it is controlled by a consortium of companies called MPEG-LA that have agreed to pool patents involving the technology. Apple, Microsoft, Sony and a long list of household names are members of the group, which receives licensing royalties from companies that want to use H.264 video in streaming content or playing content on devices.

On Tuesday, Google declared itself squarely in the WebM camp, saying "though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies". Two main lines of dissent exploded over the next few days: one, that Google has put philosophy over actual user experience; and two, that Google is two-faced for dropping H.264 because it's not "open" while embedding Flash in Chrome at present, in that all it really wants to do is force people onto its technology and make life hard for Apple.

Let's get the second argument out of the way first: calling Google a hypocrite for supporting Flash at the moment while preaching the WebM gospel is disingenuous. When you see the world as one big battle between two giants, every little development gets framed in that lens.

Google's blog post is talking about a moment in the future, at least a few years down the road when HTML5 ideally has replaced or at least sidelined technologies like Flash, which desktop browser companies really have no choice but to support in 2011 if their users want to watch video on the web. Apple may have decided to stop shipping Macs with Flash pre-installed, but even it hasn't barred the technology from the Mac the way it has from the iOS device line-up despite CEO Steve Jobs' well-known thoughts on Flash.

As in many cases involving Google, "open" can be defined in many different ways depending on whether you like the company. A Google critic is likely to point out the supposed hypocrisy, while a Google supporter might argue that supporting both Flash and HTML5 technologies is more "open" when it comes to the interests of the user, who just wants to know if this here gizmo thing gets Family Guy. (We'll save for another day the discussion about what Google's "don't be evil" pledge really means.)

Split decisions

But Google appears to be underestimating the opposition to its strategy from those who see it as bad business, not just the jeers from the Applelistas who have replaced Microsoft with Google as Public Enemy No. 1.

Video producers are clearly not thrilled with the move. Some of my colleagues at CNET TV are extremely disappointed that Google has chosen to make their lives much more difficult by forcing difficult choices.

At some point in the future, those folks will either have to encode our video in both H.264 and WebM into what amounts to a huge increase in their workload and costs, bet on one standard or another knowing they're going to cause problems for half the user base, or throw their hands up in the air and continue to use Flash video, which solves the interoperability problem but denies them the opportunity to be more creative with how video is placed on a web page: the whole point of the HTML5 video tag in the first place. And that doesn't even address what to do with six years of archived CNET video.

Those who produce CNET TV are not crazy about the prospect of having to support two different HTML5 video codecs at some point down the road. (Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Google thinks they'll choose WebM because it's open and royalty free. However, H.264 is a superior technology and companies are often willing to pay for things that they know will work and work well, said Wilson Tang, a producer for CNET TV and co-host of The 404 podcast. And besides, H.264 isn't going anywhere anytime soon: with widespread support from web video content producers and millions of iPhones, iPads and other H.264-oriented devices out in the wild, no media company can afford to toss those people overboard in support of Google's desire for a more open standard.

Truth be told, video producers were facing an uncomfortable decision anyway because of Mozilla's insistence that Firefox - with 22 per cent of the market - support only WebM and Ogg Theora, and the sense that the W3C standards body would never settle on a standard codec. Still, it's an easier decision to make when 65 per cent or so of the market supports one technology as opposed to a more even split, and Chrome adoption is growing while other browsers stay flat or decline.

What if camera makers were to include support for WebM video in their devices? That's one way Google thinks it could skip the extra work involved in transcoding H.264 video over to WebM and get more WebM videos out in the wild, and it's talking to device manufacturers about the technology.

But while that may work for consumers recording vacation videos on their personal cameras, professional video producers don't shoot video in either H.264 or WebM. They use "professional codecs" that allow video producers to do all kinds of post-production work that mums and dads uploading videos of Christmas morning simply don't require, Tang said.

That video then gets encoded into the H.264 delivery format for playback because mobile devices largely use H.264 hardware decoders; WebM hardware decoders are starting to emerge but are far from common. It's possible to decode video in software, but it's a killer for battery life on a mobile device.

The biggest potential landmine for Google when it comes to WebM is in the courtroom. It seems like only a matter of time before someone in the MPEG-LA group decides to test whether WebM's technology infringes on the patent pool behind the H.264 standard.

That means content producers who bet on WebM could find themselves in a position where they get caught up in patent uncertainty, and that's a place no one wants to be. Just ask anybody who bought BlackBerrys for their company five years ago and sweated out the final days of a landmark patent trial involving the gadget.

Shells in the omelette

No matter whether the backlash is emotional or reasoned, Google still has to deal with it if it wants to advance its philosophy that a royalty-free codec is the best solution for the future of web video. Google has urged adoption of the HTML5 technologies for several years as part of its big bet that the web will become one big software development platform.

However, if the end result of Google's move this week is that Chrome users switch to H.264-supported browsers, video producers fork the <video> tag and Flash plug-ins stick around to ensure compatibility, company executives might not find much comfort in the purity of their open philosophy. It's true you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, but you've also got to keep them in the pan.

Via CNET

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Richard Stallman
(RMS at Pitt image by Victor Powell, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, continued to speak out against the notion of cloud computing yesterday, telling The Guardian that the notion of Chrome OS's cloud model might better be described as "careless computing" than as cloud computing. Chrome OS is loosely based on a project near and dear to Stallman's heart - GNU/Linux - but "it is delivered without the usual applications, and rigged up to impede and discourage installing applications", he said.

That's developer Google's point: it believes that a netbook that can't install external applications will be inherently more secure than one that could install malware, and that a system without a lot of pre-installed applications will boot much faster. The consumer launch of Chrome OS netbooks has been delayed about six months past its original launch target, but Cr-48 test units are percolating out to reviewers.

Stallman is particularly concerned about the loss of control of one's data with such a computing model, citing the example of a government official being able to confiscate your data without having to actually show a warrant at your front door. He's been sounding this alarm for several years, though there's disagreement as to just how seriously his warnings should be heeded.

He's not the only one voicing concerns about Chrome OS: Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer who created Gmail, predicted on Twitter that the project will get killed or merge with Google's other operating system, Android, at some point over the course of next year. No less of an authority than Google co-founder Sergey Brin has suggested that such a combination could be in store for Android and Chrome OS, though Google's tendency to set up competitive projects, such as Buzz and Wave, appears to have been the strategy behind the two operating-system projects.

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt holds up an unannounced Android phone that is probably the rumored Nexus S.(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)

Schmidt, kicking off the Web 2.0 Summit at the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco, held up an "unannounced product" that appeared to be the Nexus S, which leaked on Best Buy's website last week. The phone - Google unhelpfully covered the brand label - was running Android 2.3, code-named Gingerbread, and used a near-field communications chip that Schmidt thinks could eventually replace credit cards.

Near-field communications chips allow for fast short-range wireless transmissions, and credit card companies believe that those transmissions are actually more secure than the mag-stripe technology on current credit cards, Schmidt said in a discussion with reporters. Credit cards aren't going away for quite some time, but Google is interested in getting the technology out in front of developers in order to see what happens, he said.

Schmidt touched on several topics during his summit talk and in the briefing afterward.

• Android: Google is pretty satisfied with how Android has worked out, but Schmidt said if he had to nitpick one thing it would be how Google chose to focus on developing Android itself over emphasising third-party application development. He bemoaned how people focus on the competitive battle between Google and Apple in smartphones while missing the point that the entire market is growing like crazy.
• Raises: Schmidt confirmed that Google gave employees the option of taking home last week's bonuses in actual cash, but declined to say how much money the company had sitting around last Tuesday night. A Google engineer stepped forward over the weekend to claim that the person who was fired for leaking the memo about the US$1000 bonuses put employees in danger.

• Privacy: Google is under much scrutiny from privacy advocates this year following its embarrassing Street View Wi-Fi scandal, and Schmidt reiterated that Google takes its responsibilities seriously, noting that even though the technology is available to permit real-time face-recognition in products like Google Goggles, the company has made a conscious decision to hold back.

  What "we learned with all of these things is you just can't rush a product out any more. An engineer's political views is not [necessarily] what governments would accept," Schmidt said. "What we have learned is that people disagree on where that line is, and it is not up to Google to make that decision."

• Social: Schmidt didn't have much to say about social technologies, which has long been a weak spot for Google. He expressed the potential for social cues to continue to enhance search results.

  "We agree that social information's very important, in particular the name value graphs that they generate," he said. "We can produce a better search result with your permission. Information that is anonymous about what your friends are doing is made available as one of the many signals we provide."

• Facebook: He also declined to say anything about the fact that Facebook's revamped messaging system, while not an email client, may be intended to sway consumers away from more traditional mail like Gmail (but which, on the flip side, exhibits many of the real-time messaging vibes of the failed Google Wave). "It would not be appropriate for me to comment on their product. I am the CEO of Google, not Facebook," he said.

• Chrome OS: Netbooks running the Chrome OS operating system are expected to arrive any week. Schmidt painted the difference between Google's two mobile operating systems in terms of the input methods used for those devices.

  "Android is optimised for things that involve touch, [while] Chrome OS is focused on keyboard-based solutions. That's how the market is evolving."

CNET's Caroline McCarthy contributed to this report.

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Google Instant, unveiled for the desktop in September, is now ready for iPhone and Android users.
(Credit: Google)

Google searchers in the US using the iPhone and Android phones will start seeing Google Instant show up on their devices over the course of today, Google said in a blog post. It's a beta release, meaning Google doesn't want you to get mad at them if it doesn't work exactly right, and unlike the desktop version, you have to turn it on in order to see results as you type. It only works at Google.com in your mobile browser, but not in any of the other search boxes.

This is theoretically a boon to mobile searches, because typing on a mobile device is far more annoying than typing on a full-size keyboard. However, as TechCrunch notes, the limited screen real estate on a mobile device may make the service less useful. The keypad on several touchscreen mobile phones takes up nearly half the screen on its own, and the drop-down box that produces suggested Google Instant results further reduces the page available for the search results page itself.

You'll need to be running iOS 4.0 or Android 2.2 in order for this to work, Google said.

Via CNET US

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Android floats, Apple gloats? (Credit: Google)

The company announced the news in a post to its Android Developer Twitter account, nearly two years to the day since the Android Market formally opened for business. An unofficial estimate of Android applications by AndroLib had pegged the number at 50,000 in April, but it's not clear how accurate that was, as AndroLib currently predicts that 150,000 applications are available in the market.

Google is still well behind Apple when it comes to mobile applications. On Apple's earnings call last week, CEO Steve Jobs said there are now over 300,000 applications in the App Store. Still, the milestone is worth noting as Android continues to cement its role as the Apple alternative for developers and consumers.

Before Google made the formal announcement, The New York Times posted a story noting the milestone and pointing out some of the challenges that remain for Android developers, such as the subtle-yet-important differences between the hundreds of different Android devices on the market as well as payment issues with Google Checkout.

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Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi, Qi Liu and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (left to right) discuss the new Facebook-oriented results on Bing. (Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)

Microsoft's Qi Liu, president of Microsoft Online Services, and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a press conference at Microsoft's Silicon Valley headquarters to announce an extension of a long-running partnership between the two companies to feature Facebook profiles and a "liked by your friends" section that takes advantage of the way that web publishers have implemented Facebook's "like" button on their sites.

"Over the last couple of years there has been a splintering of the web, dividing into the "topical" web organised around documents and the "social" web organised around people, Liu said. "We want to make social people first-class citizens of the search experience," he said.

Microsoft will start rolling out the features as of yesterday in the US, said Bing head Yusuf Mehdi. Bing users will see a little pop-up window in the upper right-hand corner of their screens that asks them if they want to link their Bing accounts and their Facebook accounts. If you decline the offer, your Facebook profile and likes will not be shown on Bing, Mehdi said, and you can also delete Bing from your Facebook applications if you decide later to exclude your data. Microsoft will show the reminder five times.

One aspect of the new integration will allow Bing searchers to see when their Facebook friends have hit a like button on a web page. Mehdi demonstrated how someone searching for information on a car could see the regular lists of results with an additional module entitled "liked by your Facebook friends", which will feature links to those pages with the profile photos of your Facebook friends who have chosen to share that info with Bing.

Zuckerberg and Mehdi confirmed that Bing is not sending search data back to Facebook, meaning that your Facebook friends won't know what you're searching for on Bing.

The announcement is just another sign of a deep partnership between Facebook and Microsoft, consummated back in 2007 when Microsoft invested US$240 million into the company. Bing powers the search results for queries on Facebook.com, Microsoft has sold ads on Facebook in the past and Bing Maps is the default mapping software for Facebook Places.

Why Microsoft and Bing, which trails Google by a huge margin in search market share? Zuckerberg said he'd rather bet on the hungrier company.

"What makes Microsoft exciting for us is that they are the underdog. When you are an incumbent in an area, no matter how smart you are, there's always tension between innovating on new things and preserving what you have," Zuckerberg said. Speaking of tension, there's definitely tension between Facebook and Google as Google attempts to confront the growing amount of online advertising spending going toward Facebook, potentially limiting Google's future growth prospects.

Still, later in a question-and-answer session, Zuckerberg acknowledged that over time, Facebook would be willing to share this information with other search engines. It's just that Microsoft is moving forward with this right now, he said.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land got an early look at the features, and pronounced them impressive but not game-changing. "The move offers a huge amount of promise, and perhaps gives Bing an edge that Google can't quickly replicate. But at the moment, this is no Google-killer," he wrote in a review of the service.

Via CNET

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