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Report: Belgian publishers demand up to $77 million from Google

Editor's note: Updated on Wednesday at 5:58 a.m. PDT to add information from Copiepresse.

A group representing Belgian newspaper publishers is demanding that Google pay it up to $49 million euros--some $77 million--in damages related to a lawsuit alleging the search giant linked to and cached their news stories in violation of copyright law.

According to an Associated Press report Tuesday, the group, called Copiepresse, said it has sent a legal summons to Google asking that the company appear in court in September to decide whether it should be forced to pay Copiepresse between 32.8 million … Read more

Google Mini enterprise search appliance gets a boost

The Google Mini search appliance got a booster shot Tuesday with the addition of three new features and support for six additional languages.

Google, which has been building up its enterprise presence for several years now, is bolting on to Google Mini file system access control, source biasing, and date biasing.

File system access control is designed to let Google Mini crawl through files housed in shared drives and dish them up as search results to authorized users.

Source biasing aims to give users the ability to rank URLs based on the location and type of documents they're seeking, … Read more

Study: Web-video viewers to top 1 billion by 2013

A new study says that the number of people who watch online video will top 1 billion in the next five years.

As my boss, Jim Kerstetter, points out, it's unwise to put too much faith in predictions like this, but this isn't too much of a stretch.

The rapid rate at which broadband is being adopted around the world will lead the number of Web video viewers to quadruple by 2013, according to a report issued Tuesday by technology research group ABI Research.

The study also points out that Web video sites are increasingly finding more efficient … Read more

Google's new "open" warfare

ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus had the chance to talk with Google's Tom Stocky, a director of Product Management, about its increased emphasis on developers. The result is an interesting look into the mind of Google as it pertains to developers.

MacManus asked Stocky about Adobe's and Microsoft's efforts to blend the web with the desktop through Rich Internet Applications. Stock's response is highly intriguing:

Stocky replied that typically companies sell the underlying proprietary platform and then try to get developers to build on top of that (he didn't specifically mention them, but he's obviously … Read more

Keep it simple

Occam's Razor essentially says that all things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. The principle has implications in virtually every field of science, not to mention philosophy, aesthetics, marketing, business, you name it.

If for some reason you don't buy the word of a 14th-century Franciscan friar, it might interest you to know that Albert Einstein also believed the universe loves simplicity. I don't know about you, but I'm in no position to argue with that guy.

You'd think that keeping things simple would be the easiest path, but that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes it's downright impossible. Look at the personal computer, for example. The need for backwards compatibility with legacy programs and interfaces has forever rendered the PC more complex than any of us would like.… Read more

Google to update Web toolkit?

Google is expected to update its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) this week at its new developer conference, according to eWeek.

GWT is designed to help programmers write richer Internet applications using a beefed-up JavaScript programming technique called Ajax; the project was released as open-source software in 2006 with version 1.3, and the current version is 1.4. There are several GWT talks at the Google I/O conference.

Google has been working on improving GWT's performance, Java compatibility, and developer tools, eWeek said.

Google to preach Web 2.0 gospel to developers

Just because Google so obviously loves the idea of cloud computing, don't think the company doesn't care about what happens at the other end of the network connection, too.

As former President Bill Clinton used to say, there's a third way: Google wants to improve technology on both the server in the cloud and on the client running a Web browser. The search giant will detail its approach to at least 2,800 developers paying to attend the first Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco.

There's been a long-running tension among computing companies … Read more

Google says Viacom's suit 'threatens' Net

Viacom's $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information" over the Web, YouTube parent Google said in a legal response to the suit.

The response, reported by the Associated Press, was filed late Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Google says the threat comes from Viacom's attempt to make "carriers and hosting providers" liable for what people post. Google, by the way, has said this suit will only be resolved in court.

Viacom originally filed its lawsuit last year and filed an … Read more

Software margins choked by the cloud?

Microsoft expects to lose margins as "cloud" competitors start to eat away at its core businesses.

Kudos to Microsoft for calling out the obvious. But the software maker still has a lot to learn, if it thinks it can charge more under its own cloud model because "the customer will pay Microsoft a larger fee, since Microsoft also runs and maintains all the hardware," as Nick Carr notes:

Capossela's assumption that Microsoft will be able to charge companies more under the cloud model seems optimistic, given the different economics of providing software as a Web service and the aggressive pricing strategies of cloud pioneers like Google, Zoho, and Amazon.

Put more bluntly, there's not a chance in Hades that Microsoft will be able to charge more for its cloud-based offerings--not when its competitors are using the cloud to pummel its desktop and server-based offerings. This is something that Microsoft (and everyone else) is simply going to have to get used to. The go-go days of outrageous software margins are over. Done.… Read more