Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Monday, July 09, 2007

Google to Acquire Postini for $625 million

Google Just in from Google HQ - news that Google has acquired Postini for $625 million. Postini has 300 employes and handles message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement. Postini will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google and the deal should close by the end of the 3rd quarter 2007. The Google blog has just updated with the news. There is also a very detailed FAQ document for download.

From the Google news bulletin:

"With this transaction, we're reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes. With the addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to users -- they can also streamline the complex information security mandates within these organizations," said Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Google.

"The response to Google Apps has been tremendous, with more than 1,000 small businesses signing up for the service every day. At the same time, large businesses have been reluctant to move to hosted applications due to issues of security and corporate compliance. By adding Postini products to Google's technology, businesses no longer have to choose -- employees get the intuitive products they want, and the company achieves the security and assurance it needs," said Dave Girouard, Vice President and General Manager, Google Enterprise.

"As the market leader in on-demand secure communications and compliance solutions, Postini complements Google perfectly. We share a commitment to providing enterprise customers with compelling technology alternatives. This is an exciting milestone, one that will certainly lead to the next level of rapid innovation," said Quentin Gallivan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Postini.

"Postini's founding vision is to bring to market technology solutions that address enterprise messaging problems in a different way. Our on-demand offering liberates businesses from the burdens associated with traditional on-premise solutions. We are proud of what we have done to achieve our vision on behalf of our customers, and combining Google and Postini is a powerful next step in this creative journey," said Scott Petry, Founder, Chief Technical Officer, and Executive Vice President of Product Development at Postini.

I guess this continues Google's pace of acquiring one large company a week.

Friday, July 06, 2007

MyThings Tracks Your Things

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

MyThings is a service that allows users to create an online portfolio of valued belongings.

We reviewed iTaggit earlier this week; MyThings operates in the same space. Both provide personal asset management although MyThings is the more extensive offering of the two; MyThings took $8million from Carmel Ventures and Accel Partners in May 2006 and the funding shows.

MyThings offers a integrated one stop shop for collectibles. Items can be included in the database, with tags and pictures. Once listed users are able to obtain a valuation for the item, buy (or extend) the items warranty, purchase insurance, sell the item on eBay and even donate am item to a worthy cause. MyThings also includes an extensive database of items reported lost and stolen from the world of art, antiques and collectibles; MyThings users are able to add stolen items to the database at any time and likewise the service is able to screen new submissions for items that may have been stolen.

The company has offices in Menlo Park, London and Tel Aviv, delivering a global product with a lot of appeal. Perhaps my earlier assessment of the space (in the iTaggit review) as being niche was unwarranted; the extensive user collections listed on MyThings would indicate that listing collections online may actually be a hot vertical.

iTaggit: Personal Asset Management

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

iTaggit aims to change the way people collect, organize, and enjoy their personal items and collections by providing a service to catalog collections online.

iTaggit provides an online environment for cataloguing, managing, and sharing collections of items, while preserving user and data privacy. The site features community resources, where users can connect and interact with friends, like-minded collectors, and experts. Recent upgrades include an Add Item Wizard, a Flickr-like picture uploader, an Amazon import tool, and Item Publisher.

The best way of describing iTaggit is as a personal asset management service. If you’re a hobbyist or someone who likes cataloguing collections then iTaggit will appeal; although notably this would likely be a relatively small vertical.

iTaggit took $1.04 million Series A financing round in August 2006 and makes revenue from eBay and similar affiliate advertising programs.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Belgium Says ISPs Must Protect Copyright

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

A court in Belgium has ruled that an Internet Service Provider bears the responsibility for stopping illegal file-sharing on its network. Although the ruling was made in Belgium, it relies on the E.U. copyright directive and may set precedent for the entire Union according to IFPI, an organization that represents the recording industry world wide.

Belgian courts have sided strongly with copyright holder in the past as well. In February, they ordered Google to stop copying Belgian newspaper headlines into their news and search indexes.

The suit was brought by a group representing Belgian authors an composers (SABAM) against ISP Scarlet, formerly Tiscali. In 2004, the SABAM received an injuction against the ISP, which assigned an expert whose investigation provided 11 ways to prevent infringement across the network. The judge agreed and Scarlet has 6 months to enact anti-piracy measure or face fines of up to $4,300 per day.

However, although the ruling means Scarlet must prevent piracy, it doesn’t require monitoring all network traffic. The Register quotes a SABAM statement saying, “The solutions identified by the expert are ‘technical instruments’ that limit themselves to blocking or filtering certain information transmitted on the network of TISCALI (SCARLET). They do not constitute a general obligation to monitor the network.”

Similar suits have traditionally not proven successful in the US, because ISPs have been seen simply as “common carriers“, not responsible for the contents of the packages they deliver. This has lead to a game of cat and mouse between pirates and copyright holders, epitomized by companies like MediaDefender allegedly trying to track down and catch copyright violators. As a side note, MediaDefender says the alleged honey pot, MiiVi.com, was an R&D experiment and the scandal surrounding it was a “libelously fabricated story”.

Now copyright holders are again trying to go after the bottleneck for piracy, the networks themselves. Because filtering technologies no longer place as harsh a burden on content providers, the industry is in transition and expectations are changing. After a lawsuit by Viacom, YouTube has begun scrubbing their own network for copyrighted content. Recently, AT&T announced they are making plans to track copyright infringement on their network.

Copyright protection company Media Rights Technologies has tried to push companies into implementing anti-piracy measures on their networks. They recently requested a cease and desist order against Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Real Networks alleging the companies are in violation of the DMCA because they are not implementing copyright protection on their systems, namely their own product. They’re also cheer leading their own bill, the “Perform Act”, through congress with the help of senators Feinstein (D), Graham (R), Biden (D) and Alexander.

How To: Create an RSS embedded desktop

from Lifehacker by Kyle Pott

Looking to make better use of the desktop? Instead of mindlessly staring at the wallpaper, a user at Instructables embedded a bunch of RSS feeds right into the desktop. The Instructable helps you build an HTML file with your favorite RSS feeds and size it appropriately for your desktop. The final product is a lightweight desktop background chocked-full of RSS feeds that automatically updates itself every 10 minutes. If you're looking for a quicker approach, you can get a similar effect using widgets/gadgets, or by embedding Netvibes content into your wallpaper.

RSS Desktop [Instructables]

Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Monday, July 09, 2007

Google to Acquire Postini for $625 million