Mobile Internet Usage on WiFi Widespread Across the US According to AdMob January 2009 Metrics Report

Mobile Internet Usage on WiFi Widespread Across the US According to AdMob January 2009 Metrics Report

SAN MATEO, CALIF. & LONDON - (Business Wire) AdMob, the world's largest mobile advertising marketplace, today highlighted widespread mobile Internet usage on WiFi in the United States and strong growth in Western Europe in its January 2009 Mobile Metrics Report. 

Consumer usage of WiFi to access the mobile Internet is widespread across the US. The West and Northeast experienced heavier WiFi usage by population than the South and Midwest in January 2009. The states that generated the most WiFi traffic are California with 18 percent, New York with 14 percent, and Texas with 8 percent. 

Other highlights from the January 2009 report:

* Worldwide requests increased 8 percent month over month to 6.8 billion, led by double digit growth in Western Europe and Asia. 
* Traffic from Western Europe increased 132 percent in the last year to total 550 million requests in January 2009, with Spain and Italy growing the fastest. 
* The iPhone is now the number one device by usage in Western Europe with 21 percent share of total requests.
* This strong share reflects dramatically higher mobile Web and application usage by consumers and AdMob's        strength on this device. 
* Nokia and Sony Ericsson are the number two and three manufacturers in Western Europe, with 22 percent and    17 percent share, respectively. Nokia continues to dominate the smartphone category with 11 of the top 15          devices. 
* Windows Mobile has 5 percent share of market in Western Europe with only one device, the Samsung i900, in     the top 15. Worldwide the Windows Mobile OS has 8 percent share of smartphone requests. 

Visit AdMob’s Metrics Report site (http://www.admob.com/metrics) to access the full January 2009 report, view past reports or to sign-up to get email notification when future reports become available. 

AdMob stores and analyzes handset and operator data from every ad request in its network to optimize ad serving. Each month, the Mobile Metrics Report aggregates this data to provide insights into major trends in the mobile ecosystem. 

About AdMob 

AdMob is the world's largest and highest quality mobile advertising marketplace, serving more than 4.5 billion mobile banner and text ads per month. Incorporated in April 2006, AdMob allows advertisers to reach their customers on the mobile Web and enables publishers to increase the value of their mobile sites. AdMob makes it easy for publishers to monetize their mobile traffic and for advertisers to target and reach customers on the mobile Web in more than 160 countries. 

AdMob has been named a 2008 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, one of Wired.com's 2008 Companies to Watch, and VentureBeat's Mobilebeat 2008 Best Overall Mobile Startup / Best Mobile Infrastructure Company. To learn more about AdMob, visit www.admob.com.

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Can Internet Activity Ever Be Truly Anonymous?

How much information should Internet companies be able to collect about your Web activity in order to serve you more relevant and targeted advertising? An IP address? Search queries? Your system settings and browser of choice?

For most companies like Google and Microsoft, the collection of that type of data is de rigeuer. Though it is typically deleted 18 months after its collection, and executives swear that personally identifiable information will not be found in their databases, many have their doubts.

My IP address may not reveal my name or location, but if I happen to be Googling my own name, address, or place of employment, and Google retains those search terms, am I inadvertently telling the search engine exactly who I am?

"If my ISP said, 'Is it ok if we give everything you do to another company?' I'd say of course it's not ok," Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said during a Wednesday hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee. "Online advertising is important; I understand that [but] there are so many unanswered questions about [online] information and how people navigate the Web."

Dorgan grilled Bob Dykes, CEO of NebuAd, an online advertising company that aggregates information to serve up targeted ads. "Maybe an ISP comes in and [says], 'Whenever anyone does something on our system, we're going to shovel all that information to you as its being done. What's the difference between that and wiretapping?"

"We're compliant with the law," Dykes responded. "The information we're looking at as people surf the Web doesn't include any personally identifiable information. [We are taking] an IP address and transforming that into an anonymous number with a one-way hash. All we're keeping is the qualifications from the market segments" NebuAd is targeting.

Leslie Harris, president and CEO at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), was skeptical about the anonymity of the collected data. At best, the data collected by companies like NebuAd is "pseudo-nonymous," she said.

Harris pointed to AOL, which in 2006 mistakenly released 20 million search queries that included indentifiable data. Dykes argued that that was basically because people were doing searches on houses in their neighborhoods using particular names and addresses. That is exactly the point, according to Harris.

Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, asked the two panelists if they believed that anyone data collection process on the Internet could ensure true anonymity. Dykes said yes, but Harris did not believe so.

"If pure privacy is what you want, the Internet is probably the wrong thing for you," countered Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

source:pcmag.com

Yahoo Offers Open Source Search With BOSS

Yahoo is opening up its search engine vault and letting third parties develop customized Web searches using its own technology. Build your Own Search Service (BOSS) encourages start-ups, Web developers and anyone else to build and launch Web-scale search products that take advantage of the Yahoo Search index. Yahoo is giving the keys to its crawling and indexing capabilities along with ranking and relevancy algorithms to developers in the hopes to increase its own search market share while encouraging the next step in search engine functionality.

The Yahoo Blog states that the biggest entry barrier for potential budding search companies is money. Giving access to a preexisting infrastructure affectively removes that barrier and allows developers to focus on getting their search algorithms right.

Trying to compete with search engines like Google and Yahoo requires, "hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure -- from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power," Yahoo writes on its blog.

"Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo and Google," Yahoo said.

BOSS is calculated to remove those obstacles and allow people with the desire to innovate Web search.

Speaking to Reuters, Prabhakar Raghavan, the chief strategist for Yahoo Search, said that the motivation behind BOSS is simple. "We want to disrupt the search market by removing that entry barrier and make room for more players and more ideas," Raghavan said.

Currently Google holds approximately 62 percent of the U.S. Web search market, while Yahoo maintains 21 percent, according to Reuters.

Raghavan and Yahoo believe that BOSS will allow the development of industry and social specific searches. Healthcare search, for example, is one area Raghavan believes that a start-up can develop a useful search tool for a specific industry. The potential for a social aspect of search is also something Yahoo isn't ruling out, with the results being ordered based on what a user's friends find interesting.

Yahoo already has two partners on the BOSS bandwagon. Me.dium is a personalized search start-up and Hakia is a leading semantic search engine.

The company has previously offered a search API to developers -- and the concept isn't new to the industry -- however, companies looking to use an existing API have traditionally been restricted in their access. By using BOSS, developers have unlimited queries per day, no restrictions on presentation, re-ordering is allowed, blending of proprietary and Yahoo search content is allowed.

Monetization, a potentially tricky issue with BOSS, is currently unavailable, but is coming soon. According to Reuters, Yahoo will require their own ads to be run alongside search results in exchange for the tools they provide.

Source:crn.com

Patch domain name servers now, says DNS inventor

Paul Mockapetris, inventor of the Internet's Domain Name System architecture, has some advice for those in any doubt about the seriousness of a weakness in the DNS protocol that was disclosed yesterday: Patch your DNS servers right now.

The vulnerability and the attack it enables are among the most dangerous to have been discovered in the DNS protocol so far, Mockapetris said in an interview with Computerworld Wednesday morning.

"It's absolutely critical for IT managers to upgrade their software. They want to make very sure that the caching servers on their perimeters are up to snuff," Mockapetris said. In addition, they need to also ensure that client devices such as DSL modems that might have DNS software embedded in them are properly patched. "The time to fix is now. The clock is ticking," before exploits against the flaw become widely available, he said.

The so-called DNS cache-poisoning flaw was discovered earlier this year by Dan Kaminsky, a researcher at security firm IOActive Inc. The vulnerability gives malicious attackers a way to very quickly redirect Web traffic and e-mails to systems under their control. Virtually every domain name server that resolves IP addresses on the Internet is vulnerable to the flaw, as are client devices with embedded DNS software.

According to Kaminsky's description of the problem, the weakness exists in a transaction identification process that the DNS protocol uses to determine whether responses to DNS queries are legitimate or not. The vulnerability essentially allows an attacker to poison a DNS server cache by injecting forged data into it.

The flaw exists at the DNS protocol level and affects numerous products from multiple vendors. The U.S Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), which was among the first to be informed about the problem when Kaminsky discovered it, yesterday issued an advisory describing the issue and listing over 80 vendors whose products are affected by the vulnerability. Several of those firms, including Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Red Hat Inc. and name server vendor Nominum Inc., simultaneously released patches yesterday.

According to Mockapetris, who is chairman and chief scientist at Nominum, the kind of DNS cache-poisoning exploit discovered by Kaminsky is not particularly new in concept; it essentially works by trying to correctly guess DNS packet identifiers. What makes Kaminsky's exploit lethal is that it is far more effective at doing this than anything else before. "He has figured out a way to make the attacks much more dangerous. Someone using this technique can poison a caching server in about 10 to 20 minutes," depending on the kind of bandwidth that is available, Mockapetris said.

Mockapetris added that the software patches issued by the vendors yesterday are aimed at blunting the efficacy of Kaminsky's exploit by making it much harder to guess at the packet identifiers. Even so, he cautioned, with Kaminsky scheduled to make details of his exploit publicly available at the upcoming Black Hat security convention, expect to see concerted efforts by many to use the technique to break into DNS name servers, said Mockapetris. Internet service providers are likely to be among the juicier targets, since a compromise of one of their DNS servers will likely have a far broader impact than an attack targeted at a corporate server.

source:Computerworld.com

Matt Mullenweg is the founder developer of WordPress

If you are a blogger they you might be aware of the importance of WordPress in blogosphere. Last week I upgraded my blog with latest version of WordPress 2.5.1. There I got the idea to write an article on the founder developer of WordPress. WordPress is a blog publishing system written in PHP. All data is stored in a MySQL database. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License. Matt Mullenweg is the founder developer of WordPress. He is also a author of a popular web 2.0 blog called ma.tt. In June 2002 Matt started a blog using the b2/cafelog blogging software. The purpose of that blog was just to publish the photos he was taking on a trip to Washington D.C. After a few months the development of b2 was stopped. Meanwhile, he also left his job at CNET and he started devoting his time on open source projects. Then he was contacted by Mike Little and together they started WordPress from the b2 codebase. Also, Michel Valdrighi who was an original b2 developer joined them.

WordPress is used by a 34 blogs in the Technorati’s Top 100 blogs list.

 

Source :: cmswire.com

So this is how WordPress started. In 2005, he founded Automattic which own WordPress.com and Akismet. These days Matt is frequent speaker at Web 2.0 conferences. Thanks Matt for giving internet world such a powerful blogging tool.

How Digg was started by Kevin Rose ?

Digg.com is one of the pioneers of Web 2.0 revolution on internet. Here users share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down are respectively known as digging and burying. Thousands of stories are submitted every day, but only the most dugg stories appear on the front page of the website. Sometime submissions on digg create a sudden increase in web traffic to the “dugg” website. This is called “Digg effect” or “dugg to death”. In case of this effect, there is server crash of small websites due to enormous traffic. It happened with one of my websites also. Today there are hundreds of websites which are based on this concept. But Digg was completely original idea when it was started in Nov. 2004. Even Yahoo has launched its clone which is known as Yahoo’s Buzz. Digg.com was started by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson.

In 2004, Kevin Rose met Steve Wozniak (He is one of the co-founders of Apple Computers) . One day while having lunch with Wozniak, they were talking about the old days of Apple during late 70’s. In that meeting Kevin Rose was inspired to do something new and innovative. He decided to implement his idea of a user controlled community-based news website. He withdrew $1000 out of his account and paid a freelance web developer $12 an hour to mock up a Web page and purchased some server space for $99 a month. He paid $1200 for the domain name digg.com, and the one of the greatest project in the history of internet began. By this time he was joined by Owen, Ron and Jay. The site got huge response and in October 2005, Digg.com received $2.8 million in venture capital from major investors, including Omidyar Network, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners. Really, I must say an idea can change your life.

Source:abhisays

Google Trends wiki

Google Trends is a tool from Google Labs that shows the most popularly searched terms from the beginning of 2004 to now.

Google Trends charts how often a particular search term is entered relative the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. The horizontal axis of the main graph represents time (starting from some time in 2004), and the vertical is how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches, globally [1]. Below the main graph, popularity is broken down by region, city and language. It is possible to refine the main graph by region and time period.

Google Trends also allows the user to compare the volume of searches between two or more terms. An additional feature of Google Trends is in its ability to show news related to the search term overlaid on the chart showing how new events affect search popularity.

Interestingly, there are some search keywords that are quite seasonal, like summer camps, which strongly coincides with the end of the United States school year.[2] Another example is the increase of interest in skin cancer as the northern summer approaches.[3] However, the reason for seasonal variation is not always obvious. For example, searches for Mesopotamia peak at the end of September. [4]

There are also some search keywords that come up around a certain date each year. For example, searches for the Internal Revenue Service peak on April 15, the deadline for filing taxes in the United States.[5] Another example is Thanksgiving.[6]. Most searches also seem to have some anomaly before or after Christmas each year, even terms that one would not particularly associate with the season.

Originally, Google neglected updating Google Trends on a regular basis. In March 2007, internet bloggers noticed that Google had not added new data since November 2006, and Trends was updated within a week. Google did not update Trends from March until July 30, and only after it was blogged about, again.^[1] Google now claims to be "updating the information provided by Google Trends daily; Hot Trends is updated hourly."

 

 Google Hot Trends

Google Hot Trends is a fairly recent (since May 15, 2007) addition to Google Trends which displays the top 100 hot searches of the past hour. It provides a 24-hour search volume graph as well as blog, news and web search results for the terms. Hot Trends has a history feature for those wishing to browse past hot searches. Hot Trends can be installed as a iGoogle Gadget. Hot Trends is also available as an hourly Atom web feed.

 

Google Music Trends

Google Music Trends was an opt-in service that displayed the music most listened to by users of Google Talk, in the form of the 'Week's top songs'. Trends could also be filtered by Genre and Countries.

Google Music Trends was shut down on March 31, 2008.

 

Google trends links

• Google Trends
• Google Hot Trends
• Google Trends India