Trends

If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.

So that got us thinking...what if we helped people experience the best of TV and the best of the web in one seamless experience? Imagine turning on the TV and getting all the channels and shows you normally watch and all of the websites you browse all day — including your favorite video, music and photo sites. We’re excited to announce that we’ve done just that.

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.

Because Google TV is built on open platforms like Android and Google Chrome, these features are just a fraction of what Google TV can do. In our announcement today at Google I/O, we challenged web developers to start coming up with the next great web and Android apps designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their websites for Google TV today. Soon after launch, we’ll release the Google TV SDK and web APIs for TV so that developers can build even richer applications and distribute them through Android Market. We've already started building strategic alliances with a number of companies — like Jinni.com and Rovi — at the leading edge of innovation in TV technology. Jinni.com is a next-generation TV application working to provide semantic search, personalized recommendation and social features for Google TV across all sources of premium content available to the user. Rovi is one of the world's leading guide applications. We’re looking forward to seeing all of the ways developers will use this new platform.

We’re working together with Sony and Logitech to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices will go on sale this fall, and will be available at Best Buy stores nationwide. You can sign up here to get updates on Google TV availability.

This is an incredibly exciting time — for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We're excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too.



*Nielsen, Three Screen Report, Fourth Quarter 2009

Update 2:26PM: Updated to include more information about other developers.

Posted by Salahuddin Choudhary, Google TV Product Manager

As people spend more time on the Internet, they want greater control over who has access to their online communications. Many Internet services use what are known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections to encrypt information that travels between your computer and their service. Usually recognized by a web address starting with “https” or a browser lock icon, this technology is regularly used by online banking sites and e-commerce websites. Other sites may also implement SSL in a more limited fashion, for example, to help protect your passwords when you enter your login information.

Years ago Google added SSL encryption to products ranging from Gmail to Google Docs and others, and we continue to enable encryption on more services. Like banking and e-commerce sites, Google’s encryption extends beyond login passwords to the entire service. This session-wide encryption is a significant privacy advantage over systems that only encrypt login pages and credit card information. Early this year, we took an important step forward by making SSL the default setting for all Gmail users. And today we’re gradually rolling out a new choice to search more securely at https://www.google.com.

When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience, but as always, remember to check the start of the address bar for “https” and your browser lock indicators:

Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.

A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode. Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you.

We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It’s a helpful addition to users’ online privacy and security, and we’ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings. To learn more about using the feature, refer to our help article on search over SSL.

Posted by Evan Roseman, Software Engineer

In 1978, people told Douglas Twiddy he was crazy when he started renting out vacation homes in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. More than 30 years later, his son Ross is using our AdWords advertising program to help attract prospective renters — and grow his small business, Twiddy. Thanks in part to AdWords, in just the past two years the company has added 100 new homes to its listings and hired 16 full-time employees, and it brings on another 50 seasonal employees each year.

This week is National Small Business Week, and Ross will be with me on Capitol Hill in Washington today to share his story and help unveil something that means a tremendous amount to me: a new report detailing, for the first time ever, Google’s economic impact in all 50 states.

People think of Google first and foremost as a search engine, but it’s also an engine of economic growth. In our report, we’re announcing that in 2009 we generated a total of $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers and non-profits. Over the years people have asked us whether we could quantify our economic impact on a state level, and we’re pleased to do that for the first time with this report, which you can download at google.com/economicimpact.

In a time of tighter budgets and a slow economic recovery, we’re glad to support so many small businesses and entrepreneurs across the country by helping them find new customers more efficiently and monetize their websites through targeted advertising.

Here’s a video from me and our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, with more background on where we get the numbers:



The report is filled with really wonderful stories about the direct economic impact that AdWords, AdSense, Google Grants and our search engine have across the country. These are the stories of entrepreneurs across the country growing their businesses with Google. And this morning Googlers are hosting events in 10 other cities across the country (Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Oakland, Portland (OR), Raleigh and Seattle) to help share those stories. Ladies and gentlemen, start your economic engines!

Posted by Claire Hughes Johnson, Vice President, Global Online Sales

We've been overwhelmed — but not surprised :) — by the success of our 30th anniversary PAC-MAN doodle. Due to popular demand, we’re making the game permanently available at www.google.com/pacman.

Thanks to NAMCO for helping to make this wonderful collaboration happen. Enjoy!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Check out this SlideShare presentation : Rise of the Marketing Technologist http://slidesha.re/dfMFni

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

We've been busy over the last couple weeks launching updates to make Google Apps more useful, whether you use Google Apps at work, at school or at home.

Smart Rescheduler Lab in Google Calendar
If you’ve ever tried to schedule time with a group of people who have packed agendas, you know how hard it can be to find a good meeting time that works for everyone. With the Smart Rescheduler, Google Calendar can sift through the details for you. When you need to reschedule an appointment, Smart Rescheduler quickly compares people’s calendars and ranks potential meeting times based on criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. You can enable Smart Rescheduler by going to “Labs” under “Settings” in Google Calendar.


Suspicious account activity alerts
To help keep Gmail users and the data in their accounts safer, on Wednesday we launched a new security feature to alert you if our systems detect suspicious activity in your account. When something unusual is identified, you’ll see a warning notification near the top of your inbox. You can choose to view a log of recent activity, and if it looks like your account has been compromised, you can change your password immediately. (And while we’re on the topic of security, we encourage you to brush up on our tips to keep your account safer.) We know that security is also a top priority for businesses and schools, and we plan to bring this feature to Google Apps customers once we have gathered and incorporated their feedback.


Contact delegation
Businesses using Google Apps can use a feature called email delegation, which lets employees appoint delegates who are allowed to read, send and manage email on their behalf. For example, this allows executive assistants to handle email for their managers. As of last Monday, delegates can also access and manage contacts. Now, a delegate can pick contacts from the manager’s contact list when composing a message on behalf of the manager, and keep the manager’s contacts up-to-date.

Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange
Millions of companies and schools have switched to Google Apps, and we hope to help millions more “go Google” in the near future. To make the transition as smooth as possible, we’ve released Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange, a server-to-server migration utility that brings email, contacts and calendar data from a legacy Microsoft® Exchange system to Google Apps. This makes the transition more seamless for employees, faculty and students. When they sign in to Google Apps, they’ll see the messages, contact information and calendar appointments from the old system right in Gmail and Google Calendar.

Who’s gone Google?
The number of businesses and other organizations using Google Apps continues to shoot up, and we hit another big milestone by crossing the 25 million user mark. Among those are the 7,000 employees at Konica Minolta, who are using Google Apps to help the company move fast and be more productive.

We’re excited to welcome another string of schools and universities too, including the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the College of William and Mary. Marshall University has a particularly great story: their technology group challenged themselves to deploy Google Apps to over 50,000 students in less than 24 hours – quite a feat when it typically takes large organizations months or even years to make major technology changes. We hope Marshall’s nimble approach inspires others to make the switch!

I hope you're enjoying the latest round of new features, whether you're using Google Apps with friends and family, with colleagues or with classmates. And don’t forget, you can always check the Google Apps Blog for more details and the latest news in this area.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Tomorrow from 8:30 to 9:30pm local time, hundreds of millions of people around the world will switch off their lights and participate in Earth Hour, the largest climate awareness event ever held. As climate change will effect people on every continent, we think a united, global call for action to address the problem is needed.



At Google we’re working hard to be part of the solution for the climate crisis. A first step was pledging to be a carbon neutral company. Our web-based services run in some of the world’s most efficient data centers, we deploy renewable energy where viable, and we buy high-quality carbon offsets to address the emissions we can’t otherwise eliminate.

Even with these efforts, however, there remains an urgent need for clean, affordable electricity. To that end we have a team of engineers working to develop technology breakthroughs that will help make carbon-free electricity an economically viable alternative to electricity from coal.

We’re also putting our experience with organizing information to work, so we can enable others to do projects in the sustainable space. We recently announced, for example, Earth Engine, a computational platform that enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the Earth’s forests. And we’re working with our peers through Climate Savers Computing to cut the power used by computers in half.

We also want to help you achieve your personal energy reduction targets. Most people don’t know their own direct energy footprint, so we launched Google PowerMeter to give detailed, near real-time information about home energy usage. We also like to encourage everyone to set their computer’s power management to avoid wasting electricity when it’s not being used.

It’s tools like Google PowerMeter that my parents wish they had years ago when I was a teenager and living under their roof. They were often exasperated to find the lights on in rooms I’d just left, and it took years for them to convince me that I could choose something to eat without standing in front of the fridge with the door wide open. The point is, I had to learn to become a steward of the environment. We can help many more people take steps toward better care of the environment, and make that learning curve easier to climb.

Turning off the lights won’t solve the climate crisis, but it’s a start. Earth Hour gives individuals a simple, meaningful way to participate in a global call for change. As U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated, “Earth Hour is a way for the citizens of the world to send a clear message — they want action on climate change.”

So I hope you’ll gather your friends and family and join me, and hundreds of millions of others, in turning off the lights. And please include the light in the fridge.

Posted by Erik Teetzel, Google GreenKeeper

A couple of weeks ago we reported that Google was taking the unprecedented step of reaching out to AdMob competitors to get their support around their acquisition of the company.

The FTC is looking very hard at the deal, and some consumer groups have lobbied the FTC to block it. Despite the fact that Apple acquired AdMob’s closest rival, Quattro Wireless.

But at least one of AdMob’s competitors, 4INFO, is supporting the deal (see our recent interview with 4INFO CEO Zaw Thet here).

In a letter to the FTC, Thet says “I have no concerns about my ability to compete effectively after the transaction closes,” and “this is such a rapidly growing and evolving industry that I have no concers about Google and AdMob dominating the space.”

I’ll say this – somebody just earned a ton of credit with Google. The letter is below:

4INFO, Inc.
177 Bovet Road STE 400
San Mateo CA 94402
March 31, 2010

BY HAND DELIVERY

Randall Long, Esq.
Federal Trade Commission
Bureau of Competition – Mergers I
601 New Jersey Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20580
Re: Google’s acquisition of AdMob

Dear Mr. Long:

I am writing in support of Google’s acquisition of AdMob. I am the CEO of 4INFO, the largest SMS publishing platform and advertising network in the United States. We support multiple SMS advertising units, including click-to-WAP, call, video, and others. We also help advertisers create destinations for mobile users who respond to mobile advertisements, including mobile websites, mobile videos, white-labeled SMS content, and interactive SMS voting or polling. We also enable publishers of user-solicited SMS mobile content to monetize their inventory with SMS advertisements. Our mobile ad network includes top television, print and online content publishers, including NBC, Yahoo, AOL, The Weather Channel, CBS Sports, and TV Guide. We compete with AdMob, Google, and other companies active in the mobile advertising space including clients such as P&G, Ford, Land Rover, and many more.

I am supportive of the Google/AdMob transaction because there are plenty of alternatives for monetization in the mobile advertising marketplace. I have no concerns about my ability to continue to compete effectively after the transaction closes. I believe it will continue to be easy for me to partner with large brand advertisers who wish to advertise on mobile devices and publishers who wish to monetize their mobile content.

This is such a rapidly growing and evolving industry that I have no concerns about Google and AdMob dominating this space. To the contrary, I believe that the recent interest in mobile advertising – especially from investors – will make it even easier for new companies to enter into mobile advertising with innovative products and services that compete effectively. I believe that the Google/AdMob transaction will also help raise awareness of mobile advertising generally and encourage more advertisers to engage in mobile advertising campaigns.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at XXX@4info.net or 650-350-XXXX.

Sincerely,

Zaw Thet

Zaw Thet | CEO | 4INFO, Inc.

The first-ever Google Model Your Town Competition has entered the public voting phase. It’s now up to you to help decide which of the five finalist towns should be the overall winner. Cast your vote before May 1.

Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.

Check out this SlideShare presentation : ClickDocuments: Great Content Marketing

Here's a Sunday morning toast to Larry Ellison, the software zillionaire, and his amazing USA-17, the boat that brought the America's Cup to San Francisco Bay. It was a famous victory, but there's been a bit of sourpuss grousing about it. The boat - a...

Last year, Apple’s iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smartphone sales to 14.4 percent, up 6.2 points from the year before, according to the latest market share figures put out by Gartner.  The iPhone still trails behind Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones (No. 1), which saw their share decline 5.5 points to 46.9 percent, and RIM Blackberries (No. 2), which gained 3.3 points to end the year with a 19.9 percent share.

Remember, these are worldwide estimates.  In the U.S., both Blackberry and Apple are much larger than Symbian.  And when it comes to mobile Web traffic, Apple and Android dominate with 81 percent share.  According to Gartner, Android phone sales jumped 3.4 points (to 3.9 percent), but Android is still smaller than WIndows Mobile or Linux.  Those mobile OSes, however, saw their market share drop  3.1 and 2.9 percent, respectively.  Palm’s WebOS barely made a mark with 0.7 percent share.

So when you tally everything up, Symbian lost the most share (5.5 percent), followed by Windows Mobile and Linux.  The iPhone saw the biggest gain (6.2 percent), compared to smaller but roughly equal jumps by Blackberry and Android (up 3.3 and 3.4 percent, respectively).

All together, Gartner estimates 172 million smartphones were sold last year, up 24 percent.  In contrast, total mobile phone sales were flat at 1.2 billion.  Smartphones represented 14 percent of total mobile handset sales last year, up from 11 percent in 2008.  The iPhone, for all of its growth, made up only 2 percent of all mobile phone sales last year. Below are the market share tables from Gartner:

Table 2
Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 2009 (Thousands of Units)

Company	2009 Units	2009 Market Share (%)	2008 Units	2008 Market Share (%)
Symbian	80,878.6	46.9	72,933.5	52.4
Research In Motion	34,346.6	19.9	23,149.0	16.6
iPhone OS	24,889.8	14.4	11,417.5	8.2
Microsoft Windows Mobile	15,027.6	8.7	16,498.1	11.8
Linux	8,126.5	4.7	10,622.4	7.6
Android	6,798.4	3.9	640.5	0.5
WebOS	1,193.2	0.7	NA	NA
Other OSs	1,112.4	0.6	4,026.9	2.9
Total	172,373.1	100.0	139,287.9	100.0

Source: Gartner (February 2010)

Table 1
Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users in 2009 (Thousands of Units)

Company	2009 Sales	2009 Market Share (%)	2008 Sales	2008 Market Share (%)
Nokia	440,881.6	36.4	472,314.9	38.6
Samsung	235,772.0	19.5	199,324.3	16.3
LG	122,055.3	10.1	102,789.1	8.4
Motorola	58,475.2	4.8	106,522.4	8.7
Sony Ericsson	54,873.4	4.5	93,106.1	7.6
Others	299,179.2	24.7	248,196.1	20.3
Total	1,211,236.6	100.0	1,222,252.9	100.0

Note* This table includes iDEN shipments, but excludes ODM to OEM shipments.
Source: Gartner (February 2010)

RetailMeNot.com, "a top consumer destination for coupons, discounts and promotional codes for merchandise, groceries, travel and services", shared some interesting statistics about consumer coupon use for the first month of 2010. New Jersey loves printing off coupons for use in brick-and-mortar stores, while New York prefers online coupon codes. Almost 15 million people visited RetailMeNot.com in January and saved over eight million dollars with online and printed coupons.

I’m a bit of a movie fanatic. As such, back in the day one of my favorite websites was Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX). On it, you bought and sold both movies (moviestocks) and movie stars (starbonds) based on how you thought they would do with upcoming releases. Of course, all of this was done with virtual cash (H bucks), making it a fun game. But in April, the game turns real. As in, real money.

On April 20, HSX will become a real-money commodity exchange, according to The Hollywood Reporter. As such, they’ve had to file with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for approval, which they did in November, and are now in the final phase of approval, apparently. Yes, this is actually happening. And yes, this will essentially make HSX a real-world betting site.

As THR notes:

Once launched, a new HSX site will list current and imminent movie releases with their projected four-week domestic grosses and allow exchange users to take long or short positions on the films.

And:

Investors wishing to participate in the exchange will buy “contracts” priced at one one-millionth of a film’s projected boxoffice, with films to be listed on the exchange from the time productions are announced in the industry trade papers. Trading will begin six months before a movie’s anticipated wide release.

And while the target audience is film fanatics, they’re also targeting Hollywood industry types, though warns that anyone doing any kind of insider trading is subject to prosecution just as with any other market.

Cantor Exchange, which is working with HSX on this transition to real money has more details and is kicking things off with a practice exchange until the real one is approved:

Everyone starts with 10,000 “virtual dollars” in a Cantor Exchange practice account, and at the end of the practice period Cantor Exchange will convert each 1,000 virtual dollars of profit you earn into $10 cash and deposit it into your real-money trading account (maximum $100 per trader). So if you earn 10,000 virtual dollars in profit while practicing on Cantor Exchange, you get $100! There is no cost to participate in this program.

This should be interesting, to say the least. This is certainly one way for a website to make money.

If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you have multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. And one problem you may face is pulling all of this information together to build a single online identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional online profile. Flavors.me is a new site launching today that looks to make this as simple as possible, and it does so with flying colors. After a three month long private beta, the site has just launched to the public.

The service is as simple as they come. After completing a basic sign up form, you link your Flavors.me page to any of 15 online services, with options that include Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (as well as any RSS feed). Flavors.me taps into these services via their APIs (you generally enter your credentials using OAuth or Facebook Connect), and within minutes you’re ready to start customizing your site.

All of your linked content is pulled into your Flavors.me page so it’s easy to access, but it’s never overwhelming — the site’s templates are minimalist, and hide everything but your name and a list of your online feeds/profiles at first. If you click on one of these feeds, the content will smoothly transition into view; it’s all very slick. You can also tweak your page’s color scheme, backgrounds, and layout to suit your taste (though there are only a handful of layouts to choose from initially).

You can get a feel for what’s possible by checking out my Flavors.me page, which took me all of ten minutes to set up — keep in mind that it’s entirely possible to make a page that looks better than this with a little more time.

There are plenty of other services out there that let you list all of your online presences in one place, with options including chi.mp, card.ly, UnHub, and even Google Profiles. But Flavors.me really makes the process extremely simple, and the results look great.

Flavors.me is free for its basic features, and will generate revenue through premium subscriptions, which are $20 a year. Premium features include the ability to use your own custom domain name, real time statistics, and the ability to include a contact form in your page (though obviously you could just include your Email address in the standard ‘About’ field).

Flavors.me was built by HiiDef, an incubator started by former Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and his brother, David Marcus.


Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo.

Apple thinks of itself as a mobile device company. In January at the iPad launch event, Steve Jobs noted that “Apple is the largest mobile devices company in the world now.” And responding to a direct question today at a Goldman Sachs conference, liveblogged by the WSJ, COO Tim Cook reiterated: “Yes, you should definitely look at Apple as a mobile-device company.”

Cook also pointed out that the majority of Apple’s revenues now comes from mobile devices (including laptops) or content for those devices. Indeed, if you look at the breakdown of Apple’s fourth quarter revenues of $15.7 billion, nearly $12 billion of that came from portable Macbooks ($2.8 billion), iPods ($3.4 billion) and iPhones $5.6 billion). And another $1.2 billion came from iTunes.

Apple isn’t abandoning computers. It is a mobile device company because computing is going mobile. What about things like Apple TV? “Apple TV is a hobby,” Cook says dismissively, echoing another sentiment Jobs has expressed before. Nevertheless, the company sold 35 percent more Apple TVs last quarter than the year before and continues to invest in the opportunity.

For more on what Cook said today, read the liveblog notes from the WSJ or the Business Insider.

Proof that the software that matches ads to content still needs a lot of work: Omaha Steaks pays good money to link their product to heart attacks. Free shipping! Thanks to Jon Finegold at Thinking Screen Media for sending this in.

Mobile question and answer startup ChaCha is on a roll, possibly achieving profitability, raising boatloads of money, and even venturing into social media with a Facebook app. Today, ChaCha is getting into the business listings game with local business search company Localeze. Localeze will provide ChaCha’s website with in-depth information about more than 15 million businesses across the country.

ChaCha.com visitors can access the local business listings in a search bar and through a direct listings page. In both cases, they will be served a full content page that includes Google maps, directions, phone, and other contact information. And of course, any questions and answers related to the business can be found on the content pages. Business listings can also be viewed by category and or state and city. Eventually, ChaCha’s listings will be integrated with its chachacoupons.com site.

The local business listings feature makes sense, as ChaCha realizes the importance of local content for both its mobile application and website. Localeze also helps power local business listings for Microsoft Bing’s Bing Local and Bing 411. ChaCha also recently rolled out its API, allowing developers to tap into the startup’s database with of questions and answers. ChaCha’s recently launched Facebook App allows individuals pose a question to any friends within their social network and ChaCha.com. ChaCha returns an answer from its database of hundreds of millions of answers. Users can also select “add to profile” to get a permanent “Ask ChaCha” prompt on their profile pages.

Launched in 2007, ChaCha started as a human powered search engine – meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query. ChaCha encountered the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people but then evolved into a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. The site also archives questions and answers on their website, with 500 million of them currently listed on the ChaCha site. ChaCha is answering one million questions a day via SMS, passing Google as the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile.

California lawmakers are eager to harpoon the great white whale that is Amazon.com to force it to collect sales tax on every HDTV and Kindle it sells here. But those efforts could ensnare scores of smaller fish: mom-and-pop Internet businesses that rely on...

Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched.  This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.

Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively.  But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost.

You can now chart how different services do against each other on the sharing front via a new services directory on AddThis. For instance, Google Bookmarks does much better than Google Reader, with 5 percent of all AddThis activity.  It even beats Digg (which has 3 percent).  Google Bookmarks is probably used more for personal bookmarking than for social consumption, but it is smack in the middle of Twitter and Digg when it comes to activity via AddThis.

Another comparison is Tumblr versus Posterous, which suggests that Tumblr  is much more popular as a reposting tool, and is about neck-and-neck with WordPress.

Two law firms, Beck & Lee from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego, have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by local business review and rating website operator Yelp.

The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review.

Sounds familiar, you say?

You may be thinking of last year, when East Bay Express ran an explosive story, basically accusing Yelp of being in the ‘Business of Extortion 2.0′, which covered similar ground. Shortly after reporter Kathleen Richards published the article, Yelp vehemently denied everything and called her piece inaccurate.

Now, the company will have to defend itself in court rather than on its company blog.

The lawsuit essentially alleges that the heavily funded startup runs an “extortion scheme” and has “unscrupulous sales practices” in place to generate revenue, in which the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments in the guise of advertising contracts, in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews.

The case, which is styled Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc. v. Yelp Inc., was filed on February 23, 2010, and is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. We have an e-mail in with Yelp and are awaiting a response.

Update: a Yelp representative commented as follows:

Yelp provides a valuable service to millions of consumers and businesses based on our trusted content. The allegations are demonstrably false, since many businesses that advertise on Yelp have both negative and positive reviews. These businesses realize that both kinds of feedback provide authenticity and value. Running a good business is hard; filing a lawsuit is easy. While we haven’t seen the suit in question, we will dispute it aggressively.

The class action lawsuit comes mere weeks after Yelp took a large investment from Elevation Partners, and months after we reported the company walked away from a $550 million Google acquisition deal.

(Image via Gawker)

According to the FCC, about 93 million Americans don't use fast, broadband Internet, citing cost and complexity as a factor in their refusal to enter the 20th century. The study, below, found that 80 million adults and 13 million children either still use dial-up or don't use the Internet at all at home, suggesting that either the survey methodology might be flawed or we're in serious trouble.

Facebook has been doing background checks, known as due diligence, on the location-based social network Loopt, a source with knowledge of the talks tells us. Generally speaking, due diligence of this kind is only performed when a company is in acquisition or fundraising talks.

Loopt won’t comment on this story, and a Facebook spokesperson says “As a practical matter, we don’t comment on rumor and speculation.”

There is no indication that Facebook has made an actual offer to buy Loopt at this time, and in fact we don’t even have direct information that negotiations are taking place. But it’s clear that Facebook is at least considering acquiring Loopt, and/or others in this space.

It’s also not clear that Facebook is the only company taking a look at Loopt. Google is also highly interested in the mobile social and location space. Their recent launch of Buzz, which allows check-ins of locations via a mobile device, is just one indication of that.

But Facebook is clearly furthest behind. They have one of the most popular mobile applications but have to date ignored location features and the increasingly popular checking-in at locations via mobile devices. Part of their hesitation is likely due to privacy concerns around disclosing location information, even at the user’s request. But they’ve also clearly just sat on the sidelines as well as the space developed, and recently surged in activity.

It’s time for Facebook to make their move. Jupiter Research recently stated that location based services could generate nearly $13 billion in revenue by 2014. Facebook wants their share of that.

Loopt competitors like Foursquare and Gowalla have the biggest press footprint with mobile location applications, getting lots of attention from the early adopters in Silicon Valley. But Loopt has the most users by far. And they also have longstanding carrier relationships that bring in real revenue.

Loopt was one of the hot location-based networks early on, with founder Sam Altman even getting stage time during the initial App Store unveiling event. But Loopt, like Google’s Latitude, was intially built around the “always-on” idea of location. This is something that hurt it because the iPhone did not allow third-party applications to run in the background. Meanwhile, “check-in” based services like Foursquare and Gowalla grew in popularity. Loopt has since repositioned itself as more of a check-in based service, but despite its large user base, it’s not clear if its users will adapt to this change.

In January, we published a deck Loopt was sending out to potential advertisers pitching them about a new app completely built around the idea of check-in specials. Notably, this app was to be entirely built on top of Facebook’s social graph, utilizing Facebook Connect. This app is an offshoot of GeoGraffiti, a Y Combinator startup that Loopt itself acquired last year.