Google grew from Stanford engineering

In Google's office above a bike shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto, Mayer met with the founders and employee No. 1, Craig Silverstein, as well a Stanford doctoral student. They grilled Mayer on the engineering required to apply artificial intelligence and other techniques to improve Internet search. Impressed by the tough questions, Mayer thought it was a great possibility to stretch herself professionally, and to learn.

The founders began their enterprise in 1998 with the support of advisers and Stanford computer science professors like Winograd, Garcia-Molina, Jeff Ullman and the late Rajeev Motwani, as so then as business guidance and investment from computer science Professor David Cheriton and alumnus and Sun Microsystems co-founder Andreas Von Bechtolsheim.

Google has become not only the dominant company in web search, nevertheless has as well made major strides in digitizing information in the physical world and geographic products just as Google Earth, Google Maps and StreetView. In acquiring YouTube, Google became a major clearinghouse of online videos. Gmail is the email vendor of choice for millions, and Google's Android is now a ubiquitous smart-phone operating system.

The company's breadth and scale have led to vast innovation interests, opening new doors for interaction with Stanford faculty and students. Over the last decade, Spector noted, Google has supported in broad outline 40 projects at Stanford in a wide variety of innovation areas and even social sciences, just as political science and Internet law.

Among the projects Google is supporting now, Spector said, is the Clean Slate Design for the Internet, a sweeping endeavor led by electrical engineering and computer science Professor Nick McKeown to rethink the infrastructure of inter-computer and inter-network as then as mobile Internet communications. Given that every query submitted to Google is handled by a "cloud" of servers distributed widely across the Internet and, as Mayer pointed out in her eDay speech, it's all done in about 0.2 seconds, Google is intensely curious about wringing greater performance out of networks.

Another current project, led by electrical engineering and computer science Associate Professor Christos Kozyrakis, seeks advances to make computing more energy-efficient. Assistant Professor Fei-Fei Li, in exchange, has Google's support for a project analyzing the content of images.

Google's support for the school is not always directed to a specific research problem. In 2009, the company gave $2.5 million to endow a School of Engineering professorship in memory of Motwani, who died in an accident. Computer science Professor Daphne Koller is the first to hold the professorship, which is designated for faculty members who, like Motwani, are developing fundamental technologies with important applications.

The agency in charge of the world's Internet addresses on Thursday appointed veteran hacker Jeff Moss to be its chief of security.

Want to store your digital songs, movies, TV shows, books and video games on a computer or mobile device? No problem. The real trick these days is pushing all that content onto the Internet so it can follow you from device ...

Sony is being sued in US court by gamers irked by news that a hacker cracked PlayStation Network defenses and pilfered data that could potentially be used for fraud or identity theft.

(AP) -- Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc., the maker of cellphones and cable set-top boxes that split off from the rest of Motorola in January, said Thursday that it narrowed its loss in the first quarter as ...

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CoroWare Announces Freeswitch Interface for Billing Integration Framework

CoroWare Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of CoroWare, Inc., today announced availability of CoroWare Billing Integration Frameworkâ?¢ for Metanga and Freeswitch, a software solution that integrates Metanga, a subscription-based billing from MetraTech Corp, and Freeswitch, a scalable open source telephony platform designed interconnect audio, video, text or any other form of communications media.

Service providers that want to launch a Freeswitch communications service with a choice to offer usage based billing require a billing integration solution that can be customized to interoperate with existing infrastructure components, easily modified to meet their dynamically changing business needs, and rapidly deployed in an efficient and cost effective manner.

The CoroWare Billing Integration Framework for Metanga and Freeswitch combines MetraTech's highly scalable usage-based billing system with Freeswitch's communications platform. This powerful solution is an affordable and effective way for service providers to effectively monetize their voice over IP communications services as they evolve to meet the demands of rapidly changing business models, pricing plans, and customer requirements.

Built upon Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 platform, CoroWare Billing Integration Framework for Metanga and Freeswitch processes call detail records -- including the number of inbound and outbound calls, and session minutes -- and conveys the processed usage data to the Metanga billing platform. Service providers may at that time customize billing rules, reports and payment details, effectively lowering operational costs when compared to traditional, billing systems.

CoroWare's approach provides cross platform interoperability that allows service providers to utilize "best in class" Business Support Systems components throughout their infrastructure architecture. Service providers can take advantage of many open approaches to solving their BSS needs without being limited by their billing system.

"Combined with Freeswitch and Metanga, CoroWare's billing mediation solution can help service provider deploy an affordable, flexible and powerful solution for generating profitable VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service earnings," said Rob Raymond, business unit manager of CoroWare. "This solution offering furthermore expands CoroWare's range of products and services for enterprise and service provider clients worldwide."

CoroWare Billing Integration Framework for MetraTech and Freeswitch is available today on the Microsoft Windows and SQL Server platform.

About FreeswitchFreeswitch is a scalable open source cross-platform telephony platform designed to route and interconnect popular communication protocols using audio, video, text or any other form of media. It was created in 2006 to fill the void left by proprietary commercial solutions. Freeswitch as well provides a stable telephony platform on which many telephony applications can be developed using a wide range of free tools.

About CoroWareHeadquartered in Kirkland, Washington, CoroWare is a solutions integrator with expertise in affordable telepresence, service oriented business applications, and mobile robotics. Since 2009, CoroWare has delivered HD videoconferencing solutions and services to clients worldwide in Europe, Asia, and North America. For more information on CoroWare's products and services, please visit www.coroware.com.

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Android Crapware, Hidden Chrome Settings

Readers offer their best tips for uninstalling crapware on rooted Android phones, finding hidden settings in Chrome, and using mobile phone size headsets with your computer.

On a rooted phone, Titanium Backup can taking everything into consideration uninstall a system app without much issue. For those cases where it can’t, there’s another solution.

So, first you’ll want to find where in the system the system app is located. For my example, I’ll use Twitter for Android. On my phone and ROM, it was located in /Data/App.

Then you’ll enter rm -rf com.twitter.android.apk where com.twitter.android.apk is the apk of your choosing. This is the delete command with the recursive delete flag as so then as the force delete flag.

Enter reboot and you should see your phone reboot. Once rebooted, the app which you deleted should no longer be there. You may have a garbage icon, however all you have to do is delete it and it shouldn’t give you any grief.

For those with a wired Xbox 360 controller and the Xbox headset, I found out you can plug it into your computer and at the time Windows recognises it as a headset for making VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls. It works great with Gmail calling. It even has a hardware switch to mute the microphone.

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CenturyLink expands role with Savvis

CenturyLink of Monroe, which just completed a $12 billion acquisition of Qwest Communications to become the third largest telecommunications company in the U.S., announced Wednesday it will buy Savvis Inc. for $2.5 billion in cash and stock.

"This accelerates our entry into the sector," Post said in an interview with The News-Star. "It's a unparalleled growth possibility and a natural then and there step afterwards Qwest. Many of our enterprise business clients want and need the kind of data hosting and cloud computing that we can provide moreover effectively with Savvis."

"The Savvis integration will be much more straight forward," he said. "It will operate as a separate business segment, which will reduce integration issues."

The integrated hosting business will be based in St. Louis and led primarily by key members of the Savvis leadership team, including Savvis CEO James Ousley, who will head the unit. Afterwards closing the transaction, CenturyLink will employ in broad outline 50,000 people.

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The advanced carrier service IP Multimedia Subsystem

Although the advanced carrier service IP Multimedia Subsystem, or IMS, has been a buzzword within the industry for some time now, there are many compelling reasons for carriers to move to this architecture. Some of these include: a single common platform for delivering voice and multimedia services to both fixed and mobile endpoints, lower network operational costs through managing just a single infrastructure, and a platform capable of rapid innovative service deployment.

For a better understanding of this architecture and its benefits to carriers, MetaSwitch’s white paper, titled "An Introduction to IMS: The Innovation and The Motivation," gives a good introduction to IMS and explores some common reasons for adopting IMS as an advanced carrier service.

According to the MetaSwitch white paper, one of the most compelling reasons to deploy IMS is that it can provide a common platform for delivering voice and multimedia services to a mix of fixed and mobile endpoints. Service providers who today offer both mobile and fixed line services may use a common shared transport infrastructure, however are typically not able to achieve convergence at the services layer. Class 5 switches deliver services to fixed lines, during Mobile Switching Centers deliver services to mobile phones, and these are completely separate network components.

Enhanced services may be provided by Intelligent Network techniques, however fixed and mobile networks use different and incompatible IN protocols, in doing so they cannot share the same enhanced services platform either. It is possible to develop advanced carrier services that bridge both worlds, yet such solutions are expensive to develop since they need to talk to two sets of protocols.

IMS addresses this problem by providing unification of fixed and mobile voice and multimedia services, according to the white paper. Unlike physical access network technologies that are used by fixed and mobile endpoints, IMS is in substance independent of the type of network access used. Because IMS is 100 percent IP, with all signaling based on SIP, a common set of infrastructure elements including HSS and Application Servers can serve any mix of fixed and mobile endpoints.

With IMS, it is possible to deploy rich, high-value advanced carrier services just as hosted business voice to both fixed endpoints and mobile endpoints without having to make any service-related distinction between them, the white paper states.

Furthermore, the paper highlights the special capabilities of SIP, just as forking, which allows a user to have a fixed phone and mobile phone with the same phone number without having to do anything special to support this in the network. As well, SIP signaling in the IMS network could provide a means to converge SMS and Instant Messaging services with the integration of presence information across any mix of fixed and mobile phones.

Another motivation for IMS is that it can provide a unifying architecture that supports all of the different strands of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) based network modernization with a single, consistent approach. The HSS provides a single repository of data about all subscribers, so there is only one place in the network to go to add new subscribers and to define what services a subscriber gets.

Finally, IMS provides a comprehensive blueprint for voice and multimedia telephony in 4G mobile networks, addressing all of the key issues just as roaming and the management of Quality of Service and bandwidth allocation in the access network, concludes the MetaSwitch paper.

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The centralised voice discussion

The voice environment is one in other words critical to business and has been for many years. As a result, organisations are constantly looking to find ways of making voice run more cost-effectively from an internal perspective, first with networking, by running pipes between branches to physically connect them, and at that time with voice over IP research.

The issue that crept in with networking was once again that of bandwidth, as it has been historically too expensive to dedicate bandwidth solely to voice traffic. Added to this was the cost of duplicating equipment in every branch and office, and the trouble of networking different brands at the same time, which happened with limited success.

"Centralisation ultimately involves one telephone number for the whole company, with one receptionist. Centralised administration will be put into place as a result, so only one IT manager is needed at the head office, who can manage branches remotely, and there is only one set of SLAs around the voice environment for the entire organisation, so managing this becomes a far simpler task," adds Bryant Dennis, co-owner of Converged Telecoms, a Webcom Group partner.

While talk of centralisation has grown over the last few years, cost remains the biggest stumbling block as a lot of big brand solutions are incredibly bandwidth hungry, and from a hardware perspective the environment itself can be complex and costly to implement. But, innovation, as always, is evolving and solutions are beginning to chew up less bandwidth than earlier, as much as 90% less than before, making this type of solution a more viable and realistic option than earlier.

This model is particularly beneficial in South Africa as head offices tend to be based in Gauteng, which is as well the innovation hub of the country and as a result where all of the technical resources reside. Centralisation at that time has added benefits in that the main system is located in the same region as the people required to manage and maintain it, which once again furthers cost effectiveness as it saves on travel expenses and time for resources.

"Calls can be routed from the central number using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), and with screen-based consoles it is easy to see if people are available on their lines. Fixed mobile extensions even allow for cellular phones and home telephones to form part of the network, enabling true mobile networking through seamless centralised communication."

Developing a business case for centralising the voice environment requires an understanding of specifically what it is the organisation wishes to achieve, as the solution must fit the needs of the organisation.

A multi-branch environment in an organisation that sees the value in the one-number concept is as a rule a good starting point for considering the centralised route, as if these factors are in place it is possible to reduce costs through free internal calls as then as reduce manpower costs, which can deliver significant savings through simplified IT administration.

"At its heart, centralisation takes multiple branches countrywide or even across the globe and joins them at the same time into one entity, saving on manpower costs and administration. It as well has the power to put the innovation where the brains are, and simplifies maintenance as VPN can be used to fix the majority of problems in branch systems," Webster adds.

"Now that the bandwidth issue in South Africa has normally been resolved and research has evolved to use less bandwidth than before, centralisation has become a viable solution in South Africa, and organisations can begin to take advantage of the numerous benefits it delivers," he concludes.

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Use the Cloud to Your Career Advantage

Addressing whether cloud computing will cost IT pros their jobs, Microsoft's Jeff Vance makes a point that I've seen previously: Some jobs will be lost during others will be created.

After Paul Krugman wrote a New York Times piece about the "hollowing out" of the market into low-level and very high-level jobs, however with no middle,  writer Rajan Chandras at InformationWeek made the point that innovation will drive advances in the concept of skilled labor.

This webcast brings at the same time an HR practitioner and two so then-known thought leaders to discuss how HR and business innovation are becoming more user-centric and how it will change the way we derive value and ROI from our workforce.

Define the rules at your company for the proper use of social media platforms just as Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Ensure your users are spending their time productively and company resources are being used for the business.

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UM speaker says lawyers must use social media with caution

An attorney and author of a book on modernizing managementtechniques in law offices warned students, faculty and lawyers onThursday of the inherent ethical dilemmas that can arise in a worldof electronic communication and social media.

Modern research can enhance efficiency and, in one respect,it's a lawyer's obligation to understand and participate in thisincreasingly electronic world, said Roberta Cooper Ramo, the firstwoman elected president of the American Bar Association. At thesame time, it's important to remember client confidentiality andtake the necessary precautions to uphold that responsibility,especially when trying to reduce costs through outsourcing or"cloud computing."

"Do more face-to-face instead of Facebook-to-Facebook," shesaid. "Too much innovation blunts our senses to pain andinjustice."

During Ramo's talk, titled "Ethics for American Lawyers in theAge of Twitter and the Cloud," she expressed astonishment at theconfidential information that some lawyers send in emails and theinformation they post on their Facebook pages. Social media likeTwitter and Facebook and the increasing dependence on electroniccommunication raise ethical issues not earlier encountered byattorneys.

Lawyers have an ethical obligation to stay abreast of thebenefits and risks of using innovation. It's important to know howto file, access cases and obtain rulings electronically. Not onlyis that the way the industry is headed, nevertheless it's more productive insome cases and more economical both to customers and to the firm.

Ramo didn't tell people to put down their BlackBerrys, Droidsand iPhones. Nevertheless she discouraged anyone from using a phone or acomputer that's not password protected because of the potential forprivacy invasions.

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