Old news for January 2007

Gates Launches Vista and Office 2007 In New York

Vista
 2007.01.30Microsoft unleashed a marketing blitz across Manhattan and the world Monday to announce that its most important products are available to the masses starting today.
In a spacious hotel suite near Grand Central Station, Chairman Bill Gates seemed at ease, and he smiled frequently during an interview with The Seattle Times on Monday. For good reason. At long last, his company's two biggest products -- Windows Vista and Office 2007 -- are done and on the market. Time to party. And get the sales pitch on.

Google Admits to User Data Disclosure

Google
 2007.01.22Google has confirmed that it unwittingly disclosed sensitive login and password information pertaining to more than a dozen users.
The information was disclosed three weeks ago as part of Google's freely accessible anti-phishing blacklist.
Google said in a written statement that the problem has since been fixed, and that procedures have been put in place to strip login information from future submissions.

Founders of Neteller charged in online gambling

Neteller
 2007.01.18Lefebvre and Lawrence were charged in connection with the creation and operation of an Internet payment services company that facilitated the transfer to billions of dollars of illegal gambling proceeds from U.S. citizens to the owners of overseas Internet gambling companies.
In 1999, the men founded Neteller, which is based in the Isle of Man and is publically traded in the United Kingdom.
The company began processing Internet gambling transactions in approximately July 2000, allowing companies to transfer money from U.S. customers to bank accounts overseas.

Google, Yahoo Gain Share In U.S. Web Search Market

Google
 2007.01.17Google Inc. has increased its share of the U.S. Web search market to 47.4 percent with a gain of 0.4 percent during December, while No. 2 ranked Yahoo Inc. also edged higher, a survey said on Monday.
Web audience measurement firm comScore Networks Inc. said No. 3-ranked Microsoft Corp.'s share slid 0.5 percent to 10.5 percent of U.S. Web searches while IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com's share dipped 0.1 percent to 5.4 percent.
Google has gained share in 16 of the last 17 months in the United States, the world's largest Internet market, according to comScore data.

Yahoo! buys Mybloglog.com

Yahoo
 2007.01.10The Internet portal has purchased Mybloglog.com, an Orlando, Fla.-based website that enables readers of web pages to leave information about themselves, building a social network among fans of such things as News Corp’s MySpace pages, commercial web publications, or personal weblogs, or blogs. Mybloglog also looks at reader behavior inside blogs, like what is being read and where readers go next, delivering information it can sell to web advertisers. 

Google's New Patent - duplicate content detection

Google 2007.01.03A similarity engine generates compact representations of objects called sketches. Sketches of different objects can be compared to determine the similarity between the two objects. The sketch for an object may be generated by creating a vector corresponding to the object, where each coordinate of the vector is associated with a corresponding weight. The weight associated with each coordinate in the vector is multiplied by a predetermined hashing vector to generate a product vector, and the product vectors are summed. The similarity engine may then generate a compact representation of the object based on the summed product vector.