Insurance, the bump on our way to robot cars

By Peter Nowak - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Having had the sublime pleasure of riding in a robot car a few years ago (and writing about it again recently), it was with great interest that I read the cover story in the latest issue of Wired. The article is all about robot cars – how not just Google, but all auto makers are close to making self-driving vehicles a reality.

The story, which doesn’t appear to be online yet, covered a good number of fascinating angles, from the technology being used to the potential changes we’ll face when robot cars fully arrive. One intriguing possibility is that the entire notion of car ownership may change. If we can simply order up a car on our smartphone that then drives itself to our front door, what need would we have to actually own one?

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The most influential brand in Canada? Microsoft.

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

Polling firm Ipsos Reid recently picked Canadians’ brains on who they think are the most influential brands in the country. The pollster compiled a list of 100 brands, which included the brands that spend the most on advertising in Canada every year–plus a few well-known names that don’t spend much at all, like Twitter, but that Ipsos researchers thought were influential nonetheless. Brand names could be those of corporations, like Microsoft, products, like the BlackBerry, and sometimes both (like Google and Youtube). Then Ipsos asked every one of 1,000 adult responders to rank ten out of the 100 selected brands, so that, in the end, every brand had been rated 100 times, Ipsos president of market research Steve Levy told Maclean’s.

The results? Stunning.

The most influential brand in Canada turned out to be none other than Microsoft, which beat out traditionally cooler competitors Google (which came in second) and Apple (fourth). Could it be that Canadian consumers are already well aware that Microsoft is finally coming back–or, as Businessweek put it, Steve Ballmer is no longer Mr. Monkey Boy?

And the BlackBerry? Nowhere to be found in the top 10.

For more on the Ipsos Influence Index Study, click here.

There’s no easy way out for RIM

By Jesse Brown - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 1:23 PM - 0 Comments

Trendsetter/Flickr

Now is the time for all the armchair CEOs to tell Thorsten Heins how to do his job.

RIM must focus on software and kiss developers’ asses. RIM must focus on hardware and create a SuperPhone. RIM must make a better tablet. RIM must ditch tablets entirely. RIM must stop trying to look cool and focus on business clients. RIM must get cool and target hip young clients. Opinions are like smartphones–every pundit has one.

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The day the Net stood still

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments

Yesterday’s SOPA protest changed everything or nothing, depending on who you ask.

Wikipedia went dark, as did Reddit and many smaller sites.  Google stayed live, but presented U.S. visitors with the above–a chilling break from the usual whimsical “Google Doodle.”  Hundreds of millions of people who knew little about SOPA, learned of it.  Lawmakers got the message, and many withdrew their support for the ham-fisted and technologically illiterate anti-piracy law. The bill itself may not be completely dead, but it’s pretty damn close.  Beyond the direct issue at hand, many regarded the event as a watershed in American politics.  SOPA-critic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren said:

“This is an important moment in the Capitol. Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.”

On the other hand, maybe nothing changed at all. The Obama administration had already publicly trashed SOPA, and the bill’s chances were shaky at best. The disappearance of Wikipedia for a day led to many jokes about factually incorrect homework assignments, but we all somehow got by. And sure, millions of people signed petitions or changed their Twitter picture, but such “slacktivism” is easily dismissed–what’s a disgruntled mouse click worth, anyhow?

It can be worth plenty–plenty of money, and plenty of votes.  The SOPA backlash was nothing less than America’s digital spring. The Internet flexed its muscle, and Washington flinched.  The people now know what a little slacktivism can do, and so do their representatives.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

How porn parodies avoid copyright restrictions

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 marked an intriguing confluence of events. No, it’s not some sort of Mayan end-of-the-world situation, but it is the day on which Wikipedia, Google and a number of other big websites posted the Stop Online Piracy Act. It was also the day on which the Adult Entertainment Expo kicked off in Las Vegas.

How on Earth are the two related? Bear with me.

I’ve written before about how SOPA has the potential to kick off the equivalent of an Internet Cold War. If enacted, the legislation would give U.S. authorities power to block certain websites. The target would be file-sharing enablers such as the Pirate Bay, but could also encompass other undesirable websites, which historically has meant porn. But that’s not the tree I’m barking up today.

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SOPA critics are ready for a showdown

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 9:44 AM - 0 Comments

americancensorhip.org

For background on this potentially Internet-breaking bill, see my last post on the subject. 

How much does the Internet hate America’s proposed Stop Online Piracy Act? A LOT.

In anticipation of a congressional hearing on the bill on Thursday, online activists are mobilizing in a big way: Continue…

Feuds: fightin’ words

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; CP; iStock; Corbis; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Environmentalists Vs. Keystone XL Pipeline

Environmentalists and anti-oil sands groups managed to delay U.S. government approval of a $7-billion, 2,736-km pipeline that would carry oil from Alberta to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Though pipelines are normally nothing to get excited about, TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline was singled out by those unhappy with U.S. energy policy and Canada’s development of the oil sands, a carbon-intensive source of crude. Protesters ranged from Hollywood celebrities like Robert Redford and left-leaning luminaries like Naomi Klein to concerned ranchers and residents along the pipeline’s proposed route.

Google Vs. Apple

The battle for control of the ballooning smartphone market got personal as Google’s open-source operating system, Android, overtook Apple’s iOS, which runs the iPhone. Steve Jobs, Apple’s late CEO, told his official biographer the search-engine giant didn’t play fair and accused Google of “grand theft” of the iPhone concept (among more colourful language). Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who once sat on Apple’s board, responded by saying “the Android effort started before the iPhone effort.”

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Why not searching on Google is stupid

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 4:37 PM - 0 Comments

Alain Bachellier/Flickr

Last week, I had the honour of speaking at the Online Educa conference in Berlin, an annual meeting of education professionals that this year attracted 2,000 visitors from more than 100 countries. Conference organizers have put up a video of my speech, which was about how food technology is driving economic growth in the developing world and, as a consequence, the collective demand for education there.

I also had the pleasure of participating in a debate on technological developments and their effects on privacy and learning. My teammate Peter Bowers, a teacher in the U.K., and I had the task of arguing against the following statement:

This house expresses its concern about the effect developments in technology are increasingly having on personal liberty and believes this will have serious consequences for learning in the future.

On Thursday, before the debate, I wrote about how I thought the statement was indefensible; that technology enabled liberty and therefore learning like no other force on the planet. While true, the debate was ultimately quite lively and resulted in an almost even split among the audience. Alas, our side lost by a narrow margin.

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SOPA, a U.S. bill that could “break the Internet”

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 5:39 PM - 0 Comments

American Censorship

By now you may have heard of SOPA–the Stop Online Piracy Act–an anti-infringement bill that’s working it’s way through the U.S. House of Representatives while its companion bill PIPA–Protect Intellectual Property Act–makes its way through the Senate. Opposition to the legislation has gone viral, with over a million emails hitting Congress, carrying the phrase “Don’t Break the Internet.”

These people’s beef? There are many. A tentative summary: Critics argue that, in their desire to curb piracy, SOPA and PIPA will in effect render the Internet itself legally untenable by holding search engines, ISPs and user-generated content sites responsible for other people’s piracy. The proposed legislation targets not just infringers, but anyone suspected of being associated with them–advertisers, payment sites, even those who just link to them. With their shaky understanding of technology, the bills will potentially result in entire websites (like say, Wikipedia) being blocked due to infringements found in a small section of them. Though the bills were not designed to be censorship legislation, censorship could be the outcome, as false positives and false infringement claims could block access to millions of non-infringing sites. Before things even get to that stage, self-censorship will chill voices online that simply can’t risk possibly transgressing the bills’ overly general language. Meanwhile, censorship-circumvention tools like TOR, used to evade Net-censors in Iran and China, will be rendered illegal, as such tools can also be used to gain access to pirated content.

The effects of SOPA and PIPA will be felt throughout the world, as the way the bill defines “U.S. websites” is so broad as to cover most of the Internet itself. The list of collateral damage the bills are feared to cause goes on, and the list of the bills’ critics keeps expanding. In addition to the million+ citizens who have spoken out, the legislation is also opposed by tech companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla, Wikimedia, and, yes, even Microsoft.

Here’s what people are saying about SOPA and PIPA:

“The definitions written in the bill are so broad that any U.S. consumer who uses a website overseas immediately gives the U.S. jurisdiction the power to potentially take action against it.”
-Art Bordsky of Public Knowledge

“…this aggressive U.S. approach… simply asserts jurisdiction over millions of Canadian registered IP addresses and domain names.”
-Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law

“It’ll have a stifling effect on venture capital. No one would invest because of the legal liability.”
-Internet entrepreneur Lukas Biewald, founder of Crowdflower

“This is just another case of Congress doing the bidding of powerful lobbyists—in this case, Hollywood and the music industry, among others.”
-Fortune Magazine

“…this would mean the end of the Internet as we know it.”
-Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)

“This bill cannot be fixed; it must be killed.”
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Payday loans go high-tech

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

When the Jenga tower of the American housing market toppled in 2008, subprime loans became a dirty concept. But the subprime lending sector was never just about risky mortgages. And the business of getting money to the less-than-middle class remains robust.

One of the newer entrants to that field is ZestCash, an online American start-up that aims to get small loans to borrowers with poor credit. Founded by Douglas Merrill, a former chief information officer at Google, ZestCash defines itself by what it claims not to be, a payday loan company. Payday loan merchants don’t usually discriminate. Built into their business model is the idea that many borrowers will default. ZestCash, which currently operates in four states but may expand in the new year, has a different model. They aim to judge potential customers by their online signatures. In the same way Amazon recommends books and Google orders search results, ZestCash computers can figure out if you’re a good bet to pay back your loan. Sonya Boralv, Merrill’s wife and the communications chief for the company, says even the amount of time a customer spends on the ZestCash website—testing different options, toying with different rates—can be a signal of how likely they are to default.

So far, according to the company, the model is working. ZestCash default rates are about half those in the payday loan market generally, says Boralv. Annualized, the company’s interest rates still far exceed those offered by credit cards or bank loans. But the lower default rate lets ZestCash offer better terms and a more forgiving structure than traditional payday loan houses. (Borrowers spread payments on loans over a set term.) Overall, the cost of a ZestCash loan can be as much as 50 per cent less than a similar payday loan, says Boralv.

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Are we ready for driverless cars?

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Cole Garside/Maclean's

The implication, of course, is that they don’t trust us. Why build a car that commandeers the brakes and wheel if not to eliminate that pesky statistical variable known as “human error”—which is to say, the fallibility that makes us all kin? The sooner we accept this truth the better: in Canada alone, 2,100 people die in traffic accidents each year. Fully 90 per cent of accidents are attributed to driver error.

But there’s something about piloting an automobile that stirs the inner irrationalist, which might explain the glee YouTube viewers have taken in video captured during a recent car safety demonstration in Gothenburg, Sweden. The exhibition was supposed to show off the vaunted “city safety” feature on Volvo’s S60 sedan, which applies brakes automatically in the event of an imminent crash.

Instead, a dais full of journalists was treated to the spectacle of the shiny, orange sedan plowing headlong into the back of a strategically placed transport trailer, then bouncing back after impact with its windshield wipers flapping ridiculously. Erik Coelingh, technical leader of Volvo’s so-called “active safety” program, recently told Maclean’s that the braking system had failed due to lack of power from an improperly charged battery. But there was no avoiding the tsunami of ridicule this sort of footage tends to elicit. “What’s the problem here?” snickered one Web commenter. “It came to a complete stop, no?”

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South Sudan makes it onto Google maps

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Sudan, once Africa’s largest country, gained independence in 1956. It has been breaking apart, in one way or another, almost every day since. This summer, the two largest parts of the country finally split for good. After decades of bloody civil war, South Sudan became its own nation on July 9. Recognition for the fledgling oil giant was swift, at least in some circles. The United Nations and the African Union accepted South Sudan’s membership without delay. But another, arguably equally powerful body, lagged a little behind. For months after independence, South Sudan remained a non-entity on Google Maps. Other online cartographers, including Yahoo and Bing, also ignored the new state.

Those slights didn’t sit well with John Tanza Mabusu, a South Sudanese native who works as a journalist in Washington. This summer, Mabusu started an online petition to try to pressure the digital firms into recognizing his homeland. “My people of South Sudan have endured 50 years of bitter conflict,” Mabusu wrote. Google, for one, responded swiftly. By late September, South Sudan was appearing on its eponymous site. The other tech giants, though, have yet to recognize the change. But after waiting decades for a country, one imagines the people of South Sudan can live with a little online lag.

Welcome to the Internet. No kids allowed

By Jesse Brown - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 3:50 PM - 2 Comments

If you’re under 13, you’re not allowed on Facebook.

That’s not the command of a strict parent—it’s Facebook policy. It also happens to be U.S. law. Thanks to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, it’s illegal for websites to collect the personal data of anyone under 13 without parental consent. Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to fight this law, but for now, Facebook won’t let you sign up unless you state your age as 13 or over, regardless of which country you live in.

Of course, Facebook is just one of the sites kids aren’t supposed to use. Just about every commercial website has small print in their TOU (Terms of Use) limiting access to those legally able to enter into binding contracts. In Canada, as in most countries, this means ages 18 and up. So if you’re a teenager who follows the rules, you can’t tweet, you can’t watch a YouTube video, and you can’t even run a Google search. Continue…

Caught in Facebook’s net

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of social networking giant Facebook, stepped onstage at a developers’ conference in San Francisco last week and, probably unwittingly, launched into his best Steve Jobs impression. Wearing jeans, sneakers and a grey T-shirt (the Apple Inc. chair favours black turtlenecks, but you get the idea), Zuckerberg took the wraps off a host of new Facebook features while peppering the presentation with Jobs-isms—“really easy” yet “so powerful”—that emphasized just how intuitive and exciting everything about the overhauled Facebook would be.

Except that none of the new features unveiled appear to be either—at least not at first blush. Once a relatively spartan piece of online real estate, users’ profile pages will now display a comprehensive “timeline” of their lives, curated in part by Facebook’s software and by users themselves, while a new window shows exactly what everyone in your network is doing at any given moment (Stephanie likes Peter’s status update, Lisa commented on her photo, Steve is friends with Sharon . . . and so on). Zuckerberg called it a place to monitor “lightweight” activity that threatens to bog down the main news feed, which will now consist entirely of material that is deliberately posted by a user’s friends.

Turns out there’s a reason Facebook decided to create a dedicated space for all of these auto-updates: it plans to unleash a torrent of them on its users. The company is planning to throw TV, streaming music and other online media services into the mix so that users can see, in real time, what songs their friends are listening to, which TV shows they’re watching and what news stories they are reading—and soon, no doubt, where they’re shopping. “What’s even more interesting and exciting than getting people signed up is all the things that are possible by having these connections in place,” said Zuckerberg, who suggested that Facebook and its partners will “rethink some industries.”

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YouTube on TV

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 1 Comment

People have been debating the value of YouTube for years. Some predicted Google wasted billions on something that could never make money. If recent rumours are true, the naysayers may soon be eating their words. The search-engine behemoth has apparently stepped up its efforts to deliver an alternative to cable television. The company is competing against Amazon, Yahoo and Dish Network to acquire Hulu, the online video site owned by Walt Disney, News Corp. and NBC Universal. Google’s initial offer far surpassed those of the other bidders, according to AllThingsD, a technology news website. This could be part of Google’s strategy for acquiring original video content to upload to YouTube, speculated Business Insider, a business blog, which also quoted two anonymous industry sources saying the tech giant is spending as much as $500 million shopping around for premium titles to boost its online video offering. Google also recently bought Motorola Mobility Holdings, which, among other things, makes cable set-top boxes, devices that allow users to access the Web via TV sets.

It’s all proof that the technology giant is gearing up to battle rivals like Netflix and Apple in the race to reinvent television. Its most formidable weapon, industry watchers agree, is YouTube’s unrivalled popularity.

Google’s million-watt search

By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Google’s recent decision to reveal how much energy its data centres use—220 million watts, or about one-quarter the output of a nuclear reactor, according to a New York Times calculation—is being billed by the Mountain View, Calif.-based company as a small price to pay for the convenience of having billions of Web pages at your fingertips, not to mention funny YouTube videos. And it probably is. But the rare disclosure (Google had previously feared giving rivals clues about its internal operations) has also highlighted the degree to which the Internet is not necessarily the “free” service most people think it is. All that information comes with a cost. While the numbers sound big, Google claims the actual cost per user is actually tiny. It says the environmental impact of 100 searches is the same as running a laptop for an hour or turning on a light bulb for 28 minutes. Three days of watching YouTube? That’s the same as manufacturing, packaging and delivering a DVD. However, Google’s accounting of the cost of using Gmail for a year appears a touch self-serving: “less than the energy required to drink a bottle of wine, stuff a message in the bottle and toss it in the ocean.” Is that how we’re supposed to imagine a Google-less world?

High-flying CEOs

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Charlotte Southern/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Richard Branson, the swashbuckling CEO of Virgin Group, once crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a speedboat. He’s crossed the Atlantic and Pacific by hot air balloon, too, and recently announced plans to explore the ocean’s deepest points in a custom-built submarine. Branson also likes to fly airplanes—something he apparently has in common with Larry Ellison of Oracle and Eric Schmidt of Google—which could say a lot about his management style. According to a new study, a CEO who enjoys the adrenalin rush of flying private planes is more likely to be a bold, risk-taking leader, and Branson seems to be a case in point: after all, he launched space tourism company Virgin Galactic, which calls itself the world’s first spaceline.

In the study, finance professors Stephen McKeon of the University of Oregon and Matthew Cain of the University of Notre Dame searched the Federal Aviation Administration’s certification database and other records; using this, they then compared 179 corporate executives who hold private pilots’ licences to 2,900 non-pilot CEOs. (Branson wasn’t included in the study, because it only looked at public companies.) Interestingly, none of the pilot CEOs they identified were women.

“The question is, does personal risk-taking outside the scope of the firm translate into corporate policy?” McKeon asks, and they concluded that the answer is yes. “It turns out pilot CEOs are more likely to make acquisitions in any given year,” he says, and are more likely to take on debt. Overall, pilot CEOs seem to be more aggressive in their corporate policies, and to be strong and effective leaders.

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Hey Google! We’re over here!

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 4:39 PM - 3 Comments

The words ‘Google’ and ‘Canada’ have been bumping into each other recently, in ways both good and bad for the search giant.

*Last week Google bought off the Big Pharma guard dog known as the U.S. government, which the search giant had rankled by letting online Canadian pharmacies advertise cheap prescription drugs to Americans. While Google hoped the settlement would be the end of the matter, they may not be so lucky. One of their own investors is suing the board claiming the company neglected its fiduciary duty in allowing the ads to run. Continue…

Google pours fuel on the UBB fire with movie rentals

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 12:35 PM - 1 Comment

jonsson/Flickr

Just when all was quiet on the usage-based Internet billing front, here comes Google to stir the pot again. The company on Wednesday launched YouTube movie rentals in Canada, which should make a nation of already prodigious online video consumers even more ravenous devourers of bandwidth.

Google launched YouTube movie rentals in the United States on a limited basis in January 2010, then got serious about it a few months ago by adding thousands of titles. The Canadian launch is its first international expansion, according to Google Canada spokesman Aaron Brindle.

As with all similar services available in Canada, this one comes with a bunch of caveats. The selection will be fairly limited, with just over a thousand movies from the catalogs of Warner Bros. and Universal, and Canadian studios E1, Mongrel and Alliance Atlantis. The films are also only offered in standard definition, as per the studios’ wishes, and will carry a $1 premium compared to what they cost in the U.S.: $4.99 for new releases and $3.99 for older titles. Continue…

Google launches movie rental service in Canada

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 12:25 PM - 1 Comment

Google Inc. is launching a YouTube-based movie rental service in Canada, putting the corporation in direct competition with Netflix—the service that offers unlimited access to thousands of films and television shows for a flat monthly fee of approximately 8 dollars. YouTube movies, like Netflix, has a limited selection of new Hollywood content—though sources say the Canadian version of YouTube movies has more Hollywood titles than the Canadian Netflix service. Google has made deals with Canadian studios, such as Mongrel and Alliance, in addition to other American production companies in order to effectively monetize YouTube—the third most visited website on the internet.

The Globe and Mail

Don’t underestimate Apple’s contributions

By Peter Nowak - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:07 AM - 4 Comments

Photo by Tony…/Flickr

I’m back from my short vacation and what’s the first thing I see? A character assassination attempt by my fellow blogger Jesse Brown.

Just kidding. I have nothing but respect for Jesse and love his stuff (his interview a few years back with Jim Prentice, where the industry minister hung up on him, is one of my all-time favourites). He messaged me while I was gone to ask if I was okay with him rebutting my blog post the other day about Steve Jobs and Apple’s importance to technology over the past decade. Of course I was, so he had at it.

To summarize, Jesse challenged my assertions that Apple changed everything with a slew of products that included the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad. He went on to say that Google has been the far more important technology company over the past 10 years. Continue…

AOL struggles to reinvent itself

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Reuters/Brendan McDermi

A decade ago, AOL was one of the most promising firms in the online world. Tens of millions of North American users relied on its dial-up Internet access services and came to know its trademark greeting, “You’ve got mail!” Today, its future appears murky as the former giant tries to claw back into the fold as a major Internet presence.

The company took a walloping on the stock market last week when its shares fell almost 26 per cent, hitting their lowest point since AOL ended its disastrous merger with Time Warner in December 2009. The sell-off occurred after it released second-quarter earnings, which showed total revenues were down eight per cent over last year. In response to the hit in share value, the company approved a scheme to buy up US$250 million of its own shares.

The market shellacking was a major blow for a company that’s been fighting for the past year to reinvent itself as a new media firm. It bought the news website the Huffington Post for US$315 million in February and the tech website TechCrunch last year. After installing Arianna Huffington as the head of its new Huffington Post Media Group, AOL opened several new websites—17 during the last quarter alone. AOL now boasts nearly 10 million unique visitors to its websites every month. That’s more than the New York Times, according to the company’s CEO, Tim Armstrong.

Continue…

Google wants to see your papers

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 12:17 PM - 8 Comments

Earlier this month, Google+ kicked a geeky hornet’s nest by suspending the accounts of users registered under pseudonyms and nicknames. The angry reaction to their Facebook-like “real names” policy was unsurprising, considering the tech-centric early-adopter types who currently populate the nascent social network. I don’t want to call the Google+ crowd (of which I am a member) nerdy, but let’s just say that more than a few users would rather be known as “Lord Voldemort” than whatever happens to be printed on their birth certificates.

Speaking of those birth certificates, Google would like to see them.  When suspended users complained to Google, they were given ‘review’ forms. If you insist that “BonerKing” is your ‘common name,’ Google will ask you for government-issued ID to prove it:

We have reviewed your appeal and need more information in order to verify that the name entered [ __ ] is your common name.

Please reply to this email with a copy of your government issued ID, which we will dispose of after review.

Critics of the policy brought up numerous people for whom pseudonyms are perfectly reasonable and necessary, such as women with abusive exes or stalkers, government employees forbidden from using their real names on social networks, gay teens who are out online but not at home, and so on. (As an aside, wouldn’t the entire online dating industry cease to exist if ‘real name’ policies were standardized?)

The debate has come to be known as the #Nymwars, just in case additional proof of the disgruntled users’ geekery was needed. As it rages, Google has sprinkled fuel on the fire by introducing a “Verified” account system, similar to the one used on Twitter. Some team at Google now has the job of contacting every “Lady Gaga” on the network to find out if one of them is actually her highness Stefani Germanotta.

The move raises new questions: Lady Gaga, after all, is not the name on Ms.Germanotta’s government-issued ID. So why does she get to use her nickname when the rest of us cannot? Because she’s a celebrity, stupid. But since when does Google care about celebrities? And isn’t there something weird about Google demanding to see our ID under any circumstance?

It may not be ‘evil’ per se, but it sure does feel a bit…unGoogly. I have an interview request in with the search giant, who have been remarkably open with and responsive to me in the past. I hope to share their thinking on these policies in an upcoming post.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Update:  Google initially granted me an interview on this, and then nixed it without explanation. 

Is Googorola anti-competitive? Not at all.

By Peter Nowak - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 10:16 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by laihiu/Flickr

Google kicked this week off with a bang with a surprise announcement that it was acquiring cellphone maker Motorola for $12.5 billion, a huge move that will boost the search engine company’s employee headcount by 60%. As Google CEO Larry Page explained in a blog post, it’s a defensive move to acquire patents, a particular problem area for the company that I wrote about earlier.

Patent issues aside, one of the other main aspects many have focused on is that the deal is likely to alienate Google’s other mobile partners. HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and a few others who use Google’s free Android operating system will now find themselves competing directly against the maker of that software. Some are even speculating that the acquisition could become an antitrust issue. Continue…