“Microsoft” leading “google” with a gap of a decade

Microsoft is leading Google with a gap of a  decade. It is said that the place at which Google is today was acquired by Microsoft 10 years before. “Google’s a great company, got some great products, but you know in some respects I think Google is where Microsoft was 7 or 10 years ago”, Peter Cullen, Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist.

“Google had not invested enough to build privacy into its products. Microsoft has over 40 full-time people invested in privacy and over 400 part-time people. Google hasn’t–at least from what I read about them–evolved to that.”

“We think about privacy as part of the core design…We have thought about how to design privacy into the product, as opposed to how to react to the negative impressions,” he commented.

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AMD Will Pass on ‘Netbooks’ for Now

AMD Chief Marketing Officer Nigel Dessau says AMD will pass on the low-cost notebook or netbook market for now, although Web sites are offering interesting details about a low-cost AMD notebook chip. Dessau is also looking to strengthen AMD’s Opteron brand after problems with the quad-core version of the processor.

Advanced Micro Devices is taking a pass on the low-cost notebook market for now, but new marketing chief Nigel Dessau says the chip maker will continue to watch the so-called “netbook” space as it continues to develop.

Dessau, who took over as AMD’s senior vice president and chief marketing office in March, said in a telephone interview AMD is interested in how the low-cost notebook market will develop, but has no immediate plans to offer specific processors for these laptops.

“We are not saying it’s not an important segment and we’re not saying it’s not a growing segment,” Dessau said. “What we are saying is that we are a smaller company and we have to focus on what we do well at this point. We are watching that segment rather than playing in it, but as it matures we’ll see where it goes. At this moment, we are going to focus on what we do best.”

AMD, which has placed an emphasis on processors that are low-cost and use less power, would seem to be well positioned to enter this market with an x86 processor.

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Google providing Olympics updates to mobile phones

Google is doing a great benefit to all the mobile users all over the world by providing them the latest information on Summer Olympics 2008  in Beijing .

Searching for any Olympic sport on Google’s mobile Web site will bring up, in addition to the regular search results that Google would normally offer, a timetable of Olympic schedules and results for that event. The search also works in 35 other languages, and Google has created an additional mobile Web site as a general repository of Olympic information.

When results start to come in, mobile searches for things like “swimming medals” and “French medal count” will bring up relevant Olympic data too.

The Olympics tie-ins are a little bit more extensive on Google’s regular browser search; other search engines, such as Yahoo, are doing something similar. Google is also serving ads on NBC’s online-video coverage of the Olympics using its DoubleClick technology.

If text-based mobile search just isn’t fancy enough for your precious handset, NBC will be serving up mobile video to customers of Verizon’s V-Cast service, thanks to a partnership between the two companies.

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Light compressed by scientists

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang have devised a way to confine light in incredibly small spaces on the order of 10 nanometres or about 100 times thinner than current optical fibres.

To make this happen, the researchers have bound light photons to electrons, which allows them to propagate along the surface of a conductor — a process called surface plasmonics. Simulations showed that not only could the light compress into spaces only tens of nanometres wide, but it could travel distances nearly 100 times greater than by conventional surface plasmonics alone. The compressed light would make smaller optical fibres possible.

The research team’s technique consists of a very thin semiconductor wire placed close to a smooth sheet of silver. The system acts like a capacitor, storing energy between the wire and the metal sheet. As the light travels along the gap, it stimulates the build-up of charges on both the wire and the metal, and these charges allow the energy to be sustained for longer distances.

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