Accidents can happen an...

Accidents can happen anytime most especially during traffic.Many drivers do not follow traffic rules and regulations causing severe accidents. I hope that the government will conduct a worldwide project to reduce traffic accidents. personal injury attorney

TMB Metro Transit Strik...

We’re on the ground here in Barcelona for the 2012 GSMA Mobile World Congress and are happy to report that, according to the GSMA press release, the planned strike by Metro subway workers has been staved off. An agreement has been reached. The Bus workers, however, are apparently still negotiating. The metro workers from TMB have announced that they have reached agreement with the government and have voted overwhelmingly not to strike. The metro system will operate as normal during the GSMA Mobile World Congress, held 27th February through 1st March 2012. There has not yet been a resolution between the bus workers and the government, and therefore the contingency plans announced at 9:00 am CET on Saturday, 25th February remain in place. The GSMA will update attendees should further information become available. I’m sure there are sighs of relief being heaved by the event organizers and the city government as well. One thing is for sure — it will be much easier to cover the event and bring you the latest news as many events are held off site from the Fira de Barcelona which hosts the main event.

Supreme Court Rules Sea...

The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously decided today to uphold citizens’ Fourth Amendement rights in the GPS tracking case which would have allowed the U.S. government to track a suspects’ cars without a warrant. The court states that the Fourth Amendement’s protection of “persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” extends to vehicles. According to the ruling ( PDF version here ), a warrant is required “[w]here, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area,” including a car. The case stems from a case involving the nightclub owner Antoine Jones, who was sentenced to life in prison for drug dealing before the appeals court overturned the ruling. The government had installed a GPS device on the suspect’s Jeep, which led to his later arrest. The government tracked Jones over four weeks in order as a part of its case proving Jones was distributing cocaine and storing it and money in a suburban house outside Washington D.C. In today’s ruling, five Supreme Court justices, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, and Chief Justice John Roberts, agreed that attaching a GPS to a car would violate a person’s Fourth Amendment rights. The other four justices, led by Samuel Alito, agreed in the Jones judgement itself, saying that the move to attach the GPS violated Jones’ “reasonable expectations of privacy.” All judges agreed that GPS tracking should require warrants, which upheld the appeals court decision. The ruling will have a serious impact on police investigations going forward, as GPS tracking has become a common means of obtaining information on a suspect’s movements. The case had Big Brother -esque implications, however, despite the Justice Department’s argument that the government was not after “24-hour surveillance of every citizen in the U.S.” The idea that the government walk up to your driveway and plant a GPS device (originally a military technology) on your car, had left many with a feeling of unease.

Box’s Next Frontier: Cl...

For Box, 2011 was a huge year in terms of customer acquisition. Box ended the year with 77% of the Fortune 500 using the company’s cloud storage offerings. Procter and Gamble marked one of Box’s largest deployments for the year. While Box is still continuing to focus on cloud solutions for the enterprise in 2012, the company has set its sights on a potentially huge fish for the year—the federal government. Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie tells me that there is a huge opportunity for Box in procuring cloud storage options for government agencies. “There’s going to be a big shift in public sector using cloud services this year,” Levie explains. “With so many agencies having to collaborate with public and other organizations, it’s more efficient to do this in the cloud.” One of the obstacles to offering cloud services to the government are the high security requirements. For example, we’ve seen some of the early security hurdles Google faced with expanding cloud-based Google Apps to government agencies. But Box has recently started ramping up security for cloud storage, making controls more granular and giving IT administrators more control over user functions. It is expected that Box will add even more security and control for compliance with government agencies’ data. Levie says that the company is potentially tapping into the $70 billion market for providing technology and software to the government. Clearly, that’s a huge revenue opportunity for the company. And government agencies seem interested in making a move to the cloud. In November, President Obama has ordered federal agencies to improve their records management, encouraging them to ditch paper-based storage to the cloud. Already, a number of enterprise cloud-services companies are clamoring to appeal to the government for services. Amazon recently launched the GovCloud to provide a secure cloud computing environment for government agencies. IBM, and HP recently won a $250 million private cloud contract. And Salesforce is also eying public sector initiatives to help governments adopt cloud computing. Box is currently serving a number of local and state governments with cloud storage services, says Levie. At the end of the day, he explains, the government is dealing with the exact same problems as the enterprise. And that is an opportunity Box is not going to pass up.

Is Google a Public Comp...

I have been watching from the fringes as people squabble over the new offering from Google “Search Plus Your World”. All I can see that has been accomplished is that the Internet industry press is starting to look less like reporters and more like advocates for whatever constituency they are trying to impress. The worst offender is Apple’s mouthpiece, MG Siegler , who is fully convinced that Apple represents heaven and Google represents the powers of hell and he will tell everyone about it over and over and over. Ridiculous but it is how this has played out. What is really happening is that people are arguing whether Google and its search function should be allowed to operate in a free market sense or should it be “confiscated” by the government through regulation etc so that it can be fair. This is just ridiculous in a supposedly free market environment. For painfully obvious reasons (i.e his own income and influence), Siegler outlines how Apple avoids this mess without ever saying what is actually taking place. That is that, Apple produces a product that people can buy into of their own free will. There is a cost to get there and a barrier to entry. It is free market. Google on the other hand provides a critical service that would make life a bit more difficult (although not impossible since there are competitors like Bing etc which people also like to conveniently forget) that is FREE to the end user (if they have Internet access, of course). There seems to be some confusion around this whole free thing. It really forces common sense and reason to the back seat. You see, everyone seems to be pushing for the government to do everything for them. That’s fine if you want to go there. I am not here to make a political argument. But just because something is free it doesn’t mean that EVERYONE owns it! This is a company’s product / service just like Apple’s iPhone but it is offered to the masses for free. There is only one way to “own” it; buy some freakin’ Google stock! From a business perspective though, the government should not be involved in what Google has done here with Search Plus Your World. Not at all, but people like Siegler keep yelling into their megaphone that the government will be looking into the apparent injustice that Google is perpetrating on the unsuspecting world at large. His cries will get the attention of headline hungry politicians so it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice work, MG. He even veils it in a conspiracy theory that this is part of some master plan to drag Facebook before the government before their IPO but I’m not buying that. What is really happening is that the idea of the open Internet actually is impossible to achieve in a free market. Why? Because if it were truly open then the big players of Google, Twitter and Facebook would be openly sharing their data with each other because everyone benefits. Guess what? That idea is BS because the only reason that Facebook and Twitter are not being used as true social signals by Google (meaning all data is available to the likes of Google to give people social influenced search results) is money. The guess is, Twitter wanted more than Google would pay for the access to the Twitter firehose so that went away. This happens in the free market. Companies have a right to pay what they feel is the fair amount for something and Google plus Twitter have made their positions clear so they are not doing business. Free market. Facebook doesn’t share their info with Google but they do with Bing because of their choice to be in bed with Microsoft. Once again, free market. They made a choice in business relationships and as a result Google has limited access to Facebook information to formulate a social influence result set based on their data. Really this is all a big joke. Why can’t we just get off the bandwagon that Google owes the world something? It gives the world something, it does it well and it is rewarded handsomely for a good service that is needed. It is doing it in a completely unique environment that we have no precedent for as well. If you asked the average guy on the street as to whether or not he gives a rip that Google makes a lot of money providing its service and if they think they should be limited in what they provide as a result, most would look at you cross-eyed and say “I could care less. I just want to search the Internet”. Then ask that person about social signals and the vast majority of the world (which Silicon Valley doesn’t have a single clue about) would once again say they will take what they can get for free as long as it works well enough to help them do what they want to do. In other words, this whole argument is happening at a level that the public, the majority, isn’t even involved in. This is a real funny thing that is going on here because the 1% are turning on their own! The average person cares about being able to search the Internet and get good information for free. They could care less about how much a company makes doing it. The people that “care” about this the most are the ones that will profit from it like Silicon Valley, the Siegler’s of the world, politicians and the like. It’s that simple.In the end this has nothing to do with something that is for the better good. It’s for the good of the 1%. Pretty ironic considering the usually liberal angle of the Internet set! This argument gets very circular and tiresome very quickly so I will be quiet for now. I wish opportunists like Siegler would go on radio silence as well. Now that would be heaven. Guess what? Ain’t gonna happen.