Richard Nicholson

A look back at the week's biggest Google-related news stories:   Apple severs board ties with Google  The final ties have been cut between Apple's and Google's board, with Arthur Levinson (he had been serving as an independent member on both the Apple and Google board of directors) resigning from the Google board. Not to be confused with the Google Books project, but possibly a threat to Amazon.com and other online booksellers.   Google bullish on economy The company posted increases in Q3 revenue and earnings, beating Wall Street expectations. This follows the departure of Google CEO Eric Schmidt from Apple's board in August shortly after Google announced it would be competing head on with Apple in the operating system market with Chrome OS just as it was competing with the iPhone with Android.   Amazon, meet Google Google revealed plans for Google Editions, an online store offering digital books to users of various devices, from e-book readers to laptops and cellphones. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a statement. "While there is a lot of uncertainty about the pace of economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and now feel confident about investing heavily in our future."   Google's cloud security double talk  Computerworld reported that a group called Consumer Watchdog fired off a letter to the head of the Los Angeles City Council's Budget and Finance Committee, claiming that Google was talking out of both sides of its mouth in pitching its Google Apps to the city.

Unfortunately, Google didn't get all the bugs out first.   Google on the prowl for website malware  Google on Monday rolled out a service to help Webmasters identify malware that may have been slipped into their sites. The watchdog group said Google assured the city its cloud-based apps were safe, but separately acknowledged risks in a financial filing with the federal government.   Google Docs get upgraded, but bugs surface  Google pleased users of its Docs offerings by introducing folder sharing, an ability to upload multiple items to Docs simultaneously and by improving the interface. The new tool uses automated scanners to show Webmasters of sites flagged as "unsafe" just what the offending code is.   Google Voice gets friendly Google has started allowing early adopters of Google Voice  to invite friends to join them.   Google's Postini goes on the fritz  Users of the messaging security and archiving service were festering when service problems emerged during the week. For more on Google, visit Network World's independent Google community, Google Subnet. By week's end, Google had fixed the delayed e-mail delivery issues, but some customers were unhappy with a lack of communication on Google's part, Computerworld reports.   Also, here's a look back at the previous week in Google news.

Google is reportedly working to make its settlement with book publishers more palatable to the court, but even if the deal goes through, consumers are likely a long way from getting out-of-print "orphaned" books onto their e-readers. The government and other parties have raised privacy concerns, worrying about Google's observation of what people read. (And not all authors and publishers are satisfied, although their associations signed on to the deal.) But what really has Amazon, Microsoft and other competitors in a tizzy is the part of the settlement that lets Google sell online access and subscriptions to orphaned books. The settlement, in its current state, would allow Google to make large passages of these books, which are in copyright but whose authors can't be found, searchable on the Web. As the e-reader market heats up, Amazon argues, the Google book settlement would create "a cartel of authors and publishers" who could set pricing and availability without restrictions.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice dealt a blow to Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers, saying the settlement between the three parties violates antitrust and copyright laws. These opponents would have a harder time setting up their own market of orphaned materials because they'd have to create an agreement with publishers and authors from scratch, instead of making a settlement in court. The DOJ advised a U.S. District Court not to approve the settlement unless it is modified. Google and its settlement partners are motivated to quickly address the DOJ's concerns, but delays are inevitable. Though the government seems to want the settlement to go through in the end, the slow pace of government and courts means we could be waiting a long time. It seems unlikely that the deal will be approved on October 7, when the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has scheduled a hearing on the matter.

All this could take awhile. All parties must agree to any settlement, and even then, the opponents could still make legal challenges. Maybe it's not all bad. With any luck, Google will start selling the orphaned books just as the e-reader glut hits full swing.

Teradata unveiled a range of data warehousing products and initiatives on Monday, including new public and private cloud deployment options and an upcoming appliance that employs solid-state disks. It employs a free Elastic Mart Builder tool alongside Teradata's workload management software, and is meant to help companies quickly create data marts and analyze information, as well as "control data mart proliferation," Teradata said. The company's new Agile Analytics Cloud is a set of products and services for quickly creating virtualized data marts inside a company's private cloud. Teradata also announced versions of its Teradata Express software for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and VMware Player.

It is meant for use by developers in nonproduction environments. "We want to make it easier for people to develop analytic applications on the Teradata platform," said CTO Stephen Brobst. Teradata Express provides a feature-limited version of the company's database at no charge. Porting Express to pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure services like EC2 makes doing so more attractive because companies, particularly smaller ones, don't have to acquire additional hardware, he said. Teradata's appliance uses Intel chips and will scale from between 7 and 200 terabytes of user data. In addition, Teradata announced an upcoming data warehousing machine called Extreme Performance Appliance 4555. Like Oracle's Exadata 2 product, it uses solid-state drives, which offer better performance than traditional hard disks but are more expensive, although prices are dropping.

Teradata is looking for early adopters now and plans to release the appliance in the first half of 2010, according to Brobst. This is "only fair," since Greenplum's initiative echoes what eBay has already done using Teradata technology, Monash added. "It also provides major support for what I think is an extremely sensible trend." Each vendor will bring relative strengths to the table, Monash added. With Monday's announcements, Teradata "hopes to leapfrog" its competitor Greenplum, which recently launched its own "Enterprise Data Cloud" strategy, analyst Curt Monash said in a blog post. Teradata should have an edge in managing virtual data marts versus just physical ones, but Greenplum may do better in regard to pricing and deployment options, he said.

AT&T on Friday accused Google of violating the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules by blocking Google Voice calls to some rural areas. By doing this, Google can reduce its access expenses, according to AT&T. The FCC in 2007 prohibited traditional carriers from blocking calls because it said the practice might degrade the reliability of telecommunications networks, Quinn wrote. In a letter to the FCC, the carrier said Google is claiming an advantage over other telecommunications providers by blocking calls, a cost-saving measure that traditional carriers are prohibited from using. "We urge the Commission to level the playing field and order Google to play by the same rules as its competitors," wrote Robert Quinn, a senior vice president for AT&T's federal regulatory issues, in a letter to the FCC. Google systematically blocks calls to certain areas from consumers using Google Voice, AT&T said, citing press reports.

AT&T charges that Google's call blocking violates the fourth principle of the FCC's Internet Policy Statement, which says consumers should be able to reap the benefits of competition among network, application, service and content providers. And even if it's an application and not a phone service, Google Voice is still governed by that principle because it covers application providers, the letter said. Though Google has claimed that Google Voice is not a traditional phone service, it effectively is, AT&T says. The carrier also accused Google of violating the fifth principle of the Internet Policy Statement, on nondiscrimination, which says one provider can't block fair access to another. Google itself is discriminating when it blocks calls to certain local exchange carriers, AT&T said.

EventBox, the one-stop shop for many of your social media needs, is taking a big step up in the world of Mac software. Last July, Macworld's James Dempsey dove into EventBox and all the socializing it has to offer, and I picked it as part of my $300 Student Challenge last month. Realmac Software, makers of RapidWeaver and LittleSnapper, announced Tuesday morning that it has acquired EventBox from its developers, The Cosmic Machine. Instead of visiting separate websites to get your daily dose of Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Google Reader, Reddit, Flickr, Identi.ca, and even plain ol' RSS feeds, EventBox wraps them all into one polished, centralized application.

You can create smart folders to organize your friends and information for the way you, erm, "work," upload photos to compatible services, and even send links to Instapaper for reading later. It even makes a few services work together in useful ways, such as letting you post Google Reader headlines to Facebook or Twitter right from inside the app. Realmac Software's acquisition means that EventBox will have more resources and room to grow, as Realmac is no stranger to bringing solid products to market. EventBox is now huddling into a cocoon, undergoing a transformative process that should finish in November. RapidWeaver has long been known as a sort of "iWeb Pro" upgrade, and LittleSnapper quickly gained traction as a powerful "iPhoto for designers and web developers." EventBox doesn't currently have much in the way of competition as far as tackling such a broad sample of the social media space, so The Cosmic Machine and Realmac are already a step or three ahead of the game. When it reemerges, it will be renamed as Socialite.

EventBox owners who purchased a license in the past will get a free Socialite 1.0 license, which will cost everyone else $20. Customers who scored licenses through MacHeist will receive an email with the option of purchasing a license upgrade at a discounted price. Realmac is soliciting feedback in its forums for what users want out of version 1.0 and beyond.

Calling it the "most significant" upgrade in a decade, Microsoft Corp. today revealed details for its project management application, Project 2010. The new version will include tighter integration with Microsoft Outlook e-mail and new collaboration features for buyers of the mid-range Project Professional version. Final release is due by the first half of next year, about the same time Microsoft Office 2010 is released, according to Chris Capossela, senior vice president of the Microsoft Business Division. "This is the most significant release in more than 10 years," he said. Project 2010 will also be the latest Microsoft application to adopt the Office "Fluent" user interface, better-known as the controversial "Ribbon." Finally, Microsoft is cutting the number of versions of Project from four to three, injecting portfolio management capabilities from the short-lived Project Portfolio Server into Project Server 2010. Microsoft is making the public beta of Project 2010 available later this fall, though it is taking sign-ups today.

Microsoft made the announcement during its Microsoft Project conference, which is taking place in Phoenix this week. Though relatively unknown, Project is used by about 20 million workers, according to Microsoft. Capossela, who was general manager for the Project product earlier this decade, is giving a keynote speech at the conference. It is one of the company's 10 largest revenue generators, Capossela said. "It's a wonderful, quieter business," he said. One new feature is user-controlled scheduling, which is aimed at users who don't require rigid, automatically generated deadlines.

For 2010, Microsoft will offer Project Desktop, Project Professional and Project Server. Another feature lets managers whose companies have Project Server assign tasks to employees and then lets them respond and provide updates, fill out timesheets, all through their Outlook e-mail client. Another example are collaboration abilities, such as viewing task lists for groups and timeline views of multi-worker projects that are part of the Project Professional application. Those workers must be covered by Client Access Licenses (CALs) for Project Server, but do not need to have purchased Project Desktop. "We're trying to widen the funnel down to team participants," Capossela said. This data is hosted on any version of SharePoint, including the free version known as SharePoint Foundation. Microsoft is also changing the Project user interface to Office 2007's "Ribbon." Capossela said the move was necessary because of the many Project commands, which he said "numbered in the thousands."

Previoulsy, such features required users to buy the higher-end Project Server.