APPLE TO CONGRESS: We Don't Track Our Customers (AAPL)

Apple and Google appeared before a congressional panel today to explain their policies regarding location tracking in mobile devices.

Apple continued its defensive. Guy Tribble, Apple's vice president of software technology, said a glitch caused iPhones and iPads to store location data indefinitely.

Instead, the location cache was only supposed to last a week. Apple has already issued a fix to iPhone and iPad owners with an update to iOS, version 4.3.3. The update allows users to turn all location services off if they choose.

Tribble also explained that Apple only gathers information on the location of wifi hotspots and cell towers that iPhones and iPads access. All that data are completely anonymous, and Apple has no way to see who it came from.

For third-party apps sold in the app store, Tribble said Apple conducts random audits on developers to make sure they aren't stealing user location data.

Both Apple and Google recognized the importance for mobile location data, including helping with emergencies like Amber Alerts.

If you want to check out the full video of the hearing, or read Apple and Google's testimony, check out the Senate Judiciary Committee page.

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See Also:

• Apple Got Us Touching Our Phones... Will It Get Us Talking To Them, Too?
• Yes, Android Fans, Google Already Has Voice Commands -- And Rio Already Made MP3 Players
• Google: We're Activating 400,000 Android Devices Per Day

APPLE TO CONGRESS: We Don't Track Our Customers (AAPL)

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Here's How Android Could Help Google Get Business Customers (GOOG, MSFT)

Google is gradually adding more ties between Android and Google Apps, two of the four products it hopes will drive growth.

By making sure the products work well together, Google could use Android's popularity to help sell Google Apps to companies who might otherwise stick with more traditional enterprise software from the likes of Microsoft.

It also shows once again the real reason why Microsoft needs a competitive mobile offering.

Here's what Google announced today:

• Employees who use Google Apps for Business or Education will be able to locate lost Android phones on a map and reset their passwords and PINs remotely.

• A new Android app, Google Contacts Lookup, will let Google Apps users type or speak the name or email address of any user in their organization to look them up on their phone.

• Google Apps admins will be able to force Android 3.0 tablet users to use encrypted storage, so company secrets can't leak out via lost or stolen tablets.

None of the improvements are spectacular game changers. But if Google keeps adding a few improvements like this every year, it could give them another selling point for Apps.

See also: The Real Importance Of Nokia To Microsoft

For the latest tech news, visit SAI: Silicon Alley Insider. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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See Also:

• Google's Andy Rubin Hits Back: Android Is Just As Closed As It's Always Been
• WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER BUY AN ANDROID PHONE? Take Our Smartphone Survey And Tell Us!
• Microsoft Will Beat Apple In Mobile By 2015, Says Gartner

Here's How Android Could Help Google Get Business Customers (GOOG, MSFT)

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New York Times for Kindle Customers to Receive Free Access to NYTimes.com

Amazon announced that customers who subscribe to The New York Times for Kindle will be receiving access to The New York Times Web site at no additional charge. The date for Kindle New York Times subscribers' free online access is yet undetermined; subscribers will receive further communication via e-mail in the coming weeks.

New York Times for Kindle Customers to Receive Free Access to NYTimes.com

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IBM boosts cloud services to Aussie customers

Technology services goliath IBM has announced a series of new partnerships and alliances - including two in Australia - that it says is evidence of the growth of Cloud computing services. The increased adoption of LotusLive public cloud services enable clients to innovate faster, improve daily business interactions and increase business...

IBM boosts cloud services to Aussie customers

Backlink: http://www.cebit.com.au/news/technology/ibm-boosts-cloud-services-to-aussie-customers

Making Customers Hate You Makes Google Love You

Most businesses aim to please. They put customers first and do whatever it takes to make them happy.

Some companies have found that being unethical and treating customers like garbage is actually better for business.  At the very least, it ups their Google ranking.


One company, DecorMyEyes, is downright scary to customers.  When one user tried to cancel her order, she received a scathing email. According to the New York Times, DecorMyEyes wrote her: "Listen, b*tch, I know your address. I’m one bridge over.”

Other customers had similar experiences and reported them on review sites.


"!!!!!ROBBERY!!!!" One exclaims. 

"Terrible service and a rip off. They must have blind primates doing the work!" says another.


Those are just two of the nicer reviews. While most business owners would be horrified, the DecorMyEyes founder, Stanley Borker, is thrilled.  Here's why:



"“Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com," the founder writes to all the negative commenters on an open forum.  "I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

Negative actions should have negative consequences, but this founder is laughing all the way to the bank thanks to high Google rankings. But surely the world's most powerful search engine, Google, could separate scams like DecorMyEyes from genuine businesses.


Apparently not.  The New York Times interviewed one DecorMyEyes customer who stumbled across the site when Googling her favorite glasses brand.  DecorMyEyes was the first search suggestion. The New York Times asked Google if they could filter out negative searches but received a non-answer:

"Ultimately, the spokesman sidestepped the question of whether utterly noxious retail could yield profits. The best he could do was decline to call Mr. Borker a liar for saying that it did," they write.

"The customer is always right — not here, you understand?” Borker defends himself to the New York Times. “I hate that phrase — the customer is always right. Why is the merchant always wrong? Can the customer ever be wrong? Is that not possible?”

His strategy is unethical yet slightly brilliant. He's tricking the most powerful company in the world (although Google claims to have fixed the problem now).  It is a shock and awe strategy that Google, until recently, wasn't stopping. 

Although effective, abusing customers isn't a strategy that's likely to catch on.  Constantly fending off unhappy customers is grueling, a major time-suck, and at the very least, it must weigh on your conscience.

For the full article, head over to the New York Times >>

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See Also:

• INSTANT MBA: You're Not Going To Defeat Google, But That Doesn't Mean You Can't Play In The Game
• Google May Have A Ton Of Privacy Issues, But They Make Smart PR Decisions
• Does Your Business Really Need A Google Virtual Storefront?

Making Customers Hate You Makes Google Love You

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Google: Being Bad To Your Customers Is Bad For Business

A recent article by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines. The main premise of the article was that being bad on the web can be good for business.

We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience. Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.

As always, we learned a lot from this experience, and we wanted to share some of that with you. Consider the obvious responses we could have tried to fix the problem:

• Block the particular offender. That would be easy and might solve the immediate problem for that specific business, but it wouldn’t solve the larger issue in a general way. Our first reaction in search quality is to look for ways to solve problems algorithmically.
  
  
  
  
• Use sentiment analysis to identify negative remarks and turn negative comments into negative votes. While this proposal initially sounds promising, it turns out to be based on a misconception. First off, the terrible merchant in the story wasn’t really ranking because of links from customer complaint websites. In fact, many consumer community sites such as Get Satisfaction added a simple attribute called rel=nofollow to their links. The rel=nofollow attribute is a general mechanism that allows websites to tell search engines not to give weight to specific links, and it’s perfect for the situation when you want to link to a site without endorsing it. Ironically, some of the most reputable links to Decor My Eyes came from mainstream news websites such as the New York Times and Bloomberg. The Bloomberg article was about someone suing the company behind Decor My Eyes, but the language of the article was neutral, so sentiment analysis wouldn’t have helped here either.
  
  
  As it turns out, Google has a world-class sentiment analysis system (Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs). But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying.
  
  
  
  
  
• Yet another option is to expose user reviews and ratings for various merchants alongside their results. Though still on the table, this would not demote poor quality merchants in our results and could still lead users to their websites.

Instead, in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

We can't say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future. We know that people will keep trying: attempts to game Google’s ranking, like the ones mentioned in the article, go on 24 hours a day, every single day. That’s why we cannot reveal the details of our solution—the underlying signals, data sources, and how we combined them to improve our rankings—beyond what we’ve already said. We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google. And we will continue to work hard towards a better search.

This post originally appeared on The Official Google Blog.

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See Also:

• One Reason To Take New Search Engine Blekko Seriously
• Today, Microsoft Begins To Make Money From The Yahoo Deal
• Toolbar Maker Dumps Google For Bing

Google: Being Bad To Your Customers Is Bad For Business

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