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AOL has announced that its online advertising solution, Platform-A, will offer a guaranteed CPM to third party developers creating Bebo and Facebook applications. But the guarantee comes with a catch: it’s only good for the first three impressions for each unique U.S. visitor who visits an approved developer’s application.

Boasting one of the highest CPMs in the industry, AOL says the offer is part of WIDGNET™ publisher network launched earlier this year by Platform-A’s Advertising.com. WIDGNET brings advertisers and third party developers of widgets and social networking applications together.

“This announcement reinforces Platform-A’s commitment to helping developers generate revenue and monetize their Bebo and Facebook applications in the rapidly evolving social networking space. Advertiser interest in social networks is rising at a steady rate, and Platform-A is making an unprecedented flat-fee commitment to help application developers generate revenue and guarantee monetization of their applications,” said Dave Jacobs, Senior Vice President of Publisher Services, Platform-A Advertising.com Networks. “Platform-A views social networking applications as an area where we can add significant value by letting developers focus on expanding their install base, without worrying about monetization of applications.”

Earlier this year, AOL acquired Bebo for $850 million.

Apparently Chicago-based firm LimitNone is suing Google for misappropriating the trade secrets of its “gMove” application that Google allegedly used to develop its Email Uploader.

The two-count lawsuit also claims Google violated Illinois’ consumer fraud laws.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday by Kelley Drye & Warren LLP - “the same commercial litigation group which challenged Google over the company’s online advertising system,” SlashDot noted.

Details of the suit can be found in the press release sent out by the law firm.

“Its shocking that Google would engage in this type of conduct; particularly when the other party is a small software company that built its business specifically to help Google sell its existing and future products,” said Susan Greenspon of the Chicago office of Kelley Drye & Warren LLP. “People need to realize that Google is just another large publicly traded corporation that will do whatever it takes to increase its revenue, even if that means risking its reputation among developers.”

The lawsuit alleges that in February, 2007 Google launched a suite of business software applications called Google Apps. The software was designed to challenge Microsoft’s Office suite of products (Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.) which has 500 million users. According to the lawsuit, unlike Microsoft’s products, Google Apps does not require a customer to download software onto his or her computer. Instead, Google Apps is a collection of web-based applications that reside on Google’s servers. The lawsuit alleges at the time of its launch, however, Google did not have a workable way to enable Microsoft Outlook users to easily migrate their email (called gMail), calendar and contacts to Google’s platform.

In early 2007, LimitNone developed just such a product to solve this problem and in March confidentially demonstrated the migration tool to senior members of the Google Apps team. According to the complaint, the Google Apps executives invited LimitNone to be part of the Google Enterprise Professional Program, to further develop and market the tool, and assured the company that it had no intention of developing a similar product.

The lawsuit alleges the tool, which was originally named “MY GRATE” was later renamed, at Google’s insistence, “gMove”. Though the product retailed for $29, Google asked that LimitNone sell it to Google’s customers for $19.

The lawsuit claims that throughout the remainder of 2007, Google promoted LimitNone and gMove and repeatedly told company executives that it would not develop a competing product. Google highlighted gMove on its website and introduced the company to its largest customers (including Proctor & Gamble, Intel, Orbitz, Morgan Stanley and Toys “R” Us). In addition, Google asked LimitNone to present the product to its technical sales personnel, to meet with the Google Open Source team and to continuously share updated versions of gMove.

In December, 2007, as detailed in the complaint Google told LimitNone that it would, in fact, be releasing a competing product and giving it away for free to its “Premier” customers. The lawsuit alleges that Google’s product, called “Google Email Uploader” steals gMove’s look, feel and functionality.

According to the complaint, Scott McMullan, a senior executive in the Google Apps partner program, told LimitNone that the potential for 50 million users – was “just too big to come from someone else” and that “this is how Google operates.”

Like a politician making campaign promises, Google has announced its involvement in the launch of the “Internet for Everyone” campaign. Unlike politicians, we actually know what the campaign is all about from the title and there’s a higher chance of Google carrying out this platform than politicians keeping their promises.

The “Internet for Everyone” campaign is based on four principles: Access, Choice, Openness, and Innovation. Yup, that sounds like Google. Here’s a brief history.

• In August of 2006, Google makes Wifi available for free in the city of Mountain View, California, where their headquarters are located.
• One year later, Google announces its plans to lobby for “white spaces” on unused TV spectrum, in the hopes of expanding wireless internet. Google has been very vocal about this push in 2008 as well.
• October 2007 - Google announces OpenSocial, a set of common APIs designed to work with social networks participating in the initiative.
• November 2007 - After months of speculation about Google releasing its own mobile phone, the rumors are laid to rest with the announcement of a mobile platform, Android. Google’s plans for open spectrum come into clear view.
• In March 2008, the FCC holds a spectrum auction. Though Google does not win, they bid high enough to force Verizon, the winner of the C block spectrum, to open the spectrum open to third-party applications and handsets. And just to let everyone know they’re paying attention, one month later Google releases a reminder to Verizon and the FCC to keep the spectrum open.
• Later that month, Google teams with MySpace and Yahoo to form the OpenSocial Foundation, to promote the development of cross-platform applications, driven by an open community.
• May 2008 - Google joins a coalition of investors supporting Sprint and Clearwire’s combining of their WiMax businesses.
• Last month, Google launches “Friend Connect,” which enables developers to create social media applications that can span several networking sites as well as be expanded to non-social sites.

Yahoo! has licensed Urban Mapping’s Urbanware: Neighborhoods, which contains data for 40,000 neighborhood boundaries covering more than 2,000 U.S. cities and towns. The agreement will help Yahoo provide geographically-targeted results based on actual search behavior.

“Urban Mapping’s neighborhood boundary information helps us offer our users access to more complete and relevant content,” said Bob Upham, Director of Business Development for Yahoo! Geo Technologies. “Allowing users to search by neighborhood yields more appropriate results, adding value and relevancy to the overall experience.”

Ian White, Urban Mapping CEO. “Yahoo! clearly sees the value and benefits of delivering neighborhood-based information to their community of users, advertisers, publishers and developers.”

The license is expected to help Yahoo provide improved results in local search, mobile search, yellow pages, maps, and real estate among other applications.

Semantic search engine, hakia, has announced the launch of Syndication Web Services. The new service will allow third parties to use hakia search on websites, mobile applications and document management systems. Site owners can offer hakia’s generic search, implement a custom search, or utilize a vertical search on their websites.

I spoke with hakia CEO Dr. Riza Berkan, and he says that the advantage with hakia’s web search is the focus on the quality instead of popularity when it comes to delivering search results. hakia targets precision and accuracy in the goal of providing relevant results on a searcher’s first attempt at a query.

Today’s announcement includes 7 different ways in which third parties can utilize hakia’s Syndication Web Services:

• Web Search – Brings search results from the World Wide Web
• News Search – Brings news articles for a given query
• Vertical Search – Brings search results from a vertical (for example, health) or from a particular database (such as PubMed.org)
• Summarizer – Provides a summary of a given text block or URL, ideal for content management systems
• Categorizer – Identifies categorical terms from a given text (URL or text block
• Characterizer –Identifies and expands descriptive phrases, keywords or tags. Ideal for SEM professionals and publishers
• TMR (Text Meaning Representation) – Provides text meaning representation of a given text block, suitable for core technology development

Have you checked out hakia? Would you be inclined to use their new Syndication Web Services? Give your thoughts in the comments.

To compete in social media or with open source search applications, widget development is key. But it can be costly if you don’t know what you’re doing. iWidgets is demystifying the widget development process by launching their platform into public beta. The service is free to use and brings widget creation to a wider audience.

“Private beta users were so enthusiastic about iWidgets, we knew the market was ready,” said Peter Yared, CEO of iWidgets. “Our robust tools provide an unmatched ability to display personalized content from a source website without requiring experienced programmers. The result is incredibly viral - a fun, interactive application people want to use and share.”

Widgets created through iWidgets can be used on iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace and others.

If you’ve been holding back on widgets, are you inclined to check out iWidgets? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

Related Reading:
Testing Applies to Widgets and Accessories, Not Just Landing Pages

Last year, a Google maps for mobile upgrade included the “My Location” feature. It allows users to find out where they are even if their phones don’t have GPS. Now Google is opening up the application to 3rd party developers.

My Location uses cell phone towers to approximate the location of a cell phone user. Writing on the Google mobile blog, Zhengrong Ji and Ravi Jain of the Google mobile team explained:

“If the phone has GPS, the Maps application on the phone sends the GPS coordinates along with the cell ID to the Google location server. Over millions of such updates, across multiple phones, carriers, and times, the server clusters the GPS updates corresponding to a particular cell ID to find their rough center. So when a phone without GPS needs its own location, the application on the phone queries the Google location server with the cell tower ID to translate that into a geographic location, i.e., lat/long coordinates.”

Gears for Windows Mobile and Android already have location APIs, and Google says they expect to see the My Location API implemented on the Apple iPhone applications as early as this month, as Apple launches their highly anticipated store for iPhone apps.

Related Reading:
Google Patent Details Mobile Search Plans

Visual search engine Viewzi has been in private beta for quite some time now, but they’ve just announced they expect to launch to the public this month.

Since it’s visual, a wordy blog post just isn’t going to do this news justice. So I’ve created a screenshots for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to leave your reaction in the comments!

Viewzi main search page

Viewzi’s search menu offers several options for viewing results

Video search displays results from popular video sites. Some of the videos are played in fast forward right in the results page. In Viewzi, mouseover an individual result to see the title of the video.

Web screenshot results show search results in a cover-flow style. I like this because you can easily see which pages are educational, shopping or parked domains.

Photo view is similar to video view, displaying image search results in several rows.

Simple text view combines results from Yahoo and Google and looks similar to traditional text-based search results.

Four source view displays website screenshot results from Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN. To remove one of the sets of results, just click on the search engine name that you do NOT want to see displayed. Mouseover a result for a larger view.

Celebrity Photo View is not just an image search for photos of celebrities. Instead, it’s the name for the way the results are displayed, which looks like a photo album or scrap book and features a slick drag and drop feature.

mp3 View shows results of mp3 files related to your search. You can even listen to the files in your browser instead of opening additional applications which can use up valuable memory on your computer.

At the All Things Digital conference, AOL announced that it would be joining Google’s OpenSocial. AOL recently acquired social network Bebo, which had already joined OpenSocial. First up will be the adoption of gadgets on myAOL.com.

Writing on the OpenSocial blog, AOL Principal Software Engineer Eric Staats said, “We’re excited to work toward supporting Gadgets and OpenSocial across AOL’s many products, platforms and services. By working with Google and other leaders in the industry to create products based on a more open, uniform standard, AOL and AOL users will be able to safely take advantage of a wide variety of new applications within our products that have been built by developers around the world.

Related Reading:
Google, Yahoo & MySpace Team Up for OpenSocial
Microsoft Tries to Compete with OpenSocial

In the escalating war over the planet Earth between Google and Microsoft, Google has opened up Google Earth for development.

Today at the Google I/O developers conference, Google launched the Google Earth API and browser plug-in. The Google Earth API enables web developers to Web pages into 3D map apps.

Google points to the rise of the Geoweb, a collection of user-generated content (UGCe.g. photos, videos) associated with a location.

The Google Maps API, with over 150,000 developer sites, and the Google Earth client, with over 400 million downloads, promise to help users visualize this Geoweb of content.

Key features from the Google Earth team:

• Embed Google Earth inside any web page with only a few lines of code.

• Use the JavaScript API to enable rich Earth-based web applications.

• Manipulate KML and the 3D environment: create polygons, lines, placemarks, and more.

• Convert your existing Google Maps API site to 3D with as little as one line of code.

• View the thousands of existing 3D buildings, or add your own 3D models.

• Switch to Google Sky mode for high-res imagery of stars, planets, and galaxies.

Google has yet to launch a desktop telescope to keep pace with Microsoft but opening up the API should yield some innovative applications.