Royal pardon frees Moroccan Facebook user
A MOROCCAN computer engineer jailed last month for setting up a Facebook account in the name of King Mohammed's brother has been freed after a royal pardon, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
Fouad Mortada, 26, was jailed for three years and given a 10,000 dirham ($1485) fine on February 23 for falsifying data and imitating Prince Moulay Rachid without his consent.
The ruling sparked protests from free speech campaigners around the world and Moroccan bloggers stopped writing in solidarity with Mortada.
His supporters said the Moroccan judiciary had failed to understand that thousands of people set up accounts on Facebook and other sites under the names of celebrities.
Mortada argued he had set up the account because of his admiration for the prince and meant him no harm. He had appealed to the prince for clemency before being jailed.
"Fouad's liberation is a victory for justice and freedom," said his lawyer Ali Ammar. "The king has done what the court should have done in the first place."
Tom Pfeiffer and Zakia Abdennebi in Rabat - Reuters
Google searches for YouTube revenue plan
STEVE Chen, chief technology officer of YouTube, became a multi-millionaire overnight when the business he helped co-found was snapped up by Google, but he is starting to feel pressure from the parent company to start attracting serious revenue from the site's massive audience.
Steve Chen, CTO and founder of YouTube, at Google's office in Sydney yesterday. Pic: James Croucher
STEVE Chen is starting to feel pressure from parent company Google to start attracting serious revenue from the site's massive audience.
Google bought the video-sharing site for $US1.65 billion in stock in late 2006, and since then YouTube has grown to be one of the most popular sites on the internet, with more than 100 million videos viewed every day.
But YouTube has been footing an ever-mounting bill to maintain the infrastructure that supports this activity, and at a press conference on Wednesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said it still had not found the best way to commercialise the site's audience. "We've not yet found the perfect monetisation strategy for that," he said.
YouTube's Mr Chen said the priority had always been on expanding the community first.
"When we met with (Google CEO) Eric Schmidt, and this was the day before the acquisition was going to be announced, the question was 'what priorities do you want us to concentrate on?'," Mr Chen said. "The mandate was that if you have happy users and have great content, that monetisation and working with advertisers will always come later.
"And in much of 2007 it was same policy, same strategy -- 'let's make sure we build the best product possible, and let's make sure the monetisation solutions we put out there don't anger or frustrate the users'."
Mr Chen said the trouble was balancing the interests of the site's content producers, the content viewers and the advertisers, or the YouTube "ecosystem", but he believes it has found a solution. "We did a few tests in 2007 and singled out the advertising solutions that worked well." One of the most successful advertising formats was embedding ads within the videos, which are triggered by a viewer clicking on an icon.
"The one that's working with our premium content partners is running these relevant ads that show up on the video itself. They have to be initiated or triggered by a user to watch the ad.
"By itself, you're not going to be disturbed by the video, but if you happen to see something that's interesting you can hover over it and watch the video ad in the middle of the video."
And while advertisers continue to generate free hype by way of viral marketing campaigns on YouTube, Mr Chen said there were no plans to start charging for these, at least in the short term.
Mahesh Sharma - Australian IT
Google maps public transport
GOOGLE will launch an online public transport service in Perth that will display all the connections needed to get around the city and where to eat and shop once you get to your destination.
Called Google Transit, the service is expected to go live in coming weeks and feeds off timetable information from West Australian state transport authority Transperth.
Enter start and end points for a desired journey and Google Transit will display a route map with departure points and trip times for the public transport services on each leg of the journey. The application can help plan trips weeks in advance.
While Perth will be the first Australian city with Google Transit, company officials said the search firm was in talks with other state transport authorities and expected the service eventually to be available Australia-wide. A spokesman for Transperth said there was no commercial agreement between Google and Transperth. "The arrangement is mutually beneficial," he said.
The online service works with the Australian-developed Google Maps product, created when Australian software engineers Lars Rasmussen, Jens Rasmussen, Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma signed on to Google Australia's payroll in June 2004. The four were the first Google software engineers in Australia.
The transport finder was announced in Sydney yesterday by visiting Google chief executive and chairman Eric Schmidt. He used the trip to talk up Google's plans for dominating the coming world of so-called "cloud computing" where software applications for everyday work and play sit online rather than on a desktop computer or notebook.
"Why don't we have all the (applications) on the network - and by the way it's free," Mr Schmidt said in a dig at Microsoft, which built its fortune around having software such as Windows and Office loaded on to personal computers, with a fee for every licence. In a further swipe at Microsoft, Mr Schmidt railed against having to spend time tweaking personal computer performance. "Let's put the data and the intelligence on servers run by professionals - that's us," he said.
With about 200 local employees, Google Australia's Sydney CBD headquarters is bursting at the seams. The firm will open a new campus-style Australian headquarters in Sydney's Pyrmont in the first half of next year.
Stuart Kennedy - Australian IT
A MOROCCAN computer engineer jailed last month for setting up a Facebook account in the name of King Mohammed's brother has been freed after a royal pardon, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
Fouad Mortada, 26, was jailed for three years and given a 10,000 dirham ($1485) fine on February 23 for falsifying data and imitating Prince Moulay Rachid without his consent.
The ruling sparked protests from free speech campaigners around the world and Moroccan bloggers stopped writing in solidarity with Mortada.
His supporters said the Moroccan judiciary had failed to understand that thousands of people set up accounts on Facebook and other sites under the names of celebrities.
Mortada argued he had set up the account because of his admiration for the prince and meant him no harm. He had appealed to the prince for clemency before being jailed.
"Fouad's liberation is a victory for justice and freedom," said his lawyer Ali Ammar. "The king has done what the court should have done in the first place."
Tom Pfeiffer and Zakia Abdennebi in Rabat - Reuters
Google searches for YouTube revenue plan
STEVE Chen, chief technology officer of YouTube, became a multi-millionaire overnight when the business he helped co-found was snapped up by Google, but he is starting to feel pressure from the parent company to start attracting serious revenue from the site's massive audience.
Steve Chen, CTO and founder of YouTube, at Google's office in Sydney yesterday. Pic: James Croucher
STEVE Chen is starting to feel pressure from parent company Google to start attracting serious revenue from the site's massive audience.
Google bought the video-sharing site for $US1.65 billion in stock in late 2006, and since then YouTube has grown to be one of the most popular sites on the internet, with more than 100 million videos viewed every day.
But YouTube has been footing an ever-mounting bill to maintain the infrastructure that supports this activity, and at a press conference on Wednesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said it still had not found the best way to commercialise the site's audience. "We've not yet found the perfect monetisation strategy for that," he said.
YouTube's Mr Chen said the priority had always been on expanding the community first.
"When we met with (Google CEO) Eric Schmidt, and this was the day before the acquisition was going to be announced, the question was 'what priorities do you want us to concentrate on?'," Mr Chen said. "The mandate was that if you have happy users and have great content, that monetisation and working with advertisers will always come later.
"And in much of 2007 it was same policy, same strategy -- 'let's make sure we build the best product possible, and let's make sure the monetisation solutions we put out there don't anger or frustrate the users'."
Mr Chen said the trouble was balancing the interests of the site's content producers, the content viewers and the advertisers, or the YouTube "ecosystem", but he believes it has found a solution. "We did a few tests in 2007 and singled out the advertising solutions that worked well." One of the most successful advertising formats was embedding ads within the videos, which are triggered by a viewer clicking on an icon.
"The one that's working with our premium content partners is running these relevant ads that show up on the video itself. They have to be initiated or triggered by a user to watch the ad.
"By itself, you're not going to be disturbed by the video, but if you happen to see something that's interesting you can hover over it and watch the video ad in the middle of the video."
And while advertisers continue to generate free hype by way of viral marketing campaigns on YouTube, Mr Chen said there were no plans to start charging for these, at least in the short term.
Mahesh Sharma - Australian IT
Google maps public transport
GOOGLE will launch an online public transport service in Perth that will display all the connections needed to get around the city and where to eat and shop once you get to your destination.
Called Google Transit, the service is expected to go live in coming weeks and feeds off timetable information from West Australian state transport authority Transperth.
Enter start and end points for a desired journey and Google Transit will display a route map with departure points and trip times for the public transport services on each leg of the journey. The application can help plan trips weeks in advance.
While Perth will be the first Australian city with Google Transit, company officials said the search firm was in talks with other state transport authorities and expected the service eventually to be available Australia-wide. A spokesman for Transperth said there was no commercial agreement between Google and Transperth. "The arrangement is mutually beneficial," he said.
The online service works with the Australian-developed Google Maps product, created when Australian software engineers Lars Rasmussen, Jens Rasmussen, Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma signed on to Google Australia's payroll in June 2004. The four were the first Google software engineers in Australia.
The transport finder was announced in Sydney yesterday by visiting Google chief executive and chairman Eric Schmidt. He used the trip to talk up Google's plans for dominating the coming world of so-called "cloud computing" where software applications for everyday work and play sit online rather than on a desktop computer or notebook.
"Why don't we have all the (applications) on the network - and by the way it's free," Mr Schmidt said in a dig at Microsoft, which built its fortune around having software such as Windows and Office loaded on to personal computers, with a fee for every licence. In a further swipe at Microsoft, Mr Schmidt railed against having to spend time tweaking personal computer performance. "Let's put the data and the intelligence on servers run by professionals - that's us," he said.
With about 200 local employees, Google Australia's Sydney CBD headquarters is bursting at the seams. The firm will open a new campus-style Australian headquarters in Sydney's Pyrmont in the first half of next year.
Stuart Kennedy - Australian IT
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