Google to deliver goods quickly to online shoppers

Google to deliver goods quickly to online shoppers — Internet search leader Google is taking another step beyond information retrieval into grocery delivery.

The new service, called Google Shopping Express, will initially provide same-day delivery of food and other products bought online by a small group of consumers in San Francisco and suburbs located south of the city. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., didn't say how many people will be part of the test.

Associated Press/Google - This undated photo provided by Google shows a Google Shopping express van. Internet search leader Google is taking another step beyond information retrieval into grocery delivery. The new service, called Google Shopping Express, will initially provide same-day delivery of food and other products bought online by a small group of consumers in San Francisco and suburbs located south of the city. (AP Photo/Google) 

If the pilot program goes well, Google Inc. plans to expand delivery service to other markets.

"We hope this will help users explore the benefits of a local, same-day delivery service, and help us kick the tires on the new service," Google said in a Thursday statement.

The delivery service is part of Google's effort to increase consumer reliance on the Internet, so it will have more opportunities to show online ads, which generate most of its revenue.

Google has learned that the more time people spend online, the more likely they are to use its dominant search engine or one of its other popular services, like its YouTube video site or Gmail, that include advertising.

The delivery service also could spur merchants to buy more online ads if Google's same-day delivery service encourages consumers to do more of their shopping online. Having to wait days or, in some cases, more than a week for the delivery of online orders ranks among the biggest drawbacks to Internet shopping.

It's a problem that Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc., which operate the largest e-commerce sites, already have been trying to solve by offering same-day service in some U.S. markets. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, also offers same-day delivery in five markets.

A mix of national, regional and neighborhood merchants are enlisting in Google Shopping Express. The best-known names on the list include Target Inc. and Walgreen Co. All the merchants in the Google program will sell certain items through a central website. Google has hired courier services to pick up the orders at the merchant stores and then deliver them to the customer's home or office.

Although the couriers will be working on a contract basis, they will be driving Google-branded vehicles and wearing company-issued uniforms.

It remains unclear whether Internet shopping and same-day delivery can be profitable. Online grocer Webvan collapsed in 2001, largely because it couldn't devise a pricing plan that would pay for the costs of same-day delivery without alienating shoppers unwilling to pay too much extra for the added convenience.

Google is still trying to figure out how much to charge for its same-day delivery service. For the six-month test period in the San Francisco area, consumers won't have to pay a surcharge. Google instead will receive a commission from participating merchants.

The expansion into same-day delivery comes at the same time that Google is preparing to close some of its older online services so it can devote more attention and money to other projects.

The realignment has irked some Google users. The biggest complaints have centered on Google Reader, which allows people to automatically receive headlines and links from their favorite sites, and iGoogle, which allows Web surfers to design a page consisting of the Google search engine surrounded set up other online features, such as local weather reports and stock market quotes. ( Associated Press )

Blog : Luxurious | Google to deliver goods quickly to online shoppers

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It already speaks 57 languages as well as a 10-year-old. How good can it get?

Google Translate - It already speaks 57 languages as well as a 10-year-old. How good can it get? - A computer that translates "natural language" is the holy grail of artificial intelligence—language being so integral to our intelligence and to our humanness that to crack it would be to achieve artificial consciousness itself. But until relatively recently, attempts at it have mostly sucked. They’ve tended to mix the words of one language with the grammar of the other, getting both wrong in the process. Mostly, this is the fault of literal translation—the kind of process that translates kindergarten as children garden. Newer methods—dominated by Google—turn the problem around: Using data, statistics, and brute force, they succeed in part by their refusal to "deconstruct" language and teach meaning to computers in the traditional way.

Google is grossly outperforming the rule-based methods that have historically been used to teach language to computers. These classic methods work on the principle that language can be decoded, stripped to its purest component parts of "meaning," and built back up again into another language. Linguists feed computers vocabularies, grammars, and endless rules about sentence structure—but language isn’t so easily formalized this way. There are more exceptions, qualifications, and ambiguities than rules and laws to follow. And, when you really think about it, this approach hardly respects the complexity of the problem.

Enter Google Translate—Google didn’t invent this method but they’re certainly dominating it now—which avoids that reductive concept of language altogether. Google mines existing translated material, recognizes how words or phrases typically correspond, and uses probability to deliver the best match based on context. Being Google, its digital Rosetta Stone amounts to trillions of words, from a corpus of U.N. documentation (in its six official languages, translated at high quality) to company memos to Harry Potter novels. Although Google builds a "language model" that describes the basic look of a well-formed sentence, it doesn’t have linguists try to decode the languages at all. Wittgenstein’s maxim of "Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use" is an effective working mantra for Google's statistical method.

Will Google's computers understand languages better than humans?

In his wonderful book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, the Princeton linguist and translator David Bellos notes the link between early machine translation pioneers and modern philosophers of language—that hopeless pursuit to discover “the purely hypothetical language which all people really speak in the great basement of their souls.” When I spoke to Bellos about Google, he stressed that Google's achievements doesn’t make Google Translate akin to how human translation actually works. Though a translation is what you get, translation isn’t really what Google Translate does. (Depending on what we understand by "translation"—but let’s not get into that.) “It’s like the difference between engineering and knowledge,” says Bellos. “An engineering solution is to make something work, but the way you make it work doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the underlying things. Airplanes do not work the way birds fly.”

Which is quite true. But even if Google Translate doesn’t translate language like humans do, there are parallels in the effect, especially in the way Google Translate learns language. Children don’t learn with prescriptive rules and by deconstructing sentence structure. Subjects, nouns, verbs—these are drilled later, once we’re all but fluent. When I spoke to Franz Och, who heads up Google Translate, he told me how, in hindsight, it’s almost obvious that rule-based methods aren’t necessarily as fruitful as data-driven ones. When children learn, “You just give examples, you interact with the child—grammar is something which is never explicit, it’s always implicit,” he says. “Just the same, when our system is learning, a lot of the grammar is not explicit—it’s implicit in the model parameters, in what comes out.”

Here Wittgenstein pops up again. Translation was one of the philosopher’s many examples of a "language game," a form of rule-following wherein we partake in the game (of translation) without direct use of the rules that are implicit in it. Translation isn’t reducible to its rules (grammar, syntax, semantics), but they’re still there, in some sense, beneath the surface. Just the same, Google Translate doesn’t grasp the "rules"—they’re implicit, and learned implicitly, as Och says.

A metaphor, perhaps, but this isn't the first time a little applied Wittgenstein has been put to work at Google, intentionally or not. Part of Google’s search power is in its intelligent handling of context: Searches for "hot dogs" yield results for the food rather than puppies, working on the insights of family resemblance. In Steven Levy’s recent book about Google, In the Plex, an interview with search engineer Amit Singhal suggests that the Wittgenstein influence was deliberate, and was a key breakthrough. Another example: “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that ‘bio’ means ‘biography,’ ” Levy quotes Singhal. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means ‘biological.’ ” In other words, Google's search engine learns its semantics from human input and improves with more data, just as Google Translate does.

Google Translate used to trip up more in its early days, when its data was skewed to the formal legalese of U.N. and EU documentation: Bellos recalls how searches for "avocado salad" in French (salade à l’avocat) would return "lawyer salad" in English—"avocat" being both avocado and lawyer in French, and in the corridors of the EU, "avocat" being more likely to mean lawyer.

This sort of family resemblance world of meaning is a given for humans. It's also something we clearly can teach computers—and the key to doing so is just gathering more data. Google was the first to really put this idea to use, and it marked a significant step from computers reading strict syntax to reading the force of meaning with context-sensitive intelligence. Today, the algorithm has an understanding of language something like a 10-year-old’s, but its rate of improvement is fast exceeding human language-learning development. When I say that the computer "learns," that isn’t just a metaphor. “In a very meaningful sense it’s really learning language,” says Och. It might not be able to form its own sentences, digest Gödel, Escher, Bach, and answer your questions—full-blown A.I.—but it teaches itself automatically from data alone.

With all its data, might the computer have some kind of advantage where it understands language better than we do? Could it even beat us at translation? Any reflection on the difficulties and subtleties of human translators’ work and art, from simultaneous interpreting to subtitling films, makes that suggestion almost laughable—almost. Bellos expressed great admiration for the innovations at Google, but pointed out its limitations: “Machines aren’t—at least aren’t currently—the same sort of thing as a human translator.” To reach human levels a machine must understand context in all its forms, be culturally aware in a particularly profound and deeply embedded way. It must understand the force of meaning, which of course comes from more than page by page data or facts it can be fed. Nonetheless a hefty chunk of language understanding does come from data, and data Google certainly has.

Perhaps the barrier is lower than we think. It’s at least conceivable that the machinery could become better linguists. Moore’s law—that computer power doubles relative to price every 18 months—persists, and is not to be understated. More data, more tweaks to the model, bring improvements year on year. The big question is whether or not Google's date-intensive method is determinately limited in some way. “It’s very clear that our translation quality will continue to improve,” says Och. “Where the limit is is a fundamental question.”

In the meantime, Google Translate’s enormous databank goes about learning languages as we actually speak them, taking in all their complexities and inconsistencies. It manages swear words and slang better than any rule-based system could, and keeps up to date with contemporary language. It speaks the English we speak, wherein infinitives are split and nonplussed means unperturbed—and linguistic conservatives have no say in what’s correct. But Google does. And does for dozens of languages besides English.

Might all that knowledge about language and how we speak it be something to worry about, when at the hands of a single company? Translation can be a sensitive thing—laden with responsibility that can’t be passed up to algorithms with a shrug of the shoulders. It’s worth questioning the power it brings Google—and especially since Google likes to shy away from the murky waters of culture and politics, where authority over language certainly brings them. Before you know it, all this technical tinkering and grand ambition brings them into public, social, and moral realms—something Evgeny Morozov has written about brilliantly.

In Wittgensteinian fashion, I shouldn’t advance any thesis—but there is food for thought here. With some clever technology built by some clever people, Google has decreed on language and translation, confirming the nonsense of prescriptive rules—a small victory for the descriptive grammarians, if an obvious one—and that Wittgenstein’s remarks on language really bear an effective model of artificial means of learning it. Google Translate might not become better than humans at translation any time soon—perhaps it can’t be done. But at some point it will be good enough: cheaper and more convenient than hiring human translators (for many whose standards are lower, this is already true) or bothering to learn languages ourselves—at which point "good enough" becomes our standard. How do we want our machine translators to work for us? ( slate.com )

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Google's digitization of books

Google's digitization of books. The Google Books settlement with U.S. writers and publishers, now scheduled for release Nov. 13, is the result of a four-year tussle over the question of whether the company has the right to digitize millions of books, both those in print and those out of print.

Google began its digitizing project in 2005, going to several major university libraries and digitizing every book it found there. The company said its aim is to increase the amount of knowledge available online. But the Authors Guild of America accused the company of "massive copyright infringement" and began a class-action lawsuit against it. Publishers later joined in. That class action has resulted in Google displaying only snippets of books not yet in the public domain.

Google's book digitizing project impacts readers, writers and the book publishing industry. (Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

A $125-million US settlement was announced in 2008 but was dragged back to court in June of this year amid accusations that it was unfair, following an antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Although the deal is being worked out in a U.S. court, it will apply to everyone connected to the publishing business around the world.

Under the terms of the settlement, Google will have the right to digitize any book published up to Jan. 5, 2009, and available for sale in the U.S. This includes almost all Canadian books in print, as virtually all books published in Canada are available in the U.S.

For readers, it could mean access to millions of books, including some long out of print, on the internet. The most likely subscribers to the Google service would be public, school or university libraries. Individual readers would also have the option to buy books — at prices ranging from $1.99 to $29.99 US.

The intention is to have a searchable database with millions of titles. Consumers will be able to download and print books in a PDF format. They will also be able to read them online or on devices such as iPhones and digital readers. Google Editions, an online service that will let readers buy electronic versions of books, was launched this October.

Concerns for readers

The main issue for readers is privacy. Because you are searching and reading on a public network, there is little assurance that your browsing and reading habits are private. Here are some of the questions raised by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

• Are your reading habits safe from fishing expeditions by the government or lawyers in civil cases?
• How will Google itself use information about your reading history?
• How will Google combine information about your reading habits with other information it may have about you through its other products?

Issues for authors

The service presents enormous opportunities, by putting a diverse array of books into the hands of a huge volume of readers. Some authors are welcoming the prospect that people around the world will have access to their work. But both writers and publishers have concerns about compensation and how their works might be used.

Google has agreed to pay $60 US per title for in-print books it has already digitized. There is potential for additional compensation from books sold through the online service and ads posted alongside any Google book. The company has pledged a total pot of $45 million, but authors have to apply to get their money. If they ignore the issue, or are unaware of the Google Books settlement, they get nothing.

The sheer size and scope of the Google deal is a concern for many players, from authors and publishers to governments and potential competitors. Google's deal states that the company has a right to digitize any book, unless it is explicitly withheld. So any author who does not want his or her book included in the deal had to opt out by May of this year.

Similarly, authors and publishers who want to be compensated for the digitizing of their book have to register with the Book Rights Registry, a U.S.-based not-for-profit organization created expressly for the purpose of administering copyright fees for Google Books. If authors don't register, no one will be making efforts to track them down.

For "orphan" works — those for which the copyright holder is unknown or cannot be found — Google stands to claim all the proceeds of offering them to the public. It has an effective legal monopoly on these works, which is of concern to the company's potential competitors.

Public domain

In the U.S., books become public domain 70 years after the death of the author. But international rules for when works come into public domain vary by country, with different regimes for Britain, Australia, the European Union and Canada, whose copyright act is currently under review.

The U.S. Copyright Office, the European Union, Germany, France, five U.S. attorneys general, Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon are among those who have opposed the deal. Google agreed to appoint EU members to its Book Rights Registry, which would usurp the role played by national copyright organizations. Even Chinese writers groups have come forward to object.

Many of the international aspects of the deal are still to be worked out. Google has said it plans to use geo-blocking technology to prevent access to books in other countries until agreements are reached there.

Timeline

2004: Google announces it has agreements with major U.S. university libraries to digitize their books.

September 2005: Authors Guild in the United States launches a class-action suit.

October 2005: Five large U. S. publishers sue Google over copyright infringement.

October 2008: The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers settle with Google.

June 11, 2009: A U.S. court begins reviewing the settlement agreement to see if it is fair.

Sept. 4, 2009: Authors whose books have been digitized by May 2009 had until this date to opt out of the settlement.

Nov. 13, 2009: Court to finalize settlement agreement.

June 5, 2010: Deadline for authors to apply for payment through the Books Rights Registry.

( cbc.ca )

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Small business needs 'free' thinking, Wired editor says

Small business needs 'free' thinking, Wired editor says. Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson has made waves with his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by suggesting that companies need to start thinking about how to attract customers by giving away some of their products and services for nothing.

It's a message he delivered in a speech to Canadian entrepreneurs in Toronto on Wednesday, as part of Small Business Week. Anderson discussed his keynote, the book and some of the misconceptions of his idea of "free"

Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson thinks Google and Microsoft are mirror images of each other. (Ben Margot/Associated Press)

Can you summarize the focus of your speech?

One of the messages of Free is that [free] is an incredible accelerator of small business formation. We think of "free" a lot in terms of producers offering free products, but also as consumers, we take advantage of free products. For businesses starting up today, the availability of free software like open source or hosted solutions — the fact that you don't need hardware because there's so much available in the cloud — this has basically lowered the cost of starting a business to the point where you can do it on a credit card.

The internet has a set of tools for where we work, and the fact that it is increasingly free has made it the golden age of the small company. It's a great time to start companies right now. It's never been cheaper. If you can do the company increasingly online, you can take advantage of "free" as a way to start your company, but also as a way to sell and market your products.

There are a lot of misconceptions about your book. You've mentioned situations where companies such as Gillette essentially give razors away but make their money on selling blades. That's not really what you mean by "free," right?

That is the traditional form of free, which is that it's not really free. You end up paying for it later. That continues to be a totally viable business model, and some of the book is about that. That's not really why I wrote the book or what it focuses on. Instead, the book focuses on the unique characteristics of digital markets. The reason that free is a bit of a trick in the traditional sense is that products can't really be free. The razor has a real cost and it gets paid back really quickly. The thing about digital goods is that there are no real costs. When you open a document in Google Docs or when you use Google Maps or Gmail, the cost of serving you as a customer is so close to zero that they can effectively round down. As a result, you can have a viable, profitable business model by having one per cent of your customers paying and the rest getting it for free. That allows the first real kind of free, where someone's paying and money is being made, but it's certainly not you.

One of Google's top executives was in town a few weeks ago and said that Canadian businesses have done a poor job of using the web to expand to a global level. It sounds like what you're saying is that in order to take advantage of the idea of "free," you essentially have to be addressing a global market. The bigger the market, the better, right?

Exactly. Converting a small percentage of a large number.

So in the context of Canadian small businesses, do you agree with Google's assessment, that Canadian companies aren't doing as well at that?

We have to make a distinction between physical goods and digital goods. With physical goods, not much has changed. It's a little easier to sell them online — you have distribution channels like Amazon and eBay — but you're still somewhat constrained by the economics of the real world. For digital goods, there is no reason for every digital company not to be a global digital company, unless you're selling tax services for one particular Canadian province [for example]. In general, if you're a software company offering software as a service, of course it's global. Not only should you be offering it globally, which is innate in the internet, you should also be thinking about global demand and marketing and using a free version to propagate a sample of your product to the widest possible audience. Every web company is a global company, whether they know it or not. The question is, are they thinking like a global company?

But aren't things like geoblocking and licensing a constraint to getting your digital goods to a global audience? Something like Hulu, the website that streams television shows for free, is largely constrained to the United States because of these issues.

There are legacy issues, but that has nothing to do with the infrastructure or Hulu's own business, it's that they get the content from companies who are locked into geographic restrictions. It's the same for Amazon with books and music and games. You have to unwind these geographic contracts and exclusivities and sometimes this takes decades. But there's nothing intrinsic about this; it's a hangover from 20th-century distribution models and it's just a matter of time before it goes away.

How much of an effect has Google had on this idea of free? They offer a large number of products, many of which are free. Was the rise of Google a watershed in this whole idea?

I think so. Google is the poster child for free. They have more than 300 products and almost all of them are free to consumers. Some are advertising-supported, some are not. Some are just plain, old free. Each one of them has its own sort of industrial logic, but what they all do is take advantage of digital economics — it costs very little for Google to offer these products to you. Every one that you use sort of reinforces your attachment to Google, the brand, the network. Some day they'll make money from you. If you click on one ad a week, you're profitable for Google, even if you're using every one of their services. It just takes so little to pay back the cost of doing this. So yes, they are the canonical company based on a free business model.

What they've done is taken the media model of advertising-supported and extended it across the board to products and services of all sorts, from word processing and spreadsheets to email to applications software to hosting. They showed just how far the media business model could extend and how much a powerful advertising engine could subsidize in the form of other products and services.

That's great and inspiring, but it has also created what many people worry is an emerging monopoly. I'll just point out the irony — Microsoft took its monopoly on operating systems and applications software to subsidize its entry into the online world and search. Google is taking its monopoly on search and using it to subsidize its entry into operating systems and word processing and spreadsheets. They're absolute mirror images of each other, and it's just fascinating to watch it play out.

So if Google is the poster child of free, is Microsoft the counter-poster child of not-free?

Microsoft has been competing with free for 30 years. They had to get people to pay for software in the first place. Software used to be something that you got free with a computer, with the mainframe. Then they had to compete with piracy. Then they had to compete with software that came bundled with the computer, so they released Microsoft Works that came with it. Then they had to compete with open source, then software as a service, now they have to compete online with Google. Microsoft has had more history with competing with free than any company in the world. They've done so very effectively so far, but it's only getting harder. In the next year, you'll see Word and Office become free online services. Right now they offer a service to small businesses called BizSmart by which all their enterprise software is free to companies that are less than three years old and have less then $1 million in revenue. They're definitely using free, but they're not as successful at it as Google. But nobody is.

I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but what's the solution for news organizations and newspapers? How do the media make "free" work?

I do get asked this a lot. This is one of the most misunderstood things around. The book doesn't argue that everything should be free or that newspapers should be 100 per cent free. The book argues instead for something called "freemium," which is a combination of free and paid. The book goes out of its way to identify the Wall Street Journal and WSJ.com as the best model. That is, it's a hybrid. The most popular content is free and advertising-supported, but as you dig deeper, the niche content — or maybe if you just read more stories in the case of the Financial Times and FT.com, where after 10 stories a month you have to pay — as the importance to you of this publication becomes more clear, they switch you from a free to a paid user. That is 90 per cent free, 10 per cent paid.

The problem is what's free and what's paid is an equation that every publication has to answer for itself. You can't just say, "We'll do what the Wall Street Journal is doing," because you may not be the No. 1 business publication in the United States or have a commodities trading desk that people will pay for. That model works well for the Wall Street Journal, but would it work for the Globe [and Mail]? I don't know, and that's why we're all stumbling our way toward figuring out which freemium model works for us. ( cbc.ca )

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Small businesses flock to Twitter, Facebook

Small businesses flock to Twitter, Facebook. Small businesses are using social media, services like Facebook and Twitter, like never before to communicate with customers, advertise on the cheap and create buzz around their business.

"I think Facebook and Twitter, whether we like it or not, have become the new word-of-mouth," said Donna Dooher, executive chef and owner of Mildred's Temple Kitchen in Toronto.

Mike Charbonneau of the Revue Cinema said he uses Twitter as a 'digital marquee.' (CBC) But while the technology may be new, some small business owners see the idea behind social media as old.

"We speak to each other differently. So for us it makes sense to explore the possibility to use those networking opportunities to create some buzz around our business."

For Willie Cromack of John Henry Bikes in Vancouver, using social media is about informing his customers — many of his company's tweets and Facebook posts include tips on riding — and maintaining an online reputaton.

"We do a lot of talking on our social networks to get people to understand that we're good people, and we're not going to mess them around," said Cromack.

Lewis Hilsenteger of iUpgrade, a store selling pre-owned Apple products that opened in June 2008, said using Facebook and Twitter is about survival.

"I don't think we would be around within this year without social media," said Hilsenteger.

Because he's selling a specialized high-tech product, Hilsenteger said his customers need to know what's in his store at a given moment. Many of them receive his tweets directly to their iPhones, he said.

"Most of [our customers], either through Twitter or through our website, find it important to know what our inventory is and how quickly it turns around, particularly because the inventory is changing so often. They don't know that there will always be another one," said Hilsenteger.

Use Twitter, Facebook for different tasks

Twitter and Facebook offer services that are in some ways similar — a stream of updates delivered over the internet — but businesses tend to use them for different purposes.

'We do a lot of talking on our social networks to get people to understand that we're good people, and we're not going to mess them around.'—Willie Cromack, John Henry Bikes

Twitter updates are just text, and no more than 140 characters, but they can include links to web pages. Twitter users can follow these updates so they can see them as soon they're posted.

Dooher said Twitter is great for daily updates delivered quickly.

"We do use Twitter every day before lunch service, and we tweet out our quickie [lunch special] of the day.

"That's just helping them make a decision. If they choose to come down, that's great. They know exactly what they're going to get. If it's something that doesn't appeal to them, they move on," she said.

Mike Charbonneau, marketing director for the Revue Cinema in Toronto, said he uses Twitter as a "digital marquee" for his community movie theatre.

"That's really what we use Twitter for, to let people know on a daily basis what's playing," said Charbonneau. "If they don't check us out at the website, if they don't check us out in the magazine we publish, if they don't check us out on Facebook, well, hopefully they will on Twitter."

The updates, or tweets, are public and searchable, so it's possible for anyone searching Twitter to find posts there. Charbonneau said that feature has helped expand the Revue's audience beyond its Roncesvalles neighbourhood.

Mildred's Temple Kitchen earned a mention in the blog of Peter Merholz — who coined the word "blog" — after someone recommended the restaurant to him over Twitter. A member of the kitchen's staff saw the recommendation and thanked Merholz's friend for the referral.

Facebook, on the other hand, offers more options for its posts. There's no limit on the size of the updates, and they can include photos and video. Links to other websites can include more information on the content there, including a thumbnail view. As well, discussions are more intuitively organized on Facebook, so they're easier to follow.

'A good place to go'

However, Facebook updates will more than likely only be seen by users who become fans of the Facebook page of a business or join its Facebook group.

A fan of the Revue Cinema started a "Friends of the Revue" Facebook group, which Charbonneau subsequently took over.

"People can go there and have a discussion, post pictures, so for people who are big fans of the Revue, that's a good place to go," Charbonneau said.

Willie Cromack of John Henry Bikes said he uses the company's Facebook fan page for prizes and communicating with his customers, but his posts can get lost among updates from friends.

"More conversation can take place [on Facebook], but it takes a more entertaining comment to get the responses," said Cromack.

"You can't just say, 'We got some boxes in today.' You have to have a video, a picture, a link that says, I'm going to be more entertaining today than the next guy," he said.

Cromack uses other social media sites, like Flickr and YouTube, to host his business's pictures and videos, and links to them from Twitter, Facebook and the company's blog.

Businesses can also invite their Facebook fans to special events, and Facebook will remind them when the date is approaching.

"The really good thing about Facebook is the events component. We frequently have special programming at the Revue," said Charbonneau. "Facebook's great for that."

Facebook and Twitter also differ in the number of people who use them. Facebook has over 300 million users worldwide, while Twitter, a newer service, expects to have 25 million users by the end of 2009. However, the businesses we talked to all had more Twitter followers than Facebook fans.

"We try to use Facebook for some special offers. Sometimes we'll have a discount provided strictly for members of the Facebook group that only they would know about," said Hilsenteger.

Free advertising

Because Twitter and Facebook are free services, they're especially attractive to small businesses in a tight economy.

"As a non-profit organization, you can imagine, the more ways we can get our message out about what's playing, the easier it is for us to fill the seats with people," said Charbonneau.

"Social media has allowed companies like ours to reach a significant amount of people with little or no cost at all," said Hilsenteger.

Cromack said Twitter, Facebook and his company's blog allow him to compete with bigger companies on a more level playing field.

"This is a great opportunity for us to be best-in-class, first-in, to have the same size of screen that Coke and IBM work with, and I could be as good or better than them without spending a ridiculous amount of money," said Cromack.

Dooher said social media offer an attractive alternative to traditional advertising media.

"We were being pushed to look at online advertising, print advertising, radio advertising, which really is a big investment of money, and it's very hard to get a return on that investment," she said.

"But word-of-mouth is always been the best way to promote a hospitality facility. And it's free," said Dooher.

However, tweeting every day and updating Facebook pages does take time, and the small business owners we talked to cautioned against getting lost in social media.

"We have a website, we have a newsletter, we have Facebook, we have Twitter, and sometimes I think, 'Oh, and we cook! Oh yes, I forgot about that!'" said Doohan.

"I find it's important to remember what you do, and not to get too caught up in [social media]. And we were getting a caught up in it. We were losing our minds, and we thought, 'What are we doing? Why are we doing this?'" she said.

Doohan said he found delegating some of the social media responsibilities to other members of her staff helpful.

"I will confess to you, I am 55 years of age, so it's not technology that I'm very comfortable with or familiar with, and I have engaged the services and the consultation of many of the young people that work with me," she said.

Cromack also recruited his employees to help with writing the daily biking tips for Twitter, recording videos for posting on YouTube and writing reviews of new products.

"Once I worked out the system that I wanted, and the plan I wanted in place, then I could delegate sections of it to staff," said Cromack.

"It is time-consuming, but in the end, so is talking to a customer, so it depends on where you think your time is valuable," he said. ( cbc.ca )

READ MORE - Small businesses flock to Twitter, Facebook

MPs fight online predators who counsel suicide

MPs fight online predators who counsel suicide. The House of Commons voted unanimously in favour of a motion Wednesday that could change how the Criminal Code deals with people who counsel others over the internet to commit suicide.

The motion put forward by Harold Albrecht, Conservative MP for the Ontario riding of Kitchener-Conestoga, was a response to the death of Nadia Kajouji, an 18-year-old Carleton university student who threw herself into the Rideau River in March 2008.

Nadia Kajouji committed suicide in March 2008. Police discovered that a 47-year-old male nurse from Minnesota — who was posing as a 28-year-old woman online — might have encouraged Kajouji via an internet chat room to commit suicide. (Courtesy of Nadia Kajouji's family)

During the investigation into Kajouji's death, police discovered that a 47-year-old male nurse from Minnesota — who was posing as a 28-year-old woman online — might have encouraged Kajouji via an internet chat room to commit suicide. No charges have been laid in the case, under either U.S. or Canadian law.

Definition of 'aiding and abetting' unclear

Section 241 of the Canadian Criminal Code says "everyone who … counsels a person to commit suicide, or aids or abets a person to commit suicide, whether suicide ensues or not, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years."

Albrecht would like to see the definition of aiding and abetting clarified to include the use of technologies like internet chat rooms. Wednesday's motion isn't legally binding, but Albrecht intends to work with the federal Justice Department to draft a formal bill.

"I think clarifying it in the law will give that deterrent message to close that potential loophole, and there will be adequate pressure to make sure that another story like Nadia's never occurs, " Albrecht said.

After nearly two years of suffering, Wednesday's motion brought some peace to Kajouji's family.

"All those people over there, all the MPs, they're doing something for Nadia and other kids. And it makes me very happy. It makes me very proud, " Mohamed Kajouji, Nadia's father said.

Marc Kajouji, Nadia's brother, was relieved to see something positive come from his sister's death.

"There's a lot of joy today surrounding me. And that's obviously because of Nadia, who's definitely smiling down on us, and very happy with the result I'm sure." ( cbc.ca )

READ MORE - MPs fight online predators who counsel suicide

Google to launch Chrome netbooks next year

Google to launch Chrome netbooks next year. Google plans to offer its Chrome operating system, which will let computers work without Windows and connect directly to the internet, on netbooks by Christmas next year.

The company, in a webcast news conference on Thursday, touted Chrome as a revolutionary approach that will speed users' access to the internet by making computers feel more like televisions, which work right away after being turned on.

Google's Chrome operating system will feature an interface that looks like a cross between a web browser and a smartphone.

"This is a fundamentally different model of computing," said Sundar Pichai, vice-president of product management at Google. "We're going to go through a paradigm shift."

The problem with current operating systems, such as Microsoft's Windows or Apple's OS, is that they require a sometimes lengthy boot-up to load all sorts of functions and applications that most people never use, Pichai said. Chrome does away with most of that process and takes users directly to their web browser. Pichai said current boot-up time is seven seconds, but Google is working to shave that further.

Google is working with several computer makers to combine the operating system with hardware, which will be slightly bigger than current netbooks and will feature full-size keyboards, he said. The devices will use the wireless "n" wi-fi standard to connect to the internet and will have solid state flash storage, rather than the disc drives found in many computers.

Chrome, which is free for hardware makers, is also being designed with laptop and desktop computers in mind, Pichai said, but for now the company is focused on netbooks. Google expects the Chrome-based netbooks to retail for about the same as existing models on the market.

The company also announced it was making the operating system completely open source, so that anyone who wants to develop applications for it can do so. Pichai demonstrated that Microsoft, the company that Chrome takes direct aim at, has already developed its own applications that work within Google's web browser, also called Chrome. Users can open their Excel spreadsheet documents, for example, through a web-based version of Microsoft's software.

Chrome will consequently push further the idea of cloud computing, where all of a user's files are stored on the internet rather than on their computer's hard drive. Critics have said the concept is problematic because users could lose control of their data or would be at the mercy of outages at service providers, such as Google.

Pichai countered such questions from reporters by suggesting that users will always own their own data and that online outages are far less frequent than problems that occur with the computers themselves. The cloud's reliability "compares very, very well," he said. ( cbc.ca )

READ MORE - Google to launch Chrome netbooks next year