Tech Week in Review 8-6-09

Going Google

This week, Google launched a new ad campaign that is aimed at pushing IT managers to switch to Google Apps. The billboards will run for a month and will be changed every day, updated with new information on the advantages of Google Apps. Google is going hard at Microsoft, linking to the Apps at Work website, which says:

Each day, thousands of companies are going Google by switching to Google Apps — a web-based suite of messaging and collaboration applications. It’s all hosted by Google, and designed with security and reliability in mind, saving your company the frustrations and hassles of managing traditional IT solutions yourself. Find out how others have switched from Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes to Google Apps.

Google CEO Resigns from Apple’s Board of Directors

It was something that many thought would happen eventually. Google CEO Eric Schmidt  being on the board of directors at Apple was increasingly becoming a problem as Google continued to step into Apple’s territory. Google Android competes with Apple’s iPhone. Google Chrome OS competes with Mac OS X. For more details on the resignation, check out the press release or read about why Schmidt had to go.

Sponsored Tweets Launches

IZEA is the company behind PayPerPost, which is a service that pays you to blog about stuff. They just launched  Sponsored Tweets, which is a service that will pay you to tweet about stuff. Seems to me like they’re just taking the next logical step. Many may say that sponsored posts or tweets are unethical, but I don’t see the problem as long as there is no deception involved. Sponsored tweets takes ethics very seriously. I don’t see existing services in this space being much competition, but we shall see.

Twitter, Livejournal, and Facebook Attacked

I woke up Thursday morning and noticed that Twitter was down. Little bro kept complaining about Facebook acting stupid. Little did I know that both services and LiveJournal were fending off DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks. Not really much they could actually do against the attackers, but the express purpose of the attack was to bring these services to their knees and they succeeded. Wasn’t a big problem for me since I spend most of my time on FriendFeed, but I’m sure many people were left with no clue what to do with themselves. (more at RWW)

Twitter Gets Sued and It’s Serious This Time

TechRadium has sued Twitter for patent infringement. This is no joke, though. The patents owned by TechRadium almost exactly describe the service that Twitter has become: mass notifications from one author to many subscribers via sms, voicemail, and email. While Twitter doesn’t do voicemail at this time, it’s easy to see where this lawsuit is coming from. I hope Twitter and TechRadium are able to handle this in a civilized manner as neither party will gain anything from a legal battle. (more at TC)