Misunderstood NebuAd Forced to Close down

This week American online advertising company NebuAd closed its doors for good and with it disappeared a much needed new revenue stream for ISPs.The company ran out of money, and seemed to be struggling after the US Congress held hearings last year to examine its Internet practice which was deemed to be an invasion of privacy. Congress subsequently dropped the investigation, of course. But whilst NebuAd's customers took the very proper position not to use the service whilst the investigation was going on, the systems didn't seem to go back on, NebuAd seems to have lost cash and closed shop.NebuAd gathered information at an ISP level to serve customers with relevant ads.Unfortunately, the upshot seems to be that ISPs have lost out on a great opportuinity. The ad revenue, which would have been shared with ISPs, could have been invested in improving existing technology, cutting overall costs or even used to reduce the price of services for existing and potential customers.NebuAd explicitly stated in their privacy policy that they would "specifically not store or use any information relating to confidential medical information, racial or ethnic origins, religious beliefs, or sexuality which are tied to personally identifiable information ('sensitive personal information')."However, if NebuAd actually used technology that made the customer anonymous, hasn't the public lost something that would have protected their privacy as well? And how many people are opting into services - either inadvertently or lazily - and are giving their consent for companies to totally profile them without any attempt at anonymity. It'll be a very sad occurrence if the end of this company means the end of any attempt at anonymity by companies offering advertising on the Internet, with the excuse that, "Well, you opted in, so we can glean whatever information we like about you."

Google fails

Congratulations students of the globe! For anyone from the ages of 5 to 15 can enjoy Google’s new attempt at structured data search: Google Squared. And that’s presumably the only group of people that would ever consider using it. Remember when you were eight and your teacher asked you to make a pretty table on British Monarchy with all the monarchs of Britain including their children, spouses and important dates? How you pored over huge encyclopaedias to get all the information? Well, Google Squared officially heralds the end of early education as all these tasks are completed in a matter of seconds for our burgeoning historians and other putative scientists. If only it were that easy. Just as Babel Fish translate could only ever get a student 12/20 on French translation homework after its launch all those years ago, Google Squared fails to achieve… well anything it’s going for really. A search for the British Monarchy in an attempt to tabulate a chronological factfile brings up a table with the following order – George VI, George II, George V. The genius that is Squared then goes off on a little jaunt that includes the Act of the Union, the Irish Free State, Buckingham Palace and the House of Orange. This just gets embarrassing: the picture accompanying the House of Orange? Why of course! Its Gemma Arterton arriving for the ‘Orange’ BAFTAs at the Royal Opera ‘House’. This is surely Google gone mad. Actually we shouldn’t really be surprised; to be fair to Google, nowadays the Bond Girl must get more hits than the Dutch royals.It’s rather life affirming to know that even the great god Google isn’t completely infallible. This is an exciting day indeed. This revelation is like those wonderful moments when that beautiful woman who walks like she is better than everyone else trips and falls flat on her face on Oxford Street. At the Christmas Light switch on. On the podium. And the woman is Kate Moss.One must presumably conclude that the only reason Google released this in such an awkward condition was to distract attention from somewhere else: another attempt to make searching intelligent recently arrived in the form of Wolfram Alpha, the computational knowledge engine. It proclaims to ‘generate output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.’ This means, instead of producing lists of useless links or grids of questionable information, it creates pages to answer your search, to the best of its ability. When asked, ‘How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?’, the clever engine replies, ‘The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind. (according to Bob Dylan).’ Indeed.