BlackBerry Pearl users can test voice input for Google Maps

As Google expands its product line for mobile services, the Mountain View-based company announced BlackBerry Pearl users now have the ability to use voice search

Specifically, users will be able to use Google Maps, getting directions or locations by voice instead of text searching Pearl owners can go to m.google.com/maps, press 0 to center the view of the map, press a side key and say a business name or location, and then release the button so the voice recognition software can begin to pull in results.

Google designed the software for use when typing is not possible, a user isn’t sure of the exact spelling of a name, or the name is too long.

For now, the service is available only for the BlackBerry Pearl — models 8110, 8210, and 8120 — but could be expanded to other BlackBerry devices, including the Curve. It’s currently described as "experimental," which means the results will not always be flawless.

"Like many of Google’s experimental features, we released this on a subset of phones in order to learn more about usage patterns and optimize the technology," a Google spokesperson told BetaNews Thursday. "We chose the Blackberry Pearl as it does not have a full QWERTY keyboard, making voice an even more appealing feature for users. We are always looking for ways to expand our offerings to more devices and to more users, but have nothing to announce at this time."

Several new phones have Google Maps integrated, though similar direction services are available from mobile phone providers. AT&T and Verizon Wireless both have GPS-based services available for a few dollars per month, but voice with Google Maps is free.

Nielsen research indicates mobile phone owners use Google Mobile for 9 searches per month on average, and Yahoo for 6.7, but mobile answers service ChaCha receives more than 40 searches per month. Utilizing a voice-in, text-out platform, ChaCha users are able to search for something by voice and get a response via text.

Google already uses speech recognition with its free Google 411 service.

Google must divulge YouTube log

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

The ruling comes as part of Google’s legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.

Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a "set-back to privacy rights".

The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

While the legal battle between the two firms is being contested in the US, it is thought the ruling will apply to YouTube users and their viewing habits everywhere.

Viacom, which owns MTV and Paramount Pictures, has alleged that YouTube is guilty of massive copyright infringement.

The UK’s Premier League association is also seeking class action status with Viacom on the issue, alledging YouTube has been used to watch football highlights.

Legal action

When it initiated legal action in March 2007 Viacom said it had identified about 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes on the website, which had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Following the launch of its billion-dollar lawsuit, YouTube introduced filtering tools in an effort to prevent copyright materials from appearing on the site.

The US court declined Viacom’s request that Google be forced to hand over the source code of YouTube, saying it was a "trade secret" that should not be disclosed.

But it said privacy concerns expressed by Google about handing over the log were "speculative".

Google’s senior litigation counsel Catherine Lacavera said in a statement: "We are disappointed the court granted Viacom’s over-reaching demand for viewing history.

"We will ask Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court’s order."

The ruling will see the viewing habits of millions of YouTube users given to Viacom, totalling more than 12 terabytes of data.

Viacom said it wanted the data to "compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing video with that of non-infringing videos."

‘Erroneous ruling’

Leading privacy expert Simon Davies told BBC News that the privacy of millions of YouTube users was threatened.

He said: "The chickens have come home to roost for Google.

"Their arrogance and refusal to listen to friendly advice has resulted in the privacy of tens of millions being placed under threat."

Mr Davies said privacy campaigners had warned Google for years that IP addresses were personally identifiable information.

Google pledged last year to anonymise IP addresses for search information but it has said nothing about YouTube data.

Mr Davies said: "Governments and organisations are realising that companies like Google have a warehouse full of data. And while that data is stored it is under threat of being used and putting privacy in danger."

The EFF said: "The Court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights, and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube.

"We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users."

The body said the ruling was also potentially unlawful because the log data did contain personally identifiable data.

The court also ruled that Google disclose to Viacom the details of all videos that have been removed from the site for any reason.

Google and Yahoo spider can now crawl through flash site

As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only website is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.

This announcement has been a long time coming, as Flash developers have been wishing for ways to make their content searchable for close to a decade. Adobe acknowledges this in its announcement, saying that although search engines are able to index static text and links within Flash SWF files, “[Rich Internet Applications] and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states—a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.”

This announcement may also result in some major usability changes (for the better) for Flash on the web. In a post to its Webmaster Central Blog, Google wrote that it can now index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, like that included in Flash gadgets, buttons, menus, entirely self-contained Flash websites, “and everything in between.” Google can now also follow URLs embedded within Flash files to add to the crawling pipeline. This new indexing technology does not, however, include FLV files (video files that are found on sites like YouTube) because those are generated as videos and don’t contain any text elements like an SWF file does.

Google says it’s able to do this by developing an algorithm that “explores Flash files in the same way that a person would,” by clicking buttons and manually going through Flash content. “Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed,” wrote the company. “We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.”

Of course, Google (and eventually Yahoo) won’t be able to index everything embedded within a Flash file—at least not yet. Anything that is image-related, including text that is embedded into images, will be invisible to the search engines for the time being. Google also noted that it can’t execute certain JavaScripts that may be embedded into a Flash file, and that while it indexes content that is contained in a separate HTML or XML file, it won’t be counted as part of the content in the Flash file. These are all issues that are being worked on, however, and are likely to change in the future.

Yahoo is also working with Adobe to index SWF files, but doesn’t appear to be as far along as Google just yet. One player that is noticeably missing is Microsoft, though. From Adobe’s announcement and the language used by Google, it appears as if each search engine has to work with Adobe to make this possible—meaning that Microsoft has either been excluded by Adobe for this round or has decided to voluntarily sit this one out. Either way, with searchable SWF files down, usability experts can now focus all of their attention on other Flash-related concerns, like blatant design perversion and excessive animation abuse.

GOOGLE launches new media server app.

Google just came forward with its new Google Media Server, a Windows application which allows users to share personal files or online content found on Google services ( such as YouTube or Picasa Web Albums),  with a series of UPnP compatible devices, including the PlayStation 3 and the XBox 360.

The application works with Google Desktop technology: the administration tool uses Desktop gadgets and for locating media files the app uses Google Desktop Search. In order to run the Media Server, only two things are needed: a PC with Google Desktop and UPnP-enabled device. Once this is taken care of, users will be able to access their PC-stocked video, audio and photo content.

Google’s plans include serious video advertising projects; Eric Schmidt, company CEO, said earlier this month that Google intends to make some money out of YouTube, but hasn’t yet figured out how to do so. YouTube was purchased by Google for a whopping $1.6 billion, but up to this point, the investment hasn’t brought in any profits. Meanwhile, the site has proven to eat out most of Google’s outgoing bandwidth.

With the new Google Media Server, the PC-TV gap was bridged and with the help of YouTube’s huge popularity, online videos will surely find themselves played on TVs everywhere in no time.

However, things are not going to come easy. The company may find itself in a tricky situation upon an attempt to get companies to place ads according to target demographics. Even though the number of people posting or just viewing clips on YouTube is quite impressive, the content is so unstructured, that making a demographic study about what kind of people watch which kind of clips is next to impossible.