It looked earlier today like Google’s work with one of its most high-profile Apps customers, the city government of Los Angeles, might be hitting some speed bumps. TechCrunch spotted a city memo stating that some early users complained about “issues and problems that have negatively affected their productivity and department operations,” leading to the extension of the pilot program.

Does that mean the City of Los Angeles’ relationship with Google is on the rocks? That would be a black mark for Google Apps, the company’s bundle of online office tools like Gmail and Google Docs. Google loves to trot out LA as an example of an enormous organization entrusting its operations to web-based apps.

But a Google spokesman told me that the concerns had been overstated, and he pointed me towards a blog post from Kevin Crawford, who’s managing LA’s Apps rollout:

The above issues are part of a normal Pilot and review process and is a normal part of a well-thought out project schedule — most large rollouts (with any technology) are built with flexible timeframes so issues can be addressed. … This is all NORMAL stuff happening here and the project is still on track to deliver per the schedule!

That sounds like a reasonable explanation. When you’re moving a big organization to a new system, some problems and complaints seem inevitable. Though I suppose cloud computing skeptics could also read the post as an attempt to put a happy face on real problems.

And if you want to compare, here’s more detail from the initial letter:

At the meeting [for pilot participants] many of the departments expressed concerns about both the performance and the functionality of the new system. Performance concerns focused on the slowness with which e-mails were sent, received, and accessed in the new system. Functionality concerns focused on features currently available in GroupWise that are unavailable, or significantly different, in Google’s system. Further, the Los Angeles Police Department indicated that several security issues have yet to be resolved, and that a pilot of its technical support staff must be successfully completed before it can be expanded to the rest of the LAPD.

[image: Flickr/kla4067]

Tags: City of Los Angeles, Google Apps

Companies: Google

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has modest goals. He wants to rule forever (term limits were ended last year). But he also wants to rule Twitter. His head of communications said as much a few days ago. Or, at least, those around him think he will rule Twitter. “I’m sure he’ll break records for numbers of followers,” Diosdado Cabello told Bloomberg. Of course, at the time, he didn’t yet have a Twitter account set up. Now he does. And he’s gaining users fast.

Chavez’s account (freshly verified) is here. As you can see he already has over 100,000 followers after just two days of tweets — and just two (rather mundane) tweets. That’s pretty solid considering that it took famous Americans Conan O’Brien and Bill Gates months to reach just 800,000 followers. Still, Chavez has a ways to go before he gets anywhere near the top of the Twitter mountain. Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears are currently racing to be the first users to 5 million followers.

Meanwhile, Chavez is following just 5 people. One, unsurprisingly is the one tied to Cuban leader Fidel Castro (though someone else tweets for him) Chavez’s mentor. The others Chavez follows appear to be fellow Venezuelan political leaders. As his background he appears to have chosen the same red found on the Venezuelan flag. His bio reads, “President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Bolivarian Soldier, Socialist and Anti-Imperialist.” And he’s tweeting using UberTwitter which means Chavez (or whomever is handling his account) may well be a BlackBerry user.

The best part though is his Twitter username: chavezcandanga. “Candanga” apparently literally translates into “the devil” — though, I’m told, people also use it to describe someone who is strong-willed, or fearless.

French startup English Attack,which just went into beta, is offering free English language lessons tailored specifically to the young adult market. The company is one of the 20 products pitched by (mainly European) startups in TheNextWeb conference startup rally in Amsterdam this week

Input is the key for language learning, and English Attack targets teenagers and young adults with the type of input they love best: entertainment. The majority of English learners are 15-35, and they are difficult customers. They don’t like rigid text books (in fact, they tend not to be big on reading at all), are enthusiastic gamers and social networkers and, most importantly, don’t like to pay for content online. English Attack builds free language exercises around the type of interactive, social and gaming content they are already using.

The tool is intended to be complementary to more structured English learning like classes and is aimed at intermediate level learners. Teachers can get involved by developing their own exercises. An upcoming teacher platform will also let them assign homework from existing exercises (and track how students scored). Teachers can also advertise for free on the site if they contribute content.

The business model is freemium with paid features to be added in later versions. France is the first test market to be followed shortly by Turkey and Brazil. English Attack says it has 5 or 6 competitors, only half of which are focused on English and none of which specifically target young adults. The company is currently self-funded.

Tags: english, language learning

Companies: English attack!

The copied fish mating dance was the last straw. The similarities between Crowdstar International’s Happy Aquarium and WonderHill’s Aquarium Life were so plentiful that the cloning of the social game is now a legal matter.

Burlingame, Calif.-based Crowdstar has filed a federal lawsuit accusing WonderHill of unfair competition and copyright violations for copying Happy Aquarium on Facebook. Among the signature features that WonderHill allegedly copied was a “distinctive mating dance to a backdrop of hearts and romantic music.”

It may sound trivial, but Happy Aquarium is Crowdstar’s bread and butter, attracting more than 26 million monthly active visitors a month (now fallen to about 20 million according to AppData). The game is free to play, but users pay real money for virtual goods in the game such as fish food. Crowdstar is making millions of dollars from virtual goods purchases in the game, and that has helped it expand its staff dramatically and launch new games.

The tough thing is that it may be hard for Crowdstar to prove that Aquarium Life is a rip off. Fish games have been around for a long time, and it is only recently on Facebook that they have turned into a phenomenon. Notably, Zynga launched FishVille, another fish genre game, after Happy Aquarium became so successful last fall. Aquarium Life was launched by WonderHill, a relatively small player in social games, in January.

The suit alleges that Aquarium Life’s user interface is virtually identical to Happy Aquarium’s.

The cloning of games has been a big issue in social games. Zynga cloned FarmTown, a game created by a small game company, with the launch of FarmVille last summer. Zynga’s hit game became far bigger than FarmTown, generating more than 80 million monthly active users. Yet it is hard for the makers of FarmTown to prove a case of copyright infringement, largely because farm games got their start in China.

Lots of video games are new twists on old games. The tremendously creative and popular Plants vs. Zombies game, created by PopCap games, is a derivative of Desktop Tower Defense. But the games are often so different they usually don’t result in anti-copycat lawsuits. Hence, most lawsuits related to intellectual property in video games tend to focus on the raiding of talent or the theft of actual game code.

Companies: Crowdstar, Wonderhill

The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it has signed an agreement with Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s far-reaching strategy for developing and deploying renewable energy and other sustainable technologies. The two organizations say they will work together to make these advancements more affordable and accessible for the world community.

The memorandum of understanding will open lines of communication between the U.S. government and the companies governing and working on Masdar’s various projects. The idea is to share best practices and research and development resources, particularly to advance carbon capture, water and biofuel technologies, the Energy Department says.

The culmination of the Masdar Initiative is Masdar City, a radically green, planned community located in Abu Dhabi, built by corporations including the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, and funded by the United Arab Emirates government. It will act as home base for the International Renewable Energy Agency, and is expected to cost $22 billion over eight years of construction.

Running only on solar power and other alternative sources of energy, the city — covering 2.3 square miles — is designed by British firm Foster + Partners to be both carbon and waste neutral. Cars will be banned from its streets in favor of greener mass transit options. Even the streets are designed to be narrower and shaded to allow for natural cooling.

Masdar City will also house the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, an educational institution with close ties to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It won’t just be a laboratory for green technologies, but a real, working urban environment. Current plans account for 50,000 residents and 1,500 businesses. About 60,000 more workers are expected to commute into Masdar City every day.

In addition to solar installations on most rooftops, 20-megawatts worth of wind turbines will be erected outside the city’s perimeter. Beyond that, a massive hydrogen power plant is in the works.

Water innovation is one of the areas the Energy Department is most interested in. Masdar City will depend on solar-powered desalination facilities to meet its population’s freshwater needs. Up to 80 percent of the water used will also be recycled as many times as possible, with gray water being used to irrigate agricultural plot.

Achieving waste neutrality may be the most difficult challenge. To achieve this, bio-waste will be recycled into fuel via incineration or fertilizer for crops. Plastics and glass will be aggressively recycled under current plans.

Masdar and its investors already have numerous ties in the U.S. For example, General Electric will be testing many of its new smart, energy-efficient appliances, like refrigerators and clothes dryers, within the city. The Masdar Clean Tech Fund is also a major investor in Bay Area-based solar module maker Solyndra, Texas thin-film maker HelioVolt, and clean energy company EnerTech, among other American ventures.

Tags: energy efficiency, renewable energy

Companies: EnerTech, HelioVolt, Masdar, Masdar Clean Tech Fund, Solyndra, U.S. Department of Energy

© kalleboo I saw a very thought-provoking article on the Chinese Yuan early this month. I filed the article, but didn't writing about it because, well, I've written about the Yuan several times in the last year and it would be possible to let that single topic take over any blog on China's economics. In the article, John Tamny basically argues that currencies should be more like units of measurement that like commodities. The dollar, the Yuan, the Yen, the Euro, the Indian Rupee, ...

As I wrote about back in February, ManageTwitter is easily one of the most useful third-party Twitter services out there. While there are plenty of services that help you find new people to follow, there simply aren’t enough that help you prune those that you already follow. For those of us who have been using the service for years now, and have accumulated a lot of people we follow over that time, this is a problem. ManageTwitter solves it brilliantly. And now Twitter is going to kill them.

As the service posted on its Posterous blog yesterday, Twitter has sent the service an email letting them know that they’re breaking one of their rules. Specifically, this is what Twitter wrote:

We’re writing to let you know that your application, ManageTwitter, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates bulk automated user unfollowing, which is not allowed. It’s best for both our users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes, such as removing the “Select All” option (and requiring users to decide on each user individually) to bring your application into compliance.

The problem is that ManageTwitter’s service isn’t automated at all. It simply offers up suggestions for who you should unfollow. As ManageTwitter writes:

Yes our application does facilitate bulk unfollowing BUT ManageTwitter does not facilitate any *automated* bulk unfollowing, the user has to filter based on criteria. The user is still required to do significant processing to unfollow groups of people. Furthermore the system only allows unfollowing of up to only 100 at a time.

They go on to note that they understand Twitter’s rule, but again, do not believe they are breaking it. It’s possible that the portion Twitter doesn’t like is that the checkboxes next to usernames are automatically selected for deletion (I don’t particularly like this either because most users — even many of the ones they suggest — I don’t want to unfollow) — and if so, that’s an easy fix. I have an email into Twitter asking them if that would be good enough and will update when I hear back.

I can certainly see Twitter not approving of the name for trademark reasons — but they’re apparently not disputing that at the moment, just the bulk unfollow bit.

Or maybe Twitter just doesn’t like the fact that ManageTwitter has managed to help 35,000 users unfollow nearly 6 million people on the service. I can’t imagine any social network would like a third-party service changing the social graph in such a way. But again, this service is very useful to many users, and I believe makes Twitter better — even if it is slightly less connected.

ManageTwitter is asking that you retweet this tweet in support of them.

[Thanks Courtenay]

Gilt, the well-funded company that sells high-end luxury goods online at steep discounts in short-term “flash sales”, has its eyes set on a new target: Groupon. At least, it’s launching a new service that has a very similar model. In the last two days, Gilt has been sending some members invitations to ‘Gilt City‘, where they can get “exclusive local deals and offers up to 70% off.” The service is only available in New York City for now, but it’s clear that Gilt intends to expand it elsewhere. As with Gilt’s normal flash-sales, you’ll have to request an account to take part (it looks like existing accounts already work).

Like Groupon, Gilt City offers deals from local businesses (restaurants, beauty salons, etc.) and events. Deals are available in limited quantities and for a limited time. But the site differs in a few ways from Groupon: there doesn’t seem to be a minimum number of participants needed for a deal to become “activated”, and some stores are offering multiple deals. And unlike Groupon’s one-deal-per-day, Gilt only updates once a week for now.

Gilt is only the latest in a long, long string of Groupon-like sites to launch recently, but it’s in a better position than most. Gilt already has a strong brand presence, and it’s raised $48 million. But it’s typically focused on luxury goods whereas Groupon has a broader focus, so there’s likely room for the two to coexist.

Among the deals currently being offered are specials at a local salon, a trendy restaurant, and a show, all of which are high-end. However, there’s also a deal for the 16 Handles yogurt chain, which has a pretty broad appeal.

Thanks to Josh Goldman for the heads up.

Here’s a legal whoops. Fashion companies Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga sued what they thought was a maker of counterfeit goods, only to find out that the site was owned by Chanel.

Earlier in April, the companies filed suit in federal court in New York against MyPurseWorld.com, which sold counterfeit goods once upon a time. A court issued a restraining order to prevent web hosts and internet service providers from doing business with the site.

But as of the summer of 2009, Chanel acquired ownership of the site, according to Women’s Wear Daily. In June, 2009, a federal court in Florida transferred the domain ownership to Chanel, after it sued the site’s then-operator, Sean Dollinger. Chanel used the site to post a judgment notice from the earlier case and to spread information about other counterfeiters.

Chanel said that there was no merit to Gucci’s suit because the site is now devoted to anti-counterfeiting activities. In other words, the investigators who were working on behalf of Gucci didn’t bother to check the web site and verify that it was selling counterfeit goods.

The sale of counterfeit goods online remains a huge problem, but even the U.S. government has a hard time quantifying the problem.

This accidental lawsuit only goes to show that the internet isn’t a static thing. One day, a web site may be selling counterfeit goods. The next day it may be a tool in helping to stop the sale of counterfeit goods.

The opening keynote at Facebook’s f8 conference today in San Francisco was short and sweet. But don’t let that fool you. It contained some huge announcements pertaining to how the service will interact with the broader web going forward. The three big ones: social plugins, Open Graph, and Open Graph API, make Facebook’s intentions very clear: they want to be the fabric of the web.

Erick already outlined Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s perspective on this from his keynote, but perhaps more interesting was some of what Platform Lead Bret Taylor had to say. The most interesting thing Taylor said was that Facebook’s stance is that social connections are going to be just as important going forward as hyperlinks have been for the web. Obviously, as the largest social network, Facebook to some degree has to believe (or at least say) that. But today, and really over the past several months of huge growth, Facebook has given us all a reason to believe that may be the case.

And if that’s so, Google had better watch out. There may be a new sheriff in web town.

Right off the bat, Zuckerberg rattled off some impressive numbers. While we all know that Facebook has over 400 million users (and it appears to be approaching 500 million rapidly), he also said that the service is growing at a faster rate than ever before. That’s fairly insane. He also noted that while it took the service 5 years to get to 100 million users, it took only 3 years to reach the same total in terms of mobile users. And in the past year, they seen that number grow 3x. Perhaps most impressive of all is that in just one year, Facebook got 100 million people using Facebook Connect. And that’s why everything they announced today has a real shot at completely transforming the web. Because everything they’ve announced (and specifically, Open Graph) seems to be like Facebook Connect on steroids.

All of this may sound grandiose and a bit frightening, but that’s why it’s ingenious the way Facebook is using Taylor. As he explained on stage today, Taylor used to work on a “small social network called FriendFeed” (which, of course, Facebook acquired last year). While he’s now a key member of Facebook’s team leading this new strategy, he used some of his keynote today to talk about his experience working on a startup with Facebook Connect.

He noted that at FriendFeed they found that the key to getting users to stick around and keep them using the site was that they had to connect with five friends. Unfortunately, when you’re a startup with not very many users, that’s extremely hard to do (yes, even just five). So FriendFeed implemented all types of logins and email contact lookups to try and help users find friends. The key to FriendFeed’s growth was Facebook Connect, as users were four times more likely to become engaged users if they signed up through that service, he said. In fact, if FriendFeed has continued on as an independent service, “we would have removed all those other signup buttons,” Taylor said. Yes, that includes Twitter and Google.

And lest you think his experience with Connect was all peachy, Taylor went on to explain that FriendFeed was constantly frustrated with how difficult Facebook Connect was to implement into their site. This is something that many developers have echoed over the past year. But with the new social plugins announced today, that all changes, Taylor promised. “I didn’t think the platform needed to be this complex,” he said. And now, apparently, it isn’t.

So that’s Taylor selling Facebook’s Open Graph to thousands of startups out there. And many are likely to bite. There’s no denying that social graphs are the key to a service being sticky, and there is no better social graph than Facebook’s.

Companies will have to choose whether to fight against this, and attempt to launch their own graph, or get in line. “When we connect our graphs together, the web is gonna get a whole lot better,” Zuckerberg promised.

Facebook launched some of this social plugin and Open Graph integration with several (30) large partners today. Just clicking around the web earlier, I ran into the new “like” button on CNN. It’s excellent; much better than the current share buttons which are slow and clunky in comparison.

In my opinion, Facebook still has a ways to go towards improving its actual site if it’s really going to be the long-term center of the web. (As in, the place you go to rather than Google.com.) But its claws for pulling in outside content are now razor-sharp. It’s going to be very hard for anyone to escape.

Over the next several days and weeks, we’ll undoubtedly hear why that’s a bad thing. Maybe it is. But maybe, if Facebook plays its cards right, the web will be a bit better because it will be more connected. Of course, that’s a lot of power for a still-private company to have. Let’s hope they know what they’re doing, and aren’t evil.

[photos: flickr/ingridtaylar and flickr/alan vernon]