Entries Tagged 'NYT' ↓

Austin-based data aggregation service Infochimps released several major sets of data extracted from the Twitter API today, as well as Infochimp's first application and API based on one of these datasets.

Updating the "Twitter census" data it released in November 2009, the datasets and histograms Infochimps made available today include ones that track Twitter users by follower count and by profile page color (used to make the visualization below).

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"Fresh Twitter Data"

While the two sets are among those available for no charge, Infochimps sells the more in-depth and extensive datasets it's derived from Twitter, proving there's a continued marketplace for this sort of information. For $300 you can buy the dataset containing an hour-by-hour breakdown of the occurence of hashtags, URLs, and smileys in the 1.6 billion tweets created between March 2006 and March 2010. For $250 you can purchase a dataset extracted from those same 1.6 billion tweets with all mentions of stock tokens and related keywords.

These datasets can provide incredible insights into real-time trends and conversations, as Twitter captures how we relate to one another and what sort of information we share. While information from Twitter has been culled to assess which websites we'll like and which movies will perform well, analysis from Twitter and from the expanding social graph is really just beginning. Like, for example, the ability to track the time and mention of stock names. The new dataset of stock information offered by Infochimps hopes to demonstrate to the financial industry what the music and film industry already know: big data is a powerful prediction tool.

Trst.me, a Page Rank for Twitter

In addition to releasing information about the counts and keyword content of our tweets, Infochimps offers a new analytical tool: Trst.me, a ranking system for Twitter users. Infochimps has taken 40 million Twitter users and assigned them a score from one to 10 using an algorithm similar to Google's pagerank calculations. The Trst.me application demonstrates what Sarah Perez wrote here last month: that Twitter influence is not solely based on follower count, but rather by the influence of your followers. In other words, your rank would increase far more by having Justin Bieber follow you than by having me do so. According to Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer, the company plans on adding additional metrics to this tool so that responses and retweets, as well as influence around a particular topic, can be taken into consideration.

This "trst.me" rank - available as a dataset, an API, and an application - can be used by developers, researchers and businesses to target, rank and understand Twitter users. Access to the API will cost $150 per quarter, but could hold a lot of possibilities for developers wanting to be able to weight Twitter influence or filter those tweets around a particular stream.

Kromer says the decision to build an API was a response from developers he talked to at Chirp, many of whom wanted a quick and agile tool for development, but not necessarily access to the full databases Infochimps can provide.

The Future of Big Data

In 2008, Infochimps released a scrape of Twitter data which was later taken down at the request of the microblogging site over user privacy concerns. But Kromer says Infochimps received Twitter's blessing at Chirp earlier this month for the release of today's datasets. In an interview today, Kromer said he was excited about the potential for this and other social media information - most notably public Facebook data. He says he recognizes there are privacy concerns and that people "feel different" about their Facebook and Twitter data, but he argues that open data needn't be a "nightmare" and hopes to demonstrate the benefits of building "awesome stuff," including apps and analytics that can "democratize access" to information about users' interests and behaviors.

As a recent article in The Economist observed, we are at the point of an "industrial revolution of data," with vast amounts of digital information being created, stored and analyzed. There seems to be ample opportunity in the fields of data aggregation, analysis, and visualization. With a corpus of over 1.6 billion tweets, Infochimps has certainly given us a lot of data to get started on.

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The Windows Phone 7 news kind of threw us a bit this week. It had almost no mention about how it would serve the enterprise. It almost seemed like Microsoft had given up.

Now we are starting to see some reports about how Windows Phone 7 would fit for the mobile enterprise. And it makes us wonder. Will the Windows Phone 7 better serve the enterprise than the iPhone?

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The Blackberry is the leader in the market. For our purposes, we are looking at how the challengers compare to each other. Android may become the biggest rival to the Blackberry with its tight integration into Google's enterprise suite and the ability to use multiple applications at the same time.

I's the iPhone that looks a bit vulnerable. Without a doubt, the iPhone is showing success in the enterprise. Apple had a robust earnings report for the fourth quarter thanks in good part to sales of the iPhone to people who use it for work.

But here's the catch. We really have not seen any bona fide use of mobile collaboration tools as of yet across any device. People are using smartphones to check messages and use applications. The applications they do use are services like Twitter.

When mobile collaboration does find its place in the market, it's not going to be a one application world. It will require the ability to mashup data, pulling information from multiple sources. Our daily work requires us to use multiple applications simultaneously. That's not possible with the iPhone. And it will not be possible with the iPad. This issue will become even more pronounced as more enterprise applications enter the mobile market.

In comparison, Windows Phone 7 is an information centric device. Information is stored in hubs and you can view the different hubs as a panorama on the device screen. That makes it potentially better than the iPhone or the Nexus One, which do not have that capability.

People want to see the information without having to go from application to application. A panorama is more akin to the experience we get on a device like a laptop. That's far more suitable for the enterprise.

Gizmodo:

"Out of the box, this information is organized into areas called hubs, which follow the user's areas of interest. Accessible through live tiles in the home screen, the Me (the user), people, pictures and video, music, and games--plus the omnipresent search--hubs give views into several data sources, connecting and presenting them into an interweaved panoramic stream. These hubs dig heavily into many databases, both locally and into the cloud."

Ironically, Microsoft often get labeled as a company that creates silo environments. From our view, the mobile applications of today have a certain silo effect. Windows Phone 7 and its hub structure means that it can draw from deep databases from on-premise and the cloud. That to us seems like a powerful combination that is well suited to an enterprise world.

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George Stephanopoulos. Wolf Blitzer. Ana Marie Cox. Three powerful people that you might want to get in touch with, especially if you're in D.C. One man who has the ear of all three of those powerful people is Tony Fratto, known as @TonyFratto on Twitter. Managing Director at Hamilton Place Strategies, the founder of RooseveltRoom.net, a CNBC Contributor and a former US Treasury & White House official, Mr. Fratto is the least well-known (in Twitter terms) of the mere 41 people that all three of our sought-after stars have opted-in to following on Twitter. He could be the diamond in the rough, the guy you want to know. He's probably got some important things to say, too.

These days, it's all about who you don't know. That's the theory behind a group of very interesting software projects being built on top of the giant graph of friend/follower connection data that Twitter exposes about its users. These tools unearth potential connected influencers like Tony Fratto.

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Using People to Find People

Name 3 people whom you admire, despise, work with or otherwise pay attention to and tools like HiveMind, Follower Wonk and Twiangulate will quickly calculate who all those people are following in common on Twitter. Tell those services who you are and they'll expose the people from that list that you aren't yet following yourself.

Services like this stand in an interesting place online: they aren't too hard to build and they delivery huge value to their users, but so far they have had a hard time getting people to try them out.

Using social network data is easiest with Twitter today, because of its more open nature, but this kind of work is being done on top of Facebook as well. (See this week's article The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul for example.) When it comes to using people to find people, it's almost literally a 2.0 version of what some of the biggest companies in Web 1.0 did.

Adam Lindemman, CEO of a synaptic web company called Imindi that burned up trying to enter the earth's atmosphere last year and has since been mothballed, put it very well:

"This is essentially collaborative filtering used in recommendation, for people as the object rather than Books, CDs or Movies (Amazon) or search results (Page Rank). In other words we are seeing the emergence of something like the kinds of tools that helped us navigate the information and e-commerce glut in Web 1.0 and using them to help us manage the main glut of Web 2.0 - which is the abundance of people and the need to literally mine that noise for signal."

We spoke with the creators of those three services in particular (Twiangulate, HiveMind and Follower Wonk) to find out what they're thinking as they build and promote social graph analysis tools on top of Twitter.

The Fabulous Uses of Friend Network Analysis

Henry Copeland, the creator of 8-year old blog ad network BlogAds, is building Twiangulate on the side, late at night.

Copeland is the one who told us about Tony Fratto, based on the Twiangulate map of common connections among those three media stars. He also points to a map his service created of the most inter-connected, yet otherwise obscure, friends of actress Demi Moore. That's kind of creepy.

A more benevolent use case? Say you're a reporter covering New York city schools. Who might be a good source to contact? Here's what Copeland recommends: Look at Mayor Michael Bloomberg's list of followers on Twitter. See which ones look like education-related organizations. Use Twiangulate to see who both that organization and the Mayor are following. Look for an education-related organization on that list and add it to your comparison. Repeat, until you've replaced the Mayor and are just looking at a list of who is being followed by 3 of the most-connected education organizations in the city. There's a good list of people to be in contact with. That's pretty hot stuff.

Freaky Geeky Stuff

Why are services like this not taking off like wildfire yet? "Right now we're each building a fascinating tool, but we haven't quite shaped the handle right so it fits in the user's hand," Copeland says of the three companies we looked at doing similar kinds of work.

"Then, what exactly does the customer look like? In many cases the right user doesn't yet exist. There is not yet 10k people designated as blahblahblow specialists at companies across America. There are geeks and aficionados and crazy people with visions of something that might be palm trees on the horizon... or might be a mirage.

"People need to develop habits of thinking about this stuff. They need someone to explain it to them. They need to develop an easy-to-use vocabulary set for understanding it and communicating about it. Right now 'social network analysis' just doesn't trip off the average person's tongue."

It may not roll of the average person's tongue, but there's clearly some very serious interest in it. Kevin Marshall is the creator of a bundle of social graph analysis tools called Wow.ly, including one much like Twiangulate, called HiveMind or Grou.pe. HiveMind will show you who you aren't following that a group of selected Twitter users are - and it will email you when that list changes.

"I have a couple of friends that are in the VC business around New York city," Marshall told us.

"They wanted make sure that they knew about any new deals and companies at least as fast as their competitors. So this is all just one tool to help with that sort of thing...without having to constantly check who their competitors are following manually.

"It actually feels a little like an invasion of privacy when you start getting the alerts though, because you get to see when people you are interested in start or stop following other people. But from a 'business' point of view, I think it's really powerful."

The Low Hanging Fruit

No potential privacy violation would be complete without politics and advertising. Sure enough, our third miner of the new social graph focuses on those two parts of the world.

Peter Bray lives in Portland, Oregon and built FollowerWonk.com. Follower Wonk displays common followers, as well as people that users are following mutually. It also offers some visualizations and the ability to search inside users' Twitter bio fields. Bray thinks this technology has real potential to change the world, in the short term even.

"As Follower Wonk matures, we imagine an application where a political campaign or a brand can slice & dice followers into highly leveragable segments. For example, a Democratic candidate might be able to find cross-over votes by targeting Twitter users who follow the competing GOP candidate, but also, say @sierra_club or @barackobama. Campaigns, or brands, can find and utilize these natural 'tension points', not only in terms of actual individual users, but also what interests (environment?) or messages might be potent. As social media matures, these sorts of strategies, already so common in the world of list management, are naturally going to play a significant role."

We asked Mr. Bray, if these tools were so darned potent, why aren't more people excited about them yet?

"In the universe of Google users, the percentage using, say, Google Analytics or Website Optimizer is teensy," he replied.

"Similarly, the total number of Twitter users that are going to find value in slicing & dicing their followers is small. But I think that the benefits of such user profiling and tracking are potent, and increasingly evident among brands and campaigns.

"We've seen this in one of our other applications, Versionista.com, where the McCain site used our Web page tracking and versioning tool to highlight changes to Obama's policy pages. Who would have thought that tracking changes to a campaign Web site would reveal important talking points? And similarly, you're right that few people right now realize the power of Twitter, and social media generally, in terms of the ability to find and engage a receptive audience through advanced profiling and analytics. Or the ability to deduce new messages and arguments."

Can One of These Visions Come to Fruition?

These are three men have built different tools that do roughly the same things but in different ways, and with different go-to-market visions. There are others, too, like Tickery and Klout. Will any of them be able to popularize something where there's a level of strategic thought required in order to capture substantial value from a social networking world all-too-often dismissed as trivial?

It's a complicated but thought provoking question. One that will be discussed on Twitter no doubt. Even there, Henry Copeland, Kevin Marshall and Peter Bray will take different approaches, though. There is not a single person that all three of them are following! There also wasn't anyone else that was following all three of these trailblazers, either. Until I just did.

Is this kind of analysis a privacy violation? How can privacy on sites like Twitter, Facebook and whatever comes next be balanced with interests in innovation and profit? These are the kinds of questions that the web will need to ask if services like these three become popular. They offer so much value, it seems inevitable that they will.

You can find and follow the ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter here and on Facebook here.

Disclosure: Color commentary above was provided by CEO of Imindi, a company the author has had a consulting relationship with in the past. It was also quite articulate.

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It's Facebook's 6th birthday today and it's been a very big year. On February 4th, 2004 then 20-year old Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com from his Harvard dorm-room.

At this time last year Facebook reported having more than 140 million users. We were awed then that the social network was doubling its membership every 12 months. Since then the numbers have more than doubled and the site may have already passed 400 million users. The world is on Facebook, but just 6 weeks ago the company changed what that meant with a fundamental shift in its privacy policy. Check out these 7 articles below for a big picture of the good and the bad about the incredible phenomenon that is Facebook.

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1. How a Facebook "Sentiment Engine" Could Be Huge

Facebook as living census. Facebook is changing peoples' lives by making it easy to share thoughts and keep in touch. Facebook could change the world by offering us a better picture of ourselves as a society than we've ever had before.

2. Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

The Big Z puts it all on the table.

3. The Facebook Privacy Debate: What You Need to Know

We've covered the Facebook privacy debate in and out. Here's a summary of the key points.

4. How Facebook Beat MySpace: From College Dorm to Platform

It's the question everybody wants to know. Here's our take on it.

5. Report: Facebook Game Addicts "Paid" to Oppose Health Care Reform

Incredible, horrifying story. Fortunately Facebook is taking action to prevent this kind of thing in the future, but an important read none the less.

6. Facebook Could Become World's Leading News Reader (Sorry Google)

Days after we put this post up explaining why it could happen, new traffic numbers proved that it already has happened.

7. Facebook and the Future of Free Thought

Yes, this really is serious stuff. More than 350 million people use Facebook, many every single day. It's a major cultural force.

So Facebook is taking over the world. What do you think about that? Send Facebook some birthday wishes in comments below and let us know what all this means to you.

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The iPad is clearly one of those universal technologies that will be as useful in the home as in the office. Much like the iPhone, people will want it for work simply because it will be useful for getting work completed. Like any Apple product, it's easy to use. It's lightweight. And it's mobile. Plus, this baby is as sleek as it gets.

We expect to see a similar trajectory for the iPad in the enterprise as the iPhone has had in recent months.

Apple reported its earnings earlier this week. The company reported that iPhone usage doubled since last summer after the introduction of the 3GS. The iPad with 3GS service will be available in 90 days. Our bet is that by next Fall we will be reporting similar news about the iPad as we have about the iPhone.

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Similar to the iPhone, the iPad serves as a communication device. It's clearly positioned as a consumer device for reading newspapers, watching movies and all sorts of various entertainments. But it is also well suited for the enterprise.

According to Forrester Research, the iPad will be particularly well suited to the high-end mobile office worker. These people will pay for the tablet themselves. They will primarily use it for messaging and collaboration and to access email, calendars and productivity applications.

Forrester analyst Ted Schadler says the iPad has a number of implications for the market .Google will have to respond now that Apple has extended its platform for applications. And the competition will only intensify for collaboration and productivity applications. According to Schrader:

"The importance of great document tools just increased. Apple's support of iWorks on the iPad gives execs what they need to present on the road and leave the laptop at home. Microsoft should build best-in-class iPad software in the Office formats. (Or watch execs move key material to the iWorks formats.) Adobe should take responsibility for a great PDF reader. And these readers must also be great presentation tools."

We know what the critics will say. Corporate governance will preclude the use of the iPad in the enterprise. It will have to meet corporate IT requirements for laptops. This may be true, but like the iPhone, people will buy and use it, regardless of the corporate policy.

Still, there are a number of requirements that would make it ideal for the enterprise, including the ability to wipe data remotely and hardware encryption.

But in the end, the iPad is a sleek device that people will want for work as much as for at home.

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We have not been writing too much as of late about Enterprise 2.0. Perhaps that's in part because it seems like the phrase is getting a bit tired.

Perhaps also it is because it feels like so much of the discussion centers around the technology that Enterprise 2.0 is all about.

In any case, we found this post on Tech IT Easy. It goes through five elevator pitches to make for Enterprise 2.0.

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It's a telling post. While it seems like Enterprise 2.0 is becoming widely adopted, there is still a struggle for how to explain what it means and how to pitch the concept to executive management, middle managers and the people who may find the technology valuable for their work.

Let's start at the top:

CEO

How Enterprise 2.0 can help: Better productivity and innovation.

Apprehension: Productivity will decrease when employees have access to Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Pitch: "Do you rank amongst the 65% of executives disappointed with the level of innovation in their company?"

Our take: You need a champion in executive management for Enterprise 2.0. Going direct to the CEO may be fruitless - unless of course you are the executive manager making the case.

Head of HR

How Enterprise 2.0 can help: Fosters a healthier culture across the organization and improves employee morale.

Apprehension: Employees may become less engaged.

Pitch: "Hey, I've heard that about 40% of the workforce are either disengaged or disenchanted. What are we doing in our company about that?"

Our take: What are we going to do when all of our employees have smartphones, work at home, and are working with a product team, partners and select customers on a time sensitive project?

CIO

How Enterprise 2.0 can help: Better knowledge management within the enterprise, which leads to a better ROI on IT systems.

Apprehension: Security.

Pitch: "Have you heard about this study showing that 46% of the people surveyed find what they're looking for on the company Intranet? Did you know that twice as often they find what they want on the Internet?"

Our take: Have you heard about the five business groups that are using these SaaS environments? The services are pretty affordable. By the way, have you looked into the ROI on these cloud computing apps?

Middle Manager

How Enterprise 2.0 can help: Technologies, processes and methods are evolving fast. There has to be a better way to manage the information

Apprehension: Loss of control.

Pitch: "How do you feel about the figures that managers spend two hours a day looking for data and that most of it is of no value? "

Our take: How's your email inbox looking?

Experts

How Enterprise 2.0 can help: You can get your knowledge out to the organization more efficiently.

Apprehension: Top-down directed effort will make it harder to get the work done.

Pitch: "Have you heard that knowledge workers spend 30% of their time looking for expertise such as yours?"

Our take: How do you learn about new issues? Have you ever looked on Twitter to monitor real-time conversations about your particular expertise?

Elevator Pitches: Do they Work?

Elevator pitches are meant to get the conversation started. Entrepreneurs don't close deals immediately after a 60-second pitch to a VC. The parallel to Enterprise 2.0 is a bit thin but the process of thinking through the value of Enterprise 2.0 is an exercise that has merit and may make the difference when pitching that cool, new enterprise collaboration service you are so sure would be hit in the organization.

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In the last quarter of 2009, a number of significant public speeches were made about Internet of Things in China. It started on August 7, when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made a speech in the city of Wuxi calling for the rapid development of Internet of Things technologies. It included this equation: Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth. Wen Jiabo followed up with a speech on November 3 at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, in which he encouraged breakthroughs in key technologies for sensor networks and the Internet of Things.

When was the last time you heard President Obama talking about Internet of Things? The Chinese Premier has made it a regular part of his speeches and interviews.

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That's not to say that the U.S. isn't doing anything. As Pat Burns noted in his excellent 2009 year in review of wireless sensor networks, the U.S. Department of Defence has already invested heavily in Internet of Things technologies. But China is poised to make rapid growth in this area in 2010.

Here's an excerpt from an interview Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao did with the Xinhua News Agency at the end of December:

"This concept [of Internet of Things] first came to my mind when I talked with a group of young researchers who returned to China after their overseas studies," Wen said, referring to those he met during his inspection tour to east China's Jiangsu Province in November.

"I learned Internet of Things is a network that can be applied to infrastructure and services. The program will have a rosy prospect," Wen said.

According to Internet of Things, when objects ranging from books to airplanes are equipped with minuscule identifying devices, they can be identified and managed through computer networks.

Internet of Things was one example Premier Wen cited while outlining the country's initiatives to foster new growth areas, especially in emerging strategic industries."

This would be the equivalent of President Obama talking directly about the Internet of Things to the Washington Post or New York Times. It's significant that China is putting such high level emphasis on a set of technologies that many techies in the Western world still consider very early stage.

What then can we expect from China this year in Internet of Things? According to Chinese consulting firm CCID Consulting, in 2010 China will push forward with major policy initiatives. Chinese government departments will introduce "relevant industry support policies to speed up the development of China's Internet of Things industry." At the same time, Chinese provinces, municipalities and industrial parks will release supporting policies. Jiangsu Province and Beijing will be the pacesetters, according to CCID Consulting.

In a follow-up post, we'll explore some practical examples of China's current focus on Internet of Things.

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Elia Freedman used to have it made. He was a mobile app developer in the days of the Palm Pilot and he scored bundling deals that got his sophisticated calculator software into the hands of more than 15 million people. Differentiating his product from competitors "wasn't something we had to deal with for years," he says, because of the favored position his app got in pre-loaded bundles.

Now those days are gone. Today Freedman's PowerOne Professional Calculator ($5.99 in iTunes) was accepted into the very crowded iTunes App Store, where competition for visibility is fierce. Freedman's strategy: PowerOne now focuses on being a tool-building app. Template creation for complex custom calculators in sales, medical, real estate and other markets is what the app is all about. He says he wants to solve the "there's not an App for that" problem that many professionals experience when they try to use their iPhones at work.

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Calculators: Not Just For Nerds Anymore

Our phones are becoming increasingly capable of finding meaning from and adding value to more types of data than most of us could have imagined just a few years ago. Our physical location, the direction we're facing, our proximity to other peoples' phones and soon the temperature our phone finds itself in are all fields of data that have become platforms for developers to build usable tools on top of.

Now imagine training your phone to perform the complex calculations that you need while out in the field for your unique occupation, just by entering new spreadsheet-style functions into a program and saving them as a template.

Freedman says he's talked with a crash-test engineer who finds the custom calculator he's built with PowerOne far more useful than carrying a clip board. Commercial real-estate agents in the field with clients have standard operations they can perform, but often have to pull out and enter printed formulae that slow them down and introduce a risk of error. There are millions of equations used in the medical industry, and miscalculation by nurses, doctors and pharmacists cost a shocking number of people their lives. Put the particular equations they need into their hands along with the ability to easily run equations on the fly in the field, and it could be a changed experience for all kinds of people. A phone you can train to perform the specific calculations you need in the field is a smart phone. A calculator app that helps you build calculator apps is very meta.

Possible Next Steps

Freedman says he's working on developing a more robust Web-based back end where users can share the templates. (Right now he's making-do with a GetSatisfaction page for sharing.)

He's hoping to enable a feature where organizations can push out formulae and updates to multiple users. These kinds of social features and network effects could increase the value of the service substantially, but remain a separate challenge to implement effectively. A marketplace for reselling custom-developed equation templates? Freedman says he's been contacted by multiple people inquiring about just that.

Could PowerOne function like a social, mobile, customizable version of Wolfram|Alpha? That seems like one possibility as well.

The app comes today with more than 50 pre-built templates, some quite sophisticated. Calculation results can easily be emailed to yourself or a client.

A customizable, mobile, computation application is a great example of the kind of lightweight platform that will come in handy in an increasingly data-centric future. That's the kind of development that makes this era of mobile applications so much more exciting than the old days of bundled incumbents, no matter how good that period was for Elia Freedman. You've got to hand it to him, though - his new iPhone app is thought provoking relative to the challenges of the day.

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The Jordanian government has ruled that electronic communication like websites will be subject to the country's Press and Publications Law, prohibiting speech that insults religion, according to reports from the region.

Jordanian blogger Gaith Saqer covered the news in English this afternoon on his blog Arab Crunch.

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Critics of the ruling worry that the law will be widely applied to social media, possibly even SMS and to websites that allow reader comments to be posted. Supporters appear to argue that free speech comes with responsibilities along these lines and that the legal framework actually facilitates online communication.

More information is available from the large Jordanian site AmmonNews or translated in English here.

Saqer contacted Google regarding this new front in the battle over censorship and democratized publishing online; he reports that a spokesperson said the company had no comment at this time.

Jordan isn't unique in having a law that prohibits publishing words critical of religion. The Egyptian government has now held blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman in prison for more than 3 years for contempt of religion and defaming the president of Egypt on his blog. The international watch-dog group Reporters Without Borders issued a press release yesterday saying the Egyptian government has now blocked Suleiman from meeting in jail with his lawyers for a third time.

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In an unusual display of concern, the president of Google Enterprise has made a public statement saying there should be no cause for alarm about Google Apps and its cloud computing infrastructure following a major data breach by a China-based attack on Google and 20 other large enterprise companies.

David Girouard, Google's president of Google Enterprise, said in a personally written blog post that Google suffered a massive cyber attack last month. According to the corporate Google blog, the attackers came away from Google with stolen intellectual property.

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Girouard downplayed the impact of the attack. He said Google "believes" the breach did not affect Google Apps customers.

Girouard, obviously concerned about the backlash, said the incident may raise some questions about Google security. He said that Google is introducing additional security measures to help ensure the safety of customer's data.

There are consistent questions about cloud computing's potential security flaws. Girouard is well aware of this. He tries to make it clear that this incident was not an assault on cloud computing.

"It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical. The route the attackers used was malicious software used to infect personal computers. Any computer connected to the Internet can fall victim to such attacks. While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure."

Girouard comes close to making a sales pitch in his statement, saying, in fact, that Google customers benefit from the Internet giant's investment in data security.

"While any company can be subject to such an attack, those who use our cloud services benefit from our data security capabilities. At Google, we invest massive amounts of time and money in security. Nothing is more important to us. Our response to this attack shows that we are dedicated to protecting the businesses and users who have entrusted us with their sensitive email and document information. We are telling you this because we are committed to transparency, accountability, and maintaining your trust."

This is an incredible incident that will lead to some major issues for Google Enterprise over the next several months. As the battle heats up for cloud computing supremacy, competitors will pick at this incident as an example of why a company that's more security conscious should be trusted with customer data, not a search engine giant.

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