Google Shuts Down Translation API, PayPal Restricts Masspay
Agriya builds many of its latest applications using 3rd party API’s and functionalities to provide a richer environment for the users of your website. Whether it’s Facebook Connect to let your users login with their Facebook details or Google Maps to provide geo-targeted based content, we strive to offer something more than what our competitors are offering.
Unfortunately using 3rd party tools to add additional functionality puts you at the mercy of those providers and as it turns out two of our biggest providers have cut off the services which many of our customers relied on.
The first is service to be cut off is Google Translation. We used this tool to enable our clients to quickly and easily translate their entire website in to over 50 languages at a click of a button. Agriya were one of the only providers to offer this service and it was extremely cost effective when compared to hiring a professional translator to translate the thousands of words of text.
Google has decided that using the Google Translation API should no longer be free and as some of our customers have found out, any attempts to translate your site now using the built in code will be prevented. In the place of the free Google Translation service, Google have implemented an Enterprise solution where you can pay to machine translate the text on your website. Agriya is looking in to this new API to see if there is a way we can offer cost effective translation services for your website. In the meantime all Agriya’s products let you manually translate your website.
Google’s decision to turn the Google Translation API affects all Agriya products
The second tool that has been restricted to affect our customers is PayPal’s Mass Payment function. Many of our products made use of the PayPal Mass Pay function so that the admin could pay the sellers on their website. For reasons that are not entirely clear, PayPal has started to disable this function in many PayPal accounts which means that our customers can no longer pay all their sellers with one click of a button.
We’re still not sure why PayPal are doing this but from what little information we have received it could be connected with the account activity on your website. Unfortunately there is no way to enable this feature and you will need to beg to PayPal to let you have it.
There are a couple of workarounds available. The first is Agriya will be making sure you can pay your sellers individually and hope to have this new functionality available soon. The second is the adaptive payments option which is available on some of our products where the seller gets paid instantly rather than having to request a withdrawal.
PayPal’s decision to restrict the Mass Pay option affects the following products
- GroupDeal
- FPPlatform
- FPPlatformUltraPlus
- Burrow
- GetLancer
- GroupWithUs
- SFPlatform
- BuySell
- CoupReseller
- Flipit
We’re really sorry about the inconvenience this may cause you and hope to have suitable workarounds in place as early as possible. Agriya is always striving to make better products and incorporate useful features that our clients want, but as you can see here we’re still at the mercy and whims of 3rd party providers.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Why We Don’t Need Google’s WebP
Much cheer, Google has announced yet another open source project that is designed to move the web forward and make browsing a faster, better experience. The new project is called WebP (pronounced “weppy” according to Wikipedia) and it’s designed to be a new image format for the Internet that makes file sizes smaller and thus quicker to download.
The highlights of this new image format are:
- Lossy compression (like JPEGs)
- Uses block prediction to ‘guess’ the missing colours
- Google claims that WebP can compress a standard JPEG image by 39% and retain the same picture quality
- Still under development and no browser (or image editing software) currently supports this format
- Alpha support is planned (enables transparency)
If you want to see some examples of how much WebP can compress an image without affecting the quality, Google have put up a WebP comparison page here.
However, feedback from the community hasn’t been particularly great so far with many professional photographers claiming that the new format produces more blurry images, has colour loss and saturation problems. But who knows, since this is an open source project maybe these problems will be fixed before the WebP format is adopted en-masse.
Now the question that web designers and web developers need to ask ourselves is: Do we really need a new file format? Let’s be fair, if we properly optimized all our images before uploading then speed would be less of a problem. What’s the difference between saving the image as a WebP file if it’s just going to be the same size?
Another reason why so many people are perplexed about Google’s decision to introduce a new image format is because we already have the perfect alternative to JPEG in the form of JPEG-2000 (.jp2). While this is not very well known about outside the professional photography industry, JPEG-2000 provides superior compression while maintaining a high quality – effectively you can continue to compress a JPEG-2000 image well beyond the point where a normal JPEG image starts to take on a blocky effect.
JPEG vs JPEG-2000
So the WebP format claims to be able to offer a 39% compression while maintaining image quality, so in theory a 100kb JPEG could be replaced by a 60kb WebP image. How does that compare to using JPEG-2000 images?
On the left we have the standard JPEG image and on the right we have the corresponding JPEG-2000 image. Please note that since most browsers still do not support the JPEG-2000 format we have saved the image as a PNG file as this is a lossless format – it preserves the image EXACTLY as it looks as a JPEG-2000 image.
JPEG File Size: 162 kb
JPEG-2000 File Size: 166 kb
JPEG File Size: 61.2 kb
JPEG-2000 File Size: 59.6 kb
JPEG File Size: 48 kb
JPEG-2000 File Size: 46.9 kb
JPEG File Size: 39.3 kb
JPEG-2000 File Size: 39.1 kbAs you can see the lossy compression (which to be fair was designed in the late 80′s!) in the original JPEG images starts to distort very quickly. In technical circles the ‘blocky’ effect you start to see around the edges is known as ‘artifacts’, left over from the sampling algorithm as it tries to remove pixels and guess the colours instead.
On the other hand the JPEG-2000 images retain much of their quality even when the file size has been compressed by over 75% of the original image!
We would even argue that the quality of a 30.2kb JPEG-2000 image is virtually the same as the 61.2 kb JPEG image – which is just over 50% compression. What do you think? Can you tell much difference between the two?
JPEG File Size: 61.2 kb
JPEG-2000 File Size: 30.2 kbAgriya does appreciate the initiative Google is taking to try and get web developers to use images with smaller file sizes, but when we already have the existing technology that can deliver 50% compression with the same image quality, shouldn’t they be focusing their resources on promoting it rather than trying to reinvent the wheel?
Add your thoughts below…
How Today’s Tiny New Search Engines may Win Big Tomorrow
There is a reason why Google is No.1 in the search business: anytime you ask anyone about their choice in search engines, you’ll probably discover that they don’t even see it as a choice anymore, so monolithic is Google’s influence on its customer base. And while the Google vs. Bing contest is avidly watched as ever, another more interesting contest is being fought in the microscopic minority of the search market share left over after the majors are through with it. This is the crowded part of the search engine market with hundreds of innovative new search engine providers chasing after the crumbs of the Internet user market, no more than one in 10,000, left over after the big boys have finished.In the credulous times of the early Internet, Ask Jeeves was a very popular search engine that claimed that you could type in your search in natural human English. They call it Natural Language Processing these days, and they still haven’t bested that challenge yet. Google’s attempt in this area at one time was to eschew computers altogether, and put people in charge; and it was called Google Answers. It wasn’t free either – you posted your questions, and real people, if they knew what the answers were, offered to help, for the right price. Of course that program was a miserable flop. The search engine ChaCha, with the insight that the main problem with Google Answers was that you had to pay, picks up where Google left off, and gives you ChaCha Guide. You get a real person to hand-hold you through your search, for free. Their tagline is ” Real people answering your questions! Crazy, huh?”. And it’s so crazy it makes sense.
Quintura is a search engine that tries to offer you possible searches related to your search – in a cloud of related keywords you can take ideas from. Useful related keywords are certainly things Google never helps you with. All you get with Google is your standard list of search results. Google has always been a pure search engine; it won’t give you any recommendations, it will only help you find a thing you have in mind already. And then there is the intelligent search engine. Enter, the market, for the recommendation engine, where when you try to search for, say the movie Titanic, you’ll get asked if you like tragic romantic movies and get offered a few suggestions. This of course uses algorithms like you see on Pandora, the music finder website. But it uses that and wider context.
And there are other more specialized search engines too; if you want to search for pictures, far better than the Google images, is Like. And how about search engines like Speeglebot and Nayio that are speech and voice enabled? The sky is the limit for innovation in search engines; and when the sky is Google, innovators re really motivated to do things better.
Looking at the World with Google Blinkers On
The world more and more depends on the Internet to go about even its most basic everyday business; and this would be a good time to begin thinking about how effectively the Internet is regulated. The FCC in the US is beginning to put together a set of conventions for the Internet, that aim to make sure that Internet infrastructure providers, are never given the freedom to discriminate among different kinds of services in the setting of prices for the use of infrastructure. They call it the network neutrality rules. Any kind of Internet service or website needs to be given the same terms of service as anyone else. But these rules are only mainly aimed at Internet giants – the Warners and AOL’s of this world, and the FCC needs to expand the scope of its rules.It isn’t just the service providers that own the Internet’s hardware that need to be regulated this way; the software and services that form the backbone of the Internet, the search giants Google, Bing and Yahoo, need to be brought in as well. New companies and services are discovered by users through these gatekeepers of the Internet; and little startups have their entire survival controlled by how well they are visible on these search engines. Any kind of discrimination they face, would be their undoing. The FCC needs to make sure of this.
So do any of the major search engines actually use active discrimination? Google is a company that has a finger in all kinds of pies at the same time: maps and directions, e-mail, Internet payments, among others. Google doesn’t feel any compunction plugging its own products with top billing on its search results with no mind paid to what its own algorithms think of it. Without a doubt, Google is not impartial; and for a basic service that ought to belong right up there with the other human rights, this is intolerable.There is also the Google sandbox that lots of companies and get permanently lost in, because they can never make out what rules Google has that they have broken.Google has near-complete domination of the Internet; if something doesn’t appear on Google, chances are it will never be found. And this is not good for innovation.
Most of Google’s greatest services, YouTube, Google Maps, or even AdSense, were developed by others,and when they became popular, Google acquired them one way or another. What if a Google stranglehold over the Internet prevents new services like this from ever having a fair chance?
Google and Bing Consider a New Search Engine Just for Children
Have you ever stood by a child struggling to get a search going on Google, and itched to tell him what obvious search keywords he was missing, or how he needed to understand the psychology of search differently? Most adults don’t rush to help the children out right away; the only way to learn the mind of a search engine, to learn the way it uses words, is through repeated trial and error. As far as making search engines child-friendly goes, most search engines usually go no farther than to protect them from unsavory content. It may be time for the major search engines to think of the child constituency differently. Children are using the Internet for all kinds of learning, and homework; and they need search engines to be tailored to their level of maturity. The search engines are only just beginning to grasp this; and their programmers are studying usability by children.The problem is, search engines were basically always designed for the adult mind; while they could have seen it coming, the engineers just always assumed from the start that the Internet was for serious pursuits such as research, and that frame of mind has persisted. Children for instance, do not read as effortlessly as adults do. Search engines aimed at children could conceivably make better use of pictures or videos. Children could even use an automated help system with pre-recorded content when they come up against a wall. Google is today considering designing a search engine just for children; and they have a deeper reason to do this then just being nice. They consider it possible that children would just have the same problems that adults have, only amplified. By studying the way children work on Google, adult weaknesses could become easier to notice. Studying children can provide deeper insights into the exact ways in which adults go wrong.
Google has had a Related Searches feature for about two years now. Looking up a phrase like ‘the jungle’on Google could give a child the regular results, but also possible related suggestions, like videos on YouTube, information on the various national parks in the US, and some information about species extinction in the Amazon. Children don’t type really well, and tend to look closely at the keyboard as they go along. The part of the screen closest to the keyboard, at the bottom, is therefore important screen real estate for the search engines. Bing has found a special niche with children. The search engine has especially leaned towards images far more than the others, and it attracts children.
Not to be outdone, Google has had the Wonder Wheel feature turned on for a few months now. You get to it when you press on ‘Show Options’ when you get your search results. A wheel pops up, with spokes pointing you in different desired directions. Search engines don’t understand what exactly you’re asking; they find it hard enough as it is to understand what words you want. Children seem to want to use natural language when dealing with searches. And search engines want to be able to make some sense of natural language questions. The most promising development here so far has to be the Voice Search feature available on the iPhone and Android smartphone operating system. Of course those were developed with business users in mind;children would think it was pretty cool too.
YouTube is a Big Fish in the Internet Pond; but in the Real World, Maybe not so Much
Most video serving websites will look at YouTube with awe and feel hopelessly dwarfed; but could there be anything that actually dwarfs YouTube? As it would happen, YouTube, a site that has a guaranteed lock on about 15 minutes of its viewers’ time every day on average, feels envious of the kind of command the regular boob tube has on people ‘s time that they would not mind spending hours in front of it. The way a small niche YouTube clone site looks at enviously at YouTube’s 15 minute sand thinks “Now if only I could get two of those minutes, what a difference it would make”, YouTube salivates for a couple of hours stolen from television.It’s not that YouTube lacks the content; they once said that viewers pumped a couple of dozen hours of video every minute into YouTube’s servers. They have the content; they only need a way to help viewers find the things they like, and watch them. It could take YouTube through the the roof. And this barely profitable company could really begin to pull in advertising.
What is the biggest search engine on earth after Google? Well, it’s YouTube search, of course. And YouTube searches are much more difficult for search algorithms to decipher, because there is actually nothing in the videos that actually has any keywords that the algorithm needs. No search engine actually understands the images in a video; they depend entirely on the tags submitted by the uploader. They need all-new approaches for YouTube search; kind of like the data mining that eBay or Amazon use, to give you recommendations based on what you already are known to like. Maybe they need to announce a search design prize like Netflix did, to improve recommendations.
And of course there is negative marking; if their recommendations are often wrong, they could turn visitors off.YouTube and Google figure that they need personal information for this; much, much more than what they have already. They’ll need to spy on your e-mail, look at what you do on Facebook, look at what your friends do on Facebook, before they can get something right.
They figure that perhaps users need to be given a more TV-like experience if they are to compete with it. Maybe if they could get their viewers to relax a little, and have instant gratification like with TV, they could get somewhere. If YouTube could just move away from having users used search to discover videos; if users could just flip through stacks of videos with the minimal buffering wait period, then YouTube will finally have it made.
Is it Really Relavant – Following Bing’s Market Share?
People can’t stop breathlessly following Bing’s core search share in the US and across the world. Every fraction of a percentage point that Bing gains over Google and Yahoo is noted, analyzed and digested like it was a sports statistic. For instance, Bing is reported to be growing at a faster pace each month than the month before. In December, Bing took an additional half percentage point to bob close to an 11% market share. Following the search engine share battle very closely is serious business; why then should these statistics close the club to Google, Yahoo and Bing? Why ignore the elephant in the living room, namely,China’s Baidu?Google has been in the news (and when hasn’t it) this past week for holding its ground in taking the moral high road in not submitting to China’s demands in censorship. Google’s announced pullout from China has earned it quite a shine for its reputation. It’s dignified walkout in China has done more for its business than just earn it a good name though. China’s Baidu search engine is no longer just a Google copycat making do with scraps in the dark. Baidu happens to be bigger even than Bing, and will easily soon overtake Yahoo to be number two after Google. Baidu now has 20% of the search market worldwide, not just in China.
If you really want to tabulate search market shares, how can you do it when you ignore the soon-to-be number-two player? With China’s search market losing Google, the market share that is now up for grabs iss already being carved up by other local Chinese players in search. China’s Internet businesses seem set to become great competition to Google for everything on the Internet, valuable Internet company acquisitions included. The other American search companies hardly seem primed for aggressive market positioning anyway. The fear now is that,China could end up owning valuable Internet properties in the US, and that that would be a blow to Internet freedom.
If you Always Absently Click on “Accept Rcommended Settings”, Here’s Why you Should Not
Facebook has been hard at work trying to really find its balance between privacy, user-friendly design, and open community. The latest instance in its self-discovery occurred in December, when they made some really contentious changes, that reworked everything about Facebook’s take on privacy. Some accuse it of trying to be more like the privacy-free Twitter. If before December’s changes, you went in and used Facebook’s Tool to keep your privacy settings unchanged, you would have nothing to worry about. If you chose to go with the recommended settings in the Transition Tool dialog box though, would you be distressed to learn that you just allowed Facebookto publish all your private information, photos and all, to just anyone?Anyone at all can see your status updates too, because that is the default position you chose. And if you have certain search settings in place, anyone just searching on the Internet, can see all that information appear in their general search listings too. But to change this to something more sensible is not difficult. You just need to go to the “Profile Information” setting under the Settings menu, and make sure that the Posts by Me parameter is set to Only Friends.
How about getting your personal data off Google? When you bring up the Search Settings page on Facebook, you get a message that tells you that there has been a malicious rumor abroad that leads people to believe that Facebook information is all spilled out on Google. Facebook assures you that this is not true. Nothing could be more misleading. Because Facebook’s Public Search setting in the Search Settings page, lays down what exactly you’re putting out on Google. If you have Allow selected, all information you have on Facebook that you chose to share with “Everyone” goes out on Google. You will need un select Allow to to get a reasonable bit of privacy back.
The forums are on fire with how irresponsible of Facebook it was to throw your personal information so quickly to everyone with an Internet connection. No doubt, quite a few people found their marriages breaking up, and found themselves losing their jobs because information and pictures they thought was private on their Facebook pages, was suddenly all hung out for the world to see.
Virus Attacks that Couldn’t Happen without your Cooperation
Attacking computer networks these days, or installing a virus in a fortress of security at a major corporation involves doing more than making clever coding and performing clever digital confidence tricks on company employees to beguile them into clicking on something. A recent survey of hundreds of government agencies and corporations in the US found that nearly three-quarters of all computers in them had infections of one kind or another. These are organizations that spend billions of dollars in computer security every year. What ways do the hackers have of getting past such impregnable defenses?
Usually, it could be something really low-tech, but very clever. One way that has been reported recently, has been this: a hacker designs for good virus, loads it on a pen drive, and silk screens the company logo on the face of the drive. He then leaves it somewhere conspicuous, on the company’s premises, as in the parking lot or an ATM. The hacker hopes that a company employee will discover it, plug it into his company laptop to find out who it belongs to, and by doing this, will activate a virus inside that will steal all the company passwords stored on the laptop. It will then phone home, with its cache of stolen passwords. Most firewalls and other defenses do not count on having a company employee personally bring something in like this.
The Google attacks in China were a twist on the traditional phishing tactic. They were called spear-phishing attacks. They send counterfeit e-mails to people, taking the trouble to design the e-mails with official-looking emblems and stationery, but they aim for a specific person in the organization, and they mention a well-known friend in the from-address section too. It is all about getting past an employee, and having him invite the virus inside by his own actions. They don’t just need anti virus software anymore. They need anti-gullibility behavioral training for their employees.
Cell phones are not such targets for now with hackers so far, because there are so many models and so many different operating systems. But with a very popular model like the iPhone, things could start happening, that would turn the smart phone into a surveillance device that records pictures and audio. They can even tap into an iPhone, to learn exactly where the owner is, with GPS.
In a high-tech world, low-tech is often the way infiltrations take place these days.Often, we are just looking at hoof prints and thinking exotic zebras, when we should be thinking donkeys. We need to think low-tech once again today.
Hacking rises to Fearsome New Levels
Coca-Cola has its super secret cola recipe, Dolby has its closely-guarded noise reduction circuit design, and Google has… what is it that Google has? For Microsoft, Google or any other software business, the thousands of lines of code, and the philosophy that informs them are their stock-in-trade, their capital. Google has had the Chinese authorities hack into its Gmail accounts recently; if they, or any recreational hacker were to succeed in getting into their system, and to sell their loot to the highest bidder outside, it would quickly bring Google’s search business to its knees. Or if it were the Chinese authorities doing it, or a competing search engine,they could ever-so-slightly modify Google’s codes, to make it less effective, or spy on everything Google did, and lend themselves a better advantage.This is no longer just a doomsday scenario passed out in a Hollywood movie. This is exactly what Google declares China did earlier this month to it. Google announced that some of its copyrighted code had been stolen, and the code owned by several other companies as well. Google, with help from VeriSign iDefense, when it investigated these attacks, did not even know if it has its original code anymore. They believe that China’s government has possibly inserted alterations in Google’s core coding that will help them spy on Chinese citizens using Google to search for restricted information in China. Why, in Greece, five years ago, hackers inserted alterations to Vodafone’s code, so that they could listen in on conversations conducted by the country’s political and military leaders.
Just as Microsoft has been a favored target for years, Google and Adobe are in the cross hairs today. Adobe’s software is reputed in particular to be deeply flawed security wise; since it enjoys 95% market penetration with one or another of its products, anti virus experts have their attention trained on Adobe now. It is becoming obvious too, that China, a country that first rose to prominence for its cheap knockoffs of reputed branded goods, still retains its knack for counterfeiting. Routers by Cisco, for example, are legally required to include firmware that will allow the government to obtain a backdoor into your information, for criminal investigations purposes. China could easily manufacture counterfeit Cisco routers, that will help the Chinese government look in for more information than a democratically-elected government would ever be allowed to. As it happens, the biggest risk that software corporations face still lies in the way employees can get careless, and open tainted spam when they are at work, at a company terminal.
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