Posts tagged Competitor
Google Accused of Fraud Against African Competitor [Updated: Google Statement]
Jan 14th
Mocality, a Kenya-based crowd-sourced web and mobile business listings company, has accused Google of fraudulently stealing its customers. In a blog post today, Mocality’s CEO Stefan Magdalinski maintained that Google has targeted its database, the core of its company, and lied to its users in an attempt to get them to join up with Google Africa’s Getting Kenyan Businesses Online (GKBO) program.
Shortly after GKBO began in September, Mocality “started receiving some odd calls” from customers who were confused by pitches to build them websites that came from Google in apparent partnership with Mocality. There was no such partnership and Mocality claimed to discover it was Google lying to its customers to bring them into GKBO.
Google has released a statement which we have included at the end of the article after the jump.
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Mocality did some pretty deep forensics on their traffic and discovered a specific IP, which used a Kenyan ISP and utlized the latest Chrome build, was extensively accessing their business listings. So on December 21, they re-directed a percentage of the inquiries from that IP to a page that gave a different phone number – one that connected to the Mocality call center. The calls that came in were startling.
Here’s an example, a call from someone identifying himself as Douglas, from Google Kenya, who tells the person who answered the phone, whom he believes is a business owner using Mocality, that Google and Mocality are collaborating on a new website service. Another call, available here in transcript, has the speaker accusing Mocality itself of fraud. They estimated the team identified as Google Kenya made 20-25 calls per hour to Mocality customers.
After a Christmas break, Magdalinski said there were no more instances of access from that IP. Instead, a new trend started from an Indian IP which belongs to Google. The calls began again, but this time from India. Here’s an example, starring a caller named “Deepthi.”
“It looks like Google has now outsourced the Getting Kenya Businesses Online operation to India!” wrote Magdalinski. He continued:
“When we started this investigation, I thought that we’d catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions (sections 9.12 and 9.17, amongst others), someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue.
“I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents.”
We contacted Joseph Mucheru, Google’s senior lead for Sub-Saharan Africa. We met and interviewed him in October in his office at Google’s Nairobi headquarters where we talked, among other things, about the GKBO program. We have yet to hear back from him. We also contacted Magdalinski. If either respond, we will update this article.
Forbes reported that Google’s policy manager for Africa, Ory Okholloh, said the company would make a statement by the end of the day. It is the end of the day in Kenya and all we have been able to get is a boilerplate line from Google’s corporate PR department.
“These are clearly very serious allegations, and we are doing everything possible to investigate them.”
Other publications, including The Register, have carried a different statement.
“We’re aware that a company in Kenya has accused us of using some of their publicly available customer data without permission. We are investigating the matter and will have more information as soon as possible.”
Clearly, Google is looking to shift the focus onto the fact that the information in Mocality’s database was user generated. However, as Magdalinski notes on his Twitter account, “The real issue is not taking 30% of our ‘publicly available db’ – it’s what was said to our customers on the calls.”
UPDATE: Here is the statement from Nelson Mattos, Vice-President for Product and Engineering, Europe and Emerging Markets:
“We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We’ve already unreservedly apologized to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.”
As Matt McGee notes on Marketing Land:
“The statement doesn’t specifically say that Google itself was doing the scraping and attempting to contact Mocality’s customers. By saying ‘a team of people working on a Google project,’ Google keeps open the possibility of placing responsibility for the incident on third party contractors – which is similar to what happened last week when Google said that ad agencies were responsible for a poorly-executed sponsored blog post campaign for Google Chrome.”
During my conversation with Mucheru in October, he spoke of GKBO as a Google program, conducted by the Kenya office he oversees, and not by a contracted group. If this was inaccurate, I hope he will correct it in his response to ReadWriteWeb’s questions.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Accused of Fraud Against African Competitor
Jan 13th
Mocality, a Kenya-based crowd-sourced web and mobile business listings company, has accused Google of fraudulently stealing its customers. In a blog post today, Mocality’s CEO Stefan Magdalinski maintained that Google has targeted its database, the core of its company, and lied to its users in an attempt to get them to join up with Google Africa’s Getting Kenyan Businesses Online program.
Shortly after GKBO began in September, Mocality “started receiving some odd calls” from customers who were confused by pitches to build them websites that came from Google in apparent partnership with Mocality. There was no such partnership and Mocality claimed to discover it was Google lying to its customers to bring them into GKBO.
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Mocality did some pretty deep forensics on their traffic and discovered a specific IP, which used a Kenyan ISP and utlized the latest Chrome build, was extensively accessing their business listings. So on December 21, they re-directed a percentage of the inquiries from that IP to a page that gave a different phone number – one that connected to the Mocality call center. The calls that came in were startling.
Here’s an example, a call from someone identifying himself as Douglas, from Google Kenya, who tells the person who answered the phone, whom he believes is a business owner using Mocality, that Google and Mocality are collaborating on a new website service. Another call, available here in transcript, has the speaker accusing Mocality itself of fraud. They estimated the team identified as Google Kenya made 20-25 calls per hour to Mocality customers.
After a Christmas break, Magdalinski said there were no more instances of access from that IP. Instead, a new trend started from an Indian IP which belongs to Google. The calls began again, but this time from India. Here’s an example, starring a caller named “Deepthi.”
“It looks like Google has now outsourced the Getting Kenya Businesses Online operation to India!” wrote Magdalinski. He continued:
“When we started this investigation, I thought that we’d catch a rogue call-centre employee, point out to Google that they were violating our Terms and conditions (sections 9.12 and 9.17, amongst others), someone would get a slap on the wrist, and life would continue.
“I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on 2 continents.”
We contacted Joseph Mucheru, Google’s senior lead for Sub-Saharan Africa. Mucheru is based in Nairobi, in the Kenya office. We met and interviewed him in October in Google’s Nairobi headquarters. We have yet to hear back from him. We also contacted Magdalinski. If either respond, we will update this article.
Forbes reported that Google’s policy manager for Africa, Ory Okholloh, said the company would make a statement by the end of the day. It is the end of the day in Kenya and all we have been able to get is a boilerplate line from Google’s corporate PR department.
“These are clearly very serious allegations, and we are doing everything possible to investigate them.”
Other publications, including The Register, have carried a different statement.
“We’re aware that a company in Kenya has accused us of using some of their publicly available customer data without permission. We are investigating the matter and will have more information as soon as possible.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Competitor Accuses GoDaddy of Delaying Domain Transfers
Dec 26th
One of the competitors to domain registrar GoDaddy is accusing the service of purposefully delaying domain name transfer requests. Namecheap, which stands to gain a lot of accounts from businesses and consumers switching away from GoDaddy, accuses GoDaddy of withholding WHOIS information to Namscheap, delaying the transfer process.
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Here is what Namecheap has to say about GoDaddy as written on the company blog:
We wanted to give our customers a quick update on the status of domain transfers associated with one of our competitors, GoDaddy.
First, we’re very sorry that some of you in the past 24 hours have experienced delays in transferring domains over to us.
As many customers have recently complained of transfer issues, we suspect that this competitor is thwarting efforts to transfer domains away from them.
Specifically, GoDaddy appears to be returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap, delaying the transfer process. This practice is against ICANN rules.
We at Namecheap believe that this action speaks volumes about the impact that informed customers are having on GoDaddy’s business.
It’s a shame that GoDaddy feels they have to block their (former) customers from voting with their dollars. We can only guess that at GoDaddy, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Don’t worry – each and every transfer request will be processed manually by our team. Every request will go through. We won’t rest until everyone who wants to join the Namecheap family can do so!
Note: Italics emphasis is ours, bold by Namecheap.
The Verge reports that GoDaddy lost 21,054 domains on Dec. 23, 2011 yet gained 20,034 domains. While it has been widely reported that there has been an exodus from GoDaddy, it appears that much of the churn has been business as usual for the domain registrar.
Users began to boycott GoDaddy and transfer their domains away from the service after GoDaddy was revealed to be one of the official supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act that has become very unpopular among technology circles. GoDaddy has since rescinded its support of SOPA but the damage has been done and the fact of the matter is that GoDaddy still supports SOPA in theory, if not in an official capacity.
Here is a screen shot from a user trying to transfer his website:
Reports surfaced last week that GoDaddy was calling clients with large numbers of registries that were trying to transfer away, begging them to stay. GoDaddy realizes that the cost of the SOPA blunder and PR nightmare could mean millions of dollars lost in the short term and less public trust in the longer run. Namecheap wants to position itself as the go-to destination for GoDaddy refugees. Hence, whatever Namecheap can do to make GoDaddy look bad in the process is good for business.
Are you transferring out of GoDaddy? Has the process been easy? Have you experienced delays? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Chrome Engineer: Firefox Is A Partner, Not A Competitor
Dec 24th
Google and Firefox renewed their partnership last week, ensuring that Google will remain Firefox’s default search engine (and major source of revenue). Kara Swisher reported that the deal brings in just under $300 million per year for Firefox, amounting to almost $1 billion total. Google has to cough up the cash to prevent this coveted spot in the popular browser from going to Bing and Microsoft.
MG Siegler wondered why Google would bear this expense, “paying all that money to a competitor.” He considered whether antitrust concerns played into the decision, or whether it was about mobile dominance. But Chrome engineer Paul Kasting offered a simpler answer today: “Google is funding a partner, not a competitor.”
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Google’s Goal Is A Better Web
“One thing is certain: Google is not paying Mozilla a billion dollars out of the kindness of their hearts,” Siegler wrote. “Doing so would be irresponsible to their shareholders. Again, they’re paying all that money to a competitor.” But Kasting contends that this is a misconstruction.
“People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads,” Kasting says. “It’s very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible.”
According to Kasting, “It’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done.”
Chrome and Firefox Can and Do Coexist
“It’s not hard to understand the roots of this strategy,” Kasting says. “Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything they need to do. Because of this Chrome doesn’t need to be a Microsoft Office, a direct money-maker, nor does it even need to directly feed users to Google. Just making the web more capable is enough.”
By funding Firefox, Kasting explains, Google is not concerned about competition with Chrome. It’s keeping another important browser alive. “Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well,” he says. Kasting says that Google supported Firefox before work on Chrome even began, and it only built Chrome because it thought it would drive the Web to improve even faster.
The Teams Are Committed to Working Together
There’s plenty of past evidence to support this interpretation. For example, even though Web apps are one of Chrome’s most important revenue streams, Chromium and Firefox engineers have been working together to build open standards for Web apps to communicate.
On its own, Chrome has pushed the envelope for Web technologies, but as Kasting points out, “Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they’re spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser.” A better Web, according to Kasting, will serve Google’s goals no matter what.
We’ve wondered this year whether Firefox was doomed, but if Google is committed to it, for the sake of the Web itself, the answer is certainly not.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Expected to Deliver Amazon Prime Competitor
Dec 5th
Google Expected to Deliver Amazon Prime Competitor
Google is looking to create “a service that would let consumers shop for goods online and receive their orders within a day for a low fee,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The move is a d…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Skype Alums Building a Netflix Competitor – Can It Make a Dent?
Oct 17th
Skype. Apache. Netflix. NBC. NASA. These are just some of the past employers found on the resumes of the folks working on Vdio, a top-secret new video service whose development is being led by Skype cofounders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.
The startup hasn’t been publicly unveiled, but the company recently launched a splash page with a trademarked logo for Vdio and the slogan “Are you watching?” The site’s launch wasn’t announced and it’s currently blocking search engines from crawling it. The trademark on the page was traced by GigaOm to Pulser Music Services, which is the company that launched music streaming service Rdio in 2009.
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This isn’t the first time Friis and Zennstrom have dabbled in the online video space. The entrepreneurial duo, who also founded filesharing service Kazaa, launched a video site called Joost in 2006. After a buzz-worthy start, Joost never really took off with users and shifted gears in 2009.
With Vdio, the duo is likely taking a new approach, most likely informed by their experience with subscription music service Rdio and this time, aiming squarely for Netflix.
How Vulnerable Is Netflix?
Netflix has been having a rough six weeks or so. Just as its controversial subscription rate hike took effect in the beginning of September, the company made another wildly unpopular announcement: that it would be spinning off its DVD rental service into a seperate business with its own branding and website and keeping Netflix intact as a streaming-only company. Those plans have since been abandoned. Meanwhile, the company has seen its stock price drop as it has lost an estimated 1 million customers.
Despite these recent troubles, Netflix still has 25 million customers and lots of content deals in place, which seem to keep on coming. It’s a leader in the online video space and doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.
Building a Top-Notch Team, But to Launch What?
Still, that hasn’t stopped Friis and Zennstrom from assembling a mega-team to work on this startup, which appears to be codenamed Project WBS. That’s the name of the entity that owns the Vdio trademark, which counts alumni from Joost, the Apache Foundation, NBC and somebody from Netflix with content aquisition experience. They’ve even hired somebody from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for their experience wrangling especially gigantic data sets.
The collective experience of Project WBS is impressive enough that whatever they’re building, it’s a rather serious foray into the online video space.
Other than what bloggers have dug up, very little is known about the company and its actual plans. They appear to be set to launch in the UK first. Their splash page accepts sign-ups via Facebook, but registering doesn’t unlock any additional functionality or details about the service.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
OpenStack Competitor OpenNebula Releases v3.0, Supports Hyper-V
Oct 3rd
Last week, the news was about OpenStack, by way of the first commercial rendition of the open source cloud operating system from a new firm called Piston Cloud. Having emerged from a NASA project, it’s easy for OpenStack to steal the spotlight.
This week, the latest rendition of a slightly older project is being released, and it too has a commercial rendition. It’s version 3.0 of OpenNebula (not to be confused with the NASA Nebula project based on what’s now called OpenStack), and its origin is in the laboratory as well – in this case, since 2009 at Switzerland-based physics lab CERN.
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Unlike OpenStack – whose philosophy, its leader told us, is to use as few tools independent of the client’s existing environment as possible – OpenNebula (often shortened to “ONE”) uses a reasonably rich set of dedicated tools, including a command line environment and a browser-based UI called SunStone. But like its competitor, OpenNebula’s goal is to offer a hypervisor-agnostic platform for data centers to pool together whatever assets they have, with whatever assets they may eventually have.
“OpenNebula is an open-source project aimed at developing a production-ready cloud management tool for building any type of Cloud deployment, either in scientific or in business environments,” reads the development group’s Web site. “OpenNebula releases are tested to assess its scalability and robustness in large scale VM deployments, and under stress conditions… Because two datacenters are not the same, OpenNebula offers a open, flexible and extensible architecture, interfaces and components that fit into any existing data center; and enable its integration with any product and service in the Cloud and virtualization ecosystem, and management tool in the datacenter. OpenNebula is a framework, you can replace and adapt any component to efficiently work in any environment.”
One of the more notable additions to version 3.0 – one which may be familiar to admins of general-purpose operating systems – is access control lists (ACLs). In ONE, this is a fairly uncomplicated system: Individual users have ID definitions, and such definitions may be combined into any number of groups. Using the command-line tool, the admin invokes the new oneacl command to create an instruction line in its entirety, encased in quotation marks, and appended to the ACL. That instruction may grant a user or group express permission to use, create, delete, or manage (among other operations) a resource such as a VM or a host. The operation being granted and the class of resource are each represented by single letters. So there’s no tricks here.
“For instance, using ACL rules you could create a group of users that can see and use existing virtual resources, but not create any new ones,” reads the version 3.0 documentation. “Or grant permissions to a specific user to manage Virtual Networks for some of the existing groups, but not to perform any other operation in your cloud.”
Up until version 2.2, OpenNebula supported VMware Server, VMware ESX, KVM, and Xen hypervisors. The new release adds support for Oracle’s VirtualBox (acquired from Sun) and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Upon hearing the news last week, Microsoft’s open systems general manager Sandy Gupta heaped praise on the project: “Given the highly heterogeneous environments in today’s data centers and clouds, we are seeing enablement of various Linux distributions including SUSE, CentOS, Red Hat, and CS2C on Windows Server Hyper-V, as well as emerging open source cloud projects like OpenStack – and now OpenNebula.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
