Google Shyly Steps into The Pirated Software Market - Google Maps for Russia now available

Russia is often described as the country that hosts the largest amount of illegal activity, starting with spammers and ending with software pirates. However, numerous companies tried to invest in Russia and increase their presence in the country.
Google makes a similar move today and launches the Russian version of Maps, making the mapping tool available to all the residents in their mother language. It is quite a memorable event, because the Russian authorities refused to allow this kind of utilities in the past as they are able to show a lot of details.

The Moscow Times wrote that Russia raised privacy concerns since 2005 when Google Earth was officially launched. The main reason for these complaints was that Google's downloadable mapping tool contains well-developed functions that might show a too many pictures, representing a real threat for the residents of the country.

"The Google map services is a very convenient service that allows quick and easy access to local cartographic information," said Vladimir Dolgov, head of Google Russia for The Moscow Times. "It works with the Russian language via any Internet connection method."

The most interesting aspect of this Google evolution is that the Russian largest portal, Yandex, is already offering a map solution that is used by a considerable number of users every day. Although Google is the clear favorite to win the competition, the Yandex representatives sustained they are not afraid because new investments will be done soon.

"There is no pressure on us from Google as far as map services are concerned. But the fact that their portal now works in Russian might change the situation," Yandex editor Yelena Kolmanovskaya said for the same source.

This case is somehow similar to the Google Chinese expansion when the Mountain View company encountered the opposition of Baidu, the local leader that managed to attract the majority of users.

Hungry for Money? Read This! - Impression Share, the latest AdWords innovation

Impression Share is probably one of the most useful functions included in the AdWords advertising platform because it helps advertisers organize their campaigns better with minimum
financial effort. Basically, this feature represents "the percentage of times your ads were actually shown in relation to the total number of chances your ads could have been shown, based on your keyword and campaign settings," the Google representatives said. It is quite similar with Share of Voice, "a metric often used in the advertising industry to represent the relative portion of ad inventory available to a single advertiser within a defined market over a specified time period."

As you know, the AdWords advertising product is very important for numerous companies on the Internet because it helps them to advertise their products using the power of the Mountain View giant. Recently, Google was quite reticent when it came to AdWords because it is now having some different plans for the advertising platform. If you didn't hear, Google wants to expand AdWords and take it straight into the offline media by including adverts in newspapers, radio stations or even right on the streets using the billboards.

However, this new function is a sign that Google is still interested in the online version of AdWords and the solution might receive even more goodies soon.

"Not every advertiser's goal is to appear each time his or her ads have the opportunity to show; however, Impression Share is a convenient way to assess shifts in the competitive landscape as well as ways to diagnose where you're losing Impression Share," the AdWords team said.

The interesting fact is that a lot of companies are planning to develop similar solution and to attract the same category of users although Google becomes more powerful. Look at Yahoo for example. It recently rolled out SmartAds, a new platform that is described as a revolutionary system able to conquer the online advertising market.

Google Earth Shows Picture of Secret Nuclear Submarine!

Google Earth is an interesting tool for looking at various places in the world that you haven't visited yet. It's true that some pictures are clearer than others, depending on the country and frankly, nobody would expect to see a picture of a village in Somalia as clear as the one of the Eiffel Tower.

But nobody would expect to see what a policy analyst discovered one day while making his regular checks of the maps: a top secret Chinese nuclear submarine. The Jin-class submarine is the largest and most recent development
in the Chinese navy and it's still a classified project.

Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project made the discovery and the picture was taken by DigitalGlobe's Quickbird satellite, while looking at China's Xiaopingdao submarine base near Dalian.

He confirmed that China has made important progresses with this project, which has the ultimate goal of developing a stealth nuclear-powered submarine and admits that commercial satellite imagery is an important aspect in international security.

Now don't expect the Pentagon to be using Google Earth to track down enemy or friendly military forces – which category does China belong to, these days? - since the secret submarine most likely wasn't a secret to them.

Lyle Goldstein, a specialist on Chinese maritime development and nuclear strategy at the Naval War College, explained that in his opinion, US intelligence agencies surely had extensive knowledge of this project long before these pictures were accidentally(?!) made public.

"Any photo that Google Earth has, I'm sure the Pentagon already had a long time ago. ... The Department of Defense has much better capability," he said to Alan Boyle, an MSNBC journalist.

However, for most people not involved with the US military, this is an interesting opportunity, since anyone can zoom in on the sub by starting from this interesting view of the submarine base, with the actual submarine being located at the end of an artificial peninsula that sticks out from the shoreline.