Rajeev Motwani, Google founder's mentor, dead

The celebrated Stanford professor, Rajeev Motwani, known worldwide for mentoring and advising founders of the companies like Google and PayPal, has died in a freak drowning incident.

The news of his death has sent shock waves throughout the Silicon Valley and the tech world globally, as he was known to be the master brain behind several of the key advancement in the world of internet including Google and PayPal.

The 47-year-old Motwani's body was found in the backyard swimming pool of his Palo Alto [ Images ] home in California on Friday. There was no official word about the cause of his death.

Paramedics were summoned when his body was found in the pool.

Describing Motwani as his friend and teacher, Google founder Sergey Brin wrote on his blog: "Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it."

As Google emerged from Stanford, Brin wrote: "Rajeev remained a friend and advisor as he has with many people and startups since. Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly. Yet his legacy and personality lives on in the students, projects, and companies he has touched."

A student of the prestigious St Coloumba's School in New Delhi [ Images ], Motwani was born in Jammu and Kashmir [ Images ] on March 26, 1962. After earning his Bachelors in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur [ Images ] in 1983, he came to the US to get his PhD in Computer Science from University of Berkeley in 1988. Soon thereafter he joined Stanford.

Ron Conway, a long time friend of Motwani, told a group of techies at a San Francisco event that he influenced hundreds of entrepreneurs and students, and never refused a meeting.

"For those of you who didn't know Rajeev, you might get the impression that he was your typical Silicon Valley insider -- loud, brash, full of bravado."

"Rajeev was soft spoken and gentle. He was self-confident but didn't feel the need to prove anything. He didn't speak to hear his own voice. And he didn't need to be the centre of attention.

Rajeev just wanted to be helpful. And he was. To so many of us," wrote Dave Hornik of August Capital, where Motwani regularly attended Monday meetings.

As founder of the Mining Data at Stanford Project (MIDAS) he helped developing innovative data and management concepts.

He was well known for his research in theoretical computer science, Motwani was a winner of the Godel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation.

Motwani was one of the co-authors of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm, which became the basis for Google's search techniques. He also co-authored another seminal search paper What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket with Sergey Brin, Larry Page [ Images ] and Terry WinogradHe.

He wrote two books -- Randomized Algorithms and an undergraduate textbook published in 2001.

"Success never came in the way of Rajeev's quest for knowledge and innate desire to help others. There wasn't a startup he didn't love. Like his chosen specialization of search, Rajeev was searching for the unknown. He was still active as a professor and was teaching a couple of classes as recently as the last semester," wrote his close friend Om Malik on his blog.

"He helped us improve our algorithms and ideas and introduced us to Ron Conway and to other folks which led to the acquisition of our startup. I ran into him several times since and he was always both kind and brilliant. I had hoped to work with him on a future project. While that's not to be, I imagine dozens of other computer scientists-turned-entrepreneurs can tell the same story," wrote Dan Gould, co-founder of Newroo.

http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/jun/08/google-founder-mentor-rajeev-motwani-dead.htm

Symbian: 'Why does Google need Android?

Symbian Foundation leadership team member Tim Holbrow has questioned Google's purpose behind pursuing its own Android mobile platform, calling its strategy "weird."

In an exclusive interview with TechRadar before his speech at Wireless and Mobile 09 in London yesterday, Holbrow questioned whether Google's bullish attitude to Android could be an issue of control.

"Android's a very interesting one," he said. "A question I've asked lots of people – and not had a good answer to yet – is, I can understand the Android strategy for Google when they launched it a couple of years ago but following the creation of Symbian Foundation...and given that Google have done a lot a lot of work on Symbian, why does Google need Android now Symbian's open source?

"It seems like a bit of a weird strategy," he continued. "I mean, you could see a way forward for them contributing Dalvik (Android's virtual machine) into Symbian, it would be almost job done for them and they can start really engaging with [Symbian].

"I haven't heard a good answer to that – why does Google need Android? My concern is it's a control issue, because that's not healthy for an open source platform."

Holbrow is also surprised that iPhone and Android gets quite so much coverage as it does, even if the rise in profile of mobile apps and open source is good for Symbian, too.

"We've always seen that Symbian is this large portion of lots of devices shipping, then there's this little Apple and Google slice that gets all the attention. I'm always a bit surprised at the column inches that Android gets given the number of phones they've got and units that they've shipped. [But] if they're promoting open source [it's good for the industry].

"You've seen the benefit of the iPhone throughout the whole industry. App Store gets the whole idea of applications into people's mindsets. It's allowed us to get our message across more easily."

Getting more apps onto Symbian

Holbrow, who is on Symbian's leadership team, was at the show to talk up the benefits of Symbian's new open source status. The not-for-profit Symbian Foundation is now in full control of the platform.

So how have the beta developers received things so far? The developers aren't feeling the newness of it yet, but I think over the course of the next six months we'll start to engage quite heavily with developers bringing their applications across to Symbian," he says.

"The key thing for developers as I see it is, they can almost get past the tools, they can almost get past the support but what they really want to see is 'how can I convert [the innovation in my head] into something that's going to make me money?'

And Holbrow is complementary about Apple's model. "I guess as open source I should be talking in more religious terms but...what [developers] like about the Apple Store is that 'I can understand if I create a [popular] application I can make lots of money out of it.'"

Holbrow also believes the massive market penetration of Symbian handsets will help persuade developers that the platform should be a priority in terms of development. "It's this route to market that we really need to...sell. There is an enormous volume out there.

http://digg.com/d1s5EW

Google wants to know if you are sick

Google is attempting to find out how much of a role Internet searches play in the self-diagnosis process.

The company plans later Wednesday to start rolling out a subtle question at the bottom of pages with search results for a few common ailments, such as "Did you search because you or someone you know may have an ear infection?" That question will only appear for a very small number of users who search for terms such as "ear infection," but it will help Google start to understand how many people are searching on such terms looking for treatment remedies or options as opposed to doing research, said Dr. Roni Ziegler, a product manage.

n a way, this is an extension of the work Google has done tracking the flu with Google Flu Trends. The company noticed that search activity related to the flu tends to rise about two weeks before a similar rise is reported to the Centers for Disease Control by doctors, but years of data on flu patterns validates those trends, Ziegler said. Similar data does not exist for more common health issues.

Google is not exactly sure what it wants to do with that data, or how much useful data will be produced by the experiment. Ultimately, however, everything at Google goes back into the search process, so it's possible that the data could be used to offer searchers more options, such as "Did you mean to search for treatment options for X?" at the top of the search page.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10240076-2.html

Google launches first TV ads

Chrome launched last September in a direct bid to lure users away from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Google has famously avoided traditional marketing routes in the past, however it is now desperate to promote Chrome.

Since the initial burst of publicity, Chrome has failed to provide serious competition to rival browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox.

 Chrome is used by just 1.4% of internet users compared to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, used by 66% of users, according to Net Applications market share statistics. Mozilla’s Firefox comes in second place, as the browser choice of 22% of web users and Apple’s Safari program comes in third, with 8%.

On the official Google blog, the company explained that the video was originally made by a team from Google Japan as a YouTube clip, but had proved so effective, that it had decided to take it onto traditional TV.

“We designed a Google TV Ads campaign which we hope will raise awareness of our browser, and also help us better understand how television can supplement our other online media campaigns,” said Mike Steib, director, Google TV Ads.

The Google TV Ads system allows Google to act as a broker to sell advertising time on the US TV networks. By using its to book its own TV ad, it is thought the company is trying to promote the service – which has enjoyed limited success since launch two years ago.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/google/5307663/Google-launches-first-TV-ads.html

Twitter experiments with new status notification

It appears Twitter is experimenting with some additional tweaks that may make status updates easier and faster for its users and could help decrease the back end load on its servers.

A semi transparent notification bar (see screenshot below), slides down from the top of the screen when you update your status via the Web. While in itself, the feature may not appear earth shattering, the fact that updating now feels extremely fluid and is almost instantaneous makes us wonder whether Twitter will begin caching tweets for delivery to its servers.

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/