Reported by the Yale Daily News, Yale University has put its planned switch to Google Apps for Education on hold. It seems IT went ahead with the decision to switch without first consulting their customers – the students and teachers who will be using the system. When they notified people, concerns were raised.
“People were mainly interested in technical questions like the mechanics of moving, wondering ‘Could we do it?’ But nobody asked the question of ‘Should we do it?’ ” Michael Fischer, computer science professor.
Some of the concerns raised should be a lesson to all providers of cloud computing…
It’s interesting to see the different types of company bidding to run government and military networks, for example:
- Systems integrators such as HP and CSC
- Software/hardware vendors such as IBM and Microsoft
- Online service providers such as Google and Amazon
Techcrunch has an interesting article: How We Hate NBC’s Olympic Coverage: A Statistical Breakdown.
The statistics are coming from a couple of different ‘Sentiment Analysis’ services that track what people are saying about brands online. What’s interesting is how easy it has been for these services to gather the data…
In February 2010 three Google executives were convicted of a privacy violation in an Italian court and received suspended prison sentences. The reason for the trial and conviction: they allowed people to upload a video to Google Video showing someone being bullied. It was two hours before the video was removed following complaints.
“It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post”
