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As many of you know, since becoming a part of Google in June of 2007, the FeedBurner team has been hard at work transforming FeedBurner into a service that uses the same underlying architecture as many other Google applications, running in the same high-volume datacenters. As a team, we chose this path for one reason: our highest priority is making sure your feed is served as fast as possible after you update your content, and is as close as technically possible to being available 100% of the time.

As many of you also know, a month ago we opened up ability for all AdSense publishers to move to this new platform, and just a few days ago made this move available to all FeedBurner publishers. What many of you do not know is that we have been carefully moving publishers for about six months now, looking hard at traffic patterns, debugging issues with these account transfers with publishers and their hosting and service providers, and working with many of our partners (including many other teams at Google) who run feed aggregation platforms to ensure feeds from this new platform are polled and distributed as fast and reliably as possible. (One example: we moved over 100 external Google blogs and their respective FeedBurner feeds over to the new platform as soon as we could; charity (and bug-fixing) begins at home!)

We are very aware of our responsibility to the RSS ecosystem. We are aware we host and provide service to not only some of the largest publishers, but also the feed for your site, the feeds that you rely on for mission-critical news and information, and even some feeds government provides to distribute information on a timely basis to their citizens. We know that many of you run businesses that critically depend on your feed being delivered quickly and reliably, and thus have been working with many of you to ensure that these feeds are delivered in tandem with a monetization solution that allows you to continue business as we go through this transition. FeedBurner has the privilege of serving millions of feeds globally that represent an incredibly wide spectrum of content.

It is this scale however, that makes our transition to Google’s platform technically complex, and as we have started to open up account transfers to all users, it has also amplified the permutations of publisher web server configs, service providers, feed readers, search engines, and so on, and so on. We want to ensure that the time we spend tackling this technical complexity is not mistaken for lack of urgency, concern, or priority.

Just as an example, we are aware and have been working on a known issue of returning a “502 Error” or “503 Error” when checking for updates after certain feeds are migrated. This is a very general error message, representing a number of underlying issues, but in many cases it is a service provider throttling or disallowing traffic from Google. Although we came across many of these issues during our testing phase, in reality we knew a lot of these challenges would not fully surface until we released at scale, which we now have and are dealing with as high priority issues within Google.

To help communicate these issues and resolutions much more effectively, we have created a new blog and feed that you can subscribe to during this transition period. We plan to keep these around as long as necessary. We may also add features to the site that allow you to report your own feed issue details.

The extended team — including both original team members of FeedBurner, newer team members that joined us since we’ve been at Google, and the rest of Google — is excited about our future on this new integrated-with-Google platform that all publishers will be on at the conclusion of this account transfer process. We are excited because we see the potential for scale and innovation on this platform that will make for a true next generation feed management solution. Most of all, however, we are excited about getting publishers excited for these possibilities as we reveal what we have in store.

Posted by Steve Olechowski – Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

Source: adsenseforfeeds.blogspot.com

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It’s January, and at Sprint Nextel, that means layoff time. In each of the past two years, the No. 3 U.S. wireless service provider kicked off the new year with an announcement that thousands of jobs would be eliminated.

This year is no exception. On Jan. 26, Sprint said it will eliminate as many as 8,000 employees. Investors welcomed the announcement, boosting the shares 2 percent to 2.51 on the news.

But some analysts say there may be little reason in the long run to revel in this latest attempt to reduce expenses. In spite of about 9,000 jobs eliminated in the previous two years, the company has suffered losses in four of the past five quarters and margins have been narrowing. “Cost-cutting measures like this are akin to a tourniquet,” says Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “They can help stave the bleeding, but they can’t save the patient.”

Handing out pink slips may help reduce costs — Sprint will cut expenses by $1.2 billion a year in this recent round of cuts — but the moves aren’t doing too much to address the company’s biggest challenge: keeping subscribers from disconnecting service and switching to rivals including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which is owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone of Britain.

Narrow Margins

Investors and analysts will get a clearer view of Sprint Nextel’s challenges on Feb. 19, when the company is due to release fourth-quarter results. In that period, Sprint likely lost 1.1 million to 1.3 million traditional wireless customers, according to analysts’ estimates. Subscriber losses may continue through late 2010, says Michael Gary Nelson, an analyst at Stanford Group Co..

Fourth-quarter revenue may have dropped 13 percent to $8.55 billion, the sixth straight decline, and margins may keep narrowing, in part because of costs related to the elimination of…

Source: newsfactor.com

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Venture capitalist Geoffrey Moore has no doubts about what puts the U.S. ahead of so many other lands. “The crown jewel in our economy,” says Moore, author of management and innovation-themed books such as Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Stage of Their Evolution, “is our ability to lead innovation.”

It’s a comforting image. But it also seems a touch out of date. Retail sales dropped 2.7 percent in the U.S. in December. The unemployment rate stands at 7.2 percent, with 3.6 million people tossed out of work in the past year. Home foreclosures jumped 81 percent in 2008. Clearly, President Barack Obama and his team have their work cut out to help the U.S. regain its glory.

That’s why Moore, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, and other Silicon Valley veterans, such as Genius.com Chief Executive David Thompson and Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners, are pushing for an IT innovation tax credit. Their open letter, dated Jan. 7, was sent to then President-elect Barack Obama, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and other Washington pols. This temporary break — proposed for two years initially, with an option to extend it for four more years should an economic recovery prove elusive — would reward companies that invest in IT. Any business spending at least 80 percent of its 2008 annual IT budget would qualify for the 25 percent credit, providing an incentive for executives to keep buying both hardware and software.

“People talk about infrastructure, but then they build a bridge to nowhere,” says Thompson, who had been chief marketing officer at Web-conferencing outfit WebEx before founding Genius.com, a B-to-B marketing site, in 2005. “Too often people don’t take the next step to assess how [that infrastructure] actually helps you innovate, become more productive, and actually generate more revenue and…

Source: newsfactor.com

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