Also: Cisco's Tribe deal | Mobango | Wikipedia
Google's gargantuan book project continues with a deal between the search giant and the Bavarian State Library. That means the addition of German-language titles by the Brothers Grimm, Friedrich Schiller and JW Goethe. More than one million works will be digitised in total, and then made available to search and read for free.
Google's objective is to digitise out-of-copyright books - an idea that has caused controversy with authors' groups concerned about copyright infringement and the potential dominance of English-language books.
Google has already signed up Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and the New York Public Library, and more recently the Library of Barcelona and the University Complutense of Madrid. The collection includes titles in French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and German as well as English so Google appears to be making the service as multi-lingual as possible. It's not as easy to defend the business model of putting display ads next to this out-of-copyright content, even if they are discreet.
Incidentally, Google's two founders and CEO all opted to stick with a $1 salary for the third year running while Google's four other top executives had their salaries nearly doubled to $450,000. Mind you, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are worth about $14 billion each so let's not feel too sorry for them. From the Wall Street Journal.
Cisco buys in Tribe's social net expertise
New York Times reports that Cisco is expected to announce a deal with social net site Tribe.net this week. Cisco plans to use Tribe's technology to help its corporate clients build their own niche communities for customers and the move signifies how social networking culture and tools are beginning adopted by organisations across the board.
COA News also has a story on how independent and non-profit sites are introducing social net tools including the recently launched FreeSpeech TV - a free speech version of MySpace.
Mobango
Mobile community site Mobango has upped its storage capacity to 1Gb for users that want to store videos, photos, ringtones, games and the like on the site before downloading them. Mobango scored €2m in venture funding in January from Doughty Hanson.
Wikipedia controversy number 3,445
Wikipedians have kicked off after one of their hardcore editors was revealed to have created a false user profile that claimed he was a professor of religion with expertise in canon law. Can't help feeling this is all a bit overblown, but did note it was one of his edits about Justin Timberlake that got him rumbled.
Is it not possible to be a both a professor and a Jumping Trousersnake fan?
