Productivity and business

GoDaddy offers users one month credit following service outage

GoDaddy customers are being given an apology and one month of free service after grappling with Monday's service snafu.

In an e-mail sent to GoDaddy users, the company's CEO Scott Wagner apologized for the outage that affected Web sites, e-mail availability, and other services.

"We let you down and we know it," the e-mail read. "We take our responsibilities -- and the trust you place in us -- very seriously. I cannot express how sorry I am to those of you who were inconvenienced."

To appease its customers, GoDaddy is kicking in a credit … Read more

Groupon hires new accounting officer in wake of financial woes

Brian Stevens faces some challenges as Groupon's new chief accounting officer.

The daily deals site found itself in financial hot water earlier this year after admitting to an accounting error that triggered a higher fourth-quarter loss and lower sales than initially reported. This past April, the company was forced to restate results for last year's final quarter, increasing the net loss by $22.6 million and cutting revenue by $14.3 million.

The accounting snafu triggered shareholder lawsuits and concerns from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The "material weakness" in controls over its financial statement followed … Read more

What you'll find on your new Microsoft SkyDrive page

Those of you who use Microsoft's SkyDrive will find a new look, feel, and features the next time you fire up your dedicated page.

The folks in Redmond refreshed the online storage site with a design and functionality that closely mimics the Windows 8 SkyDrive app. What changes will you find? Microsoft's Inside SkyDrive blog provides a good overview of the new features. But here's a quick look as well.

Your SkyDrive page has retired the old details view, at least as the default, in favor of the Windows 8 tile approach. All of your folders and … Read more

OAuth 2.0 leader resigns, says standard is 'bad'

OAuth 2.0 promised to improve authentication on the Net, but its author has resigned from the project after concluding the standard "is a bad protocol."

"When compared with OAuth 1.0, the 2.0 specification is more complex, less interoperable, less useful, more incomplete, and most importantly, less secure," Eran Hammer-Lahav said in a blog post yesterday. "I resigned my role as lead author and editor, [withdrew] my name from the specification, and left the working group...Deciding to move on from an effort I have led for over five years was agonizing." … Read more

Sundar Pichai: Chrome 'exceptionally profitable' for Google (q&a)

SAN FRANCISCO--It began with a mere toolbar, an add-on that gave browsers a handy Google search box.

That modest project is what eventually led to Google Chrome, now used by 310 million people by Google's tally. It's what got the project's leader, Sundar Pichai, promoted to senior vice president of Chrome and Apps. And it's what led to a very lucrative new source of profit for the company.

Chrome has spread steadily over its three-and-a-half years of public existence. It launched on Windows, extended to OS X and to Linux personal computers in the months afterward, … Read more

Google's next offline apps: Presentations, Spreadsheet

SAN FRANCISCO -- Adding offline editing abilities to Google Docs may sound like a modest, incremental change, but it's actually a major step ahead for the company's Web-based services.

And those services will take two more steps soon: Offline editing is coming to the Presentations and Spreadsheet apps, too.

"You'll see that coming out before long," Alan Warren, senior director for Google Docs and Drive, said in an interview at the Google I/O show here. Both of the apps will allow users to read and edit files offline, he added, with editing abilities coming &… Read more

Asana looks to cut down the noise in your in-box

Task-management company Asana has unveiled a new way for its users to handle the e-mail overload in their in-box.

Dubbed Inbox, the feature is designed for the companies that are currently using Asana's task-management tool. With Inbox, team members can stay up-to-date on the latest events related to a particular task or project and avoid dealing with unnecessary e-mail threads, according to Asana.

At the center of that plan is a pane that provides "the entire history and up-to-date status of the work [a message is] about," in each message sent between team members. In addition, the … Read more

Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox? Heck, use 'em all!

It's true that the newly launched Google Drive competes with plenty of other services for sharing files across all your devices. But there's something very different in this particular situation than in a lot of online services.

Namely this: why not use them all?

With social networking, few people have the patience to keep a lively feed of activity at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, and any number of other sites. We gravitate toward the one where our contacts are active.

And with e-mail, it's inconvenient to have multiple addresses on multiple services, generally speaking.

But with … Read more

Google Drive: It's slick, integrated...and not exactly free

Google is set today to open Google Drive, a service to store files online and share them among various computing devices that turns out to be a lot more important than you might think.

Why? Two reasons:

First, Google's service goes well beyond rivals because of integration with Google Docs, Google+, Gmail, and other services. Second, beyond a basic free level, ordinary consumers will pay to use Google Drive -- not much, but enough to make them into customers, not just users of an advertising-subsidized service. That's a pretty big philosophical shift for Google.

What is Google Drive? … Read more