March 2010

"What you see on Google Translate is state of the art" in computer translations that are not limited to a particular subject area, said Alon Lavie, an associate research professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Google's efforts to expand beyond searching the Web have met with mixed success. Its digital books project has been hung up in court, and the introduction of its social network, Buzz, raised privacy fears. The pattern suggests that it can sometimes misstep when it tries to challenge business traditions and cultural conventions. But Google's quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems. The network of data centers that it built for Web searches may now be, when lashed together, the world's largest computer. Google is using that machine to push the limits on translation technology. Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cellphone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation.

"Machine translation is one of the best examples that shows Google's strategic vision," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and chief executive of the technology publisher O'Reilly Media. "It is not something that anyone else is taking very seriously. But Google understands something about data that nobody else understands, and it is willing to make the investments necessary to tackle these kinds of complex problems ahead of the market."

Apple's patent lawsuit last week against Taiwanese smart phone manufacturer HTC was just one complaint aimed at a rival trying to outdo the iPhone. But the case shines a new light on the growing use of technology patents to mark turf and battle competitors in the fast-growing field of mobile.

Experts are unclear on Apple's ultimate intent in suing HTC, whether it's to explicitly stamp out what it calls theft by HTC or to sound a warning to the entire smart phone industry - including newfound rival Google - that it could be coming for them next. But analysts and observers agree that intellectual property litigation in this arena is heating up, and consumers could eventually be affected by the growing friction.

With President Obama dramatically raising the stakes and investing a major chunk of political capital in the battle, the health care debate continued its resurgence in the news, topping the media agenda for the second straight week.

From March 1-7, health care accounted for 18% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Although that is down from 24% the previous week, it marks a strong overall comeback for a subject that dropped from the media glare earlier this year when the prospects for passing, or even voting on legislation seemed to have dimmed. Last week, the narrative was driven by Obama's White House remarks on the afternoon of March 3 pushing for approval of a bill within a few weeks and declaring, that "now is the time to make a decision." That came six days after a televised health care "summit" that highlighted but failed to ameliorate the seemingly intractable divisions between Republicans and Democrats. Much of last week's media coverage and commentary focused on two major points—the extent of Obama's political gamble and the very uncertain prospects for passage.

The week's No. 2 story (13%) was the other major domestic issue, the state of the U.S. economy, which led in both the radio (16%) and newspaper (15%) sectors. The key storyline was a very unpopular one-man effort by Senator Jim Bunning to hold up a bill that, among other things, provided benefits to the unemployed.