Google have been ordered by a French commercial court to pay €500,000 to a French mapping company after it was found guilty of abusing the dominant position of its Google Maps application.

The Paris court upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographics against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free mapping services to some businesses. Bottin Cartographics provides the same services for a fee and claimed that Google’s strategy was to undercut competitors by temporarily swallowing the full cost until it gained control of the market.

The court ordered Google to pay €500,000 in damages and interest to the plaintiff as well as a €15,000 fine. A spokesperson for Google France said that the company would appeal the decision saying that the service is both beneficial for both internet users and websites.

While this is the first time Google has been convicted for its Google Maps application, the company has gotten into trouble before in France. During March 2011, the country’s data privacy regulator imposed a fine of €100,000 on the company for collecting private information while compiling its Street View service.

After a relatively slow uptake among publishers, Google are preparing a overhaul of their online content payment system OnePass to mark its first year in existence. The upgrades are not yet confirmed but they will be implemented over the next few weeks to help increase the uptake among publishers.

paidContent report that the changes in question are based on the feedback received from OnePass’ dozen or so trialist partners.  The move is timely after Apple recently revealed its intentions to enter the education market with the publication of its own ebooks. Currently the commission required to publish on Google is 10% in comparison to Apple’s 30%.

Google has been working closely with various publishers, both publicly and privately, to try and make the system more user friendly and meet the needs of publishers. The system will continue to include flexible content payment through Android apps and through the web with its 10% commission.

The service was originally revealed as a beta product back in February 2011. While publishers decide what price and terms they sell their content through, uptake of the service remained slow while it stayed a beta product. Now the relaunch aims to make OnePass an official service and boost publication numbers which will include a deal involving eight large French publications.

The industry in France is currently in turmoil due to crumbling distribution processes, slow digital reform and dependence on state aid so the relaunch of OnePass is of great interest for French publications.

Google has been pushing their Street View service commercially in recent months with the introduction of interior street view and indoor photos for businesses. The latter was expanded into its own service called Business Photos allowing users to see the interior of their store or building through Street view. Now they’ve introduced a new service called ‘Trusted Photographers’ which allows companies and retailers to be self-reliant when getting published on street view.

The service gives you the opportunity to select a photographer if there’s one available in your city, and arrange with them directly to schedule a photo shoot. Once that’s arranged, the photographer will arrive to take a 360 panoramic photo of your outlet to give visitors an idea as to what to expect if they arrive.

If you wish, you can blur some parts of your panoramic photo once it’s uploaded up or even have it taken down. At the moment, Google say they can’t take down individual panoramas so if you have more than one, you’ll have to take all down or leave them online. Users also have the option to add the embed code onto their web page, Google+ or Facebook page.

The service is available in a limited number of cities in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, France and the U.K. If the service isn’t available in your area, you can still upload images via Google Places. Below is an example of one: the Spice Market located in New York City.

Google are always making improvements to their maps service, which is quite easily one of their most popular features to date, having been responsible for a number of spin-off features. Now after adding 3D maps, traffic reports and indoor street view, Google have now revealed a new crisis response service called ‘Google Public Alerts‘.

Announcing it on their LatLong blog, the service will alert users to any unforeseen events that is happening in their area such as tornadoes, floods, thunderstorms and blizzards. When you access the service, you have access to information concerning weather reports, earthquake alerts and public safety announcements, all taken from the National Weather Service, The US Geological Survey (USGS) and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Through checking the site, you will be notified of any potential warnings that may be close to you. Clicking on a particular warning will give you further details such as the exact weather report, the severity of the report, traffic diversions and advice about what actions to take if you’re in the area. There’s also the option to search particular area to see if there are any perilous conditions to take into consideration, so if you’re heading on a long journey, you can discover if there are any diversions or precautions you must take before you set off.

All weather alerts and details can be found on the Public Alerts page. So far, only the U.S. has access to the feature, but the company is planning on introducing international content as well making the feature available on other Google products sometime in the near future. While it’s in the early stages, the service could be expanded to include different emergency alerts but how specific they’ll go (will they cover major crashes, burning buildings etc?) has yet to be seen. 

Google is combining more than 70 of its privacy policies for many of its separate products, including Android, to create what they call (according to their press release!) a “beautifully simple, intuitive user experience”. These changes take effect on March 1.

However, Gary Davis of the Irish data-protection agency (available at www.dataprotection.ie) has said that they will “be further assessing the implications of the changes now that they are launched to users”.

Google has their European HQ in Dublin, Ireland. This follows on from the fact that Facebook last month agreed to overhaul its service in Europe after a probe by the same data-protection agency. Google was targeted earlier by data- protection authorities across the European Union over its Street View program, which lets users click on maps to see photographs of roadsides.

“This new, simpler approach will make it easier for users to understand our privacy practices, and it reflects our desire to create a simpler, more intuitive user experience across Google by integrating our different products more closely,” Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, said in an e-mail.

Davis said Google informed the Irish agency and others of the planned changes ahead of its blog posting yesterday. The regulator “was not in a position to offer a more precise” view to Google of the privacy implications of the changes before they were put in place.

“Google has a responsibility to ensure that any such changes are made abundantly clear to users,” Davis said, noting the company is using several channels to make sure users read and understand the changes.

Interestingly, the EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has announced that she will be conducting an overhaul of the region’s 17-year-old data protection rules to address the use of information on the Internet.  She will also be trying to streamline the way the data protection agencies across the EU operate.  Under her plan, the Irish agency might well become a “one-stop- shop” for companies like Google and Facebook who run their European operations from Ireland.

The past few weeks have been strange for Google and their social media site. Google+ has been making so many changes in such short proximity of each other that it almost reeks of desperation, as if it’s trying to stay in the public consciousness by announcing more additions to be eventually picked up by tech sites and blogs (this one included).

Now Google’s VP for product Bradley Horowitz announced last night that Google+ will now allow users to add alternative names to their profile.

To an extent, this is a move that makes sense. Online users are more comfortable when they’re communicating through a profile that isn’t their real one. The personal restrictions that would come from using your real identity are gone, allowing the user to be more expressive in their opinion and thoughts.

The reason why trolls haven’t been mentioned yet is because Google+ still requires your real identity to work. The alternative identity is to accompany your real name (the example Horowitz gives is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). However if you have an pseudonym and you wish to use it on your profile, you must be able to prove it to Google either through references from offline in print media, news articles etc., or prove that you have such an identity with a meaningful following.

What Google defines as ‘meaningful’ isn’t entirely clear but it should stamp out any people who create an identity solely to troll, a bane for any site and users who end up arguing against them.

A Path Towards Pseudonyms

Recently Disqus found that over 60 per cent of users who comment use pseudonyms and been found to be more expressive in their opinions and thoughts while commenting. While Google+ aren’t exactly pandering towards that group, they are trying to bridge the gap between them and their own standards to increase the number of active uses, a detail that they twisted last week.

With so many new additions to the formula being introduced in such rapid succession, it’s virtually impossible to determine how many more changes Google+ will make to make the site a success. Changes like this may help then win new members in the short term, but as mentioned earlier, it comes across as somewhat desperate on their end. Considering Google+’s stance, it’s unlikely that this will lead to them introducing full blown pseudonyms in the future but with the way they’re progressing and their need to win users over, such a change may come sooner than we think.

Every couple of weeks Google+ announces something that kind of grabs our attention for five minutes before we all run back to the social networks that we actually use. Today they are launching the rather silly little meme generator which allows you to add text to any of the photos you upload to the social network. They are clearly aiming to tap in to the common thread of people sharing meme photos online and Google + has been flooded with them since it’s launch along with animated gifs.

It makes me wonder though if Google really get this whole social networking lark at all. It feels like they just want to release quirky little features that grab people’s attention, but nobody will really end up using them in the long run. Do they have to be launching tools like this or could they just let people do it the way they have been to date with sites like Meme Generator.

Facebook and Twitter let people build cool stuff on top of their networks and let the social elements of their platforms do the rest. You would never see them launching something like a meme generator. Sure this will get Google+ another little bit of attention with the techie community online but nobody in the rest of the world really cares about a meme generator.

On a slightly more serious note, they are also launching a hashtag auto complete tool today (you can see here in the video) which is probably great if you actually use the service, but like the rest of us you will probably never end up using this new feature.

Google Maps have been introducing a number of improvement this week at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show this week. The first of which was an improved app for Android which claims to improve battery life as well as improving location tracking within Google Latitude. Also GPS tracking has improved so the app is faster at tracking your location and better at estimating where exactly you are when you lose your GPS signal.

The second addition are indoor maps for the various casinos based in Las Vegas. Google had partnered with companies such as MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment to provide indoor maps for their buildings.

The final new feature is a new Google Maps powered game called “Play Your World”. The game in question lets you play a marble madness style game except the mazes in question are instead maps. The game will be powered by WebGL and will be available on Google+.

The details beyond the video itself are very sparse but there are rumours that once the game is released in February, that Google will be expanding into online gaming. If they do, it’ll more than likely be a push on Google+ to expand the range of games they have on the site by adding in-house games.

There have been hints from Google about integrating its social media site into search with +1s and linking articles and posts with their writers’ Google+ profiles. But now Google have finally integrated social elements into its search engine.

Announcing it on their blog earlier today, the new features mean that alongside the usual search results you get when you type in a topic, Google have also placed in personal results which correspond with their Google+ accounts.

The logic is that when you’re searching for an article or answer to a topic, you will be more likely to choose a link that has a personal connection, and the best way to achieve that is by integrating Google+ accounts into the search results. Since the site has so many members – mainly because the majority of their members are Gmail accounts holders – the chances of personal results cropping up whenever you search for something is quite high.

Google have split the search up into three main features. The first is ‘Personal Results’ which searches for information relating to you, such as photos, links and posts on your Google+ page. You have the option of deactivating this feature if you do not want your own content to show.

The second is ‘Profiles’ which lets you find people you’re close to or may be interested in following, while the final feature is ‘People and Places’ which lets you find profiles and pages that relate to a specific topic or area of interest. Unlike the first feature, there doesn’t seem to be an option to turn off these features, meaning that you’re stuck with these.

Another feature Google have introduced is the promotion of pages which will now appear on the right hand side of your search. Relating to the words used in your search, it will give you the opportunity to join these groups and connect with like-minded people. However, look into this and it is clear that Google+ are trying to address the problem of community, one that is non-existent. They have the numbers and there are a number of prominent users on the site, yet there’s still a serious lack of interaction among regular users, who are the foundation of any social media site.

A criticism usually directed at Facebook is that it can be quite difficult to retrace old posts. While Google+ has nailed this, Facebook have somewhat dealt with this criticism through Timeline, and these features are another attempt to push Google+ to the forefront of people’s minds. To deal with their competitors, Google+ are pushing the service to show what people are missing out on and since the main thing that they’re missing is community, they need to give people more reasons to use the service.

Google are playing with fire by trying to shoehorn Google+ into the public consciousness. Their previous attempts to integrate the site into their other services haven’t worked too well, and if this doesn’t work out either, then the site could alienate its target audience further. While the signs of success aren’t looking great, Google are determined to push the site further until it’s a genuine competitor with Facebook – the only question now is what else can Google do after this to promote the service.