Ronaldo’s ex-wife Daniela Cicarelli’s controversial beach video with boyfriend, Brazil court orders YouTube to shut

Video of wildly popular Brazilian MTV host Daniela Cicarelli, 27, a triathlete and model, and her lover, Merrill Lynch & Co. banker Renato Malzoni Filho, or as he is called in Brazil, “Tato Malzoni,” 33

The Video that has been removed from YouTube

Video on Porkolt



Video on Google

SAO PAULO, Brazil, Jan 4 (Reuters) - A Brazilian court ordered the popular video sharing service YouTube, a unit of Internet search provider Google Inc., to be shut down until it removes a celebrity sex video from its site, a judicial clerk said on Thursday.

Daniela Cicarelli, a model and ex-wife of soccer great Ronaldo, sued YouTube after a video of her apparently having sex in shallow water on a beach with her boyfriend was posted to the site.

For days it was the most viewed video in Brazil.

Cicarelli and boyfriend Tato Malzoni filed to force YouTube to take the video down and demanded $116,000 in damages for each day the video remains up. Some copies of the video have been taken off the site but users have reposted it.

The case dragged on for several months before they filed a third suit in December requesting that YouTube be shut down as long as the video is available to users.

The court honored that request on Wednesday, but legal experts say the ruling by the Brazilian court could be difficult to enforce in the United States, where YouTube is based.

Last year, a Brazilian court demanded Google disclose data on local users of its social networking site Orkut who had pages with content supporting racism or child pornography.

Google took down some of those Orkut pages but has said that under U.S. law it could not reveal user data.

Google was not immediately available for comment on Thursday.

Text: Reuters

Google AdWords ‘Click-to-call’ launched in India

Thursday, December 7th, 2006

Google logo Today, Google announced the availability of Adwords ‘Click-to-call’ – a ground-breaking online advertising product, in India. With ‘Click-to-call’ ads, users can speak directly to an advertiser they find on a Google search results page; over the phone and absolutely free.

The new google ‘click-to-call’ ads are identified by a green telephone handset located next to the ad text. Clicking on the title of the Google ad will result in the ad expanding to display a field to enter a telephone number. Once the phone number is entered and the user clicks ‘Connect For Free,’ a call will be placed to the number provided and the user’s phone will ring. On answering, the user will be connected directly to the advertiser. In addition to providing speed and convenience, Google click-to-call ads will protect user privacy by blocking the users’ phone number from the advertiser.

“Click-to-call is in line with our mission of looking for new ways to help our advertisers reach their customers and will increase the usefulness of the Internet for shoppers, merchants and advertisers in India. It will be particularly valuable for merchants or advertisers who may not have a website or as a supplementary channel for those who currently use local directories to reach potential customers. Google Click-to-call ad can also be used to generate added leads for clients that offer services via phone or call center to their clients,” said Sundararaman K, Head of Sales, Google India.

Google runs out of Answers, announces closure

IbnLive

November 30, 2006 at 12:30

San Francisco: Google has finally run out answers. Four years after the high-pitched launch of its fee-based Answers service, Google has announced its closure, apparently due to its failure to catch on with the web users.

"Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time -- and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a project," a Google official wrote on the company blogsite.

Google Answers was based on an idea by the company's co-founder Larry Page and enlisted researchers to find answers to submitted questions at rates ranging from $2 to hundreds of dollars.

It seems Yahoo's free Answers service took away all the traffic from Google, forcing it to admit a rare defeat. On Wednesday, Google went public with its decision, saying that it would stop accepting questions this week and post the last of the answers by the end of the year.

An archive of Google Answers questions and responses will, however, remain available at the Mountain View, California-company's website, company officials said.

Incidentally, the decision comes only months after Microsoft launched a similar no-charge service called Windows Live QnA. The Answers services on the web tap into the online community for responses to queries.

"Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users," software engineers Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher blogged on the company website.

"Google Answers taught us exactly how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline, why flies survive a good microwaving, and why you really shouldn't drink water emitted by your air conditioner."

Even as the news broke, the blogsphere went wild with speculation that the shutdown was proof that the company has suffered a chink in its armour. Others, however, said Google dropped the programme as Google Answers wasn't contributing to its mission of 'organising the world's knowledge and making it useful'.

Experts also point out that Google Answers had become simply redundant on the face of its hyper-efficient search engine and its sophisticated algorithms, which are now so good that most people no longer need to pay others to answer questions for them. They can do it themselves quickly, and for free.