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Chile Rattled By Huge 9.9 Magnitude Earthquake, Six People Killed

A massive earthquake measuring 8.8 magnitude on the Richter scale struck southern Chile early Saturday, knocking out power and driving people in panic into the streets, reports China's Xinhua news agency.

At least six people were killed by the earthquake, which was capable of major damage, said President Michelle Bachelet.

The earthquake struck 320 km southwest of Santiago at a depth of 59.4 km 3:34 a.m. (0634 GMT), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A Xinhua reporter said that when the earthquake struck, he felt his house shaking and heard a squeaky sound for nearly 40 seconds. Shortly after that, electricity was disrupted and everything fell into darkness.

Telecommunications also were disrupted, with almost all telephone and mobile phone calls disconnected, the reporter said.

Many people in the neighbourhood ran out to the street in panic. Helicopters were seen hovering in the air.

Witnesses said many building were damaged but how big the scale of the damage was not immediately clear.

Tsunamis carrying waves as high as 1.5 meters and traveling at 800 km per hour to the north and south were generated by the tremendous earthquake, CNN reported.

Imminent danger warnings were issued for the entire coasts of Chile and Peru and a less-urgent tsunami watch was issued for Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Antarctica.

The Japan Meteorological Agency said it is investigating the possibility of a tsunami reaching Japan after a magnitude 8.8 earthquake rocked Chile Saturday, Kyodo News reported.

Google Gmail tweak challenges Facebook, Twitter

Google Inc is tapping its huge network of Gmail users and Web surfers to create a Buzz that it hopes will help it catch up with online social networking leaders Facebook and Twitter.

The world's No. 1 search engine on Tuesday launched Google Buzz, which allows users to quickly share messages, Web links and photos with friends and colleagues directly within Gmail, the company's popular email product.

Also, a new arsenal of products make the new social networking features compatible with mobile devices such as smartphones based on Google's Android operating system.

Google's new technology mimics some of the key features of popular social networking services like Twitter and Facebook, which are increasingly challenging Google for Web surfers' online time.

By integrating Buzz directly into Gmail, Google hopes to jumpstart its social networking push by leveraging the large pool of Gmail users.

"There's always been a giant social network underneath Gmail," said Google Product Manager Todd Jackson at a press event at Google's Mountain View, California headquarters on Tuesday.

Gmail is the third most popular Web-based email in the world, with 176.5 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore. Microsoft Corp's Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Inc's Mail were No. 1 and No. 2, with 369.2 million and 303.7 million unique visitors, respectively.

Google will roll out Buzz to Gmail users over the next few days, it said.

Status messages that users publish on Buzz and flag as viewable to everyone will be automatically indexed by Google's search engine and be available within Google's recently launched real-time search results. Google said users can also keep messages private by sharing only with customized groups of friends and colleagues.

Executives said users can easily share content from various Google online properties like photo-sharing service Picasa and video site YouTube.

Content from certain third-party services such as Twitter can also be shared, although users can only view Twitter messages -- or Tweets -- within Buzz and cannot publish new messages to Twitter's service.

Executives said that Buzz is not currently able to display messages that originated on Facebook, the world's No. 1 social network with 400 million active users.

"The fact that Gmail did not connect and allow broadcasts out to Twitter and Facebook could be a real challenge to them," said Forrester Research social media analyst Augie Ray. But he noted that Google's experience serving Web surfers' relevant search results could be a strength for the company in the social media segment as users are increasingly inundated with status messages.

Google has tried to ride the social networking wave before, launching the Orkut social network in 2004. But while Orkut is big in certain overseas markets like Brazil, it has failed to attract as many users as social giants like Facebook and MySpace in the United States.

In building a social network on top of an email product, Google is following in the footsteps of Yahoo, which has taken a similar approach in efforts to keep up with Facebook but has seen lackluster results according to analysts.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he was not deterred by other companies' experiences in melding email and social networking.

"I wouldn't discount something because it's similar in the one sense ... to something else in the past that may not be that successful," Brin said on the sideline of the event following the main presentations.

Google appears to be putting a heavy emphasis on mobile and location-based capabilities, weaving Buzz technology into the mobile versions of its flagship website and its online maps products. The company also announced a special mobile application for Buzz that will run on smartphones based on Google's Android software, Windows Mobile and the Symbian operating system.

Google shares rose $2.97 to close at $536.44 on Nasdaq.

Google to support victims of the earthquake in Haiti

Some ways to help the people of Haiti, even from far away. Here are some resources:

Google Co. is trying to raise the fund for the Disastar victims....

Learn how you can help support victims of the earthquake in Haiti

The State Department's DipNote blog writes that "for those interesting in helping immediately, simply text 'HAITI' to '90999' and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts, charged to your cell phone bill. Or you can go online to organizations like the Red Cross and Mercy Corps Mercy Corps to make a contribution to the disaster relief efforts."

The American Red Cross has posted more information about its efforts and how to donate here.

Thousands feared dead as major Earthquake strikes Haiti

A major earthquake rocked Haiti, killing possibly thousands of people as it toppled the presidential palace and hillside shanties alike and leaving the poor Caribbean nation appealing for international help.

A five-story UN building was also brought down Tuesday by the 7.0 magnitude quake, the most powerful to hit Haiti in more than 200 years according to the US Geological Survey.

Reuters television footage from the capital, Port-au-Prince, showed scenes of chaos on the streets with people sobbing and appearing dazed amid the rubble.

The quake's epicentre was only 10 miles (16 km) from Port-au-Prince, which has a population of about 1 million, and aftershocks as powerful as 5.9 rattled the city throughout the night and into Wednesday. Reports on casualties and damage were slow to get out of Haiti due to communication problems.

As the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti is ill-equipped to respond to such a disaster.

"I am appealing to the world, especially the United States, to do what they did for us back in 2008 when four hurricanes hit Haiti," Raymond Alcide Joseph, Haiti's ambassador to Washington, said in a CNN interview.

"At that time the U.S. dispatched ... a hospital ship off the coast of Haiti. I hope that will be done again ... and help us in this dire situation that we find ourselves in. I'm asking the Haitians who are abroad to work together and bring all the effort in a concerted manner to help those back home."

Sara Fajardo, a spokeswoman for Catholic Relief Services, told the Los Angeles Times that its representative in Haiti said the death toll could be in the thousands.

U.S. ORGANIZING RESPONSE

U.S. President Barack Obama said his "thoughts and prayers" were with the people of Haiti and pledged immediate aid. A late-night White House meeting involving various arms of the government was held to coordinate the U.S. response.

The Inter-American Development Bank said it would provide $200,000 in immediate emergency aid. The World Bank, which said its local offices were destroyed but that most staff were accounted for, plans to send a team to help Haiti assess damage and plan a recovery.

The U.S. Coast Guard in Miami said it had mobilized cutters and aircraft to positions close to Haiti to give humanitarian assistance as needed.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's office said in a statement on Wednesday France was sending rescue services to help operations in Haiti and find French citizens there.

The quake hit at 5 p.m. (2200 GMT), and witnesses reported people screaming "Jesus, Jesus" running into the streets as offices, hotels, houses and shops collapsed. Experts said the quake's epicentre was very shallow at a depth of only 6.2 miles (10 km), which was likely to have magnified the destruction.

The presidential palace lay in ruins, its domes fallen on top of flattened walls. CNN reported on its website that Haitian Ambassador Joseph said President Rene Preval was safe, but gave no further details.

Bloodied and dazed survivors gathered in the open and corpses were pinned by debris.

The United Nations said a large number of its personnel in Haiti were unaccounted for after a five-story building at the headquarters of the U.N. mission collapsed.

"The whole city is in darkness. You have thousands of people sitting in the streets with nowhere to go," said Rachmani Domersant, an operations manager with the Food for the Poor charity. "There are people running, crying, screaming."

LITTLE HELP FOR VICTIMS

In the hillside neighbourhood of Petionville, Domersant said he saw no police or rescue vehicles.

"People are trying to dig victims out with flashlights," he said. "I think hundreds of casualties would be a serious understatement."

Witnesses said they saw homes and shanties built on hillsides come tumbling down as the earth shook.

"The car was bouncing off the ground," Domersant said.

UN officials said normal communications had been cut off and the only way to talk with people on the ground was via satellite phone. Roads were blocked by rubble.

UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy said the main UN building in Port-au-Prince had collapsed. "We don't know how many people were in the building," he told reporters.

Some 9,000 UN police and troops are stationed there to maintain order and many countries were trying to determine the welfare of their personnel.

France's minister for cooperation, Alain Joyandet, said on French radio the Hotel Montana had collapsed and that about 100 of its 300 guests had been evacuated.

Le Roy's deputy Edmond Mulet said 200 to 250 people worked in the collapsed UN building during normal hours.

There were more houses destroyed than standing in Delmas Road, a major thoroughfare in Port-au-Prince, another Food for the Poor employee said. The Hotel Montana, where many foreigners stay, was also damaged

US, Google and China square off over Internet

Google's threat to quit China over censorship and hacking intensified Sino-US frictions on Wednesday as Washington said it had serious concerns and demanded an explanation from Beijing.

China has not made any significant comment since Google, the world's top search engine, said it will not abide by censorship and may shut its Chinese-language google.cn website because of attacks from China on human rights activists using its Gmail service and on dozens of companies, including Adobe Systems.

Chinese authorities were "seeking more information on Google's statement," the Xinhua news agency reported in English, citing an unnamed official from China's State Council Information Office, the government arm of the country's propaganda system.

Friction over the Internet now seems sure to stoke tensions between the United States and China, joining friction over climate change, trade, human rights and military ambition.

With China the largest lender to the United States, holding $800 billion (491.5 billion pounds) in Treasury bills, these Internet tensions will make steering this vast, fast-evolving relationship all the more tricky, especially with the U.S. Congress in an election year.

"China has been taking a harder line," said Shi Yinhong, an expert on relations with the United States at Renmin University in Beijing. "The next few months are going to see some turbulence in China-U.S. relations. We may see some tactical concessions from China, but the general trend isn't towards compromise."

China has said it does not sponsor hacking.

Pressing China for an explanation, U.S. Secretary of State Clinton said: "The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.

"We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns," Clinton said in Honolulu.

Chinese industry analysts said the issue had snowballed beyond Google and its problems.

"If this becomes heavily politicised, and there are signs that it is, and people in the Chinese government say, 'This is good. It serves you right, and we won't bow our heads to the United States, then there'll be no way out," said Xie Wen, a former executive in China for Yahoo and other big Internet companies, who is now a prominent industry commentator.

"The impact on China's image will gradually also affect the enthusiasm of investors," he added. "It's not the pure economic losses -- a billion or so -- it's the deteriorating environment."

TENSIONS OVER INTERNET

China's policy of filtering and restricting access to Web sites has been a frequent source of tension with the United States and tech companies, such as Google and Yahoo Inc.

Google's announcement suggested the recent intrusions were more than isolated hacker attacks.

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered -- combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the Web -- have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China," Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said in a statement posted on the company's blog.

Some 20 other companies also were attacked by unknown assailants based in China, said Google.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Stephen Ju said the move was a turnaround for Google. "Just about every earnings call recently has been that they are focussed on the long-term growth opportunities for China and that they are committed."

Shares of Google dipped 1.3 percent although an executive described China as "immaterial" to its finances. Shares in Baidu, Google's main rival in China, surged 7 percent.

A Google spokesperson said the company was investigating the attack and would not say whether the company believed Chinese authorities were involved.

U.S. President Barack Obama, during a visit to China in November, told an online town hall that he was "a big supporter of non-censorship."

CHINA SILENT, NO BACKDOWN SEEN

After the Google announcement, searches on its google.cn search engine turned up images and sites previously blocked, including pictures from the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Beijing. Other searches remained restricted, carrying messages warning users that some content was blocked.

China's ruling Communist Party, wary of the Internet becoming an uncontrolled forum for the country's 360 million Internet users, is unlikely to allow Google to avoid repercussions.

"Hostile Western forces have never abandoned their strategic schemes to Westernise and divide us, and they are stepping up ideological and cultural infiltration," the Party's chief propaganda official, Li Changchun, wrote last month.

If google.cn, launched in 2006, shuts down, Beijing could seek to restrict access to Google's main search engine, which can also do searches in Chinese, although China's "firewall" of Internet filters blocks many users from opening up the results.

"The general tendency over the past year has been to accuse foreigners of having a Cold War mentality and being anti-China," said Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on the Chinese Internet at the Open Society Institute.

"How exactly they are going to react to this, I cannot anticipate, but it's likely that it will not be pretty."

Google revamps its mobile strategy with new phone

Google Inc took the wraps off a new smartphone that it will sell directly to consumers, aiming to boost its position in the emerging mobile Internet market by exerting greater control over the new generation of Web-surfing devices.

The sleek touchscreen phone, dubbed the Nexus One, is Google's boldest foray outside its traditional Internet home turf and represents the first time the 11-year-old company will sell a consumer electronics device bearing its well-known brand.

But analysts say the phone is not as revolutionary in design as Apple Inc's iPhone was. Tech websites and forums gave Google favorable reviews but also noted the new phone was not that different from others in the market that run Google's Android software, such as Motorola's Droid.

The Nexus One ships immediately and exclusively from Google's online store for $179 with a two-year contract from Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA, or $529 without a service plan.

The more expensive unlocked phone, analysts say, is priced too high to dramatically alter the relationship between carriers and hardware vendors in which wireless service providers have traditionally controlled handset distribution in the U.S.

It "wasn't the game-changer people thought it could be," Canaccord Adams analyst Jeff Rath said. Google could have shaken up the industry by offering the device for free, but instead chose more traditional pricing, he said.

(For Reuters Insider coverage see link.reuters.com/wek89g)

Executives said the phone could be profitable for Google, though analysts are not forecasting a revenue windfall in the short term.

But the move, which Google announced at a press event at its Mountain View, California headquarters on Tuesday, raises the stakes in the fast-growing smartphone business which it entered two years ago by developing the free Android software for smartphones made by other companies.

The highly anticipated Nexus One, which Google designed in close collaboration with hardware maker HTC, could provide Google with a viable challenge to the iPhone and Research in Motion's BlackBerry.

Google's decision to sell its own Google-branded phones is "a sea change in terms of Google now owning the customer, making the carrier a little bit less relevant to the conversation and maintaining more control over the hardware and software experience because they realize they're competing with players like Apple and the iPhone," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president of strategy and analysis at market research firm Interpret.

The Nexus One is the first of a variety of smartphones that Google said were in the pipeline as the company seeks to expand its reach from the PC to the mobile world and ensure its online products and ads get prominent placement on a new breed of wireless Internet devices.

Executives said that in the spring Google will sell phones that use Verizon Wireless's network in the United States and Vodafone's in Europe. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon Communications and Vodafone.

WAIT AND SEE

According to Forrester research, 17 percent of US mobile phone users had smartphones at the end of 2009, up from 11 percent a year earlier.

Investors are taking a wait-and-see view on Google's first effort to sell a hardware product directly to consumers.

Google's stock has risen about 7 percent since the start of December, setting a 52-week high of $629.51 on Monday. But analysts say that was driven by improvements in its core business of Internet search advertising, rather than the prospect of tapping a new pool of revenue selling smartphones.

Its shares closed 0.44 percent down at $623.99.

Google executives declined to provide financial targets for the new phone, though Vice President of Engineering Andy Rubin said the company would not lose money by selling the phone.

By selling the phone directly to consumers, Rubin said that Google would be able to cut out extra retailing costs and ultimately deliver phones with lower price tags.

"There's a lot of people in the value chain who don't need to be there," said Rubin. "And then prices can go down, iteration can happen quicker, distribution can be wider."

Some analysts were positive on Google's effort to continue to establish the Android as a popular operating system for smartphones and wireless devices.

"It will help them keep consistency for Android platform," said Jim McGregor, Chief Technology Strategist for In-Stat.

The new phone helps Google "get their partners all on developing a single platform that applications can be developed on."

The Nexus One is 11.5 millimeters (0.5 inch) thick and weighs 130 grams (4.6 ounces) -- which executives said was lighter than a Swiss Army knife and no thicker than a No. 2 pencil.

The phone will feature a 3.7-inch (9.4 centimeter) touchscreen display. It will run the 2.1 version of the Android operating system and feature OLED display technology, a trackball for user interface control, an accelerometer chip, and a 5 megapixel camera.

Forrester analyst Charles Golvin said the Nexus One was an impressive looking device, even if it doesn't represent the kind of "quantum leap" forward in terms of technology as the iPhone did when it was first released in 2007.

Google worked closely with HTC to develop its phone, which uses a 1 gigahertz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm Inc.

Motorola, which is banking on the Android system to power a new generation of smartphones to revitalize a flagging business, said it welcomed the competition. Co-Chief Executive Sanjay Jha told Google's audience he did not see the Nexus One as a threat, but as an expansion of the market.