Google is preparing to launch Google Offers, the search giant’s Groupon competitor, Mashable has learned. We have the documents to prove it.

One of our sources has sent us a confidential fact sheet straight from the Googleplex about the company’s new group buying service. “Google Offers is a new product to help potential customers and clientele find great deals in their area through a daily email,” the fact sheet says.

Google Offers looks and operates much like Groupon or LivingSocial. Users receive an e-mail with a local deal-of-the-day. They then have the opportunity to buy that deal within a specific time limit (we assume 24 hours). Once enough people have made the purchase, the Google Offer is triggered and users get that all-too-familiar $10 for $20 deal for that Indian restaurant you’ve never tried.

From what we can tell, Google Offers will be powered by Google Checkout. It also includes Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Google Buzz and e-mail sharing options.

Google is actively reaching out to businesses now to get them on board with Offers. It even apparently has a writing team in place to craft the write-up for offers.

Google famously tried to buy Groupon for $6 billion just a few months ago in order to bolster its local advertising business. Groupon rejected the offer though and is instead preparing for a $15 billion IPO.

The search giant clearly isn’t giving this market up without a fight, though. With its vast reach, huge resources and brand recognition, it could prove to be a powerful player in the space. We’re going to be watching these developments closely. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

Below, we’ve embedded the entire fact sheet Google is sending to local businesses:

Update: Google has responded to our inquiry and sent us the following statement:

“Google is communicating with small businesses to enlist their support and participation in a test of a pre-paid offers/vouchers program. This initiative is part of an ongoing effort at Google to make new products, such as the recent Offer Ads beta, that connect businesses with customers in new ways. We do not have more details to share at this time, but will keep you posted.”

Google essentially confirms Google Offers is real. It looks like Google Offers is in the testing phases, though.

Update 2: We’ve also learned that Google will pay out 80% of a business’ revenue share three days after its deal runs. Google will hold the remaining 20% for 60 days to cover refunds before sending the rest.

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According to the latest security report published by Sophos, spam and phishing attacks have substantially increased, on social networking sites, over the past year. Of the 1000 respondents which were polled, around 82 percent named Facebook as the biggest threat to security. This is a 22 percent increase compared to the survey of last year.

Sophos polls suggest that around 40 percent of the users quizzed, have received malware such as worms via social networking sites. This is nearly 90 percent increase since April 2009.

According to the survey, the proportion of spam has doubled since April 2009. Two third (67 percent) of the users had been spammed through the social networking sites. The incidents of phishing attacks also grew twice in size since April 2009, with 43 percent on the receiving end of phishing attacks.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos said:

The problem of security threats posed by social networks is not limited to only home users. Access to social networking accounts from the workplace, makes the sites a potential vector for attacks against businesses.

Cybercriminals are showing a drastically higher level of interest in social networks than ever before; with Facebook being the site they are targeting the most. The report cites Facebook’s app system to be a major security vulnerability. Facebook allows any user to create an application, with a wide range of powers to interact with data stored on user pages and cross-site messaging systems. These applications, like survey scams, can then be installed and run on any users’ page.

Sophos wants Facebook to employ a “walled garden” approach to address the app problem, similar to what Apple App Store does. Applications in Apple’s App Store require official approval from Apple, before they can be uploaded to the site and shared with other users. Such an initial check prevents fraudulent and scam apps from making their way into the store. If Facebook employs this functionality, a lot of issues could be resolved before they go viral on Facebook.

Graham Cluley also criticized Facebook‘s awkwardly developed features which allow rogue application developers to access users’ private information. “Either Facebook simply doesn’t “get” security and privacy. Or it just don’t care” he said.

According to Cluley, if Facebook will keeping ignoring privacy and security concerns, there will be serious problems.

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Charles Arthur of The Guardian has finally shed some light on Chrome’s recent announcement that they would be dropping H.264, and all he had to do was ask Google’s PR team.  Read on to find out what Arthur asked, what Google told him and what the implications are.

Arthur’s questions primarily had to do with the effect that Chrome’s decision to drop H.264 would have on YouTube.  A lot of speculators thought that, in their mission to “enable open innovation” and direct the web towards a codec-free system, the Google-owned YouTube would also be dropping H.264.  Arthur asked Google’s PR team, “If the patent-encumbered H.264 is so awful, and the open source WebM/VP8 is so wonderful, when is YouTube, that other big Google property, going to follow suit, and stop encoding in H.264?”  Google responded that, “This change is related to Chrome rather than YouTube.  YouTube currently supports  multiple formats, including WebM.”  Furthermore, the informational page about YouTube’s HTML5 Video Player remains very H.264-friendly:

When Arthur asked Google whether or not Chrome’s move also meant that YouTube would be dropping support for H.264 video content for the <video> tag, Google directed him to the above YouTube HTML5 guide.  This seems to imply that, indeed, H.264 is going to remain in use by YouTube for the foreseeable future.

Arthur also asked Google about what Chrome’s decision means for mobile.  He asked, “Over what timescale does Google think that WebM/VP8 will become the predominant format for serving mobile web video?”  Google replied in a similar fashion to which they responded to the YouTube question saying, “The changes announced in the blog post only relate to Chrome; we don’t have any comment about mobile at this stage.”  Basically, the announcement to drop H.264 really does only apply to Chrome at this stage, so we don’t have to worry about online or mobile video blackouts within our other browsers.  Ultimately, I’d still stand by the belief that Google, led by Chrome, will ultimately aim to get rid of the codec system all together and push their WebM/VP8 system to the forefront, but we still have quite a while before that will happen.

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In a recent report by ZDNet we learned that Trapster, every speed demon’s favorite iPhone app was hacked today. Trapster’s 10 million plus users received the following e-mail notifying them of the attack.

Trapster recently made our list of 2010′s best travel apps, because the highly rated app alerts you as you approach speed traps, red lights, speed cameras, police check points, accidents and other roadway hazards. It operates like a social network, similar to Waze, reporting information from over 10 million users.

With over 10 million user passwords likely compromised, it may no longer be every road demon’s favorite app for much longer. We suggest you check out Waze if you’re really worried about future Trapster use.

If you are a Trapster user, quickly change your login credentials, and change your password/login information for any other services where you’ve used the same email/password combination.

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fter a bad 2010 for Google in China, it is poised to get back on their feet in 2011 by gaining back the market share it lost.

It’s starting to look good as PCWorld reports that Google search’s ad share finally sees a rise after a year of decline. In Q4 of 2010, Google search ad revenues rose to 23.1%–a 1.5% growth from the previous quarter. This, however, is still a long way from its 35.6% share in end of 2009.

Google’s decline in the Chinese market began at the start of 2010 when the company announced it might leave the country after being the victim of a cyber attack that it said originated in China. This followed the company’s move to stop censoring search results in China by redirecting all users from its Google.cn page to its unfiltered Hong Kong search engine.

Although all has been resolved, it still resulted to a shift to Baidu.com, Google’s biggest competitor, which now controls a 71.7% market share. Determined to bounce back up in spite of the setbacks, Google held an event in Beijing that promoted products and services such as the Google function that will allow users to search and view foreign web pages that have been automatically translated into the selected language.

Additionally, Google still aims to capitalize on its display ad market which is fairly doing well, while starting to target businesses that wants to advertise on its platform as well.

Google may not gain the top spot any time soon but this rise in share is definitely a good sign for the world-dominating search engine. After all, a small piece in a huge pie is still pretty big–we’re talking about the world’s biggest Internet base here with more than 400 million users.

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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Google announced Thursday that co-founder Larry Page will take over as CEO and Eric Schmidt will be stepping down into a new role as “executive chairman,” overseeing the company’s expansions abroad. Mr. Page was the company’s CEO prior to Mr. Schmidt coming on board a decade ago, and managed it from the first two employees to 200.

Advertising Age – Digital

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In October, Google engineer Brian Kennish debuted Facebook Disconnect, a Chrome extension that wipes out virtually all evidence of Facebook from your Web experience. Since then, Kennish has quit his job with Google to focus entirely on Disconnect, another extension for Chrome and RockMelt that aims to help users to block the larger scope of tracking devices on the increasingly social Web.

Kennish released Facebook Disconnect in October and the extension quickly gained popularity, hitting the top 10 list of Google Chrome extensions. He told us that he quit his job at Google three weeks later so that he could “develop tools that make it trivial for the average user to understand and control the data they share whenever they browse or search the Web.” He said that he thinks Google is “collecting more personal data than any other company” and “to fight for user privacy while working there would’ve been impossible.”

Disconnect, similar to his earlier project, blocks a number of third-party widgets from sites like Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo, as well as de-personalizes search at the cookie level, allowing you to remain logged-in to services like iGoogle or Gmail without having your search queries attached to your Google profile.

Kennish said that, while the tool is in a primitive state, he hopes it will have a larger effect on the debate over privacy on the Web.

“Realistically, Disconnect won’t have a significant direct impact on the average user’s privacy — Adblock (and I mean the whole suite) is the most successful browser extension and used by less than 1% of the Web population,” said Kennish. “So government policy and what browser vendors ship natively is more important to me. I’m hoping to show a better way through software and have a butterfly effect on policy and browser implementation.”

Kennish calls the “Do Not Track” method of opting-out “a bad model for defending online privacy because phones ring and get your attention, where Web bugs are invisible and go unnoticed.”

Indeed, last summer one online advocacy group released a browser extension that alerts you“whenever your personal information is being sent to Google servers.” The result was a near constant barrage of alarm bells – if your phone rang this often, you would go insane. Disconnect takes a less obnoxious method, showing a running tally of how many calls have been blocked in the extension’s toolbar icon. Clicking on the icon also allows you to quickly allow for unblocking because, no matter our privacy talk, these tools are also useful in our online lives and not always unwanted. Kennish’s point is more that the user should be allowed to opt-in, rather than needing to opt-out – an oft-heard refrain in online privacy discussions.

Kennish said that he started with blocking standard third-party social widgets “because I consider them the most dangerous third-party resources and there didn’t seem to be another tool that blocks them out of the box. The prevalence of these widgets means they can report on almost all your browsing activity, which can then be linked to databases full of the social data you intentionally share.”

While Disconnect may be in early stages and not have a “significant direct impact” for the average user, the tool could be useful for those concerned about how different social tools are keeping track of your browsing habits. The extension is available for both Google Chrome and RockMelt.

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When an internal announcement leaked out of Yahoo last month that it was “sunsetting” popular social bookmarking service Delicious, that service’s users flew into a panic. Yahoo quickly backtracked on the plans and the service remains up and running, if minimally supported.

Would Flickr survive the hemorrhaging at its parent company Yahoo? That was the next logical question. Today Flickr power user Thomas Hawk did a little investigation of how many $25/year paid Pro accounts and thus how much annual revenue he estimates Flickr contributes to Yahoo. Hawk’s methodology seems reasonable, if generous, and led to the conclusion that Flickr probably brings in around $50 million in annual revenue. Minus expenses, the profit it brings Yahoo is probably negligible. In other words, Yahoo has little economic incentive to support, maintain or grow one of the biggest photo sharing sites on the web and the place many of us pay to store our photos online. That’s cause for concern.

Hawk’s methodology involved looking at Flickr’s last stated number of users from a year ago (40m) and decreasing that number by the 18% that the site’s publicly visible web traffic has since declined by. Then he did a search for two common names, John and Jane, and counted what percentage of the first 100 users with each name were listed as paying Pro members. This admittedly crude method led Hawk to conclude that an estimated 7% of Flickr users have paid accounts. That’s reasonable, if not high. (I’d perform a more extensive analysis right now, using the same method, if Flickr allowed for automated extraction of information from its site. It doesn’t though.)

Put all the numbers together and you get about $50 million in annual revenue. “How profitable is Flickr?” Hawk asks after discussing hosting, office and staff costs, “Your guess is as good as mine. I suspect that after you back out all the costs on their revenue though that it’s not a meaningful or significant number for Yahoo.”

As we wrote last April, when Flickr’s epic community manager Heather Champ left the company, Facebook has long been larger and now sees almost an entire Flickr’s-worth of photos (3 billion) uploaded to that social network every month.

As we wrote yesterday when discussing Facebook’s crushing Google Reader in future of news reading, it’s clear though that Facebook has come up with a winning formula: emphasis on effective user experience, easy and meaningful social interaction, casual gaming and multi-media reading and writing, not just subscription like Google Reader offers.

Facebook isn’t just photos like Flickr, it isn’t just newsfeeds like Google Reader. It isn’t just video like YouTube. It’s a whole lot of everything, with really easy publishing of updates and leveraging a big social graph holding it all together as glue.

Should Flickr users be worried about their photos? In the short term, maybe not – but in the long term, something’s going to need to change. Either we all start storing our media in easy-to-use cloud systems, or we bend our knee to the mighty Facebook, or we come up with systems that make transfer of our digital assets between institutions as easy in the future as it is to move our financial assets between financial institutions today. (Look what Dave Winer made today, along these lines.)

What’s wrong with the internet, though, if millions of people can pay $25 per year to store a visual catalog of the world and that’s not good enough, financially?

Button photo posted on Flickr, under Creative Commons (one of the coolest things about Flickr), by user Poolie.

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Did you know that Wikipedia is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week? It is, on January 15th! It’s hard to believe that the ‘edited by the everyman’ encyclopedia has been around that long… or maybe we’re just getting old. Either way, co-founder of the site (and man of many personal appeals) Jimmy Wales took the opportunity to answer some questions about the past, present and future of Wikipedia, and, when asked about the growing prevalence of mobile apps and app stores, well, Wales had plenty to say, including that models such as the iTunes app store can represent a dangerous “chokepoint” and that they could be “a threat to a diverse and open ecosystem.” He also added that mobile devices are owned by people, and those people should control their own devices. We can see where Jimmy’s coming from in some ways — apps are a wholly new, untested way of ingesting content, but we have a hard time swallowing wholesale that the app store model could threaten internet freedom more than an issue such as net neutrality. But you know, if you ask us nicely, Jimmy, we might just take your word for it. Hit up the ‘more coverage’ link to check out a video of Jimmy Wales waxing philosophical about the birthday celebration.

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AOL’s Michael Arrington isn’t backing down from his war with his AOL colleagues at Engadget.

In fact, he’s escalating it.

In the comments of our post about Arrington’s recent attacks on Engadget (and, with it, corporate parent AOL), he added more reasons he hates Engadget:

• “They’ve trolled us, repeatedly, for a year.”

• “I’m throwing punches at the engadget team and their bullshit.”

• “they’re immensely unethical”

Arrington didn’t provide an explanation for these bombs.  Not surprisingly, his colleague at AOL, Engadget’s editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky, quickly said “enough is enough” and challenged Arrington to back up his assertions with facts. At that point, Arrington dropped out of the comments.

This civil war in AOL’s “Tech Town” is obviously good for AOL’s blog traffic, so some have speculated that it’s just a publicity stunt. But it sure doesn’t feel like it. It feels like a knife fight.

When Arrington first attacked Engadget, we speculated that this might be Arrington’s first step toward the AOL door. He can’t collect his earn-out for the TechCrunch deal if just quits the company, so to get his money and his freedom, he will have to get the company to want him to leave (but not actually fired for cause).

Others see this as just typical Arrington behavior: Retaliating against a perceived enemy to settle some undisclosed score (in this case, perhaps, a post that Engadget once wrote that Arrington didn’t like).

Whatever it is, it’s getting hotter. And we suspect that AOL’s management will soon be forced to step into the mix.

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