The BSI is making this recommendation ahead of Europe's "Safer Internet Day" on February 7th.

Other Recommendations:

In addition to Chrome, which is the only browser the agency recommends, the BSI also recommends a number of other security products, including Microsoft's own anti-virus software Microsoft Security Essentials, Avira Free Antivirus and avast! Free Antivirus. The BSI also recommends the use of OpenDNS Family Shield to keeps kids safe online and TrueCrypt for encrypting your data.

The agency also recommends Gmail, as it offers encrypted access to your email, even in the free version.

This month, the featured company is travel startup Hipmunk. Other companies that have worked with Startup Threads include Reddit, Boxee, twilio and Breadpig. Startup Threads will send your bag anywhere in the world, though international shipping is a bit more expensive than shipping package inside the U.S.

Back in the early days of the last Web bubble, a company called Valleyschwag offered a similar service. There, too, $15 per month would get you a monthly bag of swag from Silicon Valley’s hottest companies. While the service was popular for a while, its founders quickly moved on to other projects. StartUp Schwag filled the hole left by Valleyschwag for a while, but they, too, ended their $15/month subscription service after a successful 32-month run in 2010.

Google also announced that the number of total YouTube views now exceeds 4 billion views per day from across the globe – an increase of 25% over the last 8 months. As Google proudly notes, this is "the equivalent of more than half the world’s population watching a video every day, the same number as there are US $1 bills in circulation, the same as number of years since there was water on Mars."

To celebrate this milestone, Google also launched the rather goofy onehourpersecond.com to highlight just how amazing this number is by connecting it to random facts and trivia ("In 24 seconds of upload to YouTube, one full day elapses, and the Nyan Cat says "Nyan" over 345,600 times.").

Thrun made this announcement at the DLD conference in Germany today.

Reuters' Felix Salmon reports that Thrun stressed that out of the 248 students who got a perfect score in his AI class, "not one was enrolled at Stanford."

It's not clear whether there was some internal conflict at Stanford about Thrun's efforts, but he clearly thought that in order to reach enough students and teach the classes he wanted to teach, he had to leave the university and start his own venture.

Udacity is being backed by Charles River Ventures. The project's first class will start on February 20th.

It's not clear if Google has any additional connection with this project, but Thrun managed to get a rather sleepy looking Google CEO Sergey Brin provide an endorsement for the class.

It's worth noting that his former Stanford colleagues Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller also build a somewhat similar platform for running online classes at the scale of the original AI class. Those efforts, and the continuously expanding number of courses running on this platform, continue to be affiliated with Stanford University, however.

To test the update, I decided that instead of just doing artificial searches for the sake of it, I would just go back to my search history and retry a day's worth of searches from last week and compare the personalized and regular results side-by-side.

Too Much Clutter, Too Many Irrelevant Results

Here is my general impression: for the majority of my searches, the personalization didn't really matter, as my online friends never said anything relevant about those queries. Switching between those results and the non-personalized ones yielded virtually the same links.

When the personalization kicked in, though, the search results were now too cluttered with often irrelevant status updates and other digital flotsam. Indeed, as I went through my list, I often found myself wishing that my Google+ friends had nothing to say about that topic.

The Google+ posts that appear in the results are often not really relevant to the search query. They also often include comments (and all those little avatars that go with them), which generally add very little to your search experience.

The Google+ follow suggestions in the sidebar often include people you already follow and this feature just feels like Google is trying to push Google+ a little bit too hard.

Every Google Search is Now an Ego Search

When I search on Google, I want to see new information, not what I did last weekend. The new algorithm puts too much of emphasis on content you created yourself – and especially posts on Google+, of course. When I search on Google, I'm not usually looking for my own stuff and I don't need to see my own photos, blog post or status updates clutter up my search results. Maybe Google could move this into the sidebar, but that wouldn't help its clutter problem either, of course.

Be Careful Who You Friend

Unless you are very careful about who you friend on Google+, the relevance of Google's new "personal results" can also quickly go down the drain. When we friend people online, we don't do so to improve our search results.

Here is what it comes down to: The fact that we are somebody's "friend" online doesn't necessarily mean that we have common tastes. While there is a high chance that we have something in common that made us connect online in the first place, chances are that this only represents a very small part of our interests and we may only share very little else in common with these people. Until Google – and all the other search engines for that matter, too – are able to understand more of the nuances of our online relationships, social search efforts like personal search will inevitably remain limited and frustrating.

If you want to opt out of the new "personal results," just look for the opt-out toggle here.

This post first appeared on Memeburn and was written by Michelle Atagana. Memeburn is an award-winning site based in South Africa that tracks emerging technologies primarily in emerging markets, including the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. SiliconFilter occasionally features relevant posts from MemeBurn.

Social media penetration is on the rise in emerging markets. A recent report from research and analysis site, eMarketer.com, looking at three studies from Pew Research Center, TNSDigitallife and Brazilian-based F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi on social media usage and how it is aiding brand awareness in emerging market territories.

Last year eMarketer estimated worldwide social network ad revenues would surpass US$8-billion by the end of 2012, allocating just under half of that figure to the United States. “Non-US revenues were expected to grow faster, as marketers attempt to increase brand awareness, market share, and profits in fast-growth countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) and beyond,” says the research and analysis site.

Social media penetration in large emerging market regions such as the BRIC territories and countries Mexico and Indonesia, currently ranges from 56% to 86% of internet users, according to Pew Research Center’s “Global Digital Communication: Texting, Social Networking Popular Worldwide”. The highest figures go to Indonesia and Russia, at 86% for each in May 2011, up from 63% and 76%, respectively in 2010 — though F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi research reveals Brazil’s internet penetration reached 93% as of August 2011.

Pew’s research further finds that in some markets, especially those with relatively low overall internet penetration, social network usage is higher than the US’s 60% of internet users. Notably in the past year, social media usage in Egypt has grown from 18% in 2010 to 28% in 2011.

A key point revealed by these studies is the way social media is being used in these regions and what it means for the emerging world. Last year’s social media revolutions may have woken the world up to the role social media can play in times of unrest, but also showed how important social media can be when it comes to consumer behaviour.

According to the TNS “Digital Life 2011″ study, social media marketing is more effective in emerging markets than more established ones. The study shows that users in “BRIC, Indonesia and Mexico were more likely to view social networks as a good place to learn about and buy brands and products than users in developed markets like Canada, the UK and the US”.

eMarketer explains the difference in growth between emerging markets and developed markets using an “experienced consumer” analogy. According to eMarketer, developed market users “are accustomed to third-party eCommerce sites and payment methods, and look to social networks mainly for keeping up with friends. In emerging markets, eCommerce is untested and new; and knowing the person or brand, even virtually, can engender more trust among users.”

The report speculates that the reason emerging market users engage more with brands on social media is due to “higher levels of trust” in these regions, which allows social networks to play a bigger role in the purchase cycle. Online shopping is still a relatively new idea in most emerging markets, being able to engage with brands on social media platforms helps build user confidence.

In the TNS report, Larry Bruck, senior vice president of global media and marketing operations at Kellogg Company, says “Digital is a business enabler, not just a marketing enabler.” Using the emerging world as example, Bruck explains that social media, not just online media, provides an opportunity to foster new business for savvy brands.

Connected Cars are Going Mainstream

As CES this week, one trend has clearly been towards brining more entertainment content to the car over the Internet.

Here are just the announcements from yesterday: NPR and Ford announced a partnership yesterday. HARMAN's Aha platform is being adopted by Honda and Subaru and also features content from partners like NPR, MOG, Slacker and others. Pioneer's Zypr platform will power Scion's BeSpoke connected infotainment audio system (PDF).

Today, Ford is also announcing that mobile streaming app TuneIn is now compatible with its SYNC AppLink platform. This will give drivers with compatible cars and phones the ability to choose between 50,000 AM, FM, HD and Internet-based radio stations and close to a million on-demand programs ready for streaming. All of this, of course, can be controlled by your voice or with the buttons on your steering wheel.

Also announced at CES: streaming radio service Slacker just turned on its long-announced (but somewhat delayed) partnership with ESPN. Slacker also lets you play news programs at the top of the hour, so if you use this service in your car, you won't even miss the news. Given that the car itself can probably pull in traffic data anyway (maybe with the help of the newly announced Scout.me service), chances are you won't even miss the old-fashioned traffic reports as your car will route you around traffic jams automatically.

Some forms of radio will probably be around for a while, especially talk radio, but it's hard to imagine that too many drivers will still be tuning their radios to any channel in a few years from now – but you will tune in by clicking on your car's or your phone's touchscreen. No dial needed.

Image credit: Flickr user Night_Owl

Maybe the most interesting aspect of the site is the real-time dashboard, which displays recent search trends, Google News mentions and YouTube video views for all the candidates. The recent surge of Rick Santorum’s campaign, for example, is nicely illustrated by this tool.

Unsurprisingly, Google today also launched a Google+ page for its elections site.

In 2008, Google also offered an election website. That site, however, only launched a few days before the start of the political conventions in August instead of at the start of the primary season. At the time, Google allowed the campaigns and a select group of reporters to highlight specific news stories on the site. It doesn’t look like this feature will make a return this year.

Last year, the "Bed Intruder Song" took the top billing in YouTube's annual top 10 list. This year, it was Rebecca Black's "Friday." While there wasn't a single cat video in last year's top 10, this year saw two of them make the list ("Nyan Cat" and "cat mom hugs baby kitten"). Sadly, my favorite cat video of the year didn't make the list, though.

Here is the complete top 10:

Mayer’s Role at Google Today

Mayer has long been one of the most visible faces of Google’s executive team (and a regular guest at LeWeb), though last year, her role shifted from being in charge of search products to a focus on location products. Asked about this title switch by Siegler, Mayer noted that titles don’t matter much to her but that she cares more about what the focuses on. While this is obviously a very political answer, quite a few pundits at the time wondered whether Mayer wasn’t actually demoted in this move.

Google+: A Pleasant Surprise

Google+, said Mayer, was a “pleasant surprise.” She stressed that Google learned a lot from its first failed social products like Wave and Buzz. She also noted that Google tried not to over-hype Google+ and launch it slowly (though one could argue that a product with millions of users isn’t really in a “field test”).  To her, the fact that the company placed a stronger emphasis on design with Google+ is also a major factor in the product’s success.

Google+ Check-In Deals Coming Next Week

Asked about Google’s recently leaked Google+ check-in deals, Mayer argued that check-ins are a useful feature for the company’s users. “We think there are interesting ways we can monetize this, but also ways to help our users safe money.” The check-in feature is now slated for launch next week.

According to Mayer, Google is also still working on its other location features outside of Google+, too, including Latitude. New features for Latitude are currently still in the works, so chances are this tool won’t be the next victim of Google’s spring cleaning campaign.

Google’s View of the Location Space as a Whole

As for the location space as a whole, Mayer noted that she thinks there is still a lot of competition in local, even as Facebook and Gowalla have now bowed out of some aspects of it. To her, it’s natural that there will be some long-term winners and losers and that it’s inevitable that some companies will drop of the radar.

To Google, maps are among the most-used features on phones. Since June 2011, Google has been seeing more maps usage on mobile devices than on the web every day (until then, mobile usage only surpassed the desktop on weekends sometimes).