Google is coughing up a fairly piddling $7 million to divide among 38 states including Washington, as part of a settlement it's agreed to, to resolve privacy concerns over data collected by the company's Street View units.

The company acknowledges gathering passwords and other personal informaiton over local Wi-Fi networks with its Street View roving vehicles.  It denies wrongdoing, however.

The settlement includes an agreement by Google to pay the 38 states and the District of Columbia a total of $7 million to be used for, among other things, civil penalties, attorneys' fees and other costs of investigation and litigation, future consumer protection enforcement and education.

Washington's share of the money is $135,604, the state Attorney General's office reported.

Charlie Schmidt, one of Spokane's most viral artists, got a nice little early present from Google this year.

The search giant and software company used Schmidt's legendary web-craze Keyboard Cat in an online promo for the JAM app used with the Google Chrome browser.  See that promo at the link here. The app lets people from different computers play music together.

We didn't ask how much Google paid him to use the cat and cat tune in the promo. It's probably a decent figure.

Spokesman.com reporter Tom Sowa wrote about Charlie Schmidt's continuing effort to patrol the web and find offenders who use Keyboard Cat without compensation to him. Here's that story.

Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc. announced on Thursday its new Lewiston manufactuing plan is producing digital relays that are being shipped globally.

Net traffic tracker comScore today released new numbers on the smartphone market in the United States.

The numbers show both Android and Apple are making strong gains in one of the strongest sectors of the country's tech industry.

The graphic here gives the counts and shows a contrast between the most recent, Jan. 2012 and Oct. 2011 numbers.

Source: comScore Mobilens.

Ok, you're not working for Google and you're probably not upper management at Starbucks. But if you work for Pullman-based Schweitzer Engineering Labs, you have something to be proud of; the privately held firm is ranked No. 97 among Fortune's Best Companies to Work For.

The list has just been released.  Google ranks No. 1. REI Equipment ranks No. 8; Nordstrom scores the No. 61 ranking. And Starbucks comes in at No. 73.

The other impressive piece of information: Schweitzer, which makes relay devices and networking components for the electrical generation and distribution industry, is among the fastest-growing firms on the basis of jobs added.

SEL has a 27 percent job growth. Only four companies on the top 100 list have a faster job-growth rate, based on the numbers used by Fortune.

Notably, the biggest job-gainer is Zappos, reporting a 70 percent job gain since last year.

A new book on entrepreneurs by Gonzaga University's Todd Finkle includes lessons drawn from Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and Warren Buffett.

Finkle is GU's Pigott Professor in Entrepreneurship. He recently arranged a trip by GU business and Hogan Program students to meet with Buffeet in Omaha.

Finkle's new book is “Lessons Learned from Leading Entrepreneurs: Case Studies in Business and Entrepreneurship.”

He'll read from the book on Saturday Nov. 19 at 2 p.m. at Auntie's Bookstore, in downtown Spokane.

We are dedicated to collecting and posting interesting, odd or slightly useful graphics and charts, wherever they may be. All we ask for is clean and fun infotainment.

Today's offering is a cool find, a superhero treatment of popular social media sites. We found it at the uber-social site FreestyleInteractive.co.uk. The infographic is from the Freestyle Interactive digital agency.

We dig the cool and clever takes on sites like Flickr. and Google+. 

Hope you all like it…

Trying as hard as we can to offer the occasional useful chart or graphic. Today's offering:  a recently published graphic on what matters to people when buying a smartphone.

Definition first: A smartphone is: a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. Smartphones and feature phones may be thought of as handheld computers that use applications similar to those you would use on a computer. (Definition from Wikipedia).

The graphic comes by way of Businessinsider.com.  The big determining factor, the survey shows, was “platform.” which means: Is this running on Apple software, Microsoft or Google Android software?

The second leading factor in smartphone selection appears to be features (the kind of buttons, the presence of a video recorder, etc.)  The third main factor are apps.

A whole bunch of cities including Spokane applied to be selected for Google's much-anticipated rollout of fiber (high-speed Internet) service.

The winning city is Kansas City, Kansas.  

A story on Mashable notes that depending on how that first city rollout proceeds, other cities may also be selected.

The stakes are fairly high for the metros blessed by the search company. Google will install a fiber network that provides 100 times faster data speeds than the typical U.S. Internet connection.

Did Spokane get anywhere near being chosen by Google in its much-publicized plan to deploy fiber networks in some lucky metros?

We wondered about that, so we contacted the Mountain View company and asked about Spokane’s chances of being one of the locations chosen. (Photo shows a rally organized by the Spokane Association of Pro-Fiberians.)

The short answer:  the decision hasn’t been made yet and Google intends to make the choice by the end of 2010. More than 1,100 cities made appeals — some silly, some highly sophisticated — to be part of the company’s plan to roll out the first phase of an ultra-high speed network across parts of the country.

As Google spokesman Dan Martin noted, the company will offer the option for one or a number of sites, with a population target of between 50,000 and 500,000.

That means it could be in just one city. Or in several cities. If it does involve several cities, it might be just a portion. In an email, Martin wrote: “… We might select a large city, but only build in a small neighborhood.”

He also said  the company so far has identified several communities “that we think might be a good fit for our project. But we’re not yet prepared to announce anything more at this time.”

The benefit, for Google, is learning how to best deploy the fiber network on a broader scale; the first locations will be beta sites, in effect. The service will not be free, Martin noted. Customers will be facing a pricing system more or less competitive with other providers.

For more Google explanations on the criteria, Martin sent along this link: http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi

Office Hours readers may have noticed the pull-down Apture Bar that floats just below your browser header. if you don’t see it, scroll your mouse toward the edge of the page and it should show up at the top of the page.

This gives a number of options we didn’t have before. It allows quick sharing with Twitter, Facebook and by e-mail. To the right side of the bar is the mojo, the Apture media search option.

One can search a term, like “data center,” and you’ll find sets of results that show up in a window right there in the results box. You don’t need to leave the blog page to search the results.

Results will include A) all of the Office Hours blog; B) All of Spokesman.com; and C) All of Google results for the search terms. Not too shabby.

Spokane is among 600-plus communities and cities who are begging (shamelessly in some cases) that Google provide their burg with an experimental, ultra high-speed broadband network.

Google announced the idea back in February and set a deadline for this week for cities wanting to be among the undefined number of U.S. metros to be included in the beta launch of the new fiber-based service. The deadline for submissions was Friday. Google is posting, on its blog.Google.com, a summary of the applications.

The original Google request for information (RFI) also produced about 190,000 responses from individuals, clamoring on the behalf of their locations.

Spokane’s true believers held a park rally this past week to catch the attention of the Google decision-makers.