Google - Our Future

Vodafone to launch HTC Magic "Google phone" on May 5

2009-04-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

Vodafone is accepting pre-orders for the HTC Magic, the first full touch-screen phone to run Google's Android operating system.

The latest “Google phone” is available for pre-order ahead of its release next month.

The HTC Magic will be available exclusively on the Vodafone network and runs Android, an operating system for mobile phones designed by Google and a host of partners to make it easier to surf the web and carry out complex computing tasks on mobile devices.

T-Mobile launched the first Android-based handset last September, but that phone, the G1, is thought to have sold in modest numbers. The Magic, which is made by Taiwanese manufacturer HTC, has already won critical acclaim ahead of its release. It features a large 3.2in touch-screen, a 3.2-megapixel camera, high-speed internet access, push email and satnav technology. Users can also downloads games and software from the Android Marketplace, the Google phone equivalent of Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Vodafone has announced that the Magic will be free to users who sign up for a two-year contract worth £35 per month, which includes unlimited web use, 700 minutes of calls, 250 texts, and unlimited calls to landlines and other Vodafone customers.

The HTC Magic will hit shops on May 5, a month before Apple is widely anticipated to unveil its third-generation iPhone at a conference in San Francisco.

The two phones will also go head-to-head with Palm’s new device, the Pre, which has received glowing early reviews from technology experts, and is widely expected to win some users away from the all-conquering iPhone.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/5188369/

Ask.com asks Jeeves to take on Google again

2009-04-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

Butler brought back in a bid for more search market share !

Web search engine Ask.com is bringing back its butler Jeeves in a bid to challenge Google in the search engine stakes. It was back in 2006 when askjeeves.com changed to the simpler moniker ask.com. Since then, the search market has seen near dominance by Google, who has around 90 per cent of the market, with others like Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask scrapping for the other 10 per cent.

Human answers

"We have been focused on developing an outstanding producer [sic] that will deliver outstanding results and Jeeves is just the icing on the cake," said Managing director Cesar Mascaraque about the search engine re-think. "Our aim is to give our users the answers they need for the lives they lead and Jeeves' role is to give our users answers in a more human way."

Quest for knowledge

To reiterate the fact that Jeeves is 'human', Ask has launched an ad campaign that sees a CG Jeeves walk around the search engine's homepage. There's even a 'Why Am I Back?' question on the front page, where Jeeves himself explaining that: "I popped out three years ago to travel the world in a quest for knowledge and I've returned to Blighty armed with answers. During my sojourn research showed the public wanted me back, which I found jolly touching."

To see the Ask.com re-jig for yourself, point your browser to http://uk.ask.com.

Google Dominating Search More Than Ever

2009-04-18T23:28:00.000-07:00

Google's dominance in Web search is growing and may grow even more thanks to a change in underlying technology it uses to present search results. So much for Steve Ballmer's ambitions for Microsoft.

Google had a 63.7 percent share of the 14.3 billion U.S. searches in March, up 0.4 percentage points from February, and above the 63.5 percent level that was its previous high. Meanwhile, Yahoo saw its U.S. search share inch downward in March to 20.5 percent, from 20.6 percent in February. I suppose we need to mention that Microsoft's share of the U.S. search market increased by one-tenth of a percentage point, to 8.3 percent in March.

Microsoft got 11 percent more search queries than in February, while Google got "only" 10 percent more -- but look at the base. Microsoft went from 1 billion to 1.2 billion queries, whereas Google went from 8.3 billion to 9.1 billion search queries.

The reality is that Google is whupping Microsoft up one side and down the other, and the beating only promises to get worse. Google is testing a new way to present search results that uses the JavaScript programming language and the related AJAX interface technology, not just regular HTML, to display the information. Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya explained to CNET's Steve Shankland that the change could shave milliseconds off response times, and Google has found that even minute improvements in that speed encourages people to search more often.

http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_search/google_dominates_search_more_than_ever.html

Cloud Computing Doesn’t Make Sense !!

2009-04-18T23:22:00.000-07:00

Clouds, clouds, clouds. Everyone talks about Google-style cloud computing — software as services off in the Internet “cloud” — as the future.

But while cloud computing is a marketing triumph, new research from asserts that trying to adopt the cloud model would be a money-losing mistake for most large corporations. The research is being presented at a symposium on Wednesday afternoon, sponsored by the McKinsey & CompanyUptime Institute, a research and advisory organization that focuses on improving the efficiency of data centers.

The McKinsey study, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” concludes that outsourcing a typical corporate data center to a cloud service would more than double the cost. Its study uses Amazon.com’s Web service offering as the price of outsourced cloud computing, since its service is the best-known and it publishes its costs. On that basis, according to McKinsey, the total cost of the data center functions would be $366 a month per unit of computing output, compared with $150 a month for the conventional data center.

“The industry has assumed the financial benefits of cloud computing and, in our view, that’s a faulty assumption,” said Will Forrest, a principal at McKinsey, who led the study.

Owning the hardware, McKinsey states, is actually cost-effective for most corporations when the depreciation write-offs for tax purposes are included. And the labor savings from moving to the cloud model has been greatly exaggerated, Mr. Forrest says. The care and feeding of a company’s software, regardless of where it’s hosted, and providing help to users both remain labor-intensive endeavors.

Clouds, Mr. Forrest notes, can make a lot of sense for small and medium-sized companies, typically with revenue of $500 million or less.

Instead of chasing cloudy visions, McKinsey suggests, corporate technology managers should focus mainly on adopting one building-block technology of the cloud model, virtualization. Such virtualization allows server computers to juggle more software tasks, and thus increase utilization, reducing capital and energy costs.

The average server utilization in a data center, according to McKinsey, is 10 percent. That can be fairly easily increased to 18 percent, the consulting firm says, by adopting virtualization software (EMC’s VMware is the leading vendor). With more aggressive adoption programs, servers in corporate data centers can reach up to 35 percent utilization, McKinsey said.

“We should focus on things we know work now, and virtualization works,” said Kenneth Brill, executive director of the Uptime Institute.

"au Box" - Android Set Up Box

2009-04-18T23:20:00.000-07:00

In a positive sign for the Google-backed operating system, Android will soon find its way to a set-top box made by Motorola.

The device, which is called "au Box," is being made for the Japanese Internet service provider KDDI, and it will be capable of playing DVDs and CDs, transfer music and video to a mobile device, and rip and store files. The box will likely be able to surf the Web with Android's Chome-like browser. The au Box doesn't have a definite release date, and it's unclear if it will be released in other markets.

The Android-powered box is being pushed along by the Open Embedded Software Foundation, a consortium of Japanese electronics manufacturers that want the Linux-based OS on a variety of devices. At this fall's electronic trade show CEATEC, the group will be showing off multiple Android-powered prototype devices including VoIP phones and TVs.

These moves show that Android appears to be gaining some much-needed momentum, as fans are still waiting for more devices other than the T-Mobile G1. There are multiple Android smartphones expected from Acer, HTC, Samsung, and others later this year, but only the HTC Magic has been announced so far.

When Google first introduced the Linux-based platform in 2007, many industry watchers saw it as another smartphone operating system. But it's become clear that Android will spread to a variety of Internet-connected devices, and computer makers like Hewlett-Packard and Asus are considering using the OS for netbooks.

The History Of Google

2009-04-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

They say the Internet is vast; and it truly is. With seemingly limitless enthusiasm, humanity marches forever onwards (and hopefully upwards as well, though unfortunately not in many cases) in its quest and thirst for knowledge and information. A well known saying is that knowledge is power and today knowledge can be found quicker and easier than ever before, through the use of the Internet. This empowerment of the people is a good and positive thing in most cases, though it can also be a sad testament to the state of some minds when this bright tool is used for more shadowy reasons. But because the Internet is so large and all-encompassing in its subject matter, there can often be a where do I start moment that holds us up. It allows us to momentarily consider that all the information in the world is of no use at all, if it cannot be sorted for our convenience and accessed for our scrutiny and subsequent use. This is where search engines come in of course, without which the Internet would probably not be used half as much as it is, certainly not by the general populace at least. Of the hundreds of such useful names out there, the biggest, most used and best known is of course, Google.

Behold the Google

But where did Google come from?

It was in 1995 that the seeds were first sown, when two graduate students in computer science met at Stanford University, and at first apparently did not get on at all. Larry Page was 24 years old and on a visit from the University of Michigan, while Russian born Sergey Brin was a year younger and selected among a group to act as hosts and gave him a tour. Apparently they spent most of their time arguing with one another about this and that and almost everything else, but on one topic they agreed; that a common problem, as computer programs became more and more powerful and contained increasing amounts of data, was how to sort out what was relevant in the compiled data to each and every new request for information. Both were frustrated that so much time had to be spent sorting through what was not required to find something of value to whatever project was being undertaken, and both were determined to do something about it - and do it in such a way that others could use it without the need for a high expense. Settling their differences on other matters, the pair’s mutual respect of the other’s abilities caused them to begin a joint venture on a search engine at the beginning of the next year which they named 'BackRub.' This forerunner of Google used a new way of analyzing a website’s 'back links' that singled it out from amongst a crowd of other sites. It proved to work very well, and soon word began to spread about it’s effectiveness as a search tool. It works well, but it can work better still! The pair was encouraged, and as the next couple of years rolled on, they continued to work on and improve their analysis techniques that BackRub employed, and soon realized that they were on to a winner. Investing in their project, they looked for bargains whenever purchasing disks and equipment; and set up headquarters in Larry Page’s dormitory room. They also began to look around for interested parties to sell their ideas to, but surprisingly found little interest amongst the major Internet players, who did not appear to realize the potential of what the duo had created.

The founder of Yahoo!, David Filo, was known to them and he encouraged them to begin their own company rather than sell a license of use to others who did not really value the prospects of searching. But he himself did not offer them a partnership at the time, as the techniques they used were not yet fully developed. So Larry and Sergey drew up a business plan, put their studies on the backburner, and themselves held a new search - for an investor in their new company, which was called Google.

Why Google?

This is derived from the word 'googol' which stands for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Sergey Brin and Larry Page chose this as they thought that was appropriate for a search engine which would seek out information from the astronomical number of possible sources contained on the Internet.

A Brightly Shining Sun They found their first investor in Andy Bechtolsheim, who was among those that founded the giant Sun Microsystems. He was impressed by what they offered, and convinced it would be a success; he immediately gave them a check for $100,000. However, the check was paid out to Google Inc., which did not yet officially exist. So the check sat on ice for a while as Sergey and Larry founded their corporation and sought out other investors to add their money into the starting pot. They were successful, and soon their available funding would near the $1 million mark. So on September 7th, 1998, Google was born; in a sublet garage in Menlo Park, California. Still in beta stage, it was nonetheless dealing with more than 10,000 searches every day, and was rapidly attracting both notice and praise from the general media and specialist publications. PC Magazine included Google in its 1998 list of the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines. Rapid Growth Google was doing well, very well, and in the space of six months their service had mushroomed by fifty fold, with now over 500,000 searches being done daily. The corporation moved home to a larger office along University Avenue in Palo Alto, and increased staff numbers to eight. They had their first commercial sign ups with Red Hat, and attracted $25 million from both of the normally competing venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Buyers. Still growing fast in personnel and performance, Google again moved to larger premises where they remain today in Mountain View, California, in a building with the nickname, Googleplex. AOL/Netscape now joined the list of those appreciating what Google could do, as they chose this search engine ahead of all others to provide its users with the tools for web searching. By now Google searches were topping 3 million per day.

From Beta to Alpha

In September 1999, the beta label came off from their website, as the home site was officially launched. Their client list became more international as both Virgilio in Italy and Virgin Net in the United Kingdom opted for Google. This year was to bring more good news and recognition yet, as PC Magazine awarded Google a Technical Excellence Award for Innovation in Web Application Development. The name also appeared in many `best lists and recommendations from various sources which included the highly thought of, Time Magazine’s 1999 Top Ten Best Cybertech list.

The new millennium brought more good news for Google as Yahoo! joined the client list, but success was not going to the heads of the now around sixty folks employed at Google. Brin and Page had long cultivated an informal atmosphere among the employees, and remained true to this relaxed state. Impromptu games of roller-hockey would break out in the car park and the offices were kept free of dividing walls to the work cubicles in order to allow an openness and corporate togetherness that was free of an `in your face hierarchical structure. This was to encourage and allow the staff to propose ideas of their own, which would be embraced without jealousy if thought to be likely to succeed. Partly because of this, the search engine continued to improve, the Google Directory was to be started, using Netscape’s Open Directory Project (ODP) as a starting base and a service for those surfing the web from wireless devices like the new WAP phones.

More awards were tumbling in, like the 2000 Webby award for Best Technical Achievement and the People’s Voice Award, also in the category of Technical Achievement. Appreciating that not everyone could speak English, alternative systems of Google were developed in ten other languages, and in June 2000 Google became the largest search engine around, with 18 million searches a day and a usable index of 1 billion web listings. Later that year the index had grown to 1.3 Billion web pages and above 60 million searches each and every day were now being sent through Google.

Google on the move Innovations continued to be introduced, including the GNS (Google Number Search) for easier and faster searching on WAP phones, the Google Toolbar to download into browser software, so users would not have to visit the Google homepage to launch their search. Also, to help bring in more income, advertising with keyword focused ads. More high profile clients came in from Europe and Asia, as well as North and later, South America, and even more awards and commendations followed like PC Worlds naming of Google as the 'Best Bet Search Engine.' But it did not stop here, there was no easing off on the accelerator pedal just because the accounts were improving.

As 2001 began, the per day search number had hit 100 million, and this year would see yet more partnerships with both commercial and educational clients. The latter receiving increased search abilities for free, wherever they are in the world, as the founders of Google clearly remember where they came from and here sought to help others accordingly. Google also now started to buy a few things itself, like the enormous web archives of Deja.com, which was the largest Usenet archive on the Internet, which they started to sort, compile and merge seamlessly into their gigantic index which would grow to 3 billion web documents and pages by the end of the year.

A Profit? For a dot com?

All this and more meant that Google was actually starting to make a profit! An unheard of thing for most of the dot com bubble that was rewarding the hard work of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as the investors that had believed in their ideas coming to fruition. 2002 started with some good news held over from 2001, as that year’s Search Engine Watch Awards were handed out, with Google cleaning up, winning highest marks for the following: Best Design, Best Image Search Engine, Best Search Feature, the Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and the Outstanding Search Service. Not a Black Box, but a Yellow one. This year also brought the trial launch of the constantly updating Google News, and the Google Search Appliance: A plug-and-play device in a cheerfully bright yellow box. This hardware and associated software could allow for companies and universities to use Google to search through their own intranets, which had previously been out of bounds to the GoogleBot web crawlers because of the necessary firewall protection designed to keep out hackers and such. These also put up a wall against the search engine spider software as they roamed the net on the hunt for new and refreshed information to add the ever enlarging index, but now the advantages of Google searches would also be warmly welcomed in these previously unseen places for those on the inside. These crawlers also would learn to gather up information in new ways and forms as the year grew older, with both file type searching initially; and then image searching improved even more; with the beta launch of Google Catalogue Search that boasted an index of more than a quarter of a million images that would end the year both fully operational and enlarged, so mail order catalogs could be searched and browsed by pictures and not only by use of text. For these reasons and much more the two founders of Google are placed on the list of 'Top Ten Technological Innovators' by InfoWorld, and receive more awards as well. More international offices would be opened, in Paris, to stand alongside other overseas concerns in London, Hamburg, Toronto and Tokyo. Also reflecting the world of the World Wide Web, Google could now search in exclusively in 28, then 35 languages apart from English, with 74 languages being supported overall. A very Froogle Google Cooperation would be announced on advertising with the search engine Ask Jeeves and that year would see the keyword advertising emerge out into the world for International users in Europe and Japan, and near year’s end; the launch of Froogle, the specialist web search engine for products that better allows for the consumer to compare prices.

2003 brought along more clients, more innovation, more international use, more offices in Milan, Amsterdam and Sydney, and naturally; more searches! More and more of everything it seems, as the companies Applied Semantics and also Pyra Labs, the latter who were the developers of the self-publishing tool known as Blogger are bought up, and Google labs, where users can try out new trial versions of Google’s latest ideas attract more and more hits with ideas like Google Webquotes, which includes information about the particular sites from other related web sites. Or Google Voice Search where a phone call is all that’s needed to access Google. Other ideas include Google Sets, which provides 'sets of whatever is searched for, with each interconnected search within these sets having their own individual search links. Doing it across the Desk Version 2.0 of the Google Toolbar saw a breath of fresh air as a pop-up blocker was included, and the noble Google Compute attracts also attracts much praise, as here idle time on the users computers can be utilized for scientific research projects.

The Google Deskbar also saw the light of day in Google Labs; a download located in the Windows Taskbar, a search can be carried straight from the desktop, without first initiating a browser.

Smart Ads

The Google AdSense arrived, which offers websites intelligent advertising. This involves the automatic placing of ads in sites which contain text relevant to the products or services being advertised, so more interested clicks will be the result of this better targeting of the ads. Local services were at the forefront as 2004 came to pass, with the Local Search initiative, reminding everyone that a large world is made up of an infinite number of smaller ones.

Then came the idea of Gmail, Google’s own email accounts which are currently in the development stage, with enormous storage capacity and searchable archives rather than a filing system, it promises to be very different indeed from what people are used to from their web-based mail providers. To Share in the Success And of course, the recent news of the IPO (initial public offering) of shares as Google’s long awaited flotation on the stock markets gathers pace. Possibly as a response to Yahoo drifting away from Google as both they and

Microsoft determines to replace Google as the number 1 for search engines, it has guaranteed that it is Google that is at the heart of the headlines again. The Internet is indeed vast, but so is the determination of Google to index it and make it searchable, so that the benefits of the World Wide Web can be made more available to all.

And with every minute of every day that goes past, now in 90 different languages worldwide, more than 138,000 searches are carried out through Google technologies.

More than 200 million searches of an index that contains close to 6 billion web pages, documents, images and postings. That’s an awful lot of zeros involved in those figures, maybe not quite yet a googol, but be sure that the Google is catching up fast with it’s mathematical namesake.

Google Founders - Larry Page and Sergey Brin

2009-04-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

Google is/isn't/is/isn't buying Twitter

2009-04-07T03:46:00.000-07:00

Twitter Inc. co-founder Biz Stone ... denied widespread rumors that its acquisition by Google Inc. is imminent. The rumors erupted late Thursday when tech blog site TechCrunch, citing two anonymous sources, reported that the companies were engaged in "late stage negotiations."
...
It can't be encouraging that Google decided to stop actively developing Jaiku, a Twitter competitor Google acquired in 2007. Instead, Google has decided ... to release the Jaiku engine as an open-source project under the Apache license ... Google also recently put mobile social-networking service Dodgeball out to pasture.

Why would Google want to buy Twitter?

They have yet to properly monetize Youtube ... Sure, Google has lots and lots of money to spend. But there isn't much to Twitter that Google couldn't recreate itself with its vast internal resources. So why spend a billion dollars on something so (relatively) simple?

For one, Twitter is already running at full speed. Google can't recreate the buzz and the excitement in the rapidly growing Twitter community ... While I get a kick out of seeing what my friends are doing and like to update them with neat things that I observe, the real value for me in Twitter is the real-time search and trending ... If I am looking for information about a hot technology topic, Twitter is the best place to find up-to-the-second information.

But

For all those Twitterers madly typing 140 characters and caught up in the grand idea of Twoogle, we return you to your regularly scheduled tweeting ... In fact, Twitter and Google (GOOG) have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,” according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service.
...
[But] what if, for example, Microsoft (MSFT) offered some huge cash payday for Twitter? In that case, I am certain Google would jump into the faceoff, backing up a giant Brinks trunk to the door of Twitter’s San Francisco offices.

Further

Microsoft should resist the temptation to become a "me-too" bidder to try to buy the company out from Google. Twitter might offer Microsoft some badly needed "cool," but ... it makes no sense at all. True, Microsoft is generally seen as old and stodgy, but buying Twitter won't change that.

As for helping Microsoft catch up to Google in search, Microsoft shouldn't even bother. It's not going to happen, and buying Twitter for hundreds of billions won't help. Microsoft should play to its strengths, notably bringing Office online, and continuing to build out its Live services. Buying Twitter would only be a distraction --- and a waste of cash.

A Better Idea :

A few weeks back, Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay wrote a provocative research piece asserting that Internet companies have a long and terrible track record of destroying shareholder cash by acquiring pre-business model start-ups ... in a follow-up piece today triggered by the Google/Twitter speculation, Lindsay declares that Internet companies in general, and Google in particular, should ... instead give back the cash to shareholders in a once-a-year dividend.
...
Indeed, Lindsay comes close to calling the entire Web 2.0 company-creation mechanism something of a Ponzi scheme. (Though he doesn’t actually use the term.) ... Lindsay, in short, has issue a kind of manifesto calling for a new focus in the Internet industry on responsible stewardship of their investors’ money.

What it all means..

At present, Twitter is having a media honeymoon. Not a weekend passes when The New York Times doesn’t devote a considerable part of its expensive newsprint to Twitter. Jon Stewart jokes about it. Even Playboy models have Twitter accounts!

In today’s dismal economic climate, thanks to its simplicity and its chameleon-like ability to be “many things to many people,” Twitter in many ways has come to represent the zeitgeist. No wonder some hip-hop moguls want to invest in the company.

Fun With Google Suggest

2009-04-07T03:42:00.000-07:00

Google Suggest is a Google Search feature that automatically completes a search query with suggested phrases as you type in the Google search text field. Suggestions are meant to be helpful--but they can sometimes be funny, bizarre, or downright creepy. We initially got lassoed into playing around with this Google feature when we noticed that select search queries were generating inexplicably odd auto-complete suggestions. The phrase “What would Jesus..." generated the suggestion "What would Jesus do for a Klondike bar?" First, though, a bit of background. Google says that its software makes suggestions based on complex popularity algorithms that are designed to predict the queries you are most likely to want to submit. Suggestions appear in a drop-down menu; and next to the suggested search phrases are green numbers approximating how many search results each particular query would return. Google Suggest works with current versions of the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Chrome Web browsers. If you find the service annoying, you can turn it off by visiting your Google Preferences page. We spent way too much time playing with this feature. We were hoping Google Suggest might shed some light on important questions such as “The meaning to life is...” But what we found instead was "The meaning to life is Christopher Walken." Who knew? What follows are funny and sometimes insightful answers to random questions. For more fun with Google services, check out: -- The Strangest Sights in Google Earth -- Strangest Sights in Google Street View -- Google's Top 17 Easter Eggs, Gags, and Hoaxes And as the search results pictured above suggest, when you've had your fill of fun with Google, you can turn your attention to "fun with goats."

Google and Apple should join the Firefox party

2009-04-06T08:35:00.001-07:00

In the past two years, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has bled 12 percentage points in market share, from 78.28 percent to 66.82 percent, according to data from Net Applications, while the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser has leaped nearly 7 percentage points, from 15.49 percent to 22.05 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari has nearly doubled its market share, to 8.23 percent, and Google's Chrome has grown to 1.23 percent.

Microsoft can't be happy, the more browser market share Microsoft loses, the easier it becomes for it to also lose operating-system market share. Indeed, over the same two-year period, Microsoft Windows has lost five percentage points in market share while Apple's Mac OS X has gained more than three percentage points and Linux has more than doubled its share. The browser, quite simply, makes the operating system much less relevant to the computing experience. This is why Apple and Google continue to invest heavily in their respective browser initiatives: the browser is the key to operating-system disruption.

For this same reason, however, both would do better to invest in Firefox, the "Linux of browsers." In some ways, the browser efforts of Apple and Google are much like the Unix efforts of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems: they threaten to splinter the browser counterattack on Microsoft rather than solidify it. Common investment in Firefox, however, would leave the industry better off, just as common investment in Linux has. Firefox, for its part, is thriving on its own. IE lacks the community flair that makes Firefox so appealing. Just imagine what it could do with the resources of Apple and Google behind it. Microsoft probably has had, and still has, nightmares about that scenario.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Fails To Halt Firefox Gains

2009-04-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

Despite the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 two weeks ago, Microsoft continues to lose browser market share to Mozilla's Firefox.

According to the latest data from Net Applications, the global market share for all versions of Internet Explorer slipped from 67.44% in February to 66.82% in March.

Firefox's global market share meanwhile rose from 21.77% to 22.05% during the same period.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Chrome browser and Apple's Safari browser also showed small gains, the former rising from 1.15% to 1.23% and the latter rising from 8.02% to 8.23% from February through March.

While relatively small shifts in market share may be attributable to data collection errors, Net Application's March statistics continue a longstanding downward trend for Internet Explorer, one that Microsoft presumably hopes to reverse with IE8.

IE8 has been doing fairly well, having risen from a market share of 1.26% on March 2 to 3.07% on March 31.

Those figures are based on Net Applications' hourly tracking numbers for IE8. The company's monthly numbers show IE at 1.17% at the end of February and 1.83% at the end of March.

Perhaps just as significant as Internet Explorer's continuing slide is the inability of Google's Chrome browser to make significant gains. With IE8 already more widely used than Chrome, which has been available for about six months, it's clear that Google will have to engage in more aggressive promotion if it wants to build a significant user base for its browser.

Chrome may become more appealing once its plug-in architecture matures -- there are a lot of potential users for whom the inability to use AdBlock Plus with Chrome is a deal breaker.

Given that Microsoft can expect significant gains for IE8 when Windows 7 finally ships, Google may have to put a link to Chrome on its home page and leave it there for quite a while to match Microsoft's distribution advantage.

Holidays for hard times – go sightseeing in Google's world

2009-04-06T05:49:00.000-07:00

Google's street-level pictures are giving the cash-strapped the chance of a virtual holiday. Martin Hickes reports.

Fifty years ago, many Yorkshire folk thought themselves lucky to have a two-week summer break in Scarborough.

But following the "loadsamoney" 80s spending spree, the dot.com boom and latterly the rise of the low-cost airlines, the average traveller has been able to enjoy slightly more exotic climes at cut-down prices.

But given the worst credit crunch in living memory, those looking for a cheaper alternative are turning to the "virtual holiday".

Google Earth and Google Maps have been well known for years, but now users can take a stroll down just about any street in the world thanks to the search engine's innovative Street View technology. Except of course in Milton Keynes, where residents recently formed a human chain to prevent one of Google's camera cars taking photographs of the town's streets.

Elsewhere, there has been less resistance, and rather than just hovering above a city, the technology allows viewers to "drop" down into the heart of, say, San Francisco, walking its streets at eye level.

Google has been adding more street level photos to the web over the past two years, thanks to the use of special camera cars which have been trundling around major landmarks discreetly snapping the environs.

Many cities in Yorkshire were this month added to the list of potential virtual destinations, but there's also more exotic locations, such as St Tropez, Paris, the route of the Tour de France, and even the Vatican.

Yorkshire ex-pat Adrian Hill, now a New Zealand national, is one of the many looking forward to a virtual holiday back to his home town in 2009.

"I love Yorkshire and miss it on a daily basis," says Adrian, an electronics engineer, who emigrated in 2001. "The pound may be low at the moment but it still costs an awful lot of money – and time – to fly back to Britain and to my beloved Yorkshire.

"To be honest, I'd rather stay here and take a virtual walk round the old place. I can even revisit my father's house in Leeds

"In every sense of the word, you can almost be there now without having to fork out a huge amount of money. Of course I can't see or smell the loveliness of the Yorkshire Dales, but it's still a fantastic boon.

"I travel a great deal on business and am fortunate to have seen many beautiful places in the world – this virtual experience is a great means of identifying potential future destinations as well.

"Virtual or otherwise, Yorkshire is still the best place in the world though."

Extensive mapping of New Zealand went live at the end of last year, but as well as strolling the streets of the world's most famous cities, the site also includes tours of classic monuments. Ancient Rome 3D is one of the most extensive collections of three-dimensional buildings allowing virtual tourists to visit the Roman Forum, stand in the centre of the Coliseum, trace the footsteps of the gladiators in the Ludus Magnus and fly under The Arch of Constantine.

While many virtual holiday makers won't be able to indulge in the usual pleasures of overseas shopping and duty free, the presence of many stores online even opens up the strange possibility of virtual shopping while on virtual holiday.

Google has stated that its ultimate goal is to provide street views of the entire world, but its attempts may yet be thwarted after a formal complaint was lodged by watchdogs from Privacy International claiming it infringed basic rights.

"While 'virtual travelling' might have its light-hearted appeal, we are concerned that Street View itself dose pose a privacy problem generally and we have written to Google on a number of occasions to express these urgent views," says spokesman Gus Hosein. "More than 200 members of the public have contacted Privacy International to express concern about specific images on Street View. We believe it has caused numerous instances of embarrassment and distress and that the promised privacy safeguards do not provide adequate protection."

Having blurred faces and number plates, Google has insisted all sensible precautions have been taken.

"The Information Commissioner's Office has repeatedly made clear that it believes that in Street View the necessary safeguards are in place to protect people's privacy," said a spokeswoman for the search engine. "Overall, the product has proven to be very popular already, not just in the UK but also in other countries where it has been launched. Of course, if anyone has concerns about the product or its images they can contact us and we look forward to hearing from them."

So until anyone says otherwise, the virtual world, at least, remains our oyster.

Courtesy:YorkshirePost

Teenager invents YouTube music player

2009-04-06T05:45:00.000-07:00

A 15-year-old programming whiz from Iowa and his father have created the world's first YouTube music player, mining the site's extensive library of music videos free of charge.

David Nelson and his father, Mark, spent a year developing Muziic Player, a free downloadable player that allows users to organise, search, stream and create playlists from YouTube's catalogue of music clips. Since its worldwide launch last month, the player has been downloaded more than a million times, forcing them to add another server to handle the incoming requests for the player.

"My dad had the idea for creating a YouTube music site, but I said it should be done in a media player format," David said. "I imagined how great it would be to open up your desktop media player and have a library of millions of music videos."

After giving it some thought, David realised its implementation was a definite possibility. "YouTube has a massive collection of user-generated music content, and holds contracts with the world's largest record labels that are compensated for the playback of supported media. It has undeniably the most extensive media library on the Internet."

Muziic Player looks and works like iTunes, taking advantage of the content ID software built into YouTube to detect video submissions not supported by YouTube's contracts for removal. This also allows for compensation of artists and record labels that do hold contracts with YouTube. Unfortunately for UK users, YouTube's withdrawal of music videos from the UK site after a failure to reach a new licensing agreement with the Performing Right Society also applies to the Muziic Player, meaning users from the UK may be unable to view certain content with the player.

But David believes his software has the ability to redefine the problems facing digital music. "Muziic fills a demand by streamlining this process and making it a whole lot easier to discover new artists and songs by using YouTube. It reinforces the idea that when done right, free, ad-supported music sharing websites and applications can provide artists and labels with full compensation and prove to be a profitable business for those streaming the content as well."

But is the Muziic Player a profitable business? Although YouTube's API does not serve advertisements through the YouTube embeddable player used by Muziic, the player makes money through ads on the Muziic.com website.

YouTube will host short videos from Disney, ABC and ESPN

2009-04-06T05:44:00.000-07:00

Google's YouTube will soon show short videos from a major U.S. television group while testing new advertising arrangements in hopes of generating revenue online.

The sports network ESPN will launch a YouTube channel next month, with Disney/ABC Television Group launching several channels in May, including ABC Entertainment, ABC News, ABC Family and a soap opera channel, according to the companies. Content will include short clips of ABC shows such as "Lost," "Desperate Housewives" and "Grey's Anatomy."

ABC, which is an indirect subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, owns 80 percent of ESPN, with the Hearst Corporation owning 20 percent.

The channels will only be available to Web surfers in the U.S. and will feature short-form content and not full programs. As part of the deal, Disney/ABC and ESPN will be able to test so-called pre-roll advertisements, which are shown before the featured content.

Disney/ABC and ESPN will be allowed to sell their own advertising inventory within their own channels. YouTube allows a few of its other partners to do this, such as CBS.

The channels will also use YouTube's InVideo overlays, which are animated ads that appear over a portion of the content. If clicked, the overlay will launch a video while pausing the featured content. If it isn't clicked, the overlay will disappear. Google has been experimenting with different ways to presents ads in a manner that doesn't annoy users but also allows it and its partners to generate ad revenue.

YouTube is hoping that its online analytical tools will give also media publishers new insight into how people are interacting with the videos.

The agreement comes as Google is still embroiled in a lawsuit with Viacom, which sued Google in March 2007 for US$1 billion. Viacom alleges more than 160,000 clips of content it controls were posted on the video-sharing site, violating its copyrights.

Since then Google has implemented a video and audio identification system that automatically scans content posted to YouTube. It lets copyright holders then decide if they want the content removed or leave it up and try to monetize it with advertisements.

The content ID system is part of Google's plan to ally with the entertainment industry to put premium-quality content on YouTube while also respecting copyright concerns.

YouTube remains the dominate player in online video. In December 2008, U.S. Web surfers viewed 14.3 billion online videos, with YouTube taking a 41 percent market share, according to comScore's Video Metrix service. More than 100 million viewers watched YouTube that month, according to comScore.

How the cloud could save the news

2009-04-05T21:30:00.000-07:00

It is probably too late for the established news media, but somewhere in the cloud could be salvation.

If there is a tech buzzword in the blighted economy right now, it has to be “cloud.”

The cloud — a.k.a., cloud computing — is the rapidly growing suite of software applications accessible by the Internet and residing in massive data centers around the country.

The cloud offers the possibility of shifting much if not all of a business’s computing needs — from hardware to software, email to databases — away from bricks and mortar and IT departments onto the shoulders of Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, IBM, and a dozen other big players.

Cloud cover growing

The trend is unmistakable. Vast and power-hungry data centers already slurp up 1.5 percent of the energy consumed in the US. Such is their growth that within two years the EPA predicts their power usage could double.

They are more and more popular because as companies struggle to shed costs in the midst of a devastating recession outsourcing business infrastructure is an appealing option.

IBM’s metamorphosis into a cloud computing company is perhaps the most interesting to watch right now. Remember that the “M” in IBM stands for “machines.” IBM made its bones in the last century by selling hardware. In recent years, it has de-emphasized metal and plastic and microchips for industrial strength software. And now it is shifting once more.

“What you are seeing are the beginnings of the whole IBM company moving toward cloud computing,” IBM vice president Sean Poulley said on Wednesday.

Clouds from both sides

Here’s another sign that the cloud is the next new thing: It’s April 1st and Amazon decided its hoax today would be about cloud computing, because “in today’s post-capitalist world” companies need “locational flexibility, the ability to literally instantiate a cloud where they need it, when they need it.”

Amazon’s tongue-in-cheek solution: cloud blimps.

OK, it’s not an April Fool’s belly laugh for everybody. But at least you can see that the cloud idea is a hot enough topic enough that it can become a joke for propeller-heads.

The cloud is the message

Now imagine you are the CEO of a struggling media company. The story line is well known: Secular disruption caused by the Internet compounded by the worst economy since the Great Depression equals more and more red ink.

Revenue is collapsing. Proposed solutions like micro-payments and premium content don’t yet seem substantial enough to make up for the loss of print advertising dollars.

What’s left is cost cutting. And that’s tough. Media companies already know how important it is to shed their industrial costs — ink, paper, presses, delivery. Another big cost is people. But people are the core asset of media companies: independent eyes and ears that watch the world and tell the stories.

The cloud could be the answer. It could allow media companies someday to avoid going down the path of making significant capital investments in online tools such as content management systems and video hosting.

Like most proposals for helping the struggling news business, the cloud’s potential for cost-shfiting probably won’t kick in until after much more pain is experienced, more bankruptcies are declared, and more newsrooms shrink.

But the potential is there. To quote Google on the subject: “We have teams of people working with hundreds of publishers to find new and creative ways to earn money from engaging online content. AdSense, DoubleClick, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Earth, Google News and many other products are a part of our significant investments to innovate in this space.”

Who will be the first to build the newspaper on a cloud?

Google's Cloud Looms Large

2009-04-05T21:24:00.000-07:00

Internet in the coming years, it's instructive to consider the Google employee: most of his software and data--from pictures and videos, to presentations and e-mails--reside on the Web. This makes the digital stuff that's valuable to him equally accessible from his home computer, a public Internet café, or a Web-enabled phone. It also makes damage to a hard drive less important.

Recently, Sam Schillace, the engineering director in charge of collaborate Web applications at Google, needed to reformat a defunct hard drive from a computer that he used for at least six hours a day. Reformatting, which completely erases all the data from a hard drive, would cause most people to panic, but it didn't bother Schillace. "There was nothing on it I cared about" that wasn't accessible on the Web, he says. Schillace's digital life, for the most part, exists on the Internet; he practices what is considered by many technology experts to be cloud computing. Google already lets people port some of their personal data to the Internet and use its Web-based software. Google Calendar organizes events, Picasa stores pictures, YouTube holds videos, Gmail stores e-mails, and Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. But according to a Wall Street Journal story, the company is expected to do more than offer scattered puffs of cloud computing: it will launch a service next year that will let people store the contents of entire hard drives online.

Google doesn't acknowledge the existence of such a service. In an official statement, the company says, "Storage is an important component of making Web apps fit easily into consumers' and business users' lives ... We're always listening to our users and looking for ways to update and improve our Web applications, including storage options, but we don't have anything to announce right now." Even so, many people in the industry believe that Google will pull together its disparate cloud-computing offerings under a larger umbrella service, and people are eager to understand the consequences of such a project.

To be sure, Google isn't the only company invested in online storage and cloud computing. There are other services today that offer a significant amount of space and software in the cloud. Amazon's Simple Storage Service, for instance, offers unlimited and inexpensive online storage ($0.15 per gigabyte per month). AOL provides a service called Xdrive with a capacity of 50 gigabytes for $9.95 per month (the first five gigabytes are free). And Microsoft offers Windows Live SkyDrive, currently in beta, with a one-gigabyte free storage limit. But Google is better positioned than most to push cloud computing into the mainstream, says Thomas Vander Wal, founder of Infocloud Solutions, a cloud-computing consultancy. First, millions of people already use Google's online services and store data on its servers through its software.

Second, Vander Wal says that the culture at Google enables his team to more easily tie together the pieces of cloud computing that today might seem a little scattered. He notes that Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are also sitting atop huge stacks of people's personal information and a number of online applications, but there are barriers within each organization that could slow down the process of integrating these pieces. "It could be," says Vander Wal, "that Google pushes the edges again where everybody else has been stuck for a while."

One of the places where Google, in particular, could have a large impact is integrating cloud computing into mobile devices, says Vander Wal. The company recently announced Android, a platform that allows people to build software for a variety of mobile phones. The alliance could spur the creation of mobile applications geared toward cloud computing, he says. People want to seamlessly move their data between computers, the Web, and phones, Vander Wal adds. "If Google is starting to solve that piece of the problem, it could have an impact because that's something no one's been able to do yet."

No Man Is an Island: The Promise of Cloud Computing

2009-04-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

"Cloud computing" promises myriad benefits -- including cost savings on technology infrastructure and faster software upgrades -- for users ranging from small startups to large corporations. That's an auspicious future considering that not everyone agrees on exactly what cloud computing is or what it can do. Despite the ethereal name, in its broadest terms, the concept of cloud computing is fairly simple.

Rather than running software on its own computers -- "on premises" as the terminology goes -- a company buys access to software on computers operated by a third party. Typically, the software is accessed over the Internet using only a web browser. As long as the software performs properly, it doesn't matter where the systems that run it are located. They are "out there somewhere" -- in "the cloud" of the Internet. Since companies tend to purchase access to this remote software on a subscription basis, cloud computing is also often termed "software as a service."

"Cloud computing refers to a number of trends related to pushing computing resources -- hardware, software, data -- further into the network," said Kartik Hosanagar, a Wharton professor of operations and information management who moderated a panel discussion on cloud computing at the 2009 Wharton Business Technology Conference. These days, no computer user is an island.

A recent study determined that 80% of the data used by business comes from outside the company. Cloud computing "is the technical response to this reality," said panel participant Anthony Arott of anti-virus software company Trend Micro, based in Cupertino, Calif. A somewhat broader definition of cloud computing comes from another expert on that panel, Barry X. Lynn, CEO of "cloud platform" provider 3tera of Aliso Viejo, Calif. "A lot of people define the cloud as having the computers be someplace else. And that's not true," he said.

"People have run IT in data centers they didn't own for years. In the 1970s, we called that 'remote job entry.' In the 1990s, it was 'outsourced data centers.' It's not a new concept. Lynn suggested that true cloud computing isn't simply about adding physical distance between the user and the computer that's doing the grunt work. What's new is "when you abstract the computer from the physical resources." In other words, you no longer have specific machines -- no matter where they are located -- dedicated to specific functions or software applications. Instead, you have a piece of software running across a pool of machines, making optimal use of all the available hardware resources.

In between these explanations of cloud computing lies a variety of products and services, all of which claim to offer a number of advantages -- lowered investment in hardware, more efficient use of computing systems in existing data centers, easier scale-up of the applications and services. These approaches are now possible due to faster and more pervasive communications. As bandwidth has become cheap and readily available, and transmission speed is no longer an impediment, it's possible to store data and run software anywhere for users to access from wherever they want.

Backing (Up) Consumers According to Prasanna Krishnan, an associate at Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and also a panelist at the Wharton conference, the easiest examples for most people to grasp may be consumer web applications such as Microsoft's Hotmail, Google's Gmail and YouTube, and Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing service. Consumers run only their browsers on local computers. The rest of the software -- along with users' email messages, photos or videos -- are on remote machines the user can't see and doesn't have to know anything about -- as if hidden in the clouds. Another conference panelist, Vance Checketts, general manager of Decho, based in Pleasant Grove, Utah, described his company's service, Mozy, as a "cloud" offering. Mozy lets users back up their home computer data online. "We have 18 petabytes [18 million gigabytes] backed up now across about a million users. It's cloud technology, but Mozy got started with just a bunch of cheap off-the-shelf disks." Google extended its successful webmail model by introducing Google Docs -- online versions of word processor and spreadsheet applications, software that traditionally runs on users' PCs. It is joined in that market by others, including Zoho, of Pleasanton, Calif., which offers a suite of online collaboration and business applications.

These convenient online tools have helped to fuel the market for netbooks -- lightweight portable computers which contain minimal data storage and computing capacity, and carry price tags usually under $400. By taking advantage of online applications and storage, users have the option to spend less money on hardware. Reducing -- or eliminating -- hardware and other operating costs naturally also appeals to corporate users, many of whom are moving toward subscription-based "software as a service" (abbreviated SaaS).

Online business applications offered by companies such as Salesforce.com (for customer relationship management) and Workday (for human resources and financial software) can not only replace expensive programs that would run on companies' premises, they can reduce the need for corporate computer servers and the related costs of maintaining them. With SaaS, companies pay subscription fees for usage rather than licensing costly enterprise software. SaaS is a growth industry: A new study by Forrester Research concludes that even in the current recession, software-as-a-service providers are seeing double-digit growth in their subscription revenue.

Ariba, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based procurement software-as-a-service company that had been left for dead after the Internet bubble burst, saw a 73% jump in its subscription revenue, from $18.8 million in the third quarter of 2007 to $32.6 million in the same period in 2008. Other companies have expanded into the cloud by offering data-center resources as more generic "computing as a service."

Google, which maintains vast warehouses of servers to run its own software applications, also offers a service called Google AppEngine that allows businesses to develop and run their own programs on Google's servers. Amazon has a similar offering called the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. These services offer companies a place to host applications and data under a pay-for-usage model -- called "utility computing" because it is ready on demand, just like turning on the lights or the water faucet. Customers pay by unit of consumption, whether it's storage space or computing time, and can scale usage up or down quickly. These computing services are particularly attractive when companies want to develop and test new applications without interfering with existing systems, and they can offer "hot," or ready-to-use, backups of the applications in use.

Back to the Future The notion that a company has a "private cloud" on its premises might seem contrary to the concept of cloud computing, but cloud-like features can also have advantages in corporate data centers. Lynn from 3tera gave a historical analysis of how computing architectures evolved. Decades ago, he said, "you had a giant mainframe, and everything ran on it. If you ran out of capacity, you would either make it bigger or get another giant mainframe." Then, client/server systems came along to distribute processing between central computers or servers and the PCs at users' desks. Still, however, every machine in the data center had to be dedicated to a specific software function or application. The newer technology of virtualization permits one piece of hardware to act as multiple "virtual machines" and be dedicated to multiple functions. This makes more efficient use of hardware, but each virtual machine still must be dedicated to a specific software function.

"What cloud computing really changes is [that] now you don't have specific machines, or virtual machines, dedicated to specific functions. You have a pool of machines. Anything can run anywhere" -- even in a company's private data center, Lynn said. Traditional corporate data centers can be inefficient. Businesses equipped for peak workloads may have servers that are underutilized much of the time. In a private cloud, a group of a company's existing computers can be brought together as a computing pool -- and an application "can just grab any available hardware and then give it back," said Lynn. "The term we use is 'disposable information technology infrastructure.'" The software from 3tera acts as a conductor, parceling out components of an application to different computers in a cloud like a taxi dispatcher. "There is no architectural reason why you can't have 20 different machine types" involved, Lynn noted, although performance is optimized if the machines are similar. For some corporate users, keeping the cloud in-house alleviates the security and privacy concerns that can come with running key applications and data outside the company. However, cloud providers insist that data is safer and less vulnerable with them.

Companies that provide storage and computing services maintain state-of-the-art facilities and implement security updates immediately. Lynn believes that eventually IT "will evolve to an almost completely external cloud," and he sees it as a natural progression. "If you're in the health care business, or financial services or manufacturing, why would you ultimately be spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on IT infrastructure? And the answer is, you've had no choice," he said. "If you woke up this morning and read in The Wall Street Journal that, say, Overstock.com has stopped using UPS and FedEx and the U.S. mail, and had bought fleets of trucks and started leasing airport hubs and delivering products themselves, you would say they were out of their minds. Why is that much more insane than a health care company spending $2 billion a year on information technology?" Panelists at the Wharton conference encouraged students in the audience to take advantage of cloud computing as entrepreneurs. Those thinking of offering innovative online services -- in the hopes of becoming the next Facebook or Twitter -- will need a way to ramp up their capacity quickly if all goes well.

With a cloud-based service, expansion capacity is as close as you can get to unlimited, panelists noted. Money is a factor, too, of course. A startup of any type can get the bulk of its computing resources on a pay-as-you-go basis, said Wharton's Hosanagar. "You don't have to worry about these big up-front fixed costs. I've had student startup companies on minuscule budgets." Added panelist Jonathan Appavoo, a research scientist at IBM: "Startups are the killer app for the cloud. As students with a good idea, this is a playground. You can be the driver of all this stuff. Computation now is so accessible, and we have an opportunity to dramatically change how things work."

Web users are getting more ruthless and impatient - Search Engines scores over Content portals?

2009-04-05T08:15:00.000-07:00

Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen shares an interesting finding that goes against the wishes of content portals:

Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave. Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention..many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed. [source]

He cites couple of reasons for this -
The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment
Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.
Interesting stats

In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then

drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.
What does this mean?

Search engines rule the world. Content portals, no matter how hard they try will have a difficulty in retaining the users (and monetizing).

Success metrics need to be revisited - it should not be pageviews anymore (and am not talking about AJAX and PV issue). UUs and Returning frequency is what really matters. At the same time, content portals should rethink their push-approach (for e.g. rss feeds) and make that as part of the content strategy.

Jakob makes another interesting point - widgets are not adding value to sites, they actually are affecting the load time badly.

Microsoft, Yahoo worried about Google-Twitter Acquisition

2009-04-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

Google's rumored possible interest in acquiring Twitter has the online world buzzing, and such a deal would have advantages for both companies. One big question, however, is how a Google acquisition of Twitter would affect Google rivals Microsoft and Yahoo as they attempt to gain market share in the search and online advertising arenas.

The online world has been positively abuzz with news of a potential Google acquisition of Twitter. While the blog TechCrunch has quoted sources as saying such a deal is imminent, others, such as BoomTown, say such talk is the purest speculation.

At the same time, Google could potentially make use of AdSense on Twitter users' pages, exposing Twitter users to contextual ads multiple times per day. Twitter's monetization potential would expand, as the company could receive a substantial percentage of the revenue generated from such ad placements; recently, Twitter has been experimenting with sponsored sites and commercial accounts as ways to generate cash flow.

But what would such a merger do to Microsoft and Yahoo?

"I would certainly see it as a threat to Microsoft, which really needs to provide a boost to its search engine," John Byrne, an analyst at Technology Business Research, wrote in an e-mail. "Differentiating by offering superior search around user-generated content and specifically microblogging could be one way for Microsoft to differentiate its search engine and unlock Google's grip on search."

Were Twitter already bought, obviously, Microsoft would have to look for another company to fill that void; given Twitter's current momentum in the microblogging space, that task could present a substantial challenge.

Acquiring Twitter would also help Google's bottom line (and hurt its competitors) by adding "tremendous stickiness and traffic," according to Karsten Weide, an analyst with IDC.

"Microblogging is becoming an accepted new channel of online communications in addition to e-mail and instant messaging, and it is here to stay," Weide said. "Does [a Twitter acquisition] make sense for Google? They don't really need more audience reach than they already have. But they might need to keep that audience reach out of others' hands. Microsoft and Yahoo come to mind."

Given the relatively low amount of revenue that Twitter generates at this point, however, Weide said he feels it would be prudent for Google to pay as little as it possibly can.

"I think an acquisition would make sense, and if they can get it for less than [$1 billion], the better it is," Weide said.

This contrasts with the view of a number of business pundits online, who have been urging Google to snatch up Twitter no matter the dollar amount required.

As for the potential success of AdSense placed on Twitter feeds, Weide pointed to the former's presence on MySpace, which generates substantial guaranteed revenues for the social networking site but hasn't been contributing mightily to Google's bottom line.

"I doubt [ads on Twitter] would do any better than on MySpace," Weide said.

In other words, although Yahoo and Microsoft could certainly use a microblogging aspect to gain a search advantage, acquiring Twitter might not be the coup de grace that Google needs in order to establish search engine dominance.

Microsoft's deal with ExecTweets, though, shows that Microsoft has an interest in engaging with microblogging as a tool in its online strategy. And should that interest allow Twitter to lever a few more dollars out of Google in any possible deal, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer probably wouldn't complain.

In either case, however, a big question presents itself: how an acquisition of Twitter by Google would affect Google's competitors in the search space and online advertising market, most notably Microsoft and Yahoo.

Twitter has been boosting its search capabilities, including transferring its search bar from search.twitter.com to its main Website and establishing a "Trends" menu to allow users to see in real time the most talked-about subjects on the site. Any deal between Twitter and Google would bring these capabilities under the search giant's roof.

Poor economy killed Wikia Search

2009-04-05T07:24:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia has been one of the biggest successes in the history of the Internet. So has Google. So on paper it makes some sense that combining the two would result in a service that would also be hugely popular. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out so well for Wikia Search. The wiki-style search engine started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is closing down, Webware first reported earlier today.

In confirming the news, Wales attempts to deflect the bad news by pointing to the success of Wikia.com, Wikia Search’s parent, in terms of growth over the past two years. But towards the end of his post, he concedes that Wikia Search has not had the success the company had hoped for. But the biggest factor in his decision to shut it down was apparently the economy. “In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely,” Wales writes. He goes on to state that he believes in the power of search on the Internet and makes a General MacArthur-esque vow to return to the field in any way he can. Wikia Search worked like other search engines, except that anyone could alter the results, like they would an entry on Wikipedia. The idea was apparently good enough for Google also to take a stab at it with SearchWiki, a less-customizable take on the idea that is now a part of Google’s core search experience. When Wikia Search launched, some touted it as the “Google Killer.” Hype doesn’t get much bigger than that on the Internet, and not surprisingly, Wikia Search could not live up to it. Google Search has simply gotten so dominant that not even the other big players, Yahoo and Microsoft, are able to compete with it in a meaningful way.

It’s similar to the way in which Wikipedia has grown so dominant that it’s eliminated the need for Microsoft’s Encarta and is making it difficult for Google’s own take on the idea, Knol, to flourish. Wikia Search also suffered from some branding issues. It seems to have settled on “Wikia Search,” but it’s previously been called “Search Wikia” by us and others. And I’ve been told by the company that both names were correct at various points. According to its own stats on the site, there have been over 11,200,000 queries on Wikia Search over the course of its life. No matter the state of the economy, it’d take a lot more than that to “kill” Google.

End of an era: Microsoft Encarta to shut down after 16 years

2009-04-05T07:17:00.000-07:00

Launched in 1993, it seemed to be everywhere in those early days - from schools, universities and offices, to the bargain bins of computer retailers. And it seems just a little sad that its time may be finally up. E-week is reporting that as of the end of August, Encarta will no longer be sold in retailers and the online edition will also be closed down.

Encarta 2009 featured just 62,000 articles, where as Wikipedia is available in multiple languages and serves over 2,800,000 articles - quite a difference. That's not to say that all of Wikipedia's content is to be completely trusted, but then perhaps it's not a concern for many people.

In recent times, Google's Knol service with over 100,000 user written pages has placed even greater competitive pressure on Encarta, making Microsoft's decision to pull out of the encylopedia game an understandable decision. We will miss you Encarta.

Gmail Grew 43 Percent Last Year. AOL Mail And Hotmail Need To Start Worrying.

2009-04-05T04:56:00.000-07:00

Google launched Gmail only four years ago, and it is now the fourth most popular e-mail service on the Web after Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and Windows Live Hotmail. In 2008, it saw some serious growth in the U.S. Google doesn’t break out the number of Gmail users, but comScore estimates unique monthly visitors. According to the latest stats, the number of people visiting Gmail grew 43 percent last year to 29.6 million. In contrast, the much more massive Yahoo Mail grew 11 percent to 91.9 million uniques. AOL Mail finished in second place for the year with 46.6 million uniques (plus another 7.2 million visitors to AIM Mail), while Hotmail actually declined 5 percent to 43.5 million. How can Gmail keep growing at such a fast rate, when the other email services seem to be stagnating? Maybe it’s because Gmail is evolving at a faster rate. If you look at any of the major Web portals by subdomain, the email service always comes out near the top in terms of driving traffic (for instance, see Yahoo’s breakdown).

Google never defined itself as a portal, but as it added more and more services beyond basic search, creating deeper connection swith consumers by offering them indispensable apps for free was always part of its strategy. And as much as we like to complain about it, email remains on of the most indispensable communication tools out there. If you look at the chart below, you can get a sense of how Gmail gained against AOl Mail and Hotmail during 2008 (I left out Yahoo Mail because it is so much larger than the others that it skews the chart). At this rate, Gmail could overtake AOL and Hotmail within the next two years. Yahoo Mail won’t be as easy to catch. Although Yahoo Mail grew only 11 percent last year, it still added more visitors (9.4 million) than Gmail (8.8 million).

GOOGLE - BEST COMPANY TO WORK FOR 2008

2009-04-05T00:57:00.000-07:00

9 COOL REASONS WHY ?

1. Movie nights

How do you get more than 6,000 Googlers to see a first-run film? You rent an entire theater for the day. That's exactly what Google's done for movies like "Lord of the Rings," "Transformers" and other blockbusters. As an extra benefit, employees get to bring a guest

2. Goo-goo Googlers

Your toddler may be too young to work at Google, but that doesn't mean the search engine doesn't care about your precious baby. In fact, a new policy lets Google moms enjoy up to 18 weeks of paid maternity leave; dads get seven weeks. Another perk: free Google baby "onesies."

3. Google's own Facebook

Google's intranet, Moma, provides all the usual corporate info, like benefits, internal newsletters, and a new employee handbook. It's used most often, however, for searching out other Googlers. Why? The directory provides photos of the company's 15,916 employees.

4. Google air

Solar panels, recycled carpets and complimentary public transportation are just some of the "green" practices Google has adopted. On its Mountain View campus, the company has recently installed a special environmentally friendly air-filtering system designed to flush out toxins and particulates. If you're stuck indoors coding all night, you might as well breath clean air.

5. Google's Fools!

Don't believe everything you find on Google - at least not till you check the calendar. It's a company tradition to design elaborate pranks to play on its users and potential employees every April 1st. Past gags include a job listing for engineering positions on the moon and a fictitious product, the brain-boosting energy drink Google Gulp (flavors included "Beta Carroty" and "Glutamate Grape"). But the jokes backfired when, on April 1, 2004, Google launched Gmail and many readers thought it was another April Fool's hoax.

6. Employee clubs

One of the many ways Google recruits and retains talent is through its club offerings. It funds the Black Googler Network, Google Women Engineers and the GLBT - Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Googlers.

7. Google's grand entrances

Orkut, Google's homegrown social network, is a big hit in Brazil. Coincidentally, Brazil is the source of the elegant hardwood used to build the
Googleplex's enormous staircase. The entrance to the company's New York headquarters is no less impressive - it's got a huge all-Lego logo built by a certified Lego designer along with a 6-foot model of the Empire State Building built by Google engineers.

8. Free food, Google style

First-class dining facilities? Check. Custom-made milkshakes and onsite farmers' market? Definitely. Yes, Googlers are a well-fed bunch: The company even has a rule -- workers can never be more than 100 feet away from food. Hence the elaborate free snack stations and restaurants scattered throughout the Googleplex.

9. Scooters are out... bikes are in

After years of getting around their sprawling Mountain View headquarters on two-wheeled Segways (which kept breaking down) and electric scooters (which employees kept falling off), Googlers now use bicycles as their primary mode of transportation at corporate

COURTESY:CNN MONEY

Vodafone's HTC's Magic Android Phone Out In May On £25 Contracts

2009-04-04T22:38:00.000-07:00

Vodafone is readying the HTC Magic phone, the second model based on Google's Android platform to reach the UK market, for next month. In a brief statement to Pocket-lint, Vodafone said that the short delay (the phone was originally due to be launched in April) was caused by a last minute hardware change. Mobiletoday says that the new phone, named HTC Magic Pioneer, will be available for as little as £25 on monthly contracts. This compares well with T-Mobile's £31.50 contract but a quick look at Vodafone's tariff list shows that £25 does not provide with unlimited internet. Vodafone Users have to spend £35 per month to get unlimited mobile internet and email. Mobiletoday also reports that T-mobile is in talks with HTC to release a third Android smartphone. Talkandroid however says that Vodafone UK has already confirmed that the Magic can be pre-ordered as from the 17th of April for £30 per month. The package is expected to include 600 minutes, unlimited SMS, Internet and email. On the other hand, T-Mobile offers 700 minutes rather than 600 minutes for £35.

Clash of the Touch Titans; iPhone 3G 3.0 vs HTC Magic Google Android

2009-04-04T22:33:00.000-07:00

My new iPhone 3G (2nd one after returning my original last Fall) is on the way after finding a deal on a new one at HowardForums. I also have been using the T-Mobile G1 since last October, but as I mentioned in my first Clash of the Titans article I am going to discuss the HTC Magic since it is the Android device without the keyboard and I am trying to stick with touch screen only devices if possible. I wanted to clarify that I am putting these articles together as a reference resource that lays out everything we currently know about the devices and operating systems running on them. This is the method I personally use for most all high value devices I purchase and I thought it would be helpful to share my process with you all. As you saw in my iPhone vs. Pre article, I didn’t reach a full conclusion because that is impossible without actually using the Pre. Some people may question why I even post these articles at this time as it may be premature, but this is the process I am going through as device release dates approach so if you think it is too early feel free to skip the articles and wait until I get a chance to get my hands on the device and post full reviews because you know I won’t be able to resist and will end up with at least one of the devices in a few months. So now let’s take a look at the iPhone 3G with 3.0 OS compared to the HTC Magic running the Google Android OS and cupcake update. I laid out what we know of the iPhone 3.0 OS operating system in my first article so I won’t repost all of that content here. I will run through each section for the HTC Magic and then offer my personal thoughts on how it compares to the iPhone 3G with 3.0 OS update on the last page of this feature. Operating System - Google Android: The Android OS is a project from the Open Handset Alliance and is currently available on the T-Mobile G1 device here in the US. Vodafone did announce the HTC Magic for the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, and Italy at Mobile World Congress in February and it has been rumored that this device will also be coming to the US eventually. The operating system in this device has a few updates over what we now see in the T-Mobile G1 that should include (not finalized yet) video capture support (not in the iPhone 3.0), onscreen touch keyboard, stereo A2DP Bluetooth functionality (present in iPhone 3.0) , updated browser, and some other minor updates. As I said, I have been using my T-Mobile G1 since October 2008 and have to say that the device has NOT soft or hard reset a single time in all those months and I have installed and removed tons of applications. I cannot believe how stable the device has been, especially given the fact that this is a brand new Linux-based OS. The Android OS is similar to the iPhone OS in that it has been optimized and offers an extremely fluid experience that is icon focused. You can easily swipe your finger across the screen and expect an instant response, you can move icons around with a tap and hold, and gestures are supported with swipes up and down. The area of the Android OS that really shines and sets the bar over every other mobile device OS I have used is the notifications. Google has implemented a top status bar that developers can access and use to present the user with different notifications. Different icons appear in this top bar and then you simply “pull down the shade” with a finger swipe to see what the notifications are. Tapping on a notification then takes you to the application that is pertinent to the notification so you can quickly address it. I LOVE this notification system and would like to see it in other devices in the future. Another shining star in the Google Android OS is the vast integration of Google and Google products in the OS. You won’t find a better mobile Gmail experience than what is on the HTC Magic. Like the commercials show Google Search is also integrated so that a dedicated search button is found on the HTC Magic and G1 both. The Google Maps experience is excellent and the G1 was the first device with street level compass support. Google Talk and IM presence is another powerful feature for those of you with your lives integrated into Google. There are still several areas where Google could improve, such as with Google Reader, Google Docs, and the new Google Voice. While the Android OS is similar in appearance to the iPhone OS, there are several areas where I think it is more advanced and gives you more power over your device. For example, you are given three “home screens” in the Android OS to place shortcut icons to applications. You can also create folders and place shortcuts into folders so you can really optimize this “virtual desktop” for better performance. You can also always slide up the bottom center tab that presents you with icons for all loaded applications on the device. In addition, you can multitask with the Android OS and have several applications running at the same time. This is nice when you want to have your IM client running and then jump over to take care of email or browse the web. A simple press and hold on the Home button gives you quick access of up to 6 of your running applications and there are 3rd party utilities to give you an even better task manager. A cool thing about the Android OS is that the display behind pop-up windows turns fuzzy so that your focus is turned to the pop-up window. The keyboard is also deeply integrated with the OS so that you can setup customized icons for all the keys on the keyboard and control every function on the device without even touching the display if you desire. While the T-Mobile G1 has a physical keyboard, the HTC Magic does not so it will be interesting to see if the virtual keyboard supports the shortcut capability. Picture messaging is supported now in the Google Android OS, but we will see this in the iPhone OS 3.0 update too. Phone functionality between the two is similar with a touch screen dialpad, contact scrolling lists, and favorite lists. Switching to speaker and Bluetooth headsets is also drop dead simple in the Android OS, just like the iPhone. There is no proximity sensor so you do need to press a button to turn the display back on during a call. One aspect of the OS that really bothers me, especially with the emphasis placed on third party applications, is the inability to store apps and databases on the external microSD card. I regularly get low memory warnings and have to actively manage applications. I understand you can perform some basic hacking to enable this capability, but this should be in the OS like it is in Windows Mobile, Palm, and S60.

Wolfram 'AI' Google Killer™,No Way !!

2009-04-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

Stephen Wolfram - the lovable George Costanza of the mathematics community who developed the invaluable Mathematica suite and wrote the much talked about but quickly forgotten "A New Kind of Science” - is trying his hand at artificial intelligence. His new project, Wolfram Alpha, set to go live in May, combines natural language processing with machine understanding. You'll be able to get succinct answers to questions like "When was Google's stock at $300 per share?" or "How much did it snow in New England last year?” Allegedly. It's a noble goal, to aggregate human knowledge in a large machine brain that's able to answer questions. The problem is: We already have Wikipedia and Google that - together - get the job done well enough. So, Wolfram Alpha seems more like a science fair project than a serious stab at machine intelligence. In a company blog post announcing it, Stephen Wolfram himself says that his new project started as a wouldn't-it-be-neat-if brainstorm. "Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle [systematic knowledge]. And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that.” Yes, true, computers have not yet been able to process knowledge on the level promised by science fiction novels of the nineteen fifties, but why not? It's not for lack of trying. AI researchers decades ago spent a lot of time and money and programmed a lot of Lisp, only to come up with a therapist named Eliza with whom you can hold a hollow conversation without the $150 per hour fee. It's not as if this year computers finally became powerful enough for proper machine understanding. No, computers haven't solved this problem because there are no people who actually need it solved. Stephen Wolfram has a history of being the answer to a question that nobody asked. His 2002 self-published manifesto, “A New Kind of Science” (abbreviated NKS for those of you who prefer the Church of Scientology method of using acronyms to make yourself sound more serious), ruffled some feathers in the scientific community. Wolfram argued that studying simple cellular automata, similar to Conway's Game of Life, will lead to greater discoveries in science. NKS was criticized for being an answer without a question, and it's possible that Wolfram is using this new project as a justification for his book: "I’d always thought, though, that eventually [machine understanding] should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it. I had two crucial ingredients: Mathematica and NKS. With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything—as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules." If you focus your attention and listen closely, you can hear his ego approaching critical mass, preparing to implode on itself. Business school lecture aside, Wolfram does deserve some credit where it is due. The Mathematica software package has been - and will continue to be - a critical resource for many people who work in quantitative science. Wolfram Alpha is built on top of Mathematica, which shows how wide a range of problems this software can solve. So, is machine understanding a new and upcoming feature in the next version of the world's most expensive scientific calculator? Unlikely. From the announcement of Wolfram Alpha: "Some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier. But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable." If you've ever dealt with real world machine learning, your snake oil detector should be deafening you right now. Explicitly curate all the data? Surely, Stephen, you have come up with an elegant mathematical solution to do this? After all, anybody who has done real world machine learning will tell you that the vast majority of your time is spent cleaning the data. It's a cruel twist that academics who teach machine learning gloss over the most important part and simply focus on the clean mathematical models. So, if this were a real breakthrough in machine intelligence, the input would be essentially arbitrary, but how does Wolfram Alpha do it? "Every different kind of method and model—and data—has its own special features and character. With a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way." That sounds an awful lot like the marriage of some Python scripts with a few hundred bucks spent hiring third world workers through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Given that, Wolfram Alpha doesn't seem terribly innovative. Correct me if I am wrong, and I know you will, but there was a programming language in 1972 called Prolog that could take carefully curated declarative statements and allow you to run logical queries over them. Something like "If the standard rate of chucking is 10 logs per minute, and all woodchucks can chuck, how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Fortunately, the full on boot to the face of media hype hasn't started yet. This is a bit of a curiosity, because Wolfram Alpha makes for a good "underfunded, smart guy taking on Google.” We heard that story with Powerset and Cuil, both of which amounted to nothing more than a comedy act. Who knows, maybe Stephen Wolfram really is cooking up something. Maybe he's just feeding his ego. In May, we'll get to see how useful the system really is. Whichever the case may be, answering the question "When was Google's stock at $300?" is a parlor trick. Answering the question "When will Google's stock be worth $300" - that might be worth something.

Web 2.0: Google's Ambition Beyond The Cloud

2009-04-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

In a wide-ranging discussion at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra said that the company plans to offer a whole suite of offline-enabled applications. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is already part way there, with Gears-enabled offline caching in Gmail, Docs, YouTube, Reader, Picasa, and Calendar. But as Gears and caching in HTML5 converge, Google users can expect a wider range of applications, on computers and mobile devices, that can function without constant Internet connectivity. Gundotra's statement of commitment confirms that Google is moving from the cloud to the desktop just as Microsoft is moving from the desktop to the cloud. It also suggests that Google's and Microsoft's denials that Microsoft Office and Google Docs are in competition are less than forthright. Google for years has preferred to characterize Docs as a collaboration tool that doesn't compete directly with Office. And in an interview Wednesday, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Business Unit president Stephen Elop said that the fundamental threat to Microsoft is not from some unnamed company that has "bolding in the browser" or "software for free," it's from a failure to innovate. Asked about Elop's dismissal of Docs as something less than real-word processing, Gundotra responded, "He has to say that." Gundotra too said what he had to. In response to interviewer Tim O'Reilly's question about whether Google plans to buy Twitter, Gundotra fell back on the industry standard talking point, "We don't as a policy comment about rumor or speculation." For Web 2.0 companies, the standards are open, but the communication remains tightly controlled. But Gundotra did affirm the importance of mobile devices to Google's future. Not that this is in any way unexpected, but he acknowledged that the center of gravity for the tech industry is moving from the computer to the phone and that Google sees voice search as a major opportunity. Phones also, he said, have characteristics that aren't shared by desktop computers: eyes (camera), ears (sound input), skin (touch and orientation sensing), all in a geographic context. That opens up new development opportunities. "We have to recognize that when we build software for phones, this is not the same model that we have on the PC," he said. Echoing a point made by Cloudfour's Jason Grigsby in a Web 2.0 session on Wednesday, Gundotra suggested that, thanks to HTML5, Web standards are poised to become the preferable mode of mobile development. The reason is that writing and maintaining native application code for dozens of mobile platforms is a tremendous burden for developers. "What's happening is the Internet is emerging as a viable platform instead," he said. To prove his point, Gundotra showed off a prototype Web application for Gmail running on the iPhone and an Android phone. It appeared to work as well as a native iPhone app. "Imagine if you could build apps that ran across all these phones because of the Web," he said. It appears many developers are starting to look beyond restrictive SDKs to do just that.

Google Launches Future Search

2009-04-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

Google Australia launched Gday today, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time: Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now. We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written! To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank. The technology behind Gday is called Mate, which stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

Google Android perfects touchscreen dialing for the blind

2009-04-04T08:34:00.000-07:00

It’s easy in interface design to forget about the disabled, but if there’s one thing that is undeniably true, it’s that the digital era has excluded the blind far more than it has excluded any other group. Take the web, for example: most web pages are completely unnavigable by the blind. But as even traditionally analog interfaces like the buttons on the face of a telephone are replaced by virtual buttons on a touchscreen, things are only going to get worse for the blind before they get better.

Cue Google Android. T.V. Raman, a blind engineer at Google, have developed software that makes the touchscreen of the T-Mobile G1 a lot more usable by blind users. And the solution they’ve come up to the dialing problem is as simple as it is ingenious.

Imagine trying to allow a blind user to dial a number on a touchscreen cell phone. Your first thought would probably be to try to program a complicate voice-recognition program. But there’s a simpler solution. When a blind user dials a cell phone with physical buttons, it’s easy: all the buttons are in a standard place and can be located through tactility. The tactile feedback of the bumps of a cell phone’s buttons are not available on a touchscreen phone… but what Raman has realized is they don’t need to be.

His solution assumes that the first place on a touchscreen your finger hits is the “5″ key. From there, a swish to the right becomes a “1″, or diagonally up and to the left becomes a “1.” Take your finger off the screen, and the entry system resets.

A niche solution to be sure. But we’re closer to perfecting software interfaces for the blind than curing blindness itself. As interfaces become less analog and more digitally ephemeral, these sort of innovations will make the already hardy lives for tens of thousands of people easier. Kudos, Google.

The big G buys twitter

2009-04-04T07:24:00.000-07:00

Google is in "late stage" talks to acquire microblogging service Twitter, according to a report on Thursday on TechCrunch citing two unnamed sources.

All Things Digital's Kara Swisher, however, on Friday said the report isn't true, also citing unnamed sources and saying the companies have only been in product-related discussions. And a TechCrunch update backpedaled a bit, citing another source who said acquisition talks were at a "fairly early stage."

Google declined to comment, but Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted a statement on his blog Friday that neither confirmed the talks nor ruled them out.

"It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects," Stone said. "Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we're just getting started." The 30-employee company is hiring, he added.

Twitter lets people post short, 140-character messages; people often subscribe to follow the stream of these tweets from acquaintances and, increasingly, companies and celebrities. After an unpleasant rocky period in which the company's servers frequently were crushed under the strain of the service, Twitter has experienced tremendous growth.

Google's origins, core technology, and profits come from search, but Twitter would fit in neatly with the company's somewhat lackluster attempt to become more of a social hub too. Facebook, which attempted to acquire Twitter in 2008, is the exemplar of just how rich a medium the Internet can become for social interactions. Social sites, though, have had a hard time showing they can mean revenue and profits as well.

Twitter isn't just about sharing with friends, though. It's increasingly about search as well. Twitter has been working to elevate the prominence of search, which can give a near-real-time window into what's on the mind of innumerable users.

And Google knows well how to treat new sources of information as signals that weigh into search results. The company has been gradually blending into its search results data from sources such as blogs and news stories that reflect new information arriving on the Web.

Plenty of people search for relatively timeless information, but plane crashes, earthquakes, election results, and other events are popular search subjects, too, and Google constantly strives to better match its results with what people are actually seeking

Future For Google AdSense?

2009-04-04T07:06:00.001-07:00

The future of AdSense is one that is much debated. The following is a look at some of the most prominent and promising ideas circulating about how Google AdSense will, and can, evolve from what it presently is. These ideas concern changes to specific uses of AdSense, the growth of AdSense and changes that would affect advertisers and site publishers who utilize AdSense.

First, in reference to the specifics of AdSense programming, algorithms are steadily becoming more powerful and developing greater capabilities. This has been seen in the Google search engine itself and the same results are expected to eventually affect AdSense. Those advertisers, who manipulate their content, allowing irrelevant high paying keywords to appear, will be faced with a major problem. They will have to contend with placing appropriate keywords in their content.

More protection for AdWords advertisers is projected for the future. This protection will address click fraud. Google currently acknowledges that click fraud is a key issue with the AdSense program and that it must be attended to. At the moment, those sites that experience high levels of traffic are able to disguise IP addresses and fraudulently increase the amounts of clicks on their site. ‘Smart pricing’ is one tool that could keep click fraud from occurring. This tool allows a set value of clicks to be placed on any one ad. If that value is surpassed, no further revenue will be made.

The growth of AdSense is global, offline and online. Google is investigating ways to integrate AdSense into other forms of media. AdSense usage would be extended to newspapers, television, movie screens, etc. This may be technologically possible in the future, though right now it seems less factual and more fiction-based. Google currently has access to an array of over 150,000 international advertisers. These advertisers could be given the ability to penetrate offline markets in different countries. Likewise, offline distributors may be allowed to create an AdWords format to advertise in content, in search and offline. But the major wave-maker in advertising technology is RSS. This technology has the possibility to send targeted ads directly to users, without navigation away from their current site. ‘Interactive television’ and similar products have been attempting to perfect this technology for a while. However, the Internet serves as a more appropriate medium, because of the absolute interactive potential the Internet possesses.

Advertisers utilizing AdSense could see more available options. One of these would be the ability to control where your contact is being displayed. This option would translate into the ability to block your product from being displayed on sites that host AdSense ads if you feel that the content does not relate to your product. On the flip side, Google has already introduced site-targeted CPM. This allows AdSense advertisers to place ads on a site regardless of whether the content is related to the product or not.

Publishers who use AdSense are almost demanding more available options. Google could offer publishers the ability to specify their own keywords. If this were to occur, publishers would be in more control of the ads being displayed on their site. While Google has been reluctant to offer this option, it is technologically possible. Also, publishers have begun to request clear specifications of AdSense’s pricing policy. Google has yet to offer an explanation of why this information is not made public, but industry insiders do not believe that Google will release any specific pricing information in the near future.

Another feature that AdSense could eventually offer publishers is allowing them to view links generating clicks. Along with the links, publishers could also view the specific keywords that were used in the links when they were clicked on. But this feature could threaten the AdSense system. The issue that arises is an opportunity for AdSense-only websites to be created, with the obvious goal of generating revenue. These sites would be devoid, or ignore, any content which is supposed to be the backbone behind AdSense ads.

At the end of the day, most of the discussed applications, tools and techniques are nothing more than mere speculation. Google is bound to surprise the industry with new features, some that are anticipated and others that would have never been thought possible.

East or West , Google Adsense is the Best

2009-04-04T06:53:00.000-07:00

Most of the Internet marketing community is at least somewhat familiar with Google Adsense at this point. Google Adsense can be a very lucrative venture for some so having a better understanding of Adsense is worthwhile.

Google Adsense is small contextual ads that are published on web sites with the consent of the web site's owner. The ads are created by publishers that are selling products and/or creating brand awareness. The ads that are created are called Adwords and they are also a Google sponsored program.

Google Adwords and Adsense run hand in hand. Every time someone does a search on Google or one of their partner networks and clicks on one of the sponsored ads, then the person who created that ad will pay Google a predetermined price. This is where the term "pay per click" comes from.

Now the beauty of Adsense is that the person who owns or hosts the web site that the Adwords ads appear on will split the amount of money that Google receives from the creator or publisher of the ad. It is a well guarded secret what the percentage of the split is, and it does vary, but for our purposes let's say it's 50%.

If a publisher is willing to pay .40 per click for his Adwords ad, then the host of the website that welcomes Adsense can expect to see roughly .20 every time someone clicks on that ad that appears on their site. The other .20 is kept by Google. So basically it is a partnership of sorts between Google and web site owners.

Adsense is shown in the most relevant way possible. What does this mean? Well, probably the best way to illustrate this would be through an example. Let's say Mary had a website featuring women's clothing. If Mary wanted to monetize her web site with Google Adsense the ads that would be shown would all be related to clothing, and more precisely, women's clothing. If a page of her site was dedicated to shoes, then the Adsense ads appearing on that page would be for women's shoes.

So how is the price per click determined? This is where the Adwords side of the equation kicks in. Adwords publishers bid on keywords. The more lucrative or sought after a keyword is, the more the publisher will be willing to pay for each click. Keywords range anywhere from a few cents to in excess of $50 per click.

It is not very hard to see how someone with a web site that generates a decent amount of traffic can make some nice money by putting Google Adsense on their site. Many Internet marketers will create web sites with specific content for the sole purpose of attracting high paying Adsense ads. Top Internet marketers can earn in excess of $10,000 a month on Adsense, and you can too!

Google moves into virtual worlds

2009-04-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

By combining satellite maps and 3-D software, Google Earth is turning into a virtual online playground.

Online virtual worlds are a hot topic, as gamers spend more and more time playing online and virtual real estate turns into a real market. Now Google is getting into the business -- and if its plans come to fruition, the virtual world will never be the same. In fact, it may look more like the world we know than futurists ever imagined.

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Google already has Google Earth, a 3-D mockup of the planet generated from satellite photos. But Google wants you to do more than just zoom through its virtual Earth. The company wants you to add on to it, too.

At the end of April the company released, for free, a popular 3-D modeling program it bought called SketchUp. Google is encouraging developers to use SketchUp to build 3-D layers on top of Google Earth. There's even a website Google provides called 3-D Warehouse, where you can demonstrate what you've built in Sketch Up.
Enter the metaverse

The notion that you can create objects and buildings and place them in a virtual world makes Google Earth sounds less like a mapping tool and more like a metaverse. What's a metaverse? Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson introduced the term in his seminal 1992 novel, Snow Crash. The metaverse was Stephenson's name for a virtual world where his characters play and do business. It was a black ball 1.6 times the size of Earth, with a giant street running around its equator.

In Stephenson's novel, millions of users uploaded customized "avatars," or virtual personalities, and strolled the street, entering shops and exclusive nightclubs, conversing and trading with the metaverse's other denizens. It was, in effect, a 3-D version of the web.

Online worlds like Second Life and There.com - not to mention online games like World of Warcraft, Lineage, and EverQuest -- are direct descendants of the metaverse vision. Entrepreneurs like Second Life's Anshe Chung have demonstrated how to run very profitable businesses trading online real estate, avatars, and other virtual goods -- businesses that have no physical presence in the real world. (See correction.)

But as popular as they are, virtual worlds like these are hardly mainstream. They're a little hard to navigate, and a little too videogame-like for the average user. It's hard to imagine your mom running around in Second Life, let alone World of Warcraft.
Googling the planet

It is, however, pretty easy to imagine your mom downloading and using Google Earth (indeed, perhaps she already is).

You can already download user-generated layers that sit on top of Google's 3-D Earth and show you, for example, the location of celebrity houses or hiking trails or famous landmarks. One dating service has even started showing people looking for partners as a Google Earth layer.

Real estate companies have started showing off virtual versions of their buildings (for sale in the real world) on Google Earth. SketchUp allows them to build entire models of their apartments, right down to the microwave oven.

Where will it end? Google Earth general manager John Hanke has said that Google Earth was partly inspired by Snow Crash's metaverse. At a recent Silicon Valley conference, he described it as a "3-D virtual world."
A virtual Earth

The result could be that we'll soon populate a virtual version of planet Earth instead of the made-from-scratch metaverses like online games or Second Life. The main element Google Earth is missing today is avatars, but at least one observer believes those to be added soon.

"I would expect to see someone using Google Earth as a virtual social space by the end of the year," says Jerry Paffendorf, research director of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a futurist organization.

Paffendorf isn't just sitting around waiting for the metaverse to happen, either. Last weekend he helped arrange something called the Metaverse Roadmap Summit, a gathering of programmers of virtual worlds.

The idea of the summit was to outline how we're going to get from here to the metaverse in ten years. There were major disagreements between the attendees, most notably between those who believe the Web should stay as a 2-D environment with 3-D components, and those who want the Web to become a 3-D metaverse-like environment where your avatar can call up 2-D screens if and when they need to - say, for a word-processing program.

Those in the latter camp believe, like Paffendorf, that Google Earth is the most likely candidate to become a metaverse. Just add avatars, they say, and the possibilities are endless.

Consumers could fly into the virtual New York, go shopping in a virtual Times Square, get past the velvet rope at a virtual Studio 54 and chat with an avatar dressed as Andy Warhol. They could plan their next trip to the real New York in meticulous detail, become a detective in a Gotham noir, browse an apartment for sale, or jump into a taxi and play a driving game.

There are, in short, many more opportunities in a virtual version of the real world than in an entirely fantastical world like Second Life -- or indeed Stephenson's original vision of the metaverse.

It's early days yet, but if Google Earth continues to develop as it has since its release a mere year ago, and if developers continue to build 3-D content and businesses continue to explore using layers, then the possibilities are as boundless as the planet.

By 2016, Google Earth should be a very crowded place indeed.

Amazing Google Facts You Dont Know

2009-04-04T06:28:00.000-07:00

1. Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.

2. Google’s Home Page Has 63 Validation Errors. Don’t believe me?: Check Google Validation

3. The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.

4. The infamous “I’m feeling lucky” button is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

5. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

6. The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’.

7. Google has the largest network of translators in the world.

8. Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

9. Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.

10. Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.

11. Google is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne.

12. Number of languages in which you can have the Google home page set up, including Urdu, Latin and Klingon: 88

13. Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices.

14. How long it would take to do a manual search of Google's 3 billion Web pages, at one minute a page?

5,707 years

15. How long it usually takes Google to search its database?

0.5 seconds

16. Market capitalization of publicly held search companies Overture, LookSmart, InfoSpace, FindWhat and Ask Jeeves.

$1,948,000,000

17. Market cap of Google, if it traded at 3 times estimated 2003 revenues (Google is a privately held company and aren't traded on the stock market, that is why this was just estimated)

$2,100,000,000

18. Number of languages in which you can have the Google home page set up, including Urdu, Latin and Klingon.

19. Google's share of global English-language searches.

33%

Google Chrome Web2.0 Next Generation Browser

2009-04-04T06:07:00.000-07:00

Google Chrome Web2.0

Google Chrome is the newbie in the browser market which has been dominated by Firefox and Internet Explorer along with Opera and Safari. Where Internet Explorer was leading followed by Firefox till now, this could change soon with the arrival of Google Chrome.

We could compare how Gmail changed the way we look at free emails, similarly Google Chrome could do the same when it comes to browsers. And similarly Chrome could become market leader when it comes to browsers soon, very similar to how Gmail reached the top spot in the category of free emails.

But since this is an entirely different category and hence Google will really need to work hard to reach the top spot particularly they had compete with Firefox which has been of late spreading like wild fire with its marketing tactics and its credibility.

One advantage that Google Chrome has right now is the fact that it has now entered the market with the great advantage as an open source browser, just like its predecessor, Firefox. This could either turn out to be the positive side of things to come or could turn out to be the other way around for Google.

Google Chrome’s success would really depend on the fact that how well it corrects the bugs and come out of the beta version, as quick as possible. There have already reports going around everywhere on Google Chrome crashes. This, they will have to rectify it quickly and make it near perfect if they really want to at least go near the top spot which has already been taken over by Internet Explorer with ease.

But similarly the sheen of Internet Explorer faded away when users experience “n” number of crashes and bugs with IE.

But as per Google’s introductory comic book, they have created a browser which would hardly crash at all. Even if a particular tab crashes, this will not affect the entire browser but only that particular tab, this feature was not even found with Firefox.

Adaptability also plays a key role here. Being an open source browser, we will still need to see how well it is being received with features like add-ons and customization. Google gears could just solve this issue, but we will need to wait and watch on this front.

Another important feature that Google Chrome could score over its predecessors is safety. The stiff competition will come from Firefox in this front as being the most safest browser so far.

Google Chrome is said to be the fastest among the other browsers, as claimed by Google. But even in this very short period of usage there were very huge differences when it comes to speed has been detected except on odd occasions where the pages loaded faster than the other browsers.

With Google Chrome’s entry we can expect a more faster and safer browsers from its competitors as well as from Google. This is good news for us, the users. The time will definitely tell us the answer, soon

Google says mobile advertising is the future

2009-04-04T04:05:00.000-07:00

A huge revolution in location-based advertising is soon to take place, according to the chief exec of Google.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos, Eric Schmidt said that mobile users could be affected by the soon-to-be truly mobile internet.

"It's the recreation of the Internet, it's the recreation of the PC (personal computer) story and it is before us - and it is very likely it will happen in the next year", he told assembled journalists.

At the moment, reports Reuters, analysts have been cautious about the future of mobile advertising, or advertising that targets where the phone users is, and consultancy Forrester predicting revenues of under $1 billion by 2012.

But, according to Schmidt, this is a massive underestimation.

He explained that Google wants to be a key player in this market by bidding for airwaves to launch an open US wireless network, which would see it competiting against established telecommunications players.

Analysts immediately responded by stating their concerns that Google would be over stretching itself as it would be a very expensive move tbut Schmidt dismissed this saying that location-based advertising - which could, for example, direct hungry travelers to nearby restaurants - would be "a very, very good business".

Google sees a future with free, ad-supported cell phones

2009-04-04T03:56:00.000-07:00

In Google's perfect world, cellphones would be free for those users who would be willing to watch ads on their devices. In an interview with Reuters, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that cell phone price subsidies should increase in tandem with the amount of advertising delivered over cellular networks. "Your mobile phone should be free," Schmidt said to Reuters. "It just makes sense that subsidies should increase."

Google has begn moving into cellphone advertising with experiemental ads consisting of brief video clips, images, and text ads underway in Japan.

Whether Google's cellphone advertising plans succeed depends on how users interact with their cellphones. Schmidt sees a time when consumers spend up to 10 hours a day not only talking, but texting, surfing the 'Net, and watching video. If you're using your cellphone that much, Google's hope is that you wouldn't mind an ad or two, especially if it subsidized the price of the phone.

The advertising experiments in Japan are reportedly going well for Google, which bodes well for the company's intention of delving deeply into advertising on mobile devices. Google has big plans for the market and is on record as predicting that revenues from cellphone advertising will eventually will eventually match those from its core, web-based ads.

Mobile phones are not the only place you will be seeing—and hearing—ads from Google in the future. The company recently entered the radio advertising market, acquiring dMarc Broadcasting for $102 million in January. dMark's core product was an automated radio advertising system, which was integrated into Google's AdSense for radio after the purchase. Google has also tried moving into print advertising, but the results haven't been as impressive. A print ad auction earlier this year ended badly for Google as interest from potential bidders was lukewarm.

Will Google's plans for the cellphone market pan out? It depends on how accepting consumers are of the concept. If the advertising is unobtrusive, perhaps with the cellphone display showing an advertiser's logo while a call is being connected, consumers will likely go along—especially if the phone is free or subsidized. But if Google and cellular providers go overboard, consumers may stay away in droves.

Semantic Search Could Secure Google's Future

2009-04-04T03:53:00.001-07:00

It is beginning to look like the next Google could be, well, Google. Or at least Google is aware of the threat semantic search engines pose to its keyword-based searches, and the company is doing something about it.

Google today announced it is adding semantic search capabilities to its engine, allowing it to provide a more useful list of related search terms along with the specific results of the keyword search.

Semantic search aims to improve search results by associating related terms and, hopefully, using them to return more useful results. That is especially important for Google, whose results have seemed to become less useful over time.

Some of the decline in search quality is a result of the number of people who have figured out how to game the system and spoof their way into top positions, but it is also because entering keywords is not a great way to search complex information. Nor is it a good way to pose conceptual questions to a search engine. The ongoing increase in the amount of information on the Web also makes searching more difficult.

Semantic search, by making an attempt to understand the meaning of a search phrase or question, is seen by many experts as the next step in making Web-based information more accessible.

Entrepreneurs also see it as the crack in Google's armor that might allow a smart and fast new company to do what Google did to its predecessors and build a new search empire. Of course, Google's real innovation was associating search with advertising, but that is a different issue.

While Google is formidable, there is still much that could be done to make search results more useful. Semantic search is a powerful tool, but Google could also improve the filtering it uses today to improve the quality of its results.

It is not a given that Google will remain the Google of search forever. Microsoft has made an acquisition in the semantic space and has spent many years doing its own linguistic research. Venture money has been flowing this way for years.

Google said it sees semantics as part of a total search solution, to be used along with its traditional keyword searches. Is this true or a large company posing in an attempt to stall the market just a bit?

Fast forward a bit and we might move into a Web where semantics are built right into the information we create. This is the realm of the Semantic Web, which is just how Tim Berners-Lee seems to envision the future of his invention.

Anyone who has ever been frustrated by search results or the general difficulty of finding what you need in the vast ocean of information should be happy about Google's announcement, thrilled that new competitors are pushing semantic search forward, and at least pondering what a future Semantic Web means for all of us.

GOOGLE 2009 PREDICTIONS

2009-04-04T03:48:00.000-07:00

At the end of each year, the blogosphere is flooded with predictions for the next. It’s time for a sneak peak into 2009 for one of the most exciting, and unpredictable, companies in existence — Google.

There are a few things that are almost certain to happen in 2009:

There will be several mobile devices that run the Google Android operating system. Android is currently only available on the G1 for T-Mobile, but that will change soon. By the end of 2009, we’ll see more manufacturers using Android on their devices, including Motorola and Samsung. In addition to the G1, HTC will be launching more units that run the operating system in 2009.

The Open Handset Alliance will grow, and more companies will promise to have devices running the open source operating system. The hype around Android will fuel development, and make the Android Marketplace successful.

Google Apps will continue to gain momentum in the Enterprise The longer the economy stays bad, the more attractive Google Apps begins to look for businesses that currently license Microsoft products. It costs an incredible amount of money to legally run things like Microsoft Exchange and Office in-house. Google’s Enterprise business will grow at Microsoft’s expense this coming year.

Google Chrome makes deal with OEM’s, and snags a significant chunk of the browser market It would be almost impossible for Google to dethrone Internet Explorer in 2009 (or even Firefox for that matter). Google will, however, make a deal with OEM’s to have Google Chrome installed, and set as the “default” browser on new computers. If this happens, it will have a significant impact on Chrome usage in 2009. I’d predict we could see Google snag as much as 10 to 15 percent of the browser market in the coming year.

GOOG will gain some of the ground it lost on wall street Overall, this was a terrible year for Google — just as it was with almost every other company because of the economy. As investors become more comfortable with Google’s dominant position, and the need for companies to keep their online marketing budgets relatively static, the share price should close in the green for 2009 (but of course, if I could accurately predict this type of thing, I’d probably be on a beach somewhere, so take it with a grain of salt).

Things that might not happen, but could include:

Google could launch an operating system In my opinion, this is a quite unlikely, but there have been rumors floating around that somewhere around 6000 employees at Google have been using a secret operating system. This speculation is based on the fact that the user agent for some web requests originating inside Google have been mysteriously removed.

Google might finally launch GDrive I say this every year, but it hasn’t happened yet. I don’t have high hopes for this one, but it’s worth putting out there.

Google may pull the plug on Google Knol The brand new service that had high hopes before its launch has yet to gain any traction. The amount of content, and the number of contributors is simply not where it needs to be — so I’m thinking that there is a decent chance that Google will simply pull the plug on this service. Cost-cutting like never before Google has never been frugal — they used to jump at any opportunity to make their employees happy. The economy may cause Google to cut costs like never before to make investors happy. It will be interesting to see if Google can somehow avoid the layoff monster — they have already let go a bunch of people, but they were temp workers on contract instead of full time employees.

Top predictions for the future

2009-04-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

1: Citywide free Wi-Fi ( by the year 2010)

And not just supplied by the local authority.

"A crowdsourced Wi-Fi network would be created if everyone turned off the encryption on their home Wi-Fi." Saul Parker, anthropologist

2: Rapid bioassays (2013)

Studying the effects of drugs on the body gets simpler and quicker, thanks to biosensitive computer chips that can give accurate, instant readings.

3: Care robots (2014)

Not robots with true AI, but helpful machines nonetheless.

4: Life-browsing (2014)

"As more of our lives go digital, we may use a program to sort our data. And it could hook up to software that understands the things people forget." Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research

5: Intelligent advertising posters (2015)

Advertising gets personal. Posters that adjust to your presence and address you personally become as common as TV ads tailored to your profile.

6: Window power (2017)

Environmentally sustainable buildings aren't just carbon neutral, they will also make a clean contribution to the power grid in the form of solar-powergenerating windows.

7: Intelligent packaging (2017)

Using smart RFID chips, the food packages in your cupboard will talk to each other, then suggest what you can make if you combine them.

8: Energy-efficient buildings (2017)

The architect Norman Foster reflects that "architectural tastes will probably be driven by the global ambition to develop a sustainable way of living," although these new buildings will still have to be "a great place to be".

The problem is that glass and concrete structures are not that energy-efficient. Richard Silberglitt, senior physical scientist at the RAND Corporation, imagines new buildings using lightweight "third-generation solar collectors" instead of glass for windows. An example of this would be the Grätzel cell, which is based on a "nanoparticle of titanium dioxide and a dye that's a solar absorber". Jim Cramer, co-founder of the Design Futures Council, sees most buildings as being energy-neutral in ten to 15 years' time.

9: Teledildonics (2018)

Remote-control sexual stimulation. "There are Japanese scientists who are focusing ultrasound into a pinpoint, creating sound that you can touch in

the air." Violet Blue, sex columnist

10: Active contact lenses (2018)

These will project words and images into the eye. We will also be able to download software to influence our dreams and share them with others.

11: Meal-replacement patches (2018)

A patch will deliver all the nutrients you need without your having to open your mouth.

12: Non-touch computer interfaces (2018)

Operate a computer without touching anything, using gestures instead. "Still ten years away partly because of the need for accurate tracking." Vint Cerf, Google

13: Nanotech drugs (2018)

Treatments will deliver themselves directly to the site of the problem. Office video walls Networked offices will take video conferencing to the next level. This could develop into "holographic projections" by 2030. Jeremy Gutsche, trend-hunter

14: Everything online

Internet-protocol (IP) addresses, the numbers that identify computers on a network, are running out. But their replacement, IPv6, will create such a vast amount of new ones, Vint Cerf tells us, that a very large number of devices can be part of the interactive environment.

"I'm anticipating that several hundreds of millions of devices will be online. A lot will be very small things – sensors, for example, for local ambient information such as temperature, humidity and possibly the detection of biohazards. Or they might be used to monitor and control building conditions or security devices." Chris Bishop sees this as leading to the fully automated home in ten to 20 years – and we are already on the way. "Some estimates show a typical modern house has around 100 fully programmable computers and this looks set to increase."

15:Folk-art revival (2019)

"Media production tools will be in the hands of the people, and theline between pro and amateur media is blurred." Douglas Rushkoff, professor of media culture, New York University.

Cheating husband caught on Google Street View?

2009-04-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

He didn't even say he was working late. No, no. He said he was away on business. However, his wife, bathing in uncontrollable suspicion, decided to do the only thing she could. She dialed up the local detective agency. Yes, Google Street View.

In the story as related by the Sun newspaper (and which still, as of 7.50am PST sits proudly on the Sun's Website), the unnamed woman seems to have had some sense of whom her errant husband might be squiring. She Google-zoomed in on the woman's house and discovered that her husband's Range Rover proved that he was, indeed, roving. Whatever will they pick up next? Yes, its distinctive shape, and its even more distinctive fancy hubcaps, were parked exactly where they shouldn't be. Divorce appears to be proceeding.

Britain has already been shaken to what remains of its foundations by Google Street View's unerring ability to discover people and things where an idealist might wish they weren't: from the vomiting man to the man walking out of a sex shop. Yes, not even the same man. One can only hope for some form of reconciliation in the sad Google Street View divorce. At the very least, wouldn't it be nice if Google picked up the legal bills? Or if the company offered to pay for counseling?

On the other hand, will the poor husband threaten to sue Google? And now, despite some confusion as to whether this whole story is nothing more than a street legend, perhaps some doubtful wife will today be inspired to leap to Street View to find evidence of her husband's philandering. Unlike with marriage, the possibilities with Google Street View are endless

courtesy:cnet

Chad Hurley On The Future Of YouTube: We Will Conquer Every Screen

2009-04-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

Chad Hurley, The Co-Founder of You Tube notes that 13 hours worth of videos are uploaded every minute to YouTube (a figure we’ve reported before). And he predicts more of the same: more videos will be uploaded to the Web, more video creators will be uploading those videos, and more viewers will be watching them on all sorts of screens from the living room to their mobile devices. In other words, more of the same means more exponential growth of videos on the Web.

Hurley’s vision of the future, though, pretty much describes the world as it is today. You can watch YouTube on your TiVo, iPhone, or PC. But if you read between the lines, he does hint that mobile might be the next really big step for YouTube.

Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call. This new video content will be available on any screen - in your your living room, or on your device in your pocket. YouTube and other sites will bring together all the diverse media which matters to you, from videos of family and friends to news, music, sports, cooking and much, much more.

The mobile opportunity for YouTube is bigger than just making all the video in the world available in your pocket. Mobile phones are also the new video cameras. Once it becomes truly easy to upload video from your phone to YouTube, it could truly become the repository of every captured moment in people’s lives.

For all his visions of the future, however, Hurley still has to figure out how make money from all of those videos.

courtesy:techcrunch

Speed test: Google Chrome beats Firefox, IE, Safari

2009-04-02T04:18:00.000-07:00

Lars Bak, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, said at the launch event Tuesday he's confident Chrome is "many times faster" than the rivals at running JavaScript, the programming language that powers Google Docs, Gmail, and many other Web applications. But when pressed for specifics, he told me to try them out. So I did.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Google's Chrome overpowers the other browsers on the five subtests by which Google measures its browser's JavaScript performance.

Google offers a site with five JavaScript benchmarks. On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition. I hope benchmarking experts and developers will weigh in with comments about how well these tests represent true JavaScript performance on the Web--either for ordinary sites or for rich Web apps.

Here's the site description of the speed tests:

• Richards: OS kernel simulation benchmark, originally written in BCPL by Martin Richards (539 lines).

• DeltaBlue: One-way constraint solver, originally written in Smalltalk by John Maloney and Mario Wolczko (880 lines).

• Crypto: Encryption and decryption benchmark based on code by Tom Wu (1,689 lines).

• RayTrace: Ray tracer benchmark based on code by Adam Burmister (3,418 lines).

• EarleyBoyer: Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch's Scheme2Js compiler (4,682 lines).

Google's overall score is head and shoulders above the competition for executing JavaScript.

A few notes: First, your mileage may vary; I ran these tests on my dual-core Windows XP machine. Second, my apologies here to Opera, whose browser I don't have installed. Third, I tried to run the SunSpider benchmark tests as well, but perhaps because a lot of other curious people had the same idea on the day Chrome launched, I couldn't get to the site.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

DOWNLOAD RARE GOOGLE VIDEO

2009-04-02T03:18:00.000-07:00

A rare video showing Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin(as teen geeks) demonstrating their newly found search engine to their professors at Stanford.

DOWNLOAD