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