Category Archives: Websites

Google Phone is coming, the gPhone is coming!

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The Wall Street Journal has (ummm – just figured out?) that Google’s phone ambitions are substantial.  It’s not yet clear if they’ll become their own huge phone company, but I’m guessing they will and that they will do a good job solving some of the nagging problems that have been experienced by .. lets see now … 99.9% of all cell users?    I do not think this necessarily bodes well for Google financially though, and release of hardware and a national cellular network may be part of their “jumping the shark” moment.    Google has thrived as a company that could ramp up as profits rolled in.   Not so with mobile, where they will have to anticipate a lot of profit and incur huge capitalization costs in a “bet” that they can capture enough of this market to turn a big buck.     Clearly Google is already going to influence this market quite a bit by spearheading the open handset alliance and other open architecture initiatives, but it’s not clear their bottom line would have a huge positive impact even when you anticipate the revenue from advertising (currently small but sure to grow) and revenue from subscribers  (currently huge but capital and labor intensive).    

I’m torn between thinking Google clearly will fix many technical challenges with the hardware (I see even cheap phones as iPhone clones with great mapping and data and more), but Google has done a simpy *terrible* job of basic customer service over the years, feeling that if a problem solving thing can’t scale up then they won’t put much energy into that problem.    Typically this has related to advertiser problems with adwords and webmaster problems with websites.  Google has made some improvements as they hired legions of people to deal with customer service, but I cannot see Google handling millions of calls along the lines of “now, which button do I press to dial my sister in Toledo?”.  Google culture is not compatible and will become impatient with the slow, labor and capital intensive mobile landscape.   Maybe they’ll change it into something better.    Maybe they won’t.

In any case they’ll bring some great phone online and as I’ve noted before I’m very excited about that.

Novamente – teaching virtual entities to “fetch”

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A sign that things are starting to hop in the field of artificial intelligence is how a topic of conversation that would have been considered fanciful – or even insane – some 20 years ago would now be fair game at any Silicon Valley pub or coffee shop.    Novamente is a fascinating company doing fascinating development and research guided in part by the idea that the best path to computer general artificial intelligence (that is, intelligence much like we humans have) is through a similar-to-human-intelligence  learning path.    To this end Novamente is teaching virtual entities to fetch, recognize themselves, and other early stages in human learning.   This is taking place in part in the Second Life virtual world.  

Sounds crazy?   Just a game?  I don’t think so.  It may be optimistic to think that AI thinking can come about in this way, but it’s sure worth a try.   

Novamente

Google Phone – gPhone’s Android is landing?

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Google is *incredibly* good at keeping secrets, and the rumors of a new gPhone or Google Phone have been flying for some time.   However CNET’s Tom Krazit is reporting tonight that Google, on Monday, will unleash “Android”, an open source approach to mobile phones.     As they have with Open Social, Google will unveil an open source approach to development of mobile software.    How do you know it’s going to be good?    Google does not do bad software.   In fact the Apple iPhone’s most compelling feature – mapping – was driven by Google software.

As I noted before about  Google’s Phone ambitions this is another brilliant move which is clearly seeking to dominate the mobile advertising space rather than try to develop and market new hardware.   

Google’s mantra could not be clearer if it was listed on every home page on earth:  “Free software by anybody and for everybody.  Monetization by ….. Google.

Google Open Social opens Social

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Google’s OpenSocial launches Thursday and will be a set of 3 APIs that will allow interface with a stable of early partners in the project incluing Friendster and LinkedIn.   Unclear to me is if the big social network players – Myspace and Facebook – will shun this solution in favor of trying to keep most  of the balls in their courts.   Eyeballs that is.  

The really provocative challenge in Social Networks is whether to close them up and try to keep everybody inside your own network (Myspace’s approach), or to open them up somewhat and hope developers will create applications to interface with your users, but still try to keep everybody playing in your application environment by your rules (Facebook), or to open things up even more as Google will do on Thursday. 

Google seems to be everywhere these days.  The Google Phone or gPhone will be out soon and I predict the Google Phone will be a spectacular success.  They may even launch their own cellular carrier network and seem to be on a tear all over the online space.   

For Google Social the partners are big, important players including linkedIn, Plaxo, Friendster, Ning, and more, but absent are the two key players in the social place, Myspace and Facebook.  If Myspace and Facebook keep doing their own thing it is going to be hard to predict how all this will shake out.   Google historically has been a fabulous tech company but conspicuously failed with their “Orkut” social network which never took off in the USA though it remains popular in Brazil.    Will Google Social turn all this around?   I just don’t know, but will be sure to check it out when available, and hope to be able to develop a travel application for the new Google Social.

TechCrunch has details.

San Jose Mercury News – A Cautionary Tale from Business Week

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There is a great summary at Business Week of the  remarkable rise and pending fall of Silicon Valley’s newspaper – the San Jose Mercury News.     They note that in many ways the Mercury News saw it all coming, but still failed to position itself to profit from the migration of offline info to online info.  

Although the article does not make this point, to me the failure supports the idea that paradigm shifts do not come from old systems evolving into new ones even when the old systems “get it”, rather they come from new folks thinking out of the old boxes and building the next generation of innovative solutions basically from scratch.  

Obviously new technology rests on the shoulders of old technology, but it seems reasonable to assume that the next big things are not going to come from the previous big things, they are going to spring up from the harsh, quirky, and shifting sands of technology and innovation.     I would suggest that IBM might be an exception to this notion but clearly Microsoft, then Yahoo and Google, now YouTube, Myspace and Facebook all fit this model of major changes coming more from scratch than from a slow simmering of existing ideas.     This also helps explain the challenges of Venture Capitalism in finding “the next big thing”, which may right now only be known by the glimmer in a college kid’s eye.

If so, who is next?

Google v Microsoft over Facebook

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Henry Blodget over at Silicon Alley Insider has a thoughtful post today predicting that Google will beat out Microsoft in the Facebook sweepstakes, and that the real winner here is Facebook founder Zuckerberg who will walk away from any deal with a jaw dropping, market driven valuation of Facebook.     Blodget notes that even if Microsoft spends enough to win the Facebook bidding war Google wins again because Facebook will simply milk Microsoft’s cash cow leaving them with little in the way of a superior online MS environment.

I think this last point is particularly relevant, and poses one of the key threats to Microsoft’s long term viability.    Unlike Google and even Yahoo, new companies don’t appear to see a Microsoft aquisition as much more than a big payday.   It’s not clear to me that Google does any more for the companies it aquires than Microsoft does, but I do think the perception is that Google will inject innovation and enthusiasm where Microsoft will just absorb you into their failing online collective.    I don’t think these assumptions are, on balance, valid, but I think they are part of the equation when new companies and their generally young, inexperienced founders are courted by the big players.

Bad News for Good Newspapers

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Nick Carr summarizes a study in the UK that suggests more perils for news organizations as they move online.    The online editions appear to be “cannibalizing” the offline edition readership.   A university study looked at how online news readers are less likely to buy a newspaper from the same company they read online.

If this proves true across the newspaper landscape it presents newspapers with the twin challenges of needing to beef up the online portal to keep up market share even as their total advertising revenues are tending to go down.   Offline readership generally gives a better ad return per reader, so even as online advertising increases that extra revenue is not likely to keep pace with the offline losses. 

Pearls before Twine

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update:  I think I was in a bad mood on this – not fair to be so hard on a new company without even trying it.   Sorry Twine, I hope you … ROCK! 

Twine is the new social network applications just “launched” at the Web 2.0 summit in Silicon Valley.   Like Paul Kedrowsky   I’m skeptical before I’ve even had a chance to test Twine.   (I will test it and review as soon as I get an invite…).

No, this is not fair but I’m getting sick of applications priming the buzz machine with hyperbole before they have even put out the application to enough people that you can figure out if it’s “Web 3.0” as Twine claims it is, or just another overhyped social application that needs widespread adoption to be useful.   

My favorite 2.0 observer, Tim O’Reilly, has a detailed review of the Twine demo after which he wonders if they’ve succeeded.    Note to Twine – if you can’t convince people in a demo that you are great you probably have some work to do, and you might even suck.

Now I really feel like an Assclown 2.0 to be so critical of what is clearly a thoughtful and potentially great application from Nova Spivak, a very clever Web 2.0 fellow. 

But I think I’m suffering from Web 2.0 stress syndrome where the hype, lies, and video clips are overwhelming me with irrelevant stuff while I try desparately to winnow out the good stuff from the bad.   We need an automated routine (aka ‘search agent’) that  does the preliminary winnowing of content and organization of other stuff and my stuff for us.  Now THAT would be web 3.0 and THAT would be worth my time as well as the time of all the moms, pops, and kids out there who are the backbone of the new web.   Silicon Valley often spills out silly companies and ideas as if the other 99.9% of the global population is clueless or irrelevant.   Theoretically Web 2.0 was to change that and make people, not computers, the center of the internet universe.   But sometimes I wonder if the Silicon folks have even paid any attention to that change.  

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Paid Content has a great article about online advertising and how the concentration of online advertising in the hands of so few websites is becoming a problem. 

They note this remarkable stat from Zenith regarding distribution of online ad revenue:

So the big problem is not that ad spending is drying up, it’s that the bulk is concentrated in a few sites. Citing the IAB, Reuters points out that the top 50 websites in the U.S. took in more than 90 percent of the revenue from online ads in H107, while the top 10 sites sucked up 70 percent of internet revs for the same period. 

They also quote Zenith as suggesting that even as late as 2009 online advertising will remain a fraction –  under 10% – of the total global ad spend of some 495 billion.     I’m skeptical of that estimate – very skeptical – because online ROIs remain vastly superior to offline, though this advantage is not as obvious as it should be because so much of the spend is done in foolish “old media” ways with large, expensive, poorly targeted campaigns.  As PPC campaign sophistication improves, people continue to move online, video continues to move online, and advertisers increasingly continue to insist on positive ROI we should see online buys approach offline – I’d wildly guess there will be online / offline ad parity by 2015, though interactive TV and video clip advertising may blur the distinction between a TV ad and an online ad.

Google and Wikipedia combine to “bomb” NYC.

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Update – below was “fixed” with Wiki’s correction and Google’s refreshed index. Looks like the bogus snippet lasted about 1-2 days at Google – probably even less at Wikipedia because they have people reviewing the edits.
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Search credibility is still a challenge for Google and Wikipedia as today’s second result for the query “New York City” indicates:

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New York City– Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

new york city has just been hit with a nuclear bomb and it has destroyed half of the cityand has left thousands dead. george bush says the people involved …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City – 315k – Cached – Similar pages

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This is a very clear example of the challenges of information systems that have no human intervention in the routine editing process (Google) , or have defective human intervention (Wikipedia).    What happened here was a malicious change of the NY City page at Wikipedia followed by Google’s spidering of the bogus content.   I’m hardly a naive user but during my search tonight for NYC info I did a double take on this Google query result and quickly had to reason out that it was bogus.    Wikipedia’s been fixed and this will probably go away within days when Google refreshes it’s listing, but you can sure see how things can get out of hand fast online. 

A recent study suggested Wikipedia and Brittanica were about equally authoritative, and I do think this is an exception to the normal super quality at Wikipedia.