Archive for Google
Google Android Mobile Phones
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle Android sounds like the name of a mobile phone, but it’s actually not. The name Google Android is used to refer to the OS of the mobile phone. The market is flooded with with mobile phones these days, and consumers are spoilt for choice. So what makes Google Android so different? And why should anyone start using a totally different OS altogether? Currently, the better known mobile operating systems in the market are Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile and more recently, OS X for iPhone. These operating systems are all competing for market share. But the similar aspect of these operating systems is that they are all closed systems. In other words, no one else, but the companies themselves can develop applications for the OS (with the exception of OS X, which we shall discuss later). Therefore, all mobile phones that are equipped with these operating systems have limited applications that can be installed. Recognizing the rising trend of the open network, Google is hoping to change all that with Google Android. With the SDK (Software Development Kit) offered by Google, developers can truly innovate and come up with applications that can be installed in Google Android. We have all seen this concept taking the Internet by storm. For instance, we see the Firefox browser closing the gap with Internet explorer. It’s able to catch up quickly because it allows developers to develop useful extensions for the browsers. To date, there are hundreds of extensions for the Firefox browser, and its popularity is still rising. The same goes for social community sites. MySpace used to be the top social community site. But Facebook became popular really fast, and have risen to be on par with MySpace. Again, it happened because Facebook started allowing developers to launch applications on its platform. The signals are clear. The open concept works, and Google Android is looking to overtake all the other mobile operating systems. The project is now being undertaken by the Open Handset Alliance, which is a group of companies formed by Google, T-Mobile, Sprint, Vodaphone, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson and other players in the mobile phone industry. Eventually, fans can’t help but compare Google Android with Apple’s OS X. After all, the Apple iPhone is immensely popular, and it also allows developers to develop third party applications for the iPhones, and distribute them through Apple’s website. However, the OS X also has a limitation – it can only work with the iPhone. So if you don’t like the iPhone (rare, but it happens), you are out of luck. Google Android looks set to become the leading OS. It’s just a matter of time. Already, the Open Handset Alliance is working with mobile phone manufacturers to develop Android mobile phones. So don’t be surprised to find mobile phones from major brands such as Samsung, HTC, Motorola, etc. in the near future.
3G Apple Iphone Versus Google G1: The Two Spearheads Of The Market
Posted by: | CommentsCurrently, there are thousands of gadgets in the market. Some of latest models include the 3G Apple iPhone and Google G1. These handsets ensure good performance and come with some new features. They attract people all over the world with their new features and functionalities. A large number of individual are hooking to them and they are becoming the most talked about phones among the users. They are very popular for their tempting look and compact design. These gadgets bring some best entertainment features to allure people. Among these widgets is the 3G Apple iPhone. It is one of the best widgets meant for fast data transferring with its fast 3G wireless technology. This is an ideal widget that comes with rich HTML email and a desktop class web browser to give the users fast internet access. This is an amazing device with 3. 5 inches wide screen that lets you enjoy videos and pictures with great clarity. Scroll through songs, albums and playlists with just a flick. Browse music by using its Cover Flow and make a playlist of your favourite songs. Not only this, it also allows the users to play songs in various popular formats such as AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR and so on. The mobile phone is equipped with a 2 mega pixels camera and the individuals can entertain themselves by capturing beautiful videos and pictures. Another striking aspect of this gadget is that it is having Bluetooth technology that can be used to share important files with other people wirelessly. The 3G Apple iPhone comes with a built-in rechargeable battery that gives the users a talktime of 5 hours and standby time of 300 hours. This smart phone is available in two beautiful colours – black and white. The GPS technology of this widget enables people to find out various unknown destinations like petrol pump, ATMs, hospitals, shopping malls and many others. So, this is a lovely device for the people who are looking for innovation in gadgets. When one makes an analysis of 3G Apple iPhone Versus Google G1, he finds that the Google G1 is also a smart choice for the users. According to TIME magazine it is the best phone of 2008. This handset comes with an internal memory of 1 GB and has a micro SD card slot for further expanding the memory of this device. It is highly popular for its high speed HTML browser with which the users can surf the internet very easily. Google maps and Street View are options meant to easily search for various unknown locations. The 3 mega pixels camera of this widget makes it more attractive because people can enjoy high quality pictures and videos with this camera phone. The pictures and videos can be easily shared with friends with the help of its Bluetooth. This is a fascinating device with its HSPDA and EDGE technologies that help the individuals to enjoy easy and fast data transfer. So, it can be concluded that both the 3G Apple iPhone and Google G1 are amazing communication options having high-end features.
Rocketinfo: Faster Than Google, Deeper Than Yahoo, More Specific Than a Speeding Bullet
Posted by: | CommentsAll of us are hip, on-line and Internet-savvy. But we don’t know the beast.
This is the core message of Bill Ganz, the president and CEO of next-step search engine ROCKETInfo Inc. (OTC:RKTI). It is a search technology company in the spirit of Google and Yahoo!, but with a new approach to the delivery of results, news and business information.
The growth potential for ROCKETInfo is remarkable: Just the business process management (BPM) aspect of this industry, including software, services and maintenance, will grow to $6. 3 billion annually by 2011, according to a report by Forrester Research, an independent technology and market research company. Analysts project a growth rate for the BPM sector of up to 35 percent annually.
ROCKETInfo does two things very well for businesses of all kinds: It is provides search engine services and is a content server that delivers targeted and relevant content such as news and financial information. The software has been designed to automate the process of defining, collecting, analyzing and delivering relevant, current news from an international pool of reputable news, media and other sources.
It is essentially publishing monolith of potentially gargantuan proportions.
Ganz’ homily: “The nexus of the dot. com era afforded a lot of ideas that were funded and what’s happening right now is that these ideas have worked. Things are now better, faster and cheaper if you understand your media and technology. ”
Ganz said that exploring ROCKETInfo’s services is much like waking up in a new world. Internet users who have become used to searching for information with providers like Google and Yahoo, he said, get millions of results per search, much of them segregated into paid-for categories. The problem is, most of this information is neither wanted nor needed. ROCKETInfo’s proprietary software filters the junk, the ads, the spam, and delivers only the desired content.
He added that, like Google and other popular search engines, ROCKETInfo provides an advanced Boolean search, but with a higher IQ – the search engine can be trained to discern the quality of information it gathers. Ganz said that for businesses, this means profound changes for gathering information on competitors, and especially in media monitoring.
“In today’s economy, the gold standard of currency is intelligent, dynamic and real-time information and knowledge management,” Ganz said. “The truth is, people are looking for information that is relevant – for us, about us. ”
In one of its most popular applications, Ganz said, ROCKETInfo delivers RSS news to the desktop, and especially to the investment industry. His system parses out information where it’s wanted, from a growing database of 80,000 sources, including 16,000 publishers, plus 30,000 blogs and podcasts.
“Simply put,” he stated, “we’re similar to what TiVo (which finds and digitally records select television broadcasts on demand) does for television, except we do it for the Internet. ”
“A ROCKETInfo search,” he said, “specializes in news that is happening right now. We don’t store news like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, Ask – those other large search companies – because we believe that news happens, that decisions you make now in your business and personal life today, are your future.
“It’s the speed, immediacy and the breadth of information that we deliver to our clients. We provide this learned data to you, metaphorically, in a box with a bow on it. We deliver it to your desktop, website, e-mails or newsletters – this is synthesized, refined data. ”
The reason ROCKETInfo is so fast is because of how it decides to refine the information and how fast it decides to refresh it. Its web services are an integrated collection of technology layers based on the proprietary Rocket Enterprise Server platform. The technology stack is comprised of collection, storage, search, analysis and delivery layers.
“We choose to refresh so quickly and search our databases so frequently because the speed of the information matters so much in the sporting world, the investment world and the business world. Speed matters. The time latency is the liability. ”
Ganz describes ROCKETInfo’s search capabilities with a drilling metaphor: “Google offers a two-mile-wide search that is three inches deep. ROCKETInfo,” he said, “offers a three-inch hole that goes two miles deep. ”
Founded in 1998, ROCKETInfo, Inc. has its headquarters in Newport Beach, Calif. , with research and development operations in Vancouver and Toronto and professional services in Ottawa. It claims over 95,000 registered users and RSS Reader / desktop downloads and more than seven million monthly searches. It has a staff of 17, plus many consultants and contractors.
Currently trading at 24 cents, ROCKETInfo has reported a market cap of $12. 46 million, which demonstrates incredible upside potential for the ground floor investor.
ROCKETInfo has 41. 21 million shares outstanding.
This article is intended for information purposes only, and is not a recommendation to buy or sell the equities of any company mentioned herein. It is based on sources believed to be reliable, but no warranty as to accuracy is expressed or implied. The opinions expressed in the article are those of the author except where statements are attributed to individuals other than the author, in which case the opinions are those of the individual to whom they are attributed.
Could Google’s First Phone Signal the Death of the Pc?
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle is breaking away from the virtual world this autumn with the launch of its first mobile phone. Not content with dominating the search and online advertising arenas, the innovative company has developed a phone that has as much power as the desktop computers in use just a few years ago, and is clearly intended as a serious challenger to Apple’s iconic iPhone.
There’s a three megapixel camera, one-touch access to YouTube and instant messaging service Google Talk, and as well as listening to music users will be able to download tracks from a new service, Amazon MP3.
All of which shouts loud and clear that the G1 is targeted firmly at consumers. In fact when it’s launched in the UK in November on the T-Mobile network, there won’t even be a business tariff at first.
The phone, officially called ‘the T-Mobile G1 with Google’ will be free on a £40 tariff, including unlimited data for browsing. T-Mobile expects the device to appeal to some business users as well, however, and there are some features that make the G1 an interesting option for the growing number of mobile workers, wherever they are.
The phone, known as the G1, runs on Google’s own operating system, Android, which is designed to bring the experience of desktop computing to mobile devices. It connects to the internet through Wi-Fi and 3G and, like the iPhone, making calls, sending emails via Gmail, surfing the web and using contacts and calendars are a touch of the screen or a click of the trackball away.
Although the G1 has the same 3. 2 inch screen as Apple’s iPhone and a similar touchscreen keyboard that takes up much of the screen space, it has one major difference: a slide-out qwerty keyboard. Although the keys are tiny this arguably makes email on the move easier and more realistic as you can type in a message of a decent length and view it on a large screen. The G1 is the first phone to have a built-in compass with motion-sensing technology, and users can navigate by using street-level Google Maps: no more getting lost on the way to meetings, interviews, or lunches.
Users will be able to download additional programs onto the G1 from the Android Market, an online software superstore. Android is open-source, so anyone can develop programs for the phone and make them available to other users without going through a Google approval process. Google claims Android effectively makes the phone future-proof, as users will be able to get frequent updates to the operating system as well as new software. And somewhere among the seriously practical and seriously playful applications that are sure to be developed, there will be some that make the G1 more useful to businesses and professionals.
Android is another step towards the current obsession of technology companies: providing the perfect mobile experience. Everyone in the industry is working on finding a way to harness the computing power tucked up in those little handsets to allow everyone from students to mobile professionals to do much more with their phones.
At the moment, however, while the G1 supports Microsoft’s Word and Excel, it doesn’t support Exchange for enterprise email. You need a Google Gmail account to use the email service and it won’t synchronise with Outlook, although it is possible to automatically redirect work email to a Gmail account, and its likely that one of the first third-party applications will be support for Exchange.
Other applications available to download at launch will include cab4me, which finds and books a cab based on your locations, PedNav, which helps you find the best walking or public transport route to where you want to go, and Shopsavvy, a program that turns the phone into a bar-code scanner that can give you instant price comparisons.
The G1 will run on a version of Google’s new browser, Chrome, offering easy searching of the internet, and fast results, but the phone won’t have Apple’s patented multi-touch technology that lets you enlarge and zoom in on web pages simply by making pinching and expanding movements on the screen with your fingers.
Google’s first phone, made by Taiwanese manufacturer HTC, also loses out to the iPhone in the looks department, with most reviewers saying it’s an ugly duckling to Apple’s swan. There’s no doubt that the iPhone is the prettiest phone around, but this could change once future Android-based design-led handsets made by the likes of LG and Samsung are released in the next year or so.
Ahead of its launch, the critics have given the G1 a mixed reaction. The consensus seems to be that it’s a good first effort, fast and responsive, and probably the first serious contender to the iPhone, but it just isn’t as sleek, exciting and sexy.
Despite the inevitable, and not always favourable, comparisons with the iPhone, gadget and Google lovers are enthused about the G1: some reports estimated that ahead of its US launch in October, the entire initial US allocation of 1. 5 million handsets had been pre-ordered, with another two million earmarked for high-street retailers. T-Mobile won’t start taking pre-orders in the UK until a couple of weeks before the phone’s release, but it says tens of thousands of people have already registered their interest.
The ‘Google phone’ might not be getting people buzzing about its design, but the use of Android as its flexible foundation will grow the global smartphone market hugely. The day when we’re all using fast, powerful, easy and practical mobile devices in our day-to-day lives and at work, wherever that might be, is getting ever closer. This time next year, the G1 and its offspring could well have dealt another fatal blow to the desktop PC.
To learn more about the G1 and register an interest, go to www. t-mobile. co. uk/shop/mobile-phones/whats-hot/
Google’s Forecast For A Speedier Internet
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle is currently the top search engine company in the industry, both in terms of market share and technology. To reach the top spot in an Industry which analysts predict could balloon in to a multi-billion dollar one, it took a Google that has an abundant supply of innovation, great foresight and to a big extent, a stealthily-developed arsenal of one the best and most advanced Search Engine Technology the whole Industry has ever seen (or not seen, since Google is trying its best to keep competitors in the dark about the true extent and power of their biggest weapon – their clusters of datacenters). Although they’re at the front of the pack right now, Google and its army of engineers are in no way sitting on their laurels. Innovation is what brought them where they are now, and innovation is definitely what they’re continually using to bring the company forward. Google’s engineers are continually working on ways to improve their search engine’s performance and to give additional features that will enhance user experience.
Although it could be very easy to miss because of its sheer simplicity, speed is one of the key reasons why Google is number one. They understood early on that in order to provide a top-notch user experience, search results must be delivered to the user in the shortest time possible. Even when on a dial up connection, Google has designed its search engine in such a way that the web search results appear in a snap. One might say that Google has perfected the speed aspect of search engine results delivery, but displaying the list of results is just half of the story. What happens when a user clicks on the result is also an important component in the overall experience of the search engine user. Google therefore wants to improve on the Internet for the user searching for information. Improving the speed of the Internet for the users is also important to Google’s other mission: to bring software applications that a user uses from the desktop to the web. The idea of network computing is something that is not entirely new, but it is only lately that we are seeing a start (albeit still slow and not without its own share of challenges) towards the right direction. Products like Gmail, Google spreadsheets, Google Calendar and Writely are testament to this Company mission.
So now we know that Google wants to deliver a user experience in a much faster way than what the current Internet technology has to offer. Now we move on to the how question. Or, how Google intends to improve the speed at which information is retrieved and delivered to the user.
We’ll start with what Google is doing now to address the problem of speed, moving on later on the company’s future plans, clues of which can be found in the company’s patent applications.
Web page pre-fetching is one method that is generally used in increasing the speed at which a web page is accessed and Google is using it in now in its search engine. Users using Firefox browser to search Google may have already felt the effect of pre-fetching without them knowing it. Google currently pre-fetches the top items in the list of search results especially if the algorithm has determined that it is most likely to be clicked by the user. Pre-fetching a web page means that the browser will download a web page to the user’s computer even before the user has clicked on the link to it such that when the user actually clicks the link, the page is loaded quickly from user’s computer memory.
The Google web accelerator is another Google product that aims to speed up the Internet experience for the users. It speeds up the speed of Internet users on broadband using a desktop component and dedicated Google servers to cache content and compress certain data before it is sent to the user GWA also uses a more aggressive pre-fetching feature that works not only on Google search result pages but also on other pages that the user is using.
The Google web accelerator and the page pre-fetching feature of the Google search engine are two methods currently being used by Google in bringing a speedier Internet experience to the user, but there are a lot more that Google is doing in its labs to make the Internet even faster, or more specifically in some cases, the speed at which information is delivered to the user. Search being the second most popular activity done by users on the Internet, speed improvements on information retrieval and delivery is an important improvement on the user experience of many Internet users.
“Predictive information retrieval” and “anticipated query generation and processing in a search engine” -two patent applications by the search company, says a lot about how Google aims to improve the search experience by hinging on one thing: anticipating and predicting what the user is looking for. The focus of the patent application mentioned is returning search results faster and more personalized for the user.
The search engine that Google wants to develop will capture the keyboard characters as they are entered by the user, then sends partial queries to the Google servers that are actually predicted by an algorithm based on what it thinks that the user is actually looking for. This prediction is based on a list of words found on one or more dictionaries which can differ from one user to user. The search engine can therefore predict what you are looking for based both on what other people are looking for and a personalized profile that Google can make out of what it knows about the user. This can include the user’s search history or other factors. Google can then display the list of suggested keywords to the user and in some cases, actual search results. Predictive information retrieval when perfected will make searching experience speedier for the user, and will smartly optimized the work being done by the search engine.
Google has a lot to gain in a speedy Internet, that’s why it’s also investing a lot of money and engineer time towards this goal. Whatever Google delivers to the table to improve the way users use the Internet, it is a sure win for its users and customers. In the same way that we don’t know how we managed to live in a world of dial up connection now that we’re on broadband, we might be surprised in what the future will be offering in harnessing more the speed potential of the Internet.
The Gmatrix Has You: Google?s Brilliant Conspiracy to Dominate the World Wide Web
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle’s mission, according to its corporate web site, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. “[1]. This may be their purpose, but they are financing this goal by dominating the long tail of the world wide web. Through its network of web properties, web applications and services, Google is brilliantly plotting to virtually own your online eye-time.
In a span of only 10 years, Google has grown from the graduate-level computer science project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin into the most valuable and pervasive network of properties and technologies on the world wide web.
Google’s properties include Google Search, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Code, Google Apps Partner Edition, iGoogle, Google Sites, YouTube, Maps, News, Shopping Groups, Books, Scholar, Finance, Blogger and too many others to list. There is scarcely a web site that Google does not touch in some way, whether it be via AdWords, AdSense, Analytics or Search.
Additionally, through the acquisition of technologies such as Urchin (now Google Analytics) and DoubleClick, Google is able to study how web users spend their time online, and position relevant advertising alongside nearly every piece of information that travels across the world wide web.
Google is also greatly extending its reach by offering a re-brandable version of Google Apps to Internet Service Providers, businesses, educational institutions and non-profit organizations. This strategic move allows Google to to expand its empire by offering improved infrastructure to the barbarians like the Romans did two thousand years ago.
In his book “Linked”[2], Albert-László Barabási explores the ideas of Graph Theory as they apply to various types of networks. An example of Graph Theory at work is the popular game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in which a player picks any random or obscure actor and another tries to connect them to Kevin Bacon is 6 links or less. Barabási explains, using Graph Theory, that there is nothing particularly unusual about Kevin Bacon’s position in Hollywood circles. In fact all entities or nodes in a given network are connected to all others by an astonishingly small number of links. For instance, Barabási found that every web page is connected to every other one of the billions of pages on the world wide web by an average of only 19 links or degrees of separation.
The close connection between all nodes in a graph, as Barabási explains, is possible due to what are known as Super Nodes[2], or nodes that have a very large number of links to other nodes. Super Nodes, within any graph, are the most important nodes because they connect all the others and shorten the distance between any two smaller nodes. This concept is exactly what Larry Page stumbled upon when he created the idea of PageRank[3]. Web pages or web sites with the most links are the super nodes of the world wide web. Google is arguably the largest of the super nodes on the world wide web. If the world wide web has a center, it is likely to be Google.
Google has discovered, however, that it can extend beyond being a super node to which all other nodes connect. By disseminating itself in the form of Analytics, AdSense, and AdWords, it can become part of every other node.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were negotiating with Wall Street underwriters to take Google public, there were many business experts who could not understand how their business model made money – or sense for that matter. [1] These experts, if you will pardon the pun, were rather short-sighted and missed the fact that Google is able to make money by what is known as the long tail, or selling a large number of items in small quantities.
In his book titled The Long Tail[4], Chris Anderson explains how a study of music downloads on Rhapsody demonstrates the long tail phenomenon. Mr. Anderson found that though the blockbuster hits, which account for 20% of music titles, may enjoy millions of downloads, the remianing 80% of titles or non-hits, when added together, account for a much larger volume of online music sales.
Google has masterfully positioned itself, through its vast network of online properties and tools and extensive reach, to capitalize on the long tail by earning a few pennies from the mouse clicks of billions of web users. The long tail applies to Google’s model because each text ad may only be clicked a few times, but there are many millions of ads and many billions of clicks.
All roads, as the saying goes, may lead to Rome, but on the world wide web, all nodes – and mouse clicks – lead to Google.
———————-1. http://www. google. com/corporate/ 2. Barabási, Albert-László. 2003. “Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. ” New York: Plume. 3. Vise, David A. , and Mark Malseed. The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time. Paperback ed. Dell Pub. , 2006. 4. Anderson, Chris (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 1-4013-0237-8.
Google Talk Creates Universally Available Voip Service
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle Talk Creates Universally Available VOiP Service
With the past record of Google’s ability to enter into and quickly dominate entirely new fields, an incursion by Google into new territory is definitely something worth taking seriously. Voice over Internet Protocol technology is no different, and right now Google appears to be making a play for a greater share of the VoIP market. There are several ways in which Google could come become a bigger player in the VoIP market. One of them is through its messenger service. Right now Google Talk is an instant messenger service that is capable of voice transmission, as well as its standard text transmission. It’s still limited to contacting other people using Google Talk and several other Instant Messenger services like GAIM, Trillian, iChat, Psi, and Adium.
That said though, Google supposedly has plans to make changes to Google Talk that would make it compatible with more traditional telephone systems. If that happens, it would obviously be much easier to get access to what would resemble a fully functional VoIP service simply by downloading a free program from Google.
This would, of course, have a major impact on established telephone service providers. Right now, one of the major impediments that VoIP technology has to becoming a major threat to conventional telecommunications companies is the fact that the VoIP services are either obscure and not as user friendly, or require the purchase of an actual monthly subscription. With Google Talk, neither of those factors would be an impediment. Google is well enough known to attract attention, the version of Google Talk that would interface with normal telecommunication systems would probably be relatively easy to use, and it would in all likelihood be free to download and not be subject to a monthly fee. This could make it a major threat to the conventional telecommunications system and the industry that relies on it being the means of choice for providing people with voice communication.
One thing that would get in the way of Google Talk becoming serious competition to commercial VoIP services would come from the fact that because of its nature the upcoming version of Google Talk would probably not have the kind if comprehensive features that you’d get with the big name VoIP services like Vonage, Skype, and Sun Rocket. Most of the larger VoIP providers include lots of extra features at no extra charge that make phone extremely convenient, and those extra features would be difficult to implement in the form of a small free ware program from Google.
Since the larger VoIP providers typically have things like voice mail, call waiting, call forwarding, conference calling, call blocking, caller ID, and call waiting to name only a few; Google Talk really wouldn’t be much of a threat to them. Some of the bigger VoIP services also even offer on the fly language translation which makes it easier to communicate with people in other parts of the world.
For these reasons it’s really unlikely that Google Talk would be a threat to other VoIP service providers. But Google also has a lot of unused bandwidth at its disposal and some of the most innovative minds in Silicon Valley. Therefore, if Google decided to launch a full blown VoIP service, the existing services would then be seriously threatened.
Could the Sports Illustrated Jinx, where teams and athletes featured on the cover famously flounder soon after publication; have spread to their fellow Time, Inc. weekly Time Magazine? This week the boys from Google are gracing Time’s cover and from their easy smiles (and a byline that mentions Internet domination) you’d think that the transformation is complete: Google has finally “pwned” us all! Well, a theory that there is some kind of jinx fits because Google seems to be getting it from all angles now. But with all the piling on, it’s important to remember that Google’s core business, search advertising, is still very much a winner.
In regards to lofty stock prices, it’s been said that the same breeze at the bottom of a mountain is a gale at the peak, meaning it doesn’t take much negativity to knock a few dollars off the price of a stock that’s performed well. And Google’s peak so far has been among the loftiest a corporation has ever experienced to date. Their success stuns – individuals netting billions, a stock price (NASD: GOOG) skyrocketing to $475 as influential analysts hint at future valuations of $1,000, $2000. Runaway success has been associated with Google since even before their IPO in November, 2004. This aura, however, may have fostered a false sense of invulnerability for the giant Mountainside, CA-based search engine.
ICMediaDirect. com, by virtue of being an online advertising company, has much to thank Google for, particularly the interest they generated in our field. Their brand recognition alone has served as advertising for our industry in recent years. Google was so hot for so long, that just being in a related space may have opened doors for us that might have otherwise been closed.
There have been some cracks in Google’s façade for some time, but little notice was given to them in the wake of relentless success. However, the record skipped last month when Google disappointed the public with their earnings and the stock sold off about 25% from its high. Still, public scrutiny was more focused on Google’s earnings, not their business.
That is, until Barron’s, the influential weekly financial newspaper, featured Google this past weekend. There was nothing playful on their cover, just the familiar Google logo being submerged into water, like the Titanic. The article makes a compelling case that Google’s success is overvalued.
Among the issues discussed was a genuine peril unique to search based advertising: click fraud. Barron’s wondered how anyone presently could gauge the depth of this problem when; a) this problem technically enriches Google, while robbing thousands of their customers, and b) its almost impossible to distinguish how much is committed. If Google knows, they’re not saying. So we see an incalculable problem within online advertising, the very business that’s finally measurable. Go figure.
But Barron’s mentioned other problems that are vexing Google, as well. The very guys on the cover of Time, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page along with CEO Eric Schmidt, are feverishly selling their stakes in the company as is the rest of top management. While much of these insider sales registered and scheduled for execution long ago – what’s truly disconcerting is that no insiders seem to be buying any stock in their company. It’s a spooky one-way street.
Even the puff piece in Time Magazine contained this loaded bon mot from Schmidt, “The company isn’t run for the long-term value of our shareholders but for the long-term value of our end users. ” I had to read the quote twice to make sure I had actually read it correctly and then again to make sure I could figure out what he meant by “end users”.
This is what the CEO of Google thinks of the people who’ve made him worth 10 figures. It made me think of Bill Murray’s character’s advice to the students at Rushmore Academy, “Take dead aim at the rich boys. Get them in the cross hairs, and take them down. ” Sorry, Eric, but this Robin Hood approach elicits this sort of reaction . . . especially when it is directed at the people who made them rich.
I believe that Google was rabidly over-hyped and is still overpriced, but it’s their chosen business, the one they perfected, and the one that I admire. Now that some Google bashing is somewhat en vogue, be sure some uninformed opinions will form. The same minds that assumed all things Internet were about to be ruled by King Google, they too will be claiming Internet advertising to be a false business, an unworthy venture.
This couldn’t be more wrong. One of the signatures of the Web 1. 0 bubble of 2000-2001 was that these overheated interactive companies weren’t making money. Not only were they unprofitable, many couldn’t even generate revenue. They were drenched with the promise of new technology and nothing else. Yes, the Internet was wondrous then, but making money off of it was not possible, at least not before some of those burn rates contributed to global warming. (Don’t laugh; check out the data, it matches perfectly. )
Then along comes the search wonder of Google. Google is merely an overpriced stock, not a collapsing bubble. Their contribution is both simple and stunning. They came up with little text boxes to correspond and link properly with searches on their network. That’s all.
99% of Google’s revenue comes from search advertising. While Barron’s was right to question whether this technology really warrants partnership with NASA for space exploration, the article also boils Google down to a machine that is merely “hawking ads” in providing contrast to Google’s self-billing as a global technology leader.
Search advertising made Google bigger than Coca-Cola in only a few short years. If that’s the end result of “hawking ads”, then Google is doing something right. Microsoft and Yahoo apparently want to hawk ads like Google, too, as Barron cites the increased and inevitable competition.
Google’s lesson for us at ICMediaDirect. com, and for anyone in Internet advertising, is that you cannot separate Google’s success from Google’s search. Everything else is a side story. Stock prices, jet planes, R&D (billions spent for that remaining 1%) – all of it serves to distract from this: 99% of Google’s revenue is derived from search advertising. Search advertising works.
This isn’t the next bubble burst, just a story of a company that did its job so blindingly well that the public overvalued its stock. Now it’s time for its stock price to cool off. I’m happy to see the sector grow more competitive. That’s terrific. I think that everyone, even Google’s shareholders, view this as a healthy sign for the search advertising industry, if not a certified validation.
Media Analyst
ICMediaDirect. comhttp://www. icmediadirect. com
e: joseph@icmediadirect. com
Google’s Forecast For A Speedier Internet
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle is currently the top search engine company in the industry, both in terms of market share and technology. To reach the top spot in an Industry which analysts predict could balloon in to a multi-billion dollar one, it took a Google that has an abundant supply of innovation, great foresight and to a big extent, a stealthily-developed arsenal of one the best and most advanced Search Engine Technology the whole Industry has ever seen (or not seen, since Google is trying its best to keep competitors in the dark about the true extent and power of their biggest weapon – their clusters of datacenters). Although they’re at the front of the pack right now, Google and its army of engineers are in no way sitting on their laurels. Innovation is what brought them where they are now, and innovation is definitely what they’re continually using to bring the company forward. Google’s engineers are continually working on ways to improve their search engine’s performance and to give additional features that will enhance user experience.
Although it could be very easy to miss because of its sheer simplicity, speed is one of the key reasons why Google is number one. They understood early on that in order to provide a top-notch user experience, search results must be delivered to the user in the shortest time possible. Even when on a dial up connection, Google has designed its search engine in such a way that the web search results appear in a snap. One might say that Google has perfected the speed aspect of search engine results delivery, but displaying the list of results is just half of the story. What happens when a user clicks on the result is also an important component in the overall experience of the search engine user. Google therefore wants to improve on the Internet for the user searching for information. Improving the speed of the Internet for the users is also important to Google’s other mission: to bring software applications that a user uses from the desktop to the web. The idea of network computing is something that is not entirely new, but it is only lately that we are seeing a start (albeit still slow and not without its own share of challenges) towards the right direction. Products like Gmail, Google spreadsheets, Google Calendar and Writely are testament to this Company mission.
So now we know that Google wants to deliver a user experience in a much faster way than what the current Internet technology has to offer. Now we move on to the how question. Or, how Google intends to improve the speed at which information is retrieved and delivered to the user.
We’ll start with what Google is doing now to address the problem of speed, moving on later on the company’s future plans, clues of which can be found in the company’s patent applications.
Web page pre-fetching is one method that is generally used in increasing the speed at which a web page is accessed and Google is using it in now in its search engine. Users using Firefox browser to search Google may have already felt the effect of pre-fetching without them knowing it. Google currently pre-fetches the top items in the list of search results especially if the algorithm has determined that it is most likely to be clicked by the user. Pre-fetching a web page means that the browser will download a web page to the user’s computer even before the user has clicked on the link to it such that when the user actually clicks the link, the page is loaded quickly from user’s computer memory.
The Google web accelerator is another Google product that aims to speed up the Internet experience for the users. It speeds up the speed of Internet users on broadband using a desktop component and dedicated Google servers to cache content and compress certain data before it is sent to the user GWA also uses a more aggressive pre-fetching feature that works not only on Google search result pages but also on other pages that the user is using.
The Google web accelerator and the page pre-fetching feature of the Google search engine are two methods currently being used by Google in bringing a speedier Internet experience to the user, but there are a lot more that Google is doing in its labs to make the Internet even faster, or more specifically in some cases, the speed at which information is delivered to the user. Search being the second most popular activity done by users on the Internet, speed improvements on information retrieval and delivery is an important improvement on the user experience of many Internet users.
“Predictive information retrieval” and “anticipated query generation and processing in a search engine” -two patent applications by the search company, says a lot about how Google aims to improve the search experience by hinging on one thing: anticipating and predicting what the user is looking for. The focus of the patent application mentioned is returning search results faster and more personalized for the user.
The search engine that Google wants to develop will capture the keyboard characters as they are entered by the user, then sends partial queries to the Google servers that are actually predicted by an algorithm based on what it thinks that the user is actually looking for. This prediction is based on a list of words found on one or more dictionaries which can differ from one user to user. The search engine can therefore predict what you are looking for based both on what other people are looking for and a personalized profile that Google can make out of what it knows about the user. This can include the user’s search history or other factors. Google can then display the list of suggested keywords to the user and in some cases, actual search results. Predictive information retrieval when perfected will make searching experience speedier for the user, and will smartly optimized the work being done by the search engine.
Google has a lot to gain in a speedy Internet, that’s why it’s also investing a lot of money and engineer time towards this goal. Whatever Google delivers to the table to improve the way users use the Internet, it is a sure win for its users and customers. In the same way that we don’t know how we managed to live in a world of dial up connection now that we’re on broadband, we might be surprised in what the future will be offering in harnessing more the speed potential of the Internet.
The Gmatrix Has You: Google’s Brilliant Conspiracy to Dominate the World Wide Web
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle’s mission, according to its corporate web site, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. “[1]. This may be their purpose, but they are financing this goal by dominating the long tail of the world wide web. Through its network of web properties, web applications and services, Google is brilliantly plotting to virtually own your online eye-time.
In a span of only 10 years, Google has grown from the graduate-level computer science project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin into the most valuable and pervasive network of properties and technologies on the world wide web.
Google’s properties include Google Search, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Code, Google Apps Partner Edition, iGoogle, Google Sites, YouTube, Maps, News, Shopping Groups, Books, Scholar, Finance, Blogger and too many others to list. There is scarcely a web site that Google does not touch in some way, whether it be via AdWords, AdSense, Analytics or Search.
Additionally, through the acquisition of technologies such as Urchin (now Google Analytics) and DoubleClick, Google is able to study how web users spend their time online, and position relevant advertising alongside nearly every piece of information that travels across the world wide web.
Google is also greatly extending its reach by offering a re-brandable version of Google Apps to Internet Service Providers, businesses, educational institutions and non-profit organizations. This strategic move allows Google to to expand its empire by offering improved infrastructure to the barbarians like the Romans did two thousand years ago.
In his book “Linked”[2], Albert-László Barabási explores the ideas of Graph Theory as they apply to various types of networks. An example of Graph Theory at work is the popular game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in which a player picks any random or obscure actor and another tries to connect them to Kevin Bacon is 6 links or less. Barabási explains, using Graph Theory, that there is nothing particularly unusual about Kevin Bacon’s position in Hollywood circles. In fact all entities or nodes in a given network are connected to all others by an astonishingly small number of links. For instance, Barabási found that every web page is connected to every other one of the billions of pages on the world wide web by an average of only 19 links or degrees of separation.
The close connection between all nodes in a graph, as Barabási explains, is possible due to what are known as Super Nodes[2], or nodes that have a very large number of links to other nodes. Super Nodes, within any graph, are the most important nodes because they connect all the others and shorten the distance between any two smaller nodes. This concept is exactly what Larry Page stumbled upon when he created the idea of PageRank[3]. Web pages or web sites with the most links are the super nodes of the world wide web. Google is arguably the largest of the super nodes on the world wide web. If the world wide web has a center, it is likely to be Google.
Google has discovered, however, that it can extend beyond being a super node to which all other nodes connect. By disseminating itself in the form of Analytics, AdSense, and AdWords, it can become part of every other node.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were negotiating with Wall Street underwriters to take Google public, there were many business experts who could not understand how their business model made money – or sense for that matter. [1] These experts, if you will pardon the pun, were rather short-sighted and missed the fact that Google is able to make money by what is known as the long tail, or selling a large number of items in small quantities.
In his book titled The Long Tail[4], Chris Anderson explains how a study of music downloads on Rhapsody demonstrates the long tail phenomenon. Mr. Anderson found that though the blockbuster hits, which account for 20% of music titles, may enjoy millions of downloads, the remianing 80% of titles or non-hits, when added together, account for a much larger volume of online music sales.
Google has masterfully positioned itself, through its vast network of online properties and tools and extensive reach, to capitalize on the long tail by earning a few pennies from the mouse clicks of billions of web users. The long tail applies to Google’s model because each text ad may only be clicked a few times, but there are many millions of ads and many billions of clicks.
All roads, as the saying goes, may lead to Rome, but on the world wide web, all nodes – and mouse clicks – lead to Google.
———————-1. http://www. google. com/corporate/ 2. Barabási, Albert-László. 2003. “Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. ” New York: Plume. 3. Vise, David A. , and Mark Malseed. The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time. Paperback ed. Dell Pub. , 2006. 4. Anderson, Chris (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 1-4013-0237-8.
