Sunday, August 15, 2010

China Is The Reason Google Did Verizon

net neutrality world logoImage via WikipediaWhile I have been busy blogging for Reshma 2010 over at my other blog Barackface, the biggest tech story I seem to have missed is the Google-Verizon pact on Net Neutrality. For the longest time Google was the loudest voice for net neutrality. What gives? What has brought about this about turn?

I think Google's losing fight in its China tussle is the reason. Google did the right thing, but it did not get the tech industry support it expected. China kept hammering Google, and kept hammering some more. Soon enough the tussle was no longer even news. That loneliness got to Google. And so this is Google saying to the American people, if the Chinese people being denied free speech does not bother you, maybe it would not bother you either if you were yourselves denied net neutrality. How do you like them apples?

Sergey Brin's Is The Right Stand

Google, Verizon And Net Neutrality
New York Times: The Google/Verizon Payment Plan: The F.C.C. should have an expanded role in regulating what is rapidly becoming the most important channel of communication in the world. ...... The Google/Verizon proposal gives broadband providers lots of leeway to offer preferential treatment to some and to choke off others. ..... the two companies propose to exempt wireless communication from most government regulation — a serious error ...... the Verizon-Google proposal ..... Google, Verizon And Net Neutrality ..... propose freeing wireless broadband — the fastest growing part of the Internet — from any antidiscrimination restrictions..... Verizon and AT&T control about 60 percent of wireless subscribers and 80 percent of Americans live in areas with only two wireline broadband providers. Consumers will lose if wireless goes unregulated.....ensure that the open Internet survives into the future.
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Thursday, August 05, 2010

Google Does Not Need Social Envy

Image representing Slide as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBase
Microsoft could not have become Google. We should not be surprised Google has not been able to become Facebook. Facebook is not Twitter. Twitter is not FourSquare.

I have been arguing at this blog that it just is not in Google's DNA to do social. Being very good at information necessarily clashes with you becoming very good at social. There is a clash.

But social is big and getting bigger. What is Google to do?

I think Google should focus on the information and search aspects of social.

I'd love to have a ridiculously good blog search engine. And I'd love to have ridiculously good Twitter search results.

And Facebook is not doing Android, Google is. That is big one.

The Chrome OS is a really big one.

It is not possible for one company to come up with everything. That is unrealistic. That is not possible. Google is still doing cutting edge work. But it is not doing all cutting edge work. That is reality.



Om Malik: Slide, Vic Gundotra, The Un-Social Reality of Google
The world’s largest search engine covets a key to the magical kingdom called the social web. It would do anything to become part of that exclusive club that, for now, is the domain of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and to some extent, Twitter..... Having failed to hire a head of social, Google decided to put its man for all seasons, Vic Gundotra, in charge of social. .... Social is more than just features ..... what it can’t do is internalize empathy. It doesn’t know feelings. It doesn’t comprehend that relationships are more than a mere algorithm .... the social web is moving toward a future where serendipity replaces search.....Buying Slide, investing in Zynga or launching Google Me are great ideas in theory, just as is the idea of me playing baseball!
Erich Schmidt: ReadWriteWeb: Google CEO Schmidt: "People Aren't Ready for the Technology Revolution"
"There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003," Schmidt said, "but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing...People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them." .... user generated content .... "If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence," Schmidt said, "we can predict where you are going to go." ...... "Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? ..... diseases and other crises will become predictable as well ..... "In our lifetimes," Schmidt says, "we'll go from a small number of people having access to information, to 5 billion people having all the world's knowledge in their native language."
Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years
Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age" .....Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly. ....... Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away. ..... "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?" ..... Not discussed were distributed social networking, structured data, recommendations, presence data and other factors that could complicate Google's plans.
Is Spamming Twitter Good Google SEO?
tweeting the same link over and over can boost a page's rank ..... Too many tweets over a certain period of time will be noticed by Google's algorithm. Tweets are just one of many "signals" Google uses to determine rank and cannot be as easily gamed
Google Says It "Overestimated" Complete Block of Web Search in China [UPDATED]
Google had been automatically redirecting google.cn to google.hk, its uncensored site in Hong Kong, but stopped that practice earlier this month and simply included a link to google.hk on the google.cn site in order to pacify Chinese lawmakers.
Android Phones Go to War
a social-networking type of display where soldiers interact as "buddies" and track each others' movements on the battlefield. ..... soldiers would carry smartphones with them into battle ..... Military satellites can focus in on minute features you can't see when using consumer-grade technology like Google Earth, so the software installed on RATS could potentially zero in on facial features or be used to read license plates..... the Indian military is another potential customer for this Android-based technology
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Whatever Happened To Google Wave?

Image representing Eric Schmidt as depicted in...Image by Eric Schmidt / Google via CrunchBase
CNet: Eric Schmidt On The Demise Of Google Wave
"Our policy is we try things," the Google CEO said, hours after the company announced it was halting development of the complex real-time communication tool. "We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new." ..... "As a culture we don't over-promote products...we tend to sort of release them and then see what happens." .... a panel in which he said that society is not ready for all the changes technology is foisting upon it..... a range of issues ranging from Android and Chrome OS to China to competition with Microsoft to a rumored deal with Verizon on Net neutrality.
My personal excitement over Google Wave ended on a personally unpleasant note. But that might have saved me some time.

Google Wave For The Masses
I Now Have Google Wave
Anil Dash On Google Wave
Bill Gates, Chrome OS, Natal, Wave
Blog Carnival: Google Wave
Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me
Google Wave Protest
Google Wave API Google Group: Stalinist Mindset
The Google Wave Developer Community Will Be Vibrant
Five Blind Men And Google Wave
A Little Trouble At The Google Wave API Google Group
Lessons From The Open Source Community For The Wave Community
Google Wave Developer Community: Asking For A Culture?
Google Wave: Organizations Will Go Topsy Turvy
Google Wave: Enormous Buzz
Possible Google Wave Applications And Innovations
Google Wave Architecture: Designed For Mass, Massive, Global Innovation
The Google Wave Architecture
Google Wave Ripples
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today
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Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Amazon's Amazing Cloud

Larry Elllison on stage.Image via Wikipedia
GigaOm: How Big is Amazon’s Cloud Computing Business? Find Out in 2010, AWS will generated about $500 million in revenues and will grow this to $750 million by 2011. By 2014, it would bring in close to $2.54 billion in revenues. ..... the total market for AWS type services .. will eventually grow to $15-to-$20 billion in 2014 ...... the total global cloud market in 2010 will be $22 billion and $55 billion in 2014..... Amazon was smart to bet early and bet big on the cloud computing opportunity

Larry Ellison on the Charlie Rose show in the late 1990s in an aside derided Amazon as being in the business of "selling books." But Amazon through its amazing cloud service has gone on to revolutionize computing in ways Jeff Bezos never imagined when he started out. He started out wanting to sell books. Amazon built its infrastructures for its own use, but upon building realized it had too much excess capacity. What to do? Necessity is the mother of invention, like the cliche goes.

There are so many big, wonderful dot coms in existence today that owe their existence to Amazon. Jeff Bezos took the electricity out of the equation. You don't need to have your own personal generator. You simply plug in.

Software as utility, hardware as utility: these were once revolutionary concepts.

We need some major revolutions in the ISP business so all humanity can come online. That is very important to the future of computing.

You Can Create An Android App Too, Anyone Can
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Post Wintel

MUNICH, GERMANY - OCTOBER 07:  Chief Executive...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
The Economist: The End Of Wintel THEY were the Macbeths of information technology (IT): a wicked couple who seized power and abused it in bloody and avaricious ways. ...... the two firms’ supposed love of monopoly profits and dead rivals. ..... increasingly seen as yesterday’s tyrants. Rumours persist that a coup is brewing to oust Steve Ballmer ..... “Intel Architecture”, the set of rules governing how software interacts with the processor it runs on. ..... the Wintel marriage is crumbling. ...... The Wintel marriage is now threatened, oddly enough, by technological progress. Processors grow ever smaller and more powerful; internet and wireless connections keep speeding up. This has created both centripetal and centrifugal forces, which are pushing computing into data centres (huge warehouses full of servers) and onto mobile devices— ...... The shift to mobile computing and data centres (also known as “cloud computing”) has speeded up the “verticalisation” of the IT industry. ...... now firms are becoming more vertically integrated. ...... Apple .. is building a huge data centre ....... Having lost its battle with the European Commission, for instance, Microsoft must now give Windows users in the European Union a choice of which web browser to install. ...... Microsoft has made big bets on cloud computing. It has already built a global network of data centres and developed an operating system in the cloud called Azure. The firm has put many of its own applications online, even Office, albeit with few features. What is more, Microsoft has made peace with the antitrust authorities and even largely embraced open standards. ....... Microsoft’s mobile business is in disarray. ...... in tablet computers, Microsoft is behind, too ..... Paul Otellini .. is pinning his hopes on a new family of processors called Atom. Rather than making these chips ever more powerful, Intel is making them ever cheaper and less power-hungry ....... ARM’s chips guzzle little power and cost much less than Intel’s, because its licensing fees are low and most customers use foundries (contract chipmakers) to make them. .... Intel’s position seems safe as long as Moore’s Law holds ..... Microsoft has yet to deliver a competitive version of Windows for smart-phones and tablets ..... Meego, an open-source operating system for mobile devices. Microsoft, by cuddling up to ARM, will be able to build chips of its own. ..... Oracle, Cisco and IBM will vie for corporate customers; Apple and Google will scramble for individuals (see table). IT, like the world, is becoming multipolar.

Like Bill Gates once said, success is a lousy teacher. But that does not explain it fully, or even a big part of it. This is about the tectonic forces in innovation, in technology. This is ultimately about hurricane size clouds.

The big company of one era does not end up also being the big company of another era. That is the nature of the beast.

Wintel was a PC era marriage. And the PC era has been ending for a while now. You end up facing a classic problem. How do you lose your love for the big revenue sources and go for the little innovative products that might (or might not) become big tomorrow, but if they become big, they will become big by eating into your current big products? No wonder it is almost always some outsider doing that munching and crunching.

As IT fans out into ever larger data centers and ever more powerful mobile devices, we have entered the era of welcome fragmentation. The PC used to be the center of the computing universe. The PC will still be around, but it will be just one creature in the vast tech ecosystem. It will be just one galaxy in the tech universe.

Like is supposed to happen in functional capitalism: the consumer wins.

The Economist
  1. World economy: The rising power of the Chinese worker
  2. Bullfighting in Catalonia: The land of the ban
  3. Turkey and its rebel Kurds: An endless war
  4. Wealth, poverty and compassion: The rich are different from you and me
  5. Climate change: Warming world
  6. Lexington: Arizona, rogue state
  7. Afghanistan: Don't go back
  8. China and the death penalty: High executioners
  9. Unemployment benefits: Read this shirt
  10. America, Afghanistan and Pakistan: Kayani's gambit
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Social, Gaming, Email

Nielsen Wire: What Americans Do Online: Social Media And Games Dominate Activity Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent just a year ago (43 percent increase) ... Americans spend a third their online time (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging. ..... “Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities – social networking, playing games and emailing .... Online games overtook personal email to become the second most heavily used activity behind social networks
I like how blogs have been included in the top category of social. I am not surprised. That speaks to my experience. I have said time and again at this blog that Blogger continues to be my social media platform of choice.

The big news is search is no longer king. That begs the question, will social as we know it still be king in 2015? I doubt that. These titles are not known to last. There is always another hit movie. Social will stay big, but at some point it is going to recede into the background like search. Search used to be king. Who is the next king? You have to ask. (This Is Not Happening: King Dennis)

Or maybe search was never king, it was email. Email is social. If the next king will also be in the social space, that has to confirm our suspicions that the internet is primarily a communication tool. The internet is one big telephone. The internet is one big telephone more than one big library. But the trick is to be able to blur that line and claim it is one big telephone.

November 2005: Email, Search, News

Google keeps trying and keeps failing at social. Social is not in Google's DNA. But info is. Where Google could really shine is at social search. Give me a ridiculously good blog search engine. Give me ridiculously good Twitter search results. Google could do well in social, if it brought search to the table. Google's challenge is to blur the line between the telephone and the library and make claim the internet is one big library. That is tough to do.


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Saturday, July 31, 2010

YouTube: 15 Minutes Are Much Better

YouTubeImage via Wikipedia
Five minutes were too short. My video sharing platform of choice was Google Video where I have uploaded tons of hour long videos. Then Google went ahead and bought YouTube and basically shut down Google Video. I don't think I have uploaded any new videos online since then.

But now I might take a second look. Five minutes felt like just enough time for teaser videos. 15 minutes are much better. 15 minutes might actually be better than 60 minutes.

Video-sharing website YouTube increases video upload limit to 15 minutes
YouTube now supports 15 minutes of fame San Francisco Chronicle
YouTube Gives Users 15 Minutes of Upload Time Tehran Times
YouTube wants your 15 minutes of fame CNN
YouTube Gives Users Their 15 Minutes of Fame New York Times (blog) As of Thursday, you can subject your friends and family to 50 percent more of your baby making that cute cooing noise or your dog doing that funny dance..... is increasing the limit to 15 minutes — the improvement requested most often by YouTube users ..... in June, a federal judge threw out Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement suit against YouTube, ruling that the site was not responsible for the behavior of its users.
YouTube bumps video limit to 15 minutes CNET (blog)

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