Octazen Solutions is a two employees startup company in Malaysia developing a contact importer software that allow sites like Facebook to grow exponentially in users. A feature like Friend Find where a registered user, by simply entering his email address and password, will be able to send an invite to his entire contact list. No wonder that Facebook has more than 400 million users where 250 million added in the last year alone.
Last week, Facebook acquired Octazen Solutions. This “talent acquisition” as described on GigaOM, means that Octazen engineers are going to shutdown their business operations to join Facebook as it says on the company’s website. Read More »

Google launches a new set of services this week that will challenge many startup companies core products as Gigaom puts it. I see it as a good move for the benefit of technology because Google is one the companies that have the means to make a change at a large scale. Startup companies had the features for a while but the end users didn’t know about them. It is true that the competition is harder now in the mobile application marketplace but very important to see significant improvements. Here is an initial list of the features launched by Google:
Real time search
They have integrated public updates from Twitter, Facebook Pages in the results pages. Updates from MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and identi.ca will be also available.

Google Goggles
Google Goggles is a visual search app for Android phones that will allow web search using pictures from the mobile camera. More information about this service is available here.

Voice search
So far the supported languages are English, Mandarin and now Japanese and will soon support more languages. This is a very interesting feature because it will boost mobile web usage. As I explained in an early post, typing text on a mobile device is not cool. In the end, Google wants to support live language translation in a conversation.

These are interesting services for the end user but this is also means more data for Google from which they can create new revenue streams.

Since the creation of the web, searching for information irrespective of the type has been depending on text input to formulate the search query. This approach was good enough since the information was mainly text based. When media content started spreading drastically over the web, photos and videos and as they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, the same keyword approach was extended to index photos, music and videos based on the context in which they appear. Google has proven that this method is successful. And from the user’s point of view, it’s very convenient, because typing text on a keyboard is the easiest way to build a query. However, as we are moving more and more towards mobile broadband, other input alternatives must be considered to build a search query. Despite the touch screen and the great user experience it has introduced to mobile users, it can never be as good as a normal keyboard due to the small size of the mobile device.
Furthermore, a mobile user expects to build a search query even in a faster way than typing text on a PC keyboard, like speech commands for example. Another input possibility in a mobile phone, is the lens of the camera which allows user to get information about photos or views without having to describe it by text. This ambition is not new, many companies have been investing in image recognition techniques for years. To match and identify similar pictures is a hard technical problem but the search giant seems to have an answer: Google Goggles. Read More »

Unusual and weird stories are always viral because it is simply the nature of human behavior to seek the unusual and odd in life. Many people have searched this morning for a town called “Argleton” on Google Maps and got a match to a small village just off the A59 near Ormskirk, Lancashire, United Kingdom. However, Argleton doesn’t actually exist.

Read More »

A very interesting presentation on Internet and the economy presented by Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker at Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday.

BusinessInsider summarizes the presentation as follows

Mobile internet is bigger than you think.
iPhone is becoming THE mobile platform.
Social media, mobile devices are changing communications and commerce.
Mobile internet trends in Japan show how the future will be. (Hint: Not much mobile advertising)
Carriers will be crushed by demand.
The Walled Gardens collapse.
Apple wins, Google maybe wins, Research In Motion withers

The number of mobile subscriptions is actually expected to reach 50 billion subscription in 2020 (even bigger than what Mary thinks, 10+ billions is mentioned in her slides). Apple is no doubt a major driver, but Google services are not to be forgotten. Also the android platform is being pushed and adopted by many manufacturers. Despite the iPhone’s popularity, I think it is still possible for other handsets to make a breakthrough. To a large extent, I seem to agree with Meeker about mobile internet trends, except for mobile advertising.

Take a deeper look into Mary’s presentation here and let me know what you think Read More »

It is confirmed that Microsoft reached a deal with Twitter and Facebook to add real-time updates into their search engine Bing. However, it only took few hours for Google to announce that they also got a similar deal with Twitter. No clear information is yet available regarding Facebook.

You can try the beta version of Bing Twitter implementation here, but don’t be surprised when you get the following message if your locale is not set united states.

TWITTER BETA

Sorry!
Bing Twitter Search is not available in this locale.

If you wish to access Bing Twitter Search, change your locale to United States.

Note: Changing your locale will affect all Bing pages. To change your locale in the future, click the United States link at the top right corner of any Bing page.

The feed from Facebook is said to work pretty much in the same way as with Twitter, however this is not available yet since Facebook has not opened its feed to public and they “need to be very careful about making sure the correct data is streamed.”, said Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg.
The weird thing in the story that Sandberg doesn’t mention any money involved in this deal, which of course I don’t really believe.

Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook gives an interesting presentation about “High performance at massive scale – lessons learned at Facebook” held at the center of networked systems at UC San Diego.

Some impressive facts presented

Facebook have 300M active users (no big secret)
They now have 30,000 server, adding new capacity daily.
They store 80 billion images (20 billion images in 4 sizes).
They serve 600,000 photos/second.
They generate more than 25 terabytes logging data per day
They have 230 engineers on staff, which means a ratio of more than 1 million active users per engineer…

Watch the webcast below Read More »

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. The developers of Google Maps started working on the Wave project in 2007, in Sydney, Australia and they presented a live demo of Google Wave earlier this year at Google I/O Event, the developer conference that was held in 27-28 May, in San Fransisco.
Last week, Google sent out 100,000 invites to Google Wave – I didn’t get one yet
But if you are interesting to learn more about Google Wave and I suggest you take a look at least at the 10 minutes overview video because this will be the next thing on the web. As Google Wave developers said it, the product answers a simple question

What email would look like if it was invented today?

Check out this video by Stephanie and Greg, product managers of Google Wave

Did you get excited by the overview video? Are you ready for some more actions? Here’s the 80 minutes demonstration from Google I/O Read More »

Watch Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, talking about the future of web TV. The points of success of the next generation web TV according to Hastings

• Broadband (already available)
• High definition screen (already available)
• Pointer instead of the usual 100 buttons TV remote (like in Nintendo Wii)
• Built-in Browser in TV sets (most game consoles already have built in browsers however with limited functionalities and codecs)
• Video codecs support like Adobe Flash

Pretty interesting talk, watch the video Read More »

From the first day, Facebook came to public it faced rumors and complaints. One of the most serious complaints was actually filed November 19, 2008 by Leader Technologies, Inc in the United States district court for the district of Delaware for infringement of U.S Patent No. 7,139,761 in this district. This patent relates to a method and system for the management and storage of electronic information.

According to the latest public Court Order document dated 4th September 2009 (embedded below), Facebook objections were denied and the company will still need to produce its entire source code for Leader’s review no later than September 15, 2009
Read More »