It looks like the Google Buzz feature roll out has been a great success for Google as they are applying once again the same strategy on Google Voice: Just Stuff it in Gmail. It really makes sense to use such a large loyal user base for mass roll out at the same time without the need to fill applications and get familiar with a new platform from the end-user side.
As of today, you can call any phone from within Gmail. You will need to install the voice and video plug-in
According to Google, calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free in 2010 and low rates on international calls ($0.02 per min to major european countries including the U.K., France, Germany as well as China and Japan. You can check the complete Google Voice calling rate here.
It’s been hyped for the last 15 hours all over the internet about Justin Bieber song U Smile getting slowed down 800% resulting in a 35 min epic music. What’s the big deal? Even Shamantis, the author of this music work, is not fascinated by what he did, not claiming “to be any sort of MY OWN talent resonating. All I did was put the song through Paulstretch. Anyone can do that” as he posted on soundcloud
and here’s the original version
The slowed down version went viral with over 500,000 plays in less than one day, but there are actually 2 other players in this story that got hyped even more. Of course, Justin Beiber himself because it’s obvious that one would want to listen to the original song and since most people haven’t heard about it earlier so you can image the number of hits and searches. The other player happens to be PaulStretch, the open source software which was used to create the slowed down version. Here you can see the trend
Every year I wait April 1st to see what the team at Google have come up with ideas. PigeonRank, Google writer, Gmail paper, … were interesting and innovative and shows that Google puts efforts into creating April fools themes. This year, it was more like a disappointment.
Missing vowels from Gmail’s login page
Another prank was Google changing their name on the search engine to TOPEKA ! Now this one is more of political aspect than humor. Perhaps a Google response to “Think Big Topeka” and the huge campaign that the community of Topeka has started to attract Google’s attention to bring the 1 Gbit Fiber experiment.
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.
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…
