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.
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.
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.
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.
Google released their Q3 earnings report, which seems to be very good.
Here’s briefly some of the figures from the report
EPS $5.89 (better than analysts predictions) Net revenue of $4.4 billion Revenue up 7% sequentially Google Sites revenue up 8% Paid clicks up 14% sequential Price per click drop a modest 6% Free cash flow was $2.5 billion
If you are interested in more details , you can check the complete report here
However, what is really interesting to show is actually the graph from SiliconAllayer Insider showing Google’s free cash flow trend.
If this trend continue they will reach Microsoft in about a year. Microsoft has been dominating the software market for personal computers with their windows and office packages. Their dominance is not going to last long and I have several reasons to prove it. 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 »
