It is being reported that the man who held the toughest job at Google, Shashi Seth, head of monetization for YouTube has left the company for greener pastures - after only a year on the job.
"I think part of being a Googler is that you like smaller environments, and I think Google got a little big for me," says Seth.
This is yet another indication that monetizing video is a lot harder than many thought it would be despite YouTube's huge viral popularity and lead in the online video sharing market. Irrespective of the fact that YouTube made $80 million in '07 and is estimated to make $125 million this year, the Viacom lawsuit is a stumbling block. Even if Google manages to keep copyright violation payoffs to the $400 million allocated for that purpose in their $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, they have a long video row to hoe in terms of pulling more than a revenue pittance per video view. YouTube is experimenting with video ads with text overlay ads, expanded text ads, placement targetting image ads, and click-to-play video ads.
There has been a steady stream of exoduses from Google in the last year. In March Sheryl Sandberg, Google's Vice President of Global Online Sales left to become the chief operating officer at Facebook. In November, Gokul Rajaram, aka Google Adsense God, who was involved with the launch of Google Adsense quit. “When we started AdSense, it was just me and four engineers. The night before we launched, Sergey spent five hours with me testing the system and pointing out bugs” said Gokul. Not too long ago, Bret Taylor, who was one of the key people behind Google Maps left to start Friendfeed.
Facebook announced today that it will be opening up its code. Dubbed Facebook Open Platform or fbOpen, this move is viewed as being in direct competition to Google's OpenSocial which is also an open source development platform for creating social apps.
"The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to Facebook Open Platform like your own tags and API methods." says Ami Vora, Senior Platform Manager, Facebook. The release is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) and the rest of the code is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).
Facebook has over 24,000 applications built on its platform, over 400,000 developers building new social apps, and about 140 applications added to their directory per day.
Billionaire takeover strategist Carl Icahn is looking at a possible play to force Yahoo back to the table with Microsoft to sell the company at a big profit. The news today sent Yahoo up about 1.30 and YHOO is still rising in after market trading.
Given that the prevailing stock price of Yahoo is well below Microsoft's top offer of $33 per share, this play has only one key challenge - making sure you can get Microsoft back to the table. Frankly I think that is not much of a hurdle to overcome as I think Microsoft Steve Ballmer's decision to drop the bid was 1) Mostly strategic to force the issue and 2) Will be quicly overcome if Icahn can seat a more sympathetic board of directors.
I'm guessing that Ballmer will have two basic requirements to return to the Yahoo table: No Google deals and no more Jerry Yang. Although it would be sad to see a founder of Yang's vision leave the company one does not need to feel too sorry for him. A Microsoft merger would value his stock close to 100% higher than the lows of a few months back, netting Yang in the neighborhood of an extra half billion over that low price.
Of course Yang has seen Yahoo trading at over $100 and I think part of his malaise over the deal is a longing for the good old pre-Google days where Yahoo was the high flyer in terms of value and buzz. Sorry Jerry, but despite Yahoo's suberb ongoing work in many aspects of the online experience, those days ... are ... gone.
Most analysts do not feel Yahoo can sustain even the current price levels without the "threat" of a takeover looming, which is propping up a share price that will likely drop to $20 or below if Yahoo had no serious takeover suitors. In fact YHOO was trading at about $18 per share a few months ago just before Microsoft bid which valued the internet empire at about 60% more than the market. Yet Yahoo argued this was not enough and the board, especially in the form of CEO Jerry Yang, went to great lengths to prevent the Microsoft Merger.
Icahn is no stranger to this takeover strategy and the graph above shows how successful it has been for him. Image Credit: Fortune Magazine Disclosure: Long on Yahoo
Maria Bartiromo at CNBC has a detailed interview with Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. The full transcript is here and below. I've noted some items below in quotes.
As we've noted here before, monetizing video and social media is very difficult. Schmidt confirms that is an ongoing challenge at Google:
... the whole social networking space has been harder for us tomonetize--that is, develop advertising businesses again--than some of theother--than some of the other spaces that we're in. It has to do what peopleare doing. When you think about it, you're in a social network, you'relooking at people's photos, you're figuring out where your friends are.You're not as likely to be purchasing a new car at the same time or purchasingclothes or purchasing a book or what have--whatever business that you're in.So the development of the advertising tools and techniques, literally theplatform, has been more difficult than we have thought. But we're working onit, and we're hopeful.
Regarding the explosive Mobile market, which clearly is a major focus for Google:
.... most people in most developed countries have a roughly 100percent coverage of mobile phones. So it really is a tremendous phenomenon. Over the next three or four years, there'll be more than another billion or somobile phones added. Eventually our numbers indicate that there'll be five or so billion mobile phones in a world of six billion or so. People, this is aphenomenon. It's an unprecedented reach, even greater than, for example,television, or even electricity in some cases. So that's a platform that we can exploit. Our mobile phone, both search traffic as well as advertising is growing very rapidly, and we think people will do more and more interesting things in mobile phones. And, I mean, small phones, big phones, big screens, things that don't look like a phone, things which are mobile.
Here is the full, unaltered transcript of that interview:
Maria Bartiromo, host: Eric, thanks so much for joining us.
Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO: Thank you for having me on again.
Bartiromo: Let's begin with this debate that seems to be brewing on Wall Street about growth. So the company grew 46 percent in the third quarter, 40 percent in the fourth quarter, 30 percent in the next quarter, and then sequentially 1 1/2 percent when you look quarter to quarter. How insulated would you say is Google to the economic slowdown or recession?
Schmidt: Well, the numbers you're using are year over year, quarter over quarter in the US. Globally, of course, we had good growth, and the US numbers are masked by the fact that, a year ago, we had a very strong quarterly growth of that quarter. So the real growth rate in the US is good, although overall growth rates are slowing, as they have for years. Just because of the scale and size of what we operate. The business has continued to be good.
Bartiromo: OK, because when you get to a certain size, it's really hard to sort of grind down more market share when you've already got 70 percent or get that much bigger, given the fact that the company is getting--you're a large business.
Schmidt: But we have--we have multiple ways in which we grow. Of course, more people use the Internet, more people are using electronic commerce on the Internet, more people are clicking on the ads, and also our ad technology is getting much, much better. And it's really any one of those will push us over the top in any given quarter; sometimes they all come together. We don't seem to be very sensitive to macroeconomics, at least right now. We don't seem to be very sensitive to things like recession. But we're very sensitive to how quickly do we bring in the new product improvement or something like that.
Bartiromo: The comScore data took everybody's estimates down, and this whole debate about whether it was accurate or not. How can you ensure that the growth occurs, even if people pull in their spending, if perhaps advertisers slow down on the budgets? I mean, is it fair to say that the hypergrowth of 2004 to '07 is--has been seen?
Schmidt: Well, as I said, if you think about it over a five- or six- or seven-year period, growth rates are slowing, as they have to. So I don't think it's a big shift. It's not, you know, today it was one way and tomorrow it's another. In our case, we focus on quality, and we have a very simple model. If we show fewer ads that are more targeted, those ads are worth more. So we're in this strange situation where we show a smaller number of ads and we make more money because we show better ads. And that's the secret of Google.
Bartiromo: Yes, that's what Mary Meeker was saying. She's saying, `Look, it could be that they're actually benefiting from a recession because they're monetizing the ads better.'
Schmidt: There's been--you you know, if you were running a business today, you would be looking very carefully at where is your marketing spend going? And we think that you'll choose to put your marketing spend on the thing that's most measurable, the thing that's most, you know--because you can always defer a branding campaign that may or may not work, but you want to get those customers and those leads right now, and that's what we do.
Bartiromo: Let's talk about DoubleClick. You acquired the company. How's the integration going?
Schmidt: Well, it just started. It started about three weeks ago. And what we're doing is we're taking their products and our products and integrating them so that people have better tools, advertisers have more, literally, ads, and publishers have more spots that they can publish information into. So it's the combination of all that that we've been waiting for so long, and it's under way. It takes six months to get all the products together.
Bartiromo: So you think that the integration process will take about six months?
Schmidt: It's on the order of that. And, of course, at Google, everything is a try. We try this, we try that, we see what works. The early indications are that we'll be largely complete within that period.
Bartiromo: It's no secret that Google owns search, but what about the display ads? Is it--is it fair to say that's sort of up for grabs? You know, you've got DoubleClick, Microsoft has aQuantis. It's up for--up for grabs, that part of the business.
Schmidt: Well, it's fair to say that that Google is not the leader in display ads, but our customers want to be able to purchase text ads and display ads and other advertising in one purchasing bundle, and the combination of the tools that we're developing, plus the DoubleClick integration acquisition and so forth, allows us to offer a single product for those advertisers. So we think that will help us with our display ads competitiveness. We think our technology is better. And so really now it's a question of earning those customers' respect and knowledge.
Bartiromo: So how do you ensure that that was actually the right acquisition and not just go it alone, do it on your own?
Schmidt: Well, we had tried that. But the customers really liked the DoubleClick product, and in our surveys we concluded that in one of these--this was one of those cases where another company had simply built a better product, which is why we went forward with the acquisition.
Bartiromo: Tell me what you're doing with Yahoo! in terms of testing. On the earnings call last time, you said you're setting up ads there. How's it going? What's involved?
Schmidt: Well, the long and short of it is that we did a test for about two weeks, which has since ended, where Yahoo! took a small percentage of their ads and replaced them by ours. We did this as part of a commercial conversation, which I obviously cannot go into, but it's one of the strategic options that we believe Yahoo! is considering at this time.
Bartiromo: Now, of course, after that, I guess the Department of Justice announces that it's, you know, doing an inquiry about this. Have you heard from the Department of Justice on this?
Schmidt: Well, again, without going into the specifics, you should expect that in all of these possible transactions, all of the regulatory bodies will be reviewing them. If there were an acquisition of Yahoo!, for example, the Department of Justice would also be doing a review. And the anti-trust laws allow the government--and I think properly so--to look at both commercial deals as well as acquisitions.
Bartiromo: What kind of a combination would you like to see with Yahoo!? What kind of a partnership would you like to see?
Schmidt: Oh, well, we actually enjoyed working with Yahoo!. We also compete with them. They're a well run and, I think, impressive company. We've primarily been concerned about the possibility of a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! because of Microsoft's history and because of the assets that Yahoo! has are quite valuable. And we actually think that in the wrong hands, they could be used in the wrong way.
Bartiromo: What do you mean, Microsoft's history?
Schmidt: I think people are aware of the anti-trust trial from 10 years ago. Microsoft has a long history in that area.
Bartiromo: Yeah, you can bet, I guess, who tipped off the DOJ about the phone call that was made, Steve Ballmer or somebody from that side. So what do we know about Microsoft and Yahoo!? Tell me this. I mean, I know that, you know, we're waiting on possible news from Microsoft, possibly, a hostile--we don't know what's going to happen next. But what kind of a challenge would Microsoft/Yahoo! be for Google?
Schmidt: Well, today we actually do not know what's going on. We read in the press that there's discussions and we'll see what they decide to do. If they go ahead and the merger's ultimately successful, it would be possible for Microsoft to integrate some of the properties and essentially eliminate consumer choice, particularly in electronic mail, instant messaging, the things where they have 80 or 90 percent market share, and that's a sweet spot for Microsoft in its ability to eliminate choice.
Bartiromo: Mm-hmm. And, of course, Google has been getting all these new killer apps, whether it's Gmail or Maps or, you know, spreadsheets. Ultimately is the game to compete direct, head on, with Microsoft?
Schmidt: Well, Google is actually trying to be an innovator, and we're always concerned about competition. We have found that if we can simply invent a brand-new product that really solves a problem that really does matter to you, we can get your business, we can get your attention, we can get your traffic and your customers or what have you. We're trying in a new thing called cloud computing to offer very powerful Web services that do the common things--e-mail, word processing and so forth--where the data's kept in the cloud, it's kept by somebody else, it's managed by professionals. You don't need to worry about where you keep all that information. We like that model a lot. We're getting traction. It is a competitive threat to other companies, but we think it's a technological breakthrough.
Bartiromo: How will you respond if Microsoft goes hostile?
Schmidt: Well, a lot will depend on whether their strategy is successful. In the short term, we have pointed out the possibility of a bad outcome, but it really depends on what happens in the hostile.
Bartiromo: Do you have any sense of how these things go? I mean, can they go in the open market, buy the stock, and then just create a proxy battle?
Schmidt: All I know is what I've read in the press, which is that essentially you replace the board and you force--you force the deal.
Bartiromo: Let me ask you about YouTube and MySpace. YouTube has these phenomenal growth rates. What do you think is behind that?
Schmidt: Video is powerful. And it's amazing. You know, we started off with Mentos and the other sort of fun videos, and now people, because they have so many digital cameras, are essentially uploading everything. Furthermore, we're beginning to see glimpses of significant professional content on YouTube. People are using it--because there's such a large reach, they're learning how to reach that audience. We're working but have not yet in my view gotten a breakthrough around monetization. So while we have lots and lots of traffic and we have lots and lots of interesting and creative people and all sorts of controversies--we're blocked in countries, so on and so on--I don't think we've quite figured out the perfect solution of how to make money, and we're working on that. That's our highest priority this year.
Bartiromo: Which is a huge priority, clearly. A lot of people feel like this is an amazing opportunity for you. So, as far as monetizing that business on YouTube, do you think that takes a year? Does it take the next five years? What's your time frame on that?
Schmidt: We believe the best products are coming out this year. And they're new products. They're not announced. They're not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying. But we have a number--and, of course, Google is an innovative place. The Yahoo! team are trying various new forms of advertising, ones which are much more participative, much more creative, much more--much more interesting in and of themselves. Google believes that advertising itself has value. The ads literally are valuable to consumers. Not just to the advertisers, but the consumers.
Bartiromo: They want to look at them.
Schmidt: When they're targeted. When they're the right ad for what you're doing or what you care about.
Bartiromo: Mm-hmm. But, you know, it gets me to MySpace. Some people feel like, when you look at the MySpace part of the business, that's really where people are looking at, or feeling a bit of an economic downturn. Let me ask you about that. The deal involving revenue promises, is that going to impact margins in the coming two years?
Schmidt: Not materially in that sense. We have pointed out, and I'll repeat again, that the whole social networking space has been harder for us to monetize--that is, develop advertising businesses again--than some of the other--than some of the other spaces that we're in. It has to do what people are doing. When you think about it, you're in a social network, you're looking at people's photos, you're figuring out where your friends are. You're not as likely to be purchasing a new car at the same time or purchasing clothes or purchasing a book or what have--whatever business that you're in. So the development of the advertising tools and techniques, literally the platform, has been more difficult than we have thought. But we're working on it, and we're hopeful.
Bartiromo: You've got $12 billion in cash right now?
Schmidt: A little more than that.
Bartiromo: What are your plans for that money? A lot of people say, `Look, the company's doing well. Growth is still continuing very strongly, global in particular. Why not pay a dividend out? Why not buy back stock?
Schmidt: We love watching that cash sit in a well-managed bank and not get lost.
Bartiromo: So you could categorically rule out, no dividend coming?
Schmidt: Well, first this: We never rule anything out. But right now we're happy to let the cash accumulate. The cash represents a strategic option for the future. As you know, we had the luxury of entering the wireless auction. And we did not win the auction, but our financial resources allowed us to credibly and seriously enter an auction for 4.65 billion. Couldn't have done that without the cash.
Bartiromo: What did you get out of that, though, Eric?
Schmidt: Well, from a corporate perspective, we participated in something important. From a consumer perspective, we know that our participation helped in making sure that the networks remained open. So consumers get choices. What's better than that?
Bartiromo: Yeah, and the FCC was happy about that. Mobile. A lot of people say mobility is where it's at. You've said, actually, I've heard you on conference calls saying that this is one of the big priorities for the company. How do you envision this? Tell me what you're looking for.
Schmidt: First place, everyone I know, everyone you know carries a mobile phone. And it's true in every country.
Bartiromo: And I'm not carrying my PC, by the way.
Schmidt: And most people in most developed countries have a roughly 100 percent coverage of mobile phones. So it really is a tremendous phenomenon. Over the next three or four years, there'll be more than another billion or so mobile phones added. Eventually our numbers indicate that there'll be five or so billion mobile phones in a world of six billion or so. People, this is a phenomenon. It's an unprecedented reach, even greater than, for example, television, or even electricity in some cases. So that's a platform that we can exploit. Our mobile phone, both search traffic as well as advertising is growing very rapidly, and we think people will do more and more interesting things in mobile phones. And, I mean, small phones, big phones, big screens, things that don't look like a phone, things which are mobile.
Furthermore, the telecommunications industry is helping because they're deploying billions of dollars of literally excess data capacity so these things will have fast networks wherever I go. One of the greatest things for me is whenever I fly somewhere, I open up and I open up my iPhone or my BlackBerry, and, boom, there's everything in my world as I've landed in a country I've never been in. It's a remarkable achievement.
Bartiromo: Yeah. What needs to happen before we actually get to that world that you're talking about? In other words, do we need to see the providers create different screens? I mean, do you need a larger screen to access some of this data? How do we get there?
Schmidt: Well, one of the problems is we haven't figured out a way to change finger sizes. We just haven't...
Bartiromo: Right.
Schmidt: There's no solution to that.
Bartiromo: Right.
Schmidt: We'd like to, but we haven't done it. And people don't like to kind of go like this. So you need a certain size screen. But there's other technology. For example, the processors in the phones have gotten faster. The batteries have gotten longer last--longer lasting. The screens have gotten brighter. The whole device has gotten lighter. So all of that has been happening while people have been talking about this. We know that these things are working now. We know because we measure it that there's been a huge increase in maps, Google Maps, hugely successful. These phones have GPSes in them. So when I want to go to the equivalent of a Starbucks, I just type "Starbucks," it says it's over there. For me, that's just a huge--a huge improvement. And that service is available almost everywhere in the world.
Bartiromo: That's amazing. Let's--that transitions right to the rest of the world. Global has been really the hot spot for Google. Tell me how you keep that going. Where are the biggest opportunities for Google right now outside of the United States?
Dr. Schmidt: Well, first place, the Internet is growing faster outside the United States than in the United States. Also advertising online growth rates are higher outside the United States than they are in the United States. You've got--and of course you have a weak dollar strategy--because the US has a very weak dollar--so that also helps. For all of those reasons, revenue outside of the United States should grow dramatically over the next while, and that's great.
In our case, the biggest difference--and, in fact, perhaps the only difference--between people in the US and other people is language. Other than that, simple rule: Everybody wants the same thing. They want fashion, they want information, they want products, they want e-commerce, they want it now, they want to have fun, they want to use credit cards or debit cards. So we work very hard to make that true globally. I think most of the large, successful US corporations, the ones that you certainly cover all day, all are going to see that kind of growth if they'll well positioned internationally.
Bartiromo: So when you look around the world, what's the most important, sort of richest area for you right here?
Schmidt: Well, for us, of course, Europe has been our stronghold for a long time. And Europe is just very, very strong for Google. They have relatively higher market share, they're very sophisticated consumers, and a very mature advertising rate. If you look at the global advertising market, it's the United States, Japan, China, Britain, France and Europe--and Great Britain. Those are the sort of the big five or six. Well, of course, we're doing very well in Europe, we're doing well in Japan, and we've been in the process of entering China for a while, and we're growing there nicely.
Bartiromo: What's happening there, though? You're number one in every market except a handful in Asia. How do you break in, and really with a solid foothold.
Schmidt: Well, in each case, they're different. In China, of course, there's all the issues of regulation and censorship. We delayed our entry for good reasons, and as a result we're not number one there. In some of the other countries, it's because we didn't get the language right. It turns out Asian languages often have what you and I would think of are nonsensical ways in which words are put together. So, for example, all the words in Thai are put into one very long sentence. They don't have word breaks. So developing the technology to do that right and then search and index against it took us a little while longer. We've now addressed that, so we think we should do well now.
Bartiromo: Fascinating. So what's the biggest challenge that you're facing today?
Schmidt: In Google's case, I think it's internal. It's the ability to manage the creative process, deal with the complexity in what is a relatively large company, in terms of people, who's doing what. We have 50 development centers all around the world, people in different time zones, `Are you doing that? Are you doing that? Do I work with you? How do I check in my code?' Those sorts of things.
Bartiromo: And for a long time, people were saying, `Look, you know, Google has this incredible campus, and, you know, spending money, and really showering employees, making sure that people are happy there.' Are you beginning a new process of managing employee growth right now and managing expenses more aggressively than you have in the past?
Schmidt: Well, certainly not our benefits, per se. Every day I turn around, there's some new benefit that we've come up with for our employees. It's part of our culture; we're happy to do that. And, of course, we have gross margins to afford it. So higher gross margins is one of the explanations. We have slowed our head count growth for a couple of reasons, but the biggest reason is it began to feel like we really didn't have a good sense of what people were doing. The systems in the company, literally who's doing what, what are they doing, seemed to lag our ability to hire these great people. So we slowed it a little bit. But we're still going to hire some number of thousand people this year.
Bartiromo: Let me--let me go back to something on the DoubleClick acquisition. Are you seeing any pushback from some of the advertisers who say, `Look'--the ad agencies who say, `We're already spending a ton of money on Google. Why do we need to spend more on all this other stuff away from search?' How are you going to get them to devote more money to display, to audio, to print and TV ventures, which are--and everything else you're--and the display ads, obviously.
Schmidt: Because we earn it. Because you can measure it. We never want people to give us--give us money that we don't earn and that we can't prove that they--that they--that it really provides value. That's not a good business for us. So as we enter these markets, we hope to say, `We have the tools that can show you that if you put this display ad out there, you really will get the sale.' And we have ideas, we have new research in how to do that in a closed loop way that is phenomenal. So our innovation model is in very category of ads, not just text ads, to show real return, real sales, and we think we can do that. And if we do that, we'll get the business. And if we can't do it, we shouldn't get the business.
Bartiromo: Right, because it's so measurable. That's why you don't really see a real dry up in the advertising during a recession.
Schmidt: Which is...
Bartiromo: Would you agree with that?
Schmidt: That's our hope. Our hope is that, again, in a recession, people would say, `Look, I'm going to put my money where I know my money's being well spent.' Now, we don't know that we're in a recession, but if we were, we hope that's what will happen.
Bartiromo: Now, earlier you said, `Look, growth levels have to slow, obviously.' What's appropriate then? I mean, when you say--I mean, investors are saying, `Look, is this company insulated? Is it not insulated?' So you say of course growth levels have to slow. To what?
Schmidt: Well, we don't know, but obviously, we don't plan to a growth level, we plan to an innovation level. Our idea is you just keep inventing new stuff, and it grows as quickly as it can. And there's some capacity with which we can deliver these to customers and that they can adopt them. And, of course, they have to do work. They have to learn how to use new tools, we have to talk to them, there's a lot of selling and marketing involved. It just doesn't happen automatically. Here's a new idea. People have to be comfortable with it. But once they are, we've found that growth rate is quite...(unintelligible).
Bartiromo: As a steward of technology and innovation your entire career, what would you say is the most innovative thing out there? What's the next big thing, from your standpoint?
Schmidt: I've always thought that the scariest piece of innovation is knowledge understanding and language translation. I don't understand how it works, but to watch a computer--literally watch it--read something in English, dissect what it's about, translate it into a language that I don't speak and having that other person say, `Wow, that's incredible,' to me, that's magic. And it isn't magic, it's just very good computer science, very good artificial intelligence, very good physics. And that's where we are. So the things that are most impressive to me are the things where the computer does something that nobody could do, literally translate things 100 language in parallel, summarize something for me, take me to something which I didn't know I was interested in but knows that I cared about it. And we're right on the cusp of that.
Bartiromo: Eric, your stock went from $750 to $450 in a very short period of time. What do you think happened?
Schmidt: I don't know. We don't really focus on short-term movement of the stock price. We said, since the company went public, that we're in this for the long term, and we want shareholders to be with us. These short-term fluctuations in outlook and so forth are not something that we focus on. We don't talk about it. We're really focused on this huge opportunity before us, which is automating the trillion-dollar industry that is advertising. We won't get all of that, for sure, but we should be able to get a significant part of that over the lifetime, certainly of my service to the company. And our goal is to build this into an institution that lasts for many, many years and is the greatest innovator in technology in this space.
Bartiromo: So the biggest priorities right now, continuing to access that potential huge, huge advertising market. What else?
Schmidt: Well, our number one priority is end-user--end-user happiness. Literally, are people happy with the results that they get using Google search? So it's literally search, and every day we bring out new improvements and indices that are--taxonomies that are understanding of language, more content, bigger--all of the things that make Google such a great search experience. That's our number-one priority, even more important, for example, than advertising. The way we pay for it, of course, is by improving our advertising solutions, as you described. That's what we do in the core.
Our next big play is in this applications phase, where we think people spend a lot of time online with information, and we can help them, whether it's their e-mail, which is an easy one to understand, but what about their personal data? What about their spreadsheets and their calendar, keeping it all there? And we can help them search. We can solve the problem of `how do I live in this digital lifestyle?' If we do that right, they can do it on mobile phones as well as at home, in their office and on a Mac and on a PC, and it all works great.
Bartiromo: This is all fantastic for the consumer. It's free, they've got access to all this stuff, they don't have to pay for it. What about...
Schmidt: It's a pretty good model.
Bartiromo: Yeah.
Schmidt: It works pretty well.
Bartiromo: What about the corporate customer? I understand that there are tests going on right now. What are you hearing from that customer?
Schmidt: We're working with the corporate customers to do the same thing inside their networks as we do with consumers. Now, corporate customers are not the same thing as consumer customers. Corporate customers have a much higher need for reliability, so we'll sign an agreement that guarantees a certain level of service. But then we charge for it. So that's a case where people are willing to pay for something which is free without the level of reliability. They also have other needs. They need greater security, for all the obvious reasons. And they also need better integration with all of the other services that their companies have. This is a long process. It's not a fast process. But it's very deeply valuable. And those customers we will have for 20 or 30 or 40 years as they build into our model. We like that model. It's an enterprise play. It's a business that I've been in for a long time, and one which will ultimately be very, very lucrative through Google.
Bartiromo: Do you ever look back and think about what has happened to the company? I mean, you, for a long time, have been really one of the most admired companies out there, and then one of the sexy, sort of big growers out there. And then as the company got bigger and bigger, people started to get afraid of Google, they way they were afraid of Microsoft at one point as well. Do you worry that that's the perception or that perception could take hold at some point?
Schmidt: We do worry about perception because we want to make sure that we are--that our perception is consistent with the way we way we behave. Google runs on a set of principles, and every company has their own principles. Ours are about doing no evil, it's about trying to serve the end user. Larry Page, our--one of our founders, wrote a very thoughtful memo about what it's like to be a big company. So, for example, he authored the rule that we'll never trap people's data. So if you become dissatisfied with us, we will make it easy for you to go to our competitor. Most companies don't do that. So we're trying to find that balance between the structure of a company and the need for predictability and so forth with our real mission, which is to serve you as an end user. And if you're not happy with us, keeping you trapped, that's a mistake. We want you to have another choice.
Bartiromo: Final question. Eric, let's face it. Microsoft wants Yahoo!. How much of a disadvantage do you think Google is at if these two players get together, what...(unintelligible)...two and third player in the market?
Schmidt: Well, a lot of people debate this. There's a big debate within the company. People say, on the one hand, that we stay focused, which, of course, we're very focused, while they're doing their maneuver. On the other hand, people are concerned about the history, as I mentioned, and the possibility of merger. So I don't think we really know yet. We debate it all the time.
Bartiromo: Eric, would you like to add anything else?
The "deadline" imposed by Microsoft on Yahoo expired yesterday, which makes it likely that Microsoft is either preparing to drop their bid or - and this appears a more likely scenario - preparing for a hostile takeover where they'll try to get a new slate of directors approved for Yahoo who would view the takeover favorably, leading to a probable merge this summer.
Yahoo's board meets today and although it would be interesting to be there I'm certainly not envious of the Yahoo board right now. If Microsoft drops their current offer Yahoo stock is likely to drop severely - perhaps even below the 52 week low into the high teens. Shareholders will be understandably upset if fighting Microsoft has led to nothing more than a 30%+ drop in share price. Some have suggested a Google advertising partnership may help matters but I'm skeptical that the broad market views Yahoo as favorably as Yahoo seems to think. If they did one would expect Microsoft's share price to be faring much better than it has while people await the takeover verdict. In fact most stock watchers are convinced that if Microsoft announces they are dropping the quest for Yahoo MSFT will see a significant jump in share price.
Larry at CNET has noted some interesting alternative scenarios to a Microsoft Yahoo merger, even including a CNET option.
I think my prediction is the same as it has been for some time: Microsoft will start the hostilities but will also let Yahoo know they can get about $34 per share if Yahoo does not put up a fight. Yahoo will (finally) give in to avoid a potential price meltdown, lawsuits, and a fight that is only going to misdirect energy while both companies watch Google scoop up the increasing online advertising revenues.
Larry Dignan and Dan Farber at CNET have the early scoop on Yahoo's freshly unveiled Yahoo! Open Strategy somewhat cryptically labelled .... "Y!OS"
Ari Balogh, Yahoo CTO said at the San Francisco Web 2.0 Conference today:
“We are taking open to a whole other place,"... “We are rewiring Yahoo from the inside out with a developer platform that will open up the assets of Yahoo in a way never done before, making the consumer experience social throughout and provide hooks to developers.”
It is too early to know if this type of openness will be embraced by developers to the degree needed to make a significant impact in the way people use Yahoo services, but it is very encouraging to see how the key players are racing to claim the title of the "most open" online environments. Facebook's API's were followed by Google Open Social and now Yahoo which appears to offer more programmatic freedom than ever across Yahoo's massive number of network assets and 500,000,000 person user base.
Google has been named the world's number one and most powerful brand for the second year in a row clocking in at an estimated value at $85,057 million which represents a 30% increase in its brand valuation. This, according to BrandZ's top 100 brand ranking for 2008. Other tech heavyweights in the top ten included GE, Microsoft, China Mobile, IBM, and Apple which was the biggest mover in the top 10 and a new entrant, moving up from sixteenth to seventh place with an incredible 123% increase in brand value to $55,206 million. HP was at sixteen, Cisco ranked twenty-two, and Oracle and Intel at numbers twenty-six and twenty-seven respectively.
Google is a marketer's dream with its ranking being driven by financial performance and equity value. The brand equity measurement is determined by a global survey of 100,000 consumers.
Despite a small 1% drop this morning, stock in internet giant Google (GOOG) appears to be stable at the new price level of approximately $533 per share, about a 20% increase from the lows of last week. Until Thursday's favorable earnings report Google stock had come under severe downward pressure after reports that revenue could suffer from a major slow down in the increase in paid clicking at Google - by far the internet's most important advertising venue with control of approximately half of all online advertising.
Thursday's earnings, however, indicated that the reports of a Google revenue demise from fewer clicks had been greatly exaggerated. Clearly Google's quality control initiatives have managed to pull more revenue from each click. Click growth is certainly slowing based on Comscore and other large scale reporting, but Google once again has pulled a revenue rabbit out of their magic hat and in doing so has recovered some of the value lost during the stock slide of the past several months.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been critical of what he feels was irresponsible reporting by Comscore that led analysts to conclude that Google was in serious trouble. Although Comscore and Google had issued clarification on the implications of the reporting, Google's stock price had suffered severely in Q1 2008, mostly on the basis of how analysts interpreted Comscore's findings of a serious slowdown in paid clicks.
Microsoft has purchased the innovative travel service "Farecast" for a reported $115,000,000. SeattlePI has more about this breaking story. Farecast uses a predictive algorithm to help users determine if airline ticket pricing is poised to go up or down from the current levels and thus helps to find bargain pricing online.
Rather than develop extensive "Web 2.0" features internally, it is becoming very clear that Microsoft is trying to fuel their massive new web initiative with cash, buying companies like Farecast (and Yahoo) that can make Microsoft an immediate player in the rapidly evolving online environment.
Google stock soared in after hours trading to over $500 per share after a very favorable earnings report that suggests Google is doing a much better job of pulling revenue out of paid advertising clicks. After hours GOOG showed a gain of over 11% from today's closing price.
Google Q1 earnings report comes out after today's market close. Many consider this report to be a bellweather for the internet industry at large as well as for Google, given Google's massive dominance in the online advertising space.
A key issue is how well Google monetizes search clicks now that they have implemented new quality controls on advertising. Comscore reports suggest that the growth in total paid clicks is diminishing dramatically from earlier levels (though still up from last quarter), but Google has suggested that they now do a better job of pulling revenue from each paid click. This complex algorithmic balancing act between total clicks and revenue per click will largely determine the fate of Google's stock price after the close today.
CNBC has a short Google earnings preview with some of the key analytical issues associated with today's report.
Google watchers are anxiously awaiting the GOOG earnings report due this Thursday. Google shares, trading today at about $477 are off a whopping $270 per share from the 52 week high of $747.
Henry Blodget suggests that Google can show 25% growth but only throug a substantial increase in the price per click, a Google metric that won't be clear until the Thursday report.
This 25% growth estimate obviously assumes that Google has seen a strong increase in price-per-click: If it hasn't, and the Comscore data is accurate, US revenue will miss by a mile and Google's overall revenue will come in well below consensus. Thursday's earnings report will be interesting.
Click revenues are very dynamic making it hard to predict the effect on revenues of the changes at Google which are a funciton of of total paid clicks, which are up but very modestly over last years, and the revenue *per click*, which can vary with season, market, user interface, and other factors. Google has been seeking better quality control for pay per click advertisements which appears to have increased the revenue per click but also was a key factor in the huge decrease in the growth rate of total clicks.
As Bloget notes, Thursday's earnings report will be very interesting.
The number of searches in the U.S. on the major search engines increased from 9,882 billion in Feb'08 to 10,771 billion in Mar'08 representing a 9% jump. According to comScore, Google sites were the biggest beneficiaries and accounted for more than 6.4 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo sites with 2.3 billion, and Microsoft sites with 1 billion.
Google also continued to lead as the top search engine with a 0.6% increase in the share of searches followed by Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL which all experienced decreases in their market share.
comScore qSearch 2.0 Report - Total U.S. Home/Work/University Location
Searches Query Volume by Site
Search Entity Feb-08 Mar-08 Mar vs. Feb Total Core Search 9,882 10,741 9.0% Google Sites 5,855 6,438 10.0% Yahoo! Sites 2,136 2,296 7.0% Microsoft Sites 953 1,012 6.0% AOL Network 488 512 7.0% Ask Network 450 503 12.0%
* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
comScore qSearch 2.0 Report - Total U.S. Home/Work/University Location
Share of Searches (%)
Search Entity Feb-08 Mar-08 Mar vs. Feb Total Core Search 100.0% 100.0% 0.0 Google Sites 59.2% 59.8% 0.7 Yahoo! Sites 21.6% 21.3% -0.3 Microsoft Sites 9.6% 9.4% -0.2 AOL Network 4.9% 4.8% -0.1 Ask Network 4.6% 4.7% 0.1
* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
YouTube has come out with a tool to help you answer the question of who's watching you. YouTube Insight is a free video analytics tool that allows users who upload videos to YouTube to track the viewership on their videos including the geographic breakdown by region, as well as the popularity relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. Uploaders can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of their videos to find out how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks. Another key feature expected shortly is a breakdown of how viewers discovered your video. Using these metrics, you can increase your videos' view counts and improve your popularity on the site. To view your video analytics, click "About this Video" button under "My Account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos."
Google has announced that it will be enabling offline access to Google Docs. The planned rollout is expected to happen over the next couple of weeks. Powered by Google Gears - which once enabled, provides the user with a local version of their documents and a list of documents and editors. Features are limited offline; users are able to view and edit. Changes are made via a web browser even when offline and saved locally and when back online, documents are sync'd back up with the server. Offline access is only being provided for docs initially, not spreadsheets and presentations.
Comscore will soon release their report of Google advertising activity for February and Silicon Alley Insider says they already have the numbers that show Google with 515 million US paid clicks in February, up 3% year over year. Unfortunately for Google a gain of only 3% is not very impressive on the surface and is also somewhat misleading because we had 29 days in February this year, which means that ad clicks at Google were flat on a year to year comparison.
The market did not take this click report very well, and Google has fallen over 3% in after hours trading, though tomorrow's trades will tell the full tale of how this information will be incorporated into Google's share price which will open at about $444 tomorrow due to the after hours trading corrections to the close today at $458. This is not as low as the $412 Google has traded at recently but well off Google's 52 week high of $747.
Lacking from these reports however are the revenues obtained from these clicks. Better optimization can yield higher revenues from the same number of clicks, and major changes recently were implemented by Google, effectively elimating many ads that Google felt did not meet their new "quality scores" which reflected higher advertising standards. Thus it is possible that this new approach could actually lead to a "better than expected" revenue outcome for Q1 without more clicks. That said, if the advertising market as a whole is flattening out, Google will be very hard pressed to continue their amazing revenue growth. It is not clear if the current stock price on GOOG fully reflects the pessimism many analysts have expressed about online advertising in the next few years.
Google has recently launched the ability to search within a site from the Google search results page. Smack dab in the midst of your search results, you can be served up a search box to directly search the site you are seeking. The idea is to get you to the exact page on the web site.
Google would now like to help you build websites. The company has now added Google Sites to its Google Apps web office suite which allows end users and businesses to create websites. The was made possible by virtue of their acquisition of Jotspot some time back and the re-tooling of that app into this new site creation tool. Sites allow code-challenged users to build, customize, and oh yes search their websites. Users can centralize all types of information including videos and presentations and share their site with just a few people, across a company, or with the world.
"With only a few clicks, just about anyone will be able to quickly set up and update a Web site featuring a wide array of material, including pictures, calendars and video from Google Inc.'s YouTube subsidiary," said Dave Girouard, general manager of the division overseeing the new application. This is yet another attempt by Google to rival Microsoft Office and Sharepoint in this case. Dan Farber's blog over at Cnet provides this perspective: "Google now has a pretty good and easy web-page creator with some wiki features made user-friendly, and a half-hearted attempt at integrating the rest of the Apps empire using Sites. Perhaps they get it right in the next release."
Andy Beal recently wrote that Google's stock is far from the $2000 a share predicted by Henry Blodget publisher of InternetOutsider. After missing analyst estimates and the announcement of the Microsoft - Yahoo takeover (predicted here), Google's shares (GOOG) have been hit very hard. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Ram Shriram who own majority of the Class B shares (which control the company) have seen the fortunes drop by US$16 Billion collectively. The Microsoft Yahoo overture shows Google's vulnerability. Over 90% of the company's revenue comes from search advertising. If I ran Google, I would have used the high share value as cheap currency to make acquisitions of web products, tools and services companies that litter Silicon Valley to transition to a provider of multiple web offerings and reduce the dependence on a single revenue stream. Google's market value has dropped US$70 Billion from it's peak - that is a lot of acquisitions.
After the let down of Google's Opensocial attempt, Google has now launched Social Graph API, which aims to be a centralized place which web services can use to access relationships between people. So, how does it work? FOAF and XFN are used to provide information about relationships between people in hyperlinks. For instance, an example of XFN hyperlink would be "<a href="http://jeff.example.org" rel="friend met">" which says that Jeff is my friend. Google's crawler which already indexes links for its search engine, will now also build a social graph. This social graph is then exposed in the form of an API which will be accessible by any third party. And how does Google create a social graph from links? If me and a friend are following each other on Twitter, then it will consider us friends. So, if I visit any third party site and specify that I represent the following twitter account, then that third party site can query the API to tell me that my friend is also using this service presently. Another way is the use of affiliation; that is, I mention my Facebook profile on my blog and Twitter account on my Facebook, then Google's Algorithm will know that all three pages belong to a person named Mayank. Using this (maybe) public information, my public profile is made along with my connections which any third party can use. Of course, this also leads to the possibility of fraudulent information being generated and owned. That is, what is stopping people from claiming that they are Larry Page? Would an equivalent to bombing of search results be possible here? I don't see an answer being offered presently.
Facebook and Google are both part ofDataportability. Dataportability and people indexing can, of course, both co-exist. Though it's yet to be seen in what form these services will be provided and when they will reach an inflection point beyond which a user expects availability of this information everywhere. What we can at least be sure of is that the social graph will be openly offered in the not too distant future which will enable many useful services. Here is a video telling more about Google's attempt.
Google now allows you to associate other email addresses with your Google account. If you sign into your Google account and click on "Edit" next to "Personal Information" you will see the below.
You can only add one email address at a time but what this allows you to do is to associate other information from your other email addresses with your main Google account so information is synchronized. This is useful for things such as appointments which can show up centrally in your Google Calendar if they are sent to any of your other email addresses.
Interestingly, I tried to add another Gmail address and got this message "You can not associate a Gmail address with your Google Account." I tried to add two other non-Gmail email addresses of mine but got "A user with the email you specified already exists" which apparently means 'it's possible that you've already created another Google Account with that username. Someone may have also accidentally entered your email address when creating a Google Account, but hasn't been able to verify email ownership'. Finally, I got a third to work. An email verification is sent to the email address you requested to be added and you can activate it from there.
Want to develop applications for Google's new Android mobile phone platform and make a cool $275K?! Google has put $10M into a competition to do just that. The idea is to develop a lot of original cool apps that are highly functional as well as usable. The apps need to access core Android functionality like location-based services, accelerometer and always-on networking.
The smartphone market is heating up and Google is looking to the development community to create the killer app that's going to make people switch to Android. Apple also recently announced that it will be releasing an iPhone/iPod Touch SDK in late Feb.
Google has made a number of improvements to their Google Apps on the iPhone. Just a month after the launch of its initial version, the Google Apps for iPhone diehards have gotten even slicker. The web applications including Search, Gmail, Calendar, and Reader are now sporting an even more streamlined interface intended to make the applications faster, easier to activate, and improve their overall usability via the iPhone touch-screen interface.
The new features include the ability to customize default tabs for easier navigation, speedier Gmail where new emails automatically appear eliminating the need to do a manual refresh, at-a-glance monthly view of Calendar appointments, and access to and synchronization of iGoogle gadgets on the iPhone. The redesign is intended to provide iPhone users with a desktop-like web application experience optimized for the iPhone.
Google plans to expand this experience to international versions of the iPhone and to other platforms that offer similar usability and browser capabilities. To get the new Google experience on the iPhone, navigate to www.google.com on the iPhone Safari browser.
Upping the ante on personalization, Google is now allowing users to customize and personalize their iGoogle homepage even further. The company yesterday announced the release of the iGoogle Themes API along with a themes directory. The Themes API allows users to either create their own new theme or select from a user-generated one. Users can create a theme and share it with the tens of millions of iGoogle users around the world.
Google Maps has teamed up with The Weather Channel to integrate weather details. So, if you're planning a trip and don't know whether to pack your Uggs or Oxfords, you can simultaneously get the weather information for your intended destination along with the directions.
From Google.com, type a city name, for example, and click "Google Search" and select "Maps" from the top left or from the search results. From Google Maps, click on the "My Maps" tab and check the option for "The Weather Channel" under the Featured Content section. And voila! You get the overall lay of the land and corresponding temperatures. Click on the temperature bubble on the map for your location of choice and out pops the forecast compliments of weather.com. You can also filter your results further for specific weather overlays, points of interests (cities, airports, etc.), and temperature settings (celsius or fahrenheit).
There is a useful video from Google providing tips on how to prevent the indexing of web pages you don't want Google to crawl so it doesn't show up on the web.
In an announcement yesterday, Google, Facebook, and Plaxo joined the DataPortability.org Workgroup. The announcement stated that as key players in the social networking space, "their joint support of the DataPortability initiative presents a new opportunity for the next generation of software - particularly in the fields of social software, user rights and interoperability". The DataPortability initiative is focused on creating end-to-end data portability for which it claims the technology already exists so that "as users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors".
This is super cool and interesting. Imaging having your flattened gif text or video being read and indexed by the search engines - in particular, Google. Well, it might just happen. Google has apparently filed an application with the World Intellectual Property Organization to patent such a technology. "The method also includes searching a collection of keywords including keywords extracted from image text, retrieving an image associated with extracted image text corresponding to one or more of the image search terms, and presenting the image." Already in Google Image searches, you get the image thumbnail view, title and url of the webpage where the image resides, and image dimensions, file size, and format. This proposed technology would take this a step further to improve and possibly increase the search results of universal search on Google - i.e. web, images, maps, news, shopping, blogs, books, etc. This way we can be assured that our multimedia assets are fully utilized and leveraged in improving their findability and discoverability. I wonder how this will work for highly stylized text like a checkmark used to denote the letter "v" or gif text that is highly pixelated by design. Would this technology be able to read and interpret such characters?!
Currently, we depend on the ALT attribute text for indexing of imagery but it has been suggested that this has been decreasing in relevance due to misuse. So, what's next? Will search engines be able to interpret and imply meaning to standard iconic images without text like an envelope used to denote email, or interpret shapes like the map of the US or an animal or a graph or even recognize photos or caricatures of popular people. There are lots of interesting things that can be done but I guess we will have to wait to see.
Google Docs has just come out with the ability to embed a slideshow presentation onto a web page. Here how it's done.
1. In Google Docs, create a presentation and click on the "Publish" tab on the far right 2. Click on "Publish document" to publish the presentation so people can view it 3. Copy the code for the iframe that appears 4. Paste the code anywhere to share it in a blog, website, etc.
I tried it out and created a presentation below. I've got to say it was really simple. And as I edit the preso, it is automatically updated unless I click "Stop publishing".
Other new features include: -you can import slides from other Google or Powerpoint presentations using "File > Import Slides" -drag-and-drop image insertion capability -rearrange slides by dragging and droppig or duplicating slides -change background or add a background image -more visually pleasing toolbar
The Iowa causcus is in full swing and Google is on the candidates' trail. Google Maps is providing real-time voting results, event feeds, and videos. Google has also been host to the candidates at the Googleplex including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and John McCain. The maps provide a color coded visual of the winners in the 99 counties in the state.
China is imposing restrictions starting Jan. 31 on the broadcasting of internet videos to only sites run by state-controlled companies. It will require providers to obtain a government permit, report questionable content to the government, and pull content if deemed politically disruptive, pornographic, etc.
The new regulation applies to sites that provide online video or allow users to upload video. For popular video sharing sites like YouTube which is U.S. based with a China version and video sharing sites based in China, there is likely to be some impact. Already, WSJ is reporting that recently access to YouTube in China was temporarily blocked and that while Google China has an internet content license from the Chinese government, YouTube does not.
Mad Money's, Jim Cramer, was on the Today Show yesterday. As part of his predictions for 2008, the money man told host, Meredith Viera, that Google was a favorite of 2007 and that there would be a whole new generation of Google users this year. He didn't expound on this but it seems like Jim is betting his money on another up year for the search giant. In the short segment, Cramer didn't mention any other tech stocks. There was no ranting and raving involved :). (Image source: Time, CNBC/AP)
Yahoo's Chief Performance Officer (CPO), Steve Souders, is moving to Google starting next week and will be a speaker on "Creating High-Performance Websites" at our Web 2.0 Conference on Jan. 29. Sounders, who has been with Yahoo since 2000 was responsible for developing a set of best practices for making web sites faster. He worked on the YSlow Firefox (Firebug) extension, as well as the official Developer Network, and the User Interface blogs. He is also the author of a book titled - you guessed it - High Performance Web Sites.
Google Search dominated the online search market in November according to a report by Nielson Online. Google grew its share of the U.S. online search market to 57.7% with 4.25 billion searches in November from October's 55.5%.
Yahoo came in second with 1.32 billion searches and a decreased market share of 17.9% from 18.8% in the previous month.
Microsoft Live was third with about 880 million searches and a decreased market share of 12% from 13.8% in October.
AOL was number four with approximately 332 million searches accounting for a 4.5% share.
Japan's top mobile phone carrier NTT DoCoMo is reportedly teaming up with Google to offer search and email on the company's handsets. Users will soon be able to access Google search, email, scehduling and photo-saving through NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode Internet network. The company is also looking at using Google's free OS for mobile devices to create the next gen handset which could result in a host of new services being rolled out by the two giants as early as mid '08.
Google Adwords which allows you to place ads on Google SERP pages has renamed the feature formerly known as "site targeting" to "placement targeting". Whereas, site targeting allowed advertisers to target entire websites, placement targeting AdWords ads can now appear on precise subsections or positions on sites in addition to an entire website, select web pages, or a particular page position.
Here's how you can create your own placement-targeted ad:
Login and click Placement-Targeted. Log into your Adwords account, and from the 'Online Campaigns' table on the 'Campaign Summary' page, click 'placement-targeted' at the top right in the 'Create a new campaign' section.
Create new placement-targeted campaign. Follow the five-step setup wizard to create a campaign and from the 'Target ad' step, list URLs of websites where you would like your ad to appear. You can also search for placements that match the themes and topics you'd like to target.
That's it. This now allows you to place ads on any sites you choose that is running Google Adsense.
The new version of the Google Toolbar released last week comes outfitted with support for Windows Accessibility APIs which is used by assistive technologies like screen readers, etc. and enables keyboard navigation and access. As stated, "version 5 of the Toolbar comes as a part of our ongoing efforts to enhance accessibility in our client-side and web applications". If you have version 5 of the Toolbar installed, open a browser window, click the global shortcut "Alt+G", and your cursor will be automatically placed in the Google Toolbar search text field. If you are using a screen reader, you'll hear "Google Toolbar Search". Using the Tab key on your keyboard will navigate you from button to button and the arrow keys lets you focus or open a drop-down menu.
Clearly, the advantage of doing this is that it opens your product up to a much larger group of users as it is now more widely accessible to more users. Web accessibility has been a growing area for about five years now and has garnered a lot of interest recently with cases like Target.com and others.
As a testament to the advent of more and more rich and streaming media content on sites today, it comes as little surprise that on Monday, Google extended its traditional Sitemaps protocol in its release of Video Sitemaps which helps to make videos more searchable on Google Video Search. The Google Sitemaps Protocol allows website owners to inform search engines about URLs on their sites that are available for crawling. Now, with Video Sitemaps, site owners can specify all the video files on their site along with relevant metadata. Video-specific sitemaps can be submitted in addition to the standard Sitemap.
As it is the tradition at this time of year, business blogs everywhere start posting forecasts and predictions for the year to come. Here are, without further ado, my 2008 predictions for local and social media:
The year of Identity. One of the big challenges of social media is having to sign-up and add your friends in a multitude of web sites. Expect 2008 to be the year where this problem becomes a major issue and gets potentially solved through identity interoperability initiatives like OpenID.
Social is now everywhere and open. The last few months of 2007 have set the stage for a very social 2008. Any new major initiatives will include social elements by default and will use existing standards like OpenSocial, DiSo or Facebook.
Fragmentation & personalization of media. Given the lower barrier to entry for new local/social projects, user and advertiser fragmentation will continue to accelerate in 2008. From a user point of view, this will lead to new personalization tools allowing consumers to create their own unique media view.
The year of ad networks. As a corollary of point #3 above, given that user fragmentation will accelerate, an increasingly large number of ad networks will pop-up to aggregate consumers into a critical advertising mass. It's all about advertiser defragmentation. Directory publishers will want to become ad networks themselves to push their ads outside of their core destination sites in order to increase their total reach.
Content wants to be distributed. That's the second corollary of point #3. Increasing user fragmentation requires content producers to atomize their content and push it in the fabric of the web. Think of your business in terms of content units or atoms (some inspiration came from Clay Shirky's "fame vs. fortune" post from 2003).
Social graph-based search. I am now a firm believer that social graph-based search will be the future of search (including local search) and we will see this concept gain some tractions in 2008. I think humans will always trust recommendations and advice from people in their "social network" (friends, family, colleagues, known experts, etc.) more than a machine. Online word-of-mouth is the biggest local search opportunity out there.
More M&A activity in local. 2007 was quite active from a local M&A (Idearc buying Infospace's directory business, Citysearch/InsiderPages, AT&T/Ingenio, Marchex/Voicestar, etc.) but I expect 2008 to be even more active given i) the need for directory publishers to execute on their strategies and ii) the need to aggregate traffic to increase advertiser ROI.
Mobile: the year before the big bang. 2008 will be the year where a solid mobile development base (open devices, networks, platforms) is established leading to an explosion in 2009. Watch for the Google spectrum bid in January.
Just in time for the busy holiday travel season, Google has introduced today a new flight status feature to its search results. To get the 411 on a flight's status, simply search for an airline and flight number, and the first search result will tell you whether your flight is on time or delayed as well as the estimated departure and arrival times. The result is called out with a nifty plane icon.
Back in November, I reported that Google had replaced "Video" with "Products" at the top of its pages. Now, Google has renamed "Products" to "Shopping" cutting to the chase. Click on it and get Product Search for stuff to buy. Also, looking at the screenshot from my November post, it looks like the order of the links at the top of the page have also changed from Web, Images, Products, News, Map, Gmail to Web, Images, Maps, News, Shopping, Gmail.
Google is expected to start adding blogs in the next week or so to its universal search results, an initiative which was launched back in May. According to Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience, queries will return links to blogs alongside the images, news, books, local maps and video. This is indicative of the growing popularity and effectiveness of blogs which at last count were being created at 100,00 per day. The other big three search engines - Yahoo, Live Search, and Ask - currently include blogs as part of their search results in some form or the other.
We are all guilty of it. Many of us have Googled ourselves at some point or the other. Employers are Googling candidates as part of their standard background check on potential hires. And, according to a research study (PDF) by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 47 percent of Internet users have searched for themselves through Google, up from 22 percent in 2002. Younger users tend to self-search more and men and women search equally for info on themselves. Three percent search regularly, 22% once in awhile, and 74% once or twice.
It is not surprising that there would be a ton of information on people considering the onslaught of Web 2.0 tools that enable and facilitate user generated content and overall information sharing such as blogs, vblogs, photo blogs, photo sharing sites, videos, social networks, lifecasting sites like Twitter, etc. Eighty-two percent of adult online users maintain a public profile compared to 77% of teens. Sixty percent of internet users are not worried about how much information is available about them online but most people are aware of their digital footprint especially those with the highest educational levels. Most people search for the contact information of others online and 7% of those who have searched for information on key people in their lives do so regularly.
Google Profile is the new online calling card for users which will soon link up for use on multiple Google products. "A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you're all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you'd like." Anyone can see your Google Profile and it may be searchable if "you put your full name in the Nickname field, pages on which your profile appears may be returned as results by Google".
Profiles contain information such as a nickname (your real name is displayed only to your contacts), occupation, location, links, photo, and biographical info about yourself. Profiles are already available for Google Maps, Reader, and Shared Stuff.
This is quite similar to profile cards that you can create with other non-Google sites as well as other Google products like Blogger and social network, Orkut. Profile unifies and simplifies the profile carding utility across Google products and has the makings of a social network in itself.
Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, was recently interviewed by the NY Times where he responded to a question by Steve Lohr on what's really different now in light of Enterprise 2.0 where technology is driving the way companies are organized and managed. Here is some of what he had to say:
We’ve recognized, and now embrace, our biggest challenge — the changing nature of time. The relentless pace of technology improvement continues to make time management more and more critical for business leaders. While this has certainly long been true, the big difference now is the immediacy of information and action. Technology’s primary role has long been to speed up the transfer of information but now we increasingly contend with its unpleasant byproduct, information overload.
There are distinct consequences to this new age of "Instant Information." A) No falsehood can last. Everything can be and usually is checked, even as you are saying it.
B) People expect an immediate answer. If you don’t answer almost immediately, they bombard you with queries.
C) You can measure everything. At Google, we measure revenue, productivity, engineering.
D) Managers need new ways to listen to information and uncover the gems. These might include: transparency within the company, “best practices” where people are always suggesting better ways of doing things and 20-percent time so people are free to try out new ideas.
E) Managers need to devise clever strategies to obtain everyone else’s information, even as they risk sinking in the proverbial sea of information. The best way I have found to effectively filter information for my own tastes and interests is the social graph, a method of representing the relationships between people in a given context.
Of course, many challenges and opportunities for managers and leaders are the same now as they were 50 years ago. The need for leadership, for hope, for a vision, for motivation are the same in every generation.
The latest beta release of the Google Toolbar for IE is now available. It still has the same cool features like pop-up blocking, buttons, spell check, and bookmarking. But a core new capability is the portability of users' Toolbar settings. Users can now save their settings online and as a result, have it available to them anywhere they go and on any computer they use.
The Toolbar also now offers support for Google Gadgets. Users can associate an icon with a gadget and when visiting any site, click on that icon in their Toolbar to launch the gadget, use the gadget in that webpage, and close it when done. The example cited was with the Google Product Search gadget where users can highlight the name of something they'd like to buy on any page and do a quick price comparison right there.
Another interesting feature is the Google Notebook integration which is denoted by a star icon in the Toolbar and allows users to copy, save, and share text from webpages by selecting the text and right clicking to note it or clicking on the notebook star icon to launch the Notebook where they can save the text and their notes. And when you visit that webpage again, you will see the copied text highlighted - an option which can be disabled in the Toolbar.
No more 404 or DNS error pages. Whoa! Users will get suggestions instead of error pages if they mistype a URL or a page is down. Now expect to see the familiar "Did you mean" with alternatives like when you do a Google search.
MySpace, the social networking community site founded by Thomas Anderson and Christopher DeWolfe and later sold to News Corp, announced that it is expanding its global prescence into Brazil. The Portuguese language site is the fourth regional site in the Americas and the 20th country site. Google' social networking counterpart, Orkut, is already huge in Brazil. The majority of its users are reportedly in Brazil and as of November 2007, 62.9% of the traffic come from Brazil, followed by 19.2% from India.
According to Cnet, "one advantage to MySpace may be that Orkut is designed for the 18+ crowd and focuses on networking and dating, not music and pop culture. MySpace's appeal to teenagers and music fans could fill a different niche, but it's a stretch--Brazil is one country where a single site more or less totally dominates the social-networking landscape."
Google released it Knol project on Thursday which is its equivalent of Wikipedia where anyone can contribute their knowledge on a particular subject by creating a web page with their content. This is yet another example of leveraging the wisdom of the crowds in what's referred to as crowdsourcing. Another recent example of this was enabling users to edit locations on Google Maps.
The Knol interface is interesting. It is quite un-Googley in its overall look and feel (LAF). It is still widescreen like most Google's sites, which is also a sign of the times, and the interface actually uses what appears to be a shade of the Google blue. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. And clearly, this is intentional. While the Google SERP pages are structured and clear, etc., the Knol interface appears very structured, clean and clear, and well laid out. It is also easy on the eye, calm and soothing - almost clinical. Wikipedia, ironically has more of the Googley feel to it in that it appears more Web 2.0-esque - not too structured and more user-generated or user-contributed. This is also a factor of the target audiences - in the case of the Knol, it is intended for authors to contribute to and the general population to consume. Knol uses serifed fonts whereas, Google goes sans-serifed. And this is likely because fonts like times roman are more preferred in the traditional offline literary world and Knol is about writing articles. You'll notice nytimes.com, for instance, uses the same font. The search feature does not read 'Google Search' in the button label like on Google.com nor does it indicate 'powered by Google'. Although it seems that Google is attempting to maintain Knol as a separate and distinct brand, the Google Search is their strongest asset which should be leveraged here. As a user, I would feel more confident in my search if I saw some association with Google in the search feature given that I use Google Search and it is well known that site searches tend to be poor. Cool! Look forward to seeing more on this.
On Wednesday, Google has released a new iPhone interface for Picasa Web as an upgrade to the previous version of the tool which according to the Engineer behind it "was using some very cool AJAXy features, but these were designed with a desktop web-browsing experience in mind".
Users can log in to Picasa from their iPhone at http://picasaweb.google.com and view their albums with a full view of their pics along with comments from friends. Photos can also be viewed in slideshow mode. Users can search for photos within their own albums or publicly available albums and can save their friends' albums as part of their favorites. This is currently only available in English.
Every year end, Google puts together a "Year-End Zeitgeist", a look at the most popular and fastest-rising search terms. Not surprising, 2007 was a big year for politics and celebrity shaninigans. There were also some timeless themes that surfaced: what is love, who is god, and how to kiss, etc.
In response the Google's OpenSocial API which just launched with a splash at the beginning of November, and amidst a lot of critisicm of Facebook's 'closed' platform, Facebook announced yesterday that it is opening up its platform to make it available to other social networking sites. It is licensing its technology so that Facebook apps can run on other social networking sites other than Facebook. There are apparently 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications who can now potentially make their applications available on other social sites. Facebook apps are built using proprietary FBML markup.
And in support of this move, social network Bebo which rivals MySpace and Facebook also announced that it will be the first social network to license Facebook's technology thereby, allowing developers to extend Facebook's apps to Bebo. Facebook has faced a lot of criticism of late of its controversial social advertising campaign using beacons to track users and display their personal information publicly. This appears to be a move in the right direction for the company, however late and reactionary.
Try Googling "christmas" and you'll notice that the Sponsored Links to the right of the search results are decked out for the holiday season. Each Sponsored Link is almost bulletized with a Christmas tree beside it. I tried the same thing with "merry christmas" and "happy holidays" but didn't get the same festive decor.
Google has just introduced Google Maps Street View to more cities other than San Fran where it was originally launched earlier this year. Now, you can get the same virtual street-level photographic views of additional locations in the US. Street level 360 degree views now exist for cities such as Vegas, the Big Apple, LA, Miami and others. Users can pan, rotate, and zoom in & out on maps. Here's a how-to of how this works.
In a bid to claim more of the mobile market and to catch up to competitors, Microsoft is reportedly set to launch mobile advertising on Monday on the U.S. version of MSN Mobile. Mini banners and text ads will be displayed on the MSN Mobile portal along with news, weather, stock, and movie info, search, email (Hotmail), IM (Messenger), and Microsoft's blogging and social networking platform (Live Spaces). They apprently already run ads in other global markets. As you may recall Microsoft bought online advertising company aQuantive in May for $6 billion in response to Google's Doubleclick purchase for $3 billion.
Google's Mobile Ads are text-based and allows users to navigate to the advertiser's mobile site or call the business directly. With Yahoo Mobile Ad Network, it appears that advertisers can choose from display banner ads, sponsored search links, video spots, in–game or in–application placements, call, SMS, or if you don't have a mobile site, they will even build one for you.
Google is reporting that they have now doubled the number of Sitelinks that lets you jump directly to specific pages deeper in a site. Sitelinks are basically a set of deeplinks or jumplinks that appear below certain search results on a Google SERP page. They have apparently been so popular that Google has tweaked their algorithm to start displaying up to eight Sitelinks per site instead of just four allowing users to get a good snapshot of a site's content and more easily access additional areas of a site. Sounds like something you as a site owner and user might want, then expect to see even more sites sporting Sitelinks with more descriptive names as they are working on making that happen as well.
The Blog Council has come to order. It has been formed, site launched, and first meeting set to convene in January. Per their official description, the Blog Council is a community for official corporate blogs and bloggers that represent major global corporations acting as a strong advocate in support of responsible, ethics-based corporate blogging. Their mission is to create best practices (global corporate blog directory, standardized blog terminology glossary, moderating and responding to comments), community, ROI, and advocacy. Other initiatives include proactive blogger relations, blog policy, blogs as customer service tools, ROI of blogs, creating "brand love" in the blogosphere, managing blogs in multiple languages, dealing with employee personal blogs, and how to engage bloggers to write about a company. Council member companies include AccuQuote, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, Starwood Hotels, and Wells Fargo. I don't see Google on the list, at least not yet, but the Official Google Blog is more popular than all the others' blogs. Neither is Sun on the list whose CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has a blog. The council is clear to differentiate itself from and as not representing personal, SMB, and professional bloggers.
Corporate blogging is the corporate adaption of blogging. And, given that corporations have a corporate and legal reponsibility to protect themselves and shareholders, it seems logical that they would have some rules of engagement around this. But this smells of a corporate stranglehold on an inherently open, unregulated, free speech realm. The Council's own site is a blog but already I don't see how you comment other than email the "Blog Council". I don't know about anyone else, but I don't read any of the member council company blogs; okay, maybe I've looked at a Microsoft Blog before. I guess I might check out some of the others in time to see the fruits of this endeavour. Will all this policy-making help or hinder corporate blogging?! I guess that is yet to be seen but people are mostly skeptical.
Robert Scoble writes: "If your company needs help "getting it" then you shouldn’t be hanging out with other companies.... Demonstrates that the industry has a LONG way to go before it understands the real value that seemingly unimportant conversations have."
Google has rolled out a new mobile interface for the iPhone. iPhone users who visit Google.com from their iPhone will now have access to many of their fave Google's services such as the Search, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, as well as other features like Docs, SMS, GOOG-411 and Notebook all accessible from the menu bar at the top of the page. Google has integrated AJAX to create a "fast and fluid" experience leveraging the iPhone's large touch screen, Wi-Fi, and Safari browser. To test drive it for yourself, visit www.google.com from your iPhone.
Yesterday, Gmail announced the next evolution of labels for your Gmail Inbox, the colored label. Labels are used to tag and categorize your email for easy access similar to the folders concept but emails are not actually removed from your inbox into a label. In its previous iteration, labels were shrowded in green; with the new version, users will be able to color code their email by colors meaningful to them. For example, a red label might denote something urgent, green for bills, and yellow for a friend.
I've tried it out and really like it. This new feature further enhances the personalization and customization of the user's inbox and makes it more user friendly. The colored labels only work in the newest version of Gmail, currently available for IE7 and Firefox 2.
Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience at Google announced yesterday on the Today Show, the fastest rising search terms on Google in 2007.
Here they are: 1. iphone 2. webkinz 3. tmz 4. transformers 5. youtube 6. club penguin 7. myspace 8. heroes 9. facebook 10. anna nicole smith
Yahoo also released their "Top Trends in Search" list yesterday for 2007.
News Stories - top 10 news stories: 1. Saddam Hussein 2. Iran 3. Iraq 4. President George W. Bush 5. Oil and Gas prices 6. Barack Obama 7. Hillary Rodham Clinton 8. San Diego Fires 9. Afghanistan 10. Virginia Tech
Today, Google Adwords, the Google advertising program where users choose keywords to create their own ads and advertise on Google SERP pages and ad network, has introduced a new feature called AdWords Local PlusBox. Local PlusBox provides mapping and tel info for local business ads appearing in the "Sponsored Links" section above the search results of a Google SERP page. These ads will have a plus icon (+) next to the business address and when users click on it, the ad expands to include a map, address, driving instructions, and phone number, in addition to the location name that appears beneath the last line of ad. Even better for advertisers, they will not have to pay for clicks on Local PlusBox, maps, or driving instructions; only for clicks that take users to their landing pages. This new feature is being rolled out to US, Canada, UK, and Germany and should be available in the next week or so.
This is a natural and useful extension of the mapping feature for both advertisers and users. Currently, in the main search results, the mapping feature exists for some listings. It makes sense that for the top sponsors this should be enabled as well. It is convenient, all-encompassing, and complete information all on the same page. No mention of if this feature will eventually roll out to the Sponsored Links in the right rail of Google SERP pages as well; although, there is less real estate to play with there in terms of the width of that column and might require either adjusting the width of the map or column.
LiveJournal, the online blogging platform owned by Six Apart which also owns Typepad, Moveable Type and Vox, has sold LiveJournal to Russian online media company, SUP, founded in 2006. The financial terms of the sale have not been made public.
LiveJournal, which has been in existence since 1999, was started by Brad Fitzpatrick who went on to join Google as its social networking guru. It claims to have 14 million users and 18 million unique visitors a month, the majority of users are 15 to 22 years old and mostly female, and it is open source. The WebGuild featured Ben and Mena Trott, co-founders of SixApart, which acquired LiveJournal in January 2005, as speakers back in April 2004 to talk about blogging and their experiences in starting SixApart.
I know that some Harvard classes use LiveJournal mostly because its free (but there is a paid component to it as well) and I wouldn't be surprised if other academia do as well. LiveJournal.com also "supports the OpenID distributed identity system, letting you bring your LiveJournal.com identity to other sites, and letting non-LiveJournal.com users bring their identity here". This is something another free blogging software, Blogger, is also moving towards this with its latest announcement that it is adding OpenID commenting where users can sign in using their LiveJournal identity.
Talk about portable widgets is not new. After all, 2007 has been proclaimed "Year of the Widget" by Newsweek. Though what I intend to discuss here is more about portability aspects and efforts in this direction rather than about widgets themselves. One of the early entrants in the market was Knofabulator (remember anyone?) which was bought by Yahoo. Then it seemed that they didn't know what to do with it and rebranded it but added no extra functionalities. A few days back it was in the news that Yahoo was releasing version 4.5 of its Konfabulator widget. The new version includes things like HTML and Flash support as well as a better user interface. However, Yahoo widgets are still only for desktops like Vista or XP. However, with Google releasing widgets for Mac a few days back, as well as Mac having widget support and Microsoft supporting widgets in Vista, Yahoo may find itself facing tough competition in a comparatively small market. Such widgets are important if we see them in the light of what is expected of applications in future. Application virtualization is gaining ground and also to be noted is the following vision of Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt.
Netvibes is a company which had initially announced a widget platform to make widgets that can work on Vista, Google, Mac, and even Yahoo widgets. It is called Universal Widget API and has the aim of "build your module once, deploy everywhere". Other companies in this space are Musestorm and Clearspring. Musestorm enables non-programmers to develop rich media widgets and Clearspring specializes in distributing widgets as well as analytics and API. The next step, of course, would be for these applications or widgets to run on mobile as well. For instance, I am sure Google's Android which is to be released next year with Open Handset Alliance will soon be integrated with their Web ToolKit so that applications can run over mobile, computer, and web. And won't that be cool?
The latest feature coming out from Blogger is OpenID commenting. Blogger in draft, the experimental version of the popular blogging platform, Blogger, has just announced that they are now enabling OpenID-based commenting for blogs. OpenID provides users with a single digital identity across mutliple sites eliminating the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying the user experience. Users of OpenID-enabled services such as LiveJournal and WordPress can comment on a blog using their accounts from those sites rather than with a Blogger/Google account. Once released to the larger public, this can be enabled through the "Settings > Comments" in Blogger.
Google Reader, the Google web-based RSS reader and aggregator, has added new features to its core functionality. Yesterday, Google announced that they have just released personalized recommendations and drag-and-drop support in Reader. Personalized recommendations will allow users to find and subscribe to more feeds and the drag-and-drop utility allows users to move and re-order feeds and folders around for a more customized experience. If you click on "Discover" in the left nav, you'll see a tab for "Recommendations" and note the drag-and-drop in action in the screenshot.
Google Labs is experimenting with new features designed to improve users' search experience. The features will appear on search results pages and help users customize and personalize their search experience.
On search results pages, if you like a result, you can move it up on the page and mark it with an orange asterisk to clearly denote it for future reference when you re-search for that keyword. If there's a result you don't like, axe it and you won't need to see it again when you search for the same keyword in the future. If you want to recommend a better webpage that should appear for a keyword search, you can do that and in future searches for that keyowrd, your recommended site will appear at the top of the SERP page marked again with an orange asterisk. And, like any good tool, it not only saves your changes for future searches of the same keyword but it also allows you to undo your changes by clicking on a link to view your results in their original ordering. More info.
Fortune Magazine has come out with a list of the 25 most powerful people in business. At the top of the list is Apple's, Steve Jobs. Also in the top five are Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin of Google.
Other tech giants on the list include of course Bill Gates of Microsoft, John Chambers of Cisco, Mark Hurd of HP, and media mogul cum social networking giant by virtue of MySpace, Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp. Complete list.
Zoho, a provider of a suite of productivity web applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation tools announced that it has made its word processing app, Zoho Writer, available offline.
Akin to Google Apps and desktop based Microsoft Office, Zoho represents what can be deemed the next generation of Office 2.0 apps. Offline capability is enabled by Google Gears, an open source JavaScript browser extension. Writer users can now view and edit documents offline and synchronize their offline changes with the online versions of their docs and, as a result, eliminate costly downtime.
The Nasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today announced it has launched the NASDAQ Internet Index (Nasdaq:QNET). The Index is a new benchmark designed to track the performance of companies engaged in a broad range of internet-related services such as:
1) internet access providers 2) internet search engines 3) web hosting 4) website design 5) internet retail commerce
"The NASDAQ Internet Index is comprised of securities of companies that are at the forefront of internet technology. They are leading innovators in providing faster internet access, creating more intuitive e-commerce experiences, and developing the second generation Web," said NASDAQ Senior Vice President Steven Bloom.
However, they NASDAQ did not provide a break down of the index composition. Many in internet industry have relied on Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) to be a proxy of the internet industry. Why not! Google operates:
1) the largest search engine 2) the largest online advertising network 3) the largest online video site 4) the third largest social networking site 5) one of the largest payment flow services, email and mapping services
Soon Google will be a big player in: 6) mobile applications 7) productivity applications 8) online storage services (other than email)
Just did a Google search for Thanksgiving and noticed that the link for "Video" which used to be on the top left has been surreptitiously replaced with "Products". It appears on the homepage as well as on search results pages. "Video" has now been down-levelled to the "more" pulldown which is an alpha listing thereby, positioning Video at the bottom of the list. Ouch! If you click on Products, the two links switch places with Products moving into the pulldown and Video appearing at the top of the page in its previous position...seems like that shouldn't happen. This is a clear indication of lesser emphasis being placed on Google Video which has really been phased into YouTube and a greater emphasis on business and commerce. Can you say cha Checkout?!
It is being reported by ValleyWag that the long awaited Googlephone will be making its debut next month and will run on any OS including the Google Android OS. As Google defines it, any phone running Android will be considered a Googlephone. The device will be dubbed the "Bug".
In a related post, Steve Horowitz, Engineering Director at Google, was quoted as saying "there is actually no gPhone". Sergey Brin describes Android as a new open source operating system and software platform for mobile phones which allows you to write services and software on mobile phones.
The OpenSocial Event on Wednesday was very well received and a lot of fun. Thank you to everyone who attended and to the speakers Chris Schalk, Google Developer Programs at Google, Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, and Akash Garg, Co-Founder/CTO at Hi5 Networks.
It was a lively and interactive session. The video should be up in a week for anyone who missed it or just wants a recap. Continue the discussion online and here are all the photos.
There are reportedly plans underway to transform your email into a social network. Yahoo and Google are looking at turning their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.
"Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts."
This is a creative extension of traditional Gmail and Yahoo email that so many people use and whose success is dependent on a number of factors. Gmail already has chat integrated and both My Yahoo and iGoogle have widgets or gadgets available. Google also recently made an upgrade to the Gmail Contacts Manager which is more usable and profile oriented.
Internet finance sites such as Google and Yahoo Finance have been waiting months for regulatory permission to start offering free, real-time U.S. stock quotes. Presently, most web sites not associated with a broker show U.S. stock quotes with a 15- or 20-minute delay.
The hold up is over the price the stock exchanges can charge web sites for trading data. Katie Stanton, of Google Finance said they have already got approval from two Chinese exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen to carry real-time quotes and immediately saw a leap in demand for that service.
"You can get real-time sports scores, weather, news, but you still can't easily get real-time stock market data," she said. "We should have had this ages ago."
"We're falling behind the rest of the world here," said Ron Jordan, senior vice president of NYSE Euronext's U.S. market data. "The fact that China can introduce real-time prices into the United States before the NYSE can is ridiculous."
Stock exchanges want to charge web sites a per user fee by tracking each user. Web sites such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and others offer wider distribution of market information to consumers than NYSE or NASDAQ on a daily basis.
You read that right! Per Steve Horowitz, Engineering Director at Google, "there is actually no gPhone". What is for sure though is Android. Sergey Brin describes Android as a new open source operating system and software platform for mobile phones which allows you to write services and software on mobile phones. Watch the video! For more on all things Android visit http://code.google.com/android/.
Google (NASD: GOOG) , will be investing up to around US$5.5 million for a 30% stake in Chennai (the birth place of Google's founding member Ram Shriram) based Ventureast Fund, a seed-stage fund that will invest in technology fostering innovation in India. The fund will invest in technologies and solutions focused on small and medium-sized enterprises and bridging the digital divide in India and global markets.
Google has already invested USD $3.75 million into the fund with the remainder to be made by March 2008, when the fund is scheduled to close. Google's investment strategy has been to seek out unique products, technologies and engineering teams that can help it provide innovative products to users or enhance existing services.
Google has also made an undisclosed investment in Bangalore-based early stage venture fund Erasmic Venture Fund. One of their portfolio companies being Position 2, a search engine optimization and marketing services company that utilizes a US/India delivery model.
Google made its debut as an investor in venture capital funds in January 2007, when it invested nearly USD 3.75 million in India's Seedfund. Google has also joined the Indian Angel Network, an organization of professionals and companies dedicated to supporting entrepreneurship in India.
Earlier this year, Salman Ullah, Google's Director Corporate Development, left to start his own venture firm named Merus Capital.
Facebook's idea of inserting ads into user profiles and sending it to their network of friends could be illegal in the State of New York. The program allows corporations to set up Facebook pages where visitors who take certain actions can thereby trigger the sending of a “Social Ad” to their network of friends. Here is Facebook’s own explanation:
The NY Times is reporting that, Facebook’s Social Ad platform may be illegal in New York under a 100 year old privacy law that states that “any person whose name, portrait, picture, or voice is used within this state for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without the written consent first obtained” can sue for damages, and doing so is a criminal misdemeanor.
William McGeveran, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School said users can sue advertisers who use their names and images without permission under a common law principle. He quotes from the law:
"One who appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another is subject to liability to the other for an invasion of his privacy."
This is similar to the international ad campaign run by Virgin Mobile where a 16-year-old girl's photo was taken from Flickr without her consent. Virgin Mobile has been hit with a law suit over the incident however the company maintains that the use of the photo is lawful and fits with Virgin’s image.Now imagine this scenario playing out with hundreds, thousands and maybe even millions of Facebook users. Soon Facebook will be buried in so much legal trouble. Hey, maybe Facebook could turn this into a business model. Why not Viacom's has built a successful business on litigation. Wow! what will the new Facebook valuation be?
Yahoo! will not be focusing on mobile as Google is doing. Instead Yahoo will be focusing on selling ads for the mobile platform, reports the Globe and Mail.
"Yahoo is working on a number of deals that enable it to sell ads across carriers", said Marco Boerries, GM Yahoo Mobile.
Yahoo has been inking deals with network carriers to bring mapping, email and other features to mobile internet users. These services will be accompanied by Yahoo ads.
Boerries doubts Google will be able to sell enough advertising to cover the costs it will incur from its mobile business model. However, if Google succeeds in doing so, Yahoo is open to adopting a similar software-based model.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, told reporters that Google was not ahead in no way but search. "Google is not ahead of us," he told reporters at a Tokyo hotel. "In the area of search specifically, Google would lead."
Ballmer is increasingly on the defensive. In Mumbai, he said that "Facebook investment was not a mistake." Days after the Facebook investment Google and the rest of the social networking industry joined together to create OpenSocial. OpenSocial has put Facebook in the corner. Again.
Ballmer was in Tokyo to launch Windows Live programming package for e-mail, instant messaging, blogging and photo-sharing in Japan. The product was announced in the U.S. Tuesday. On Monday, Google announced that its similar product offerings for personal computers will be made available for free on mobile devices. The program called Android will be made available next year.
Google calling! It is being reported that screenshots of the much anticipated Google Phone have been leaked. Based on screenshots of the app, the interface suggests that aside from basic phone capabilities, the gPhone provides:
-geo-location specific search for people and businesses -hours of business -reviews -proximity -mapping
Oprah now has her own YouTube Channel. It appears that even the big "O" is not immune. Oprah, who has had her own TV show for 22 years, now has her own channel on YouTube. And its not likely because YouTube is cool. Chances are that Oprah is seeing the shift of eyeballs from TV to the web and that advertisers are no longer willing to pay a premium for tv ad spots so she is moving to where the eyeballs are...the web. She also did a YouTube interview with the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who appeared on the Oprah Show.
What's gonna be on this channel: -exclusive video including video she made herself for YouTube -what's coming up on the Oprah show -behind the scenes highlights of what goes on backstage during commercials
She stated that she is very excited for everybody to be able to show their own videos. Check it out: www.youtube.com/oprah.
Maka maka. It's official! Google's platform agnostic API OpenSocial is live. Per its Product Managers:
"OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that will work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn, among others. In addition, this allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites. Learn once, write anywhere, if you will. And because it's built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don't have to learn a custom programming language." (like Facebook's proprietary ftml maybe?!)
"Perhaps most interestingly, we will see social capabilities move into new contexts. OpenSocial will also work in non-traditional social contexts, such as on Salesforce.com and Oracle. With a common set of APIs, it will be even easier to extend social functionality. Beyond the many fun and entertaining social applications we already have seen, we think we'll see a number of social applications emerge in business contexts."
The business applications and adaptations of this should very interesting.
Google's highly anticipated OpenSocial app platform where developers can create applications that work on its own social networking sites like Orkut and any participating social networks is set to go live today. News of this was first reported by TechCrunch in September.
OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications on the web. These common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications.
These APIs will allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:
- Profile Information (user data) - Friends Information (social graph) - Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)
Developers such as Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide will create apps which can be hosted on participating social networks such as Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo, Oracle, MySpace, Bebo, and SixApart.
OpenSocial is in direct response to Facebook which allows developers to create apps on the Facebook platform but which are not portable to other platforms. With OpenSocial, apps will work not only on Google but across other platforms.
Google has launched a new non-Google branded site called SearchMash which is designed to serve as an experimental testing ground for user interface ideas without the Google brand skewing the objectivity of the results.
Here are 14 observations on SearchMash: 1. The character count on the SearchMash homepage is even less than the Google.com classic homepage. 2. With SearchMash, there is no search button but there are instructions to 'hit enter to get results' but those directions disappear on the search results page. I always hit 'enter' myself versus clicking the "Google Search" button and I never click "I'm Feeling Lucky". I wonder how many people actually do. 3.The SERP page on SearchMash has a frame for the header which houses the search text field so it doesn't scroll with the page. 4. On SearchMash, you can only search web pages by default whereas Google shows you the options to search for images, videos, news, maps, blogs, etc. but SearchMash automatically gives you results for web, images, blogs, videos, and wikipedia oddly enough. 5. My search for 'flowers' on SearchMash yielded about half the number of results (14,200,000) than on Google (22,600,000). There is no time of how long it took to generate the results, the number of results showing on the page, or definitions. 6. The search results are on the left, and the images, blogs, videos, and wikipedia results are in the right rail along with a feedback survey which doesn't take you off the page. It doesn't seem to save your feedback results on the page if you navigate away to another site and then come back or do another type of search like image/blog/video/wikipedia and and go back to web search. 7. There is no pagination. There are ten results by default, designated by a "..." divider (not sure that's necessary) and when you click a link for 'more web results' or hit the space bar, the page expands downward until, in this case, I hit 100 results (so not sure what happened to my 14,300,000 results) versus paging to more pages as on Google. 8. The results are numbered which is also different from its Google counterpart. 9. The color palette is the same kind of blue and white just a softer blue and no yellow designated 'Sponsored Links' section and no heavy demarcation of section areas. So, if there are any paid links, they are not called out in anyway. 10. The font size is smaller by default (12px), all the text is the same size, the blue is a little brighter and there is no underlining by default for links (not even on mouseover but opting instead for background highlighting). 11. You can click to see images or blogs or video results which then loads in the left channel and web results moves to the top right column and whichever type of result you've clicked on doesn't show up on the right. 12. You can click on 'hide details' in the title bar to collapse the display of web or images results, allowing more results to fit in view. 13. Searches seem ranked the same as on Google. 14. From your SERP, you can also search within a site. So, my search yielded 1800flowers.com as a result, which I could click on to navigate to or search their site for 'flowers'. Cool! It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
Google is reportedly now using their own machine translator technology on Google Translate which was previously provided by Systran, a provider of online translation, translation software, and tools. There are apparently still issues with both technologies - Systran translation used by Altavista and Yahoo, and Google translation.
I like that Google allows you to translate a word or a block of text, entire web pages, and search in other languages. What is also cool is when you translate text, it will give you the option to "Suggest a better translation" so it's almost self-learning or self-correcting. But the option to "Get Translation Browser Buttons" is just an option to add to favorites; I expected a Google Toolbar button add-on. The Yahoo translation tool limits you to 150 words for their text translation, you can search the web for translated text but you can't specify what language you want to search in; I guess by default it assumes you want to search in the language of the translated text. They do have the option to "Add Babel Fish to your Yahoo! Toolbar" and I like the "Add Babel Fish Translation to your site" widget where depending on which one you choose, you can have people localize your site on the fly.
The problem with all this is that these tools are machine translations without any human intervention and while neither methodology is error free, computer assisted translation is more exacting. However, translations are of natural-language and dependent on context and conventions and is not always as literal or word-for-word. Most larger companies with geo-specific sites are engaged in multi-lingual computing at some capacity. And as a result, most pay a pirate's booty for human translation services which is billed by the word. It would be great if these online translation technologies could be used initially followed by human intervention.
People around the world have become obsessed with Google (NSDQ: GOOG). Whenever "Google" is mentioned in subway cars in London or a busy street in Tokyo people become excited almost curious. Information week reports that whenever they post images of Google, like the photos of Google's new digs in Ann Arbor, Mich., readers are drawn to it like bees to honey. The above photo was taken at an Italian soccer match where fans were carrying the banner of the Goggle homepage for the search term "Juventus" and the corresponding search result.
Google has become a utility that and most people cannot live without. People are curious to know about the company, how to get a job at Google and how the company became an overnight success. Everybody seems to have heard about the gourmet meals, and other perks like masseuse and laundry services. Many, CEOs and VP of fortune 500 companies attend the WebGuild Events at Google seeking jobs, some to witness the culture so that they can implement the "Googlely Feel" (as Marissa Mayer famously puts it) at their own companies to attract employees as well as keep their employees from leaving for Google.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that another Yahoo executive Jacki Kelley VP Sales Strategy is jumping ship. She joined the company about a year ago. Jacki is being poached by Wenda Harris Millard, who left Yahoo earlier this year for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO) after a rocky goodbye. To view other Yahoo departures click here.
At MSLO, Kelley will be the Executive Vice President of media sales, overseeing all digital, magazine and broadcasting sales. A noted perk with her new position is that Kelley will be in New York on a full-time basis. As it’s been reported that Kelley was beginning to tire of travel between NYC and Sunnyvale, CA, it would be a luring factor for Kelley’s ultimate decision to leave Yahoo.
Kelly was recruited as VP despite the fact she knew nothing about the internet business. This was classic Terri Semel. He clogged the internet power house with old world cronies who knew nothing about the internet business as it is widely known today. Terri himself did not know what email was when he joined Yahoo! and he was baffled why people would send eachother email when they could simply make a phone call or walk over to their desks. Click here to see all executive departed to date.
Google joined San Francisco in its energy conservation bid by turning off the lights on its most expensive real estate yet, the Google.com homepage. On Saturday from 12:01 am to 9 pm, the company blackened its homepage to Bay Area users in its show of support of Lights Out San Francisco.
"Given our company's commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Lights Out campaign, and ... darkened our homepage [Saturday] to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful citywide event".
I didn't see any other tech companies on the list of supporters being socially responsible other than Yahoo who apparently donated 10,000 CFLs for distribution.
Google Gadgets was the topic of discussion for Jeff Huber, VP of Engineering, at Google in a presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit. Jeff explained that gadgets are representative of the programmable web. Gadgets are being created using rss, html, flash, and css and that gadgets are open, easy, mashable, packable, portable, and embeddable. He went on to say that gadgets serve to disaggregate the web and are socially distributed.
There are 20,000 gadgets on over 100,000 sites and a billion are served each week via syndication. There are also gadgets being embedded in gadgets eg. Google Maps. According to Huber, "what rss did for content, gadgets are doing for apps. It is the power of the open platform and open distribution system that is responsible for growing gadgets versus as a company trying to do this. It is an open ecosystem that is democratic and self-sustaining. The platform is fast, open, and easy. The web is the platform."
UC Berkeley has joined the internet revolution and is making available courses for free via YouTube.
University officials announced that over 300 hours of UC Berkeley classes and events are available online at the web address www.youtube.com/ucberkeley. The classes include lectures on peace and conflict studies, bioengineering, sciences, technology and computer programming.
UC Berkeley was one of the first major universities to embrace webcasting and podcasting and now YouTube.
There is the transcript of the statement made by David Drummond, Chief Legal Officer, Google on the proposed acquisition of DoubleClick by Google (GOOG).
It explains in simple english Google's existing online advertising business and DoubleClick's display ad technology and business.
David went on to say that "Google’s business model has focused on what’s known as the “long tail” of the Internet – the millions of individuals and small businesses that cater to niche interests and markets. We lower the barrier to entry for these small publishers and advertisers, and we match them up with users who are interested in what they have to say or sell."
Smith said, "While there are millions of web sites and advertisers on the Internet, there are actually a very small number of “intermediaries” that provide the tools and services that connect them. If you are a web site and want to sell ad space on your site, or if you are an advertiser who wants to display your ads online, you have to work with them or one of their intermediaries."
Google has launched a link sharing service called Google Shared Stuff. It is very similar to the bookmarking service (Google Bookmarks) released in 2005 and Delicious.
The service allows you to add links to your "shared stuff page" by adding a bookmarklet to your web browser's "Links" or "Bookmarks" bar or by clicking this Share button, which currently only seems to be available on Google Video but is likely to be made available for embedding on any website.
Upon clicking the icon, a popup allows you to choose whether you want to share a thumbnail image and article preview taken from the website or just the link.
There has been so much talk about the Google GPhone (NASDAQ: GOOG), that I feel like I have one. Google has also assembled many of the requirements for a next generation internet mobile company such as mobile search, mobile maps, web based voice mail, voice enable directory service, mobile advertising and many other offerings that I am probably not aware of. So a device is not that much of a stretch. Google could give a struggling device manufacturer a significant boost in distribution. Google could offer free calls anywhere in the world subsidized by ads of course, and running off its massive internet backbone. I already use GrandCentral and it is an amazing tool. For more on GrandCentral please Google it. Also, does Apple know something we don't? Is the gphone launch imminent or are the cutting the price of the 8G iPhone simply because it is not moving? In the meantime I am Gruuving with my iPhone and GServices.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed on the WebGuild Blog including posts, comments, and external links, are those of the individual
authors and not WebGuild's.
It is being reported that the man who held the toughest job at Google, Shashi Seth, head of monetization for YouTube has left the company for greener pastures - after only a year on the job.
Facebook announced today that it will be opening up its code. Dubbed 
Billionaire takeover strategist Carl Icahn is looking at a possible play to force Yahoo back to the table with Microsoft to sell the company at a big profit. The news today sent Yahoo up about 1.30 and YHOO is still rising in after market trading.
Maria Bartiromo at 
Google has been named the world's number one and most powerful brand for the second year in a row clocking in at an estimated value at $85,057 million which represents a 30% increase in its brand valuation. This, according to BrandZ's top 100 brand ranking for 2008. Other tech heavyweights in the top ten included GE, Microsoft, China Mobile, IBM, and Apple which was the biggest mover in the top 10 and a new entrant, moving up from sixteenth to seventh place with an incredible 123% increase in brand value to $55,206 million. HP was at sixteen, Cisco ranked twenty-two, and Oracle and Intel at numbers twenty-six and twenty-seven respectively.
YouTube has come out with a tool to help you answer the question of who's watching you. YouTube Insight is a free video analytics tool that allows users who upload videos to YouTube to track the viewership on their videos including the geographic breakdown by region, as well as the popularity relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. Uploaders can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of their videos to find out how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks. Another key feature expected shortly is a breakdown of how viewers discovered your video. Using these metrics, you can increase your videos' view counts and improve your popularity on the site. To view your video analytics, click "About this Video" button under "My Account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos."
After the 
Want to develop applications for Google's new Android mobile phone platform and make a cool $275K?! Google has put $10M into a 
Google has made a number of improvements to their Google Apps on the iPhone. Just a month after the launch of its initial version, the Google Apps for iPhone diehards have gotten even slicker. The web applications including Search, Gmail, Calendar, and Reader are now sporting an even more streamlined interface intended to make the applications faster, easier to activate, and improve their overall usability via the iPhone touch-screen interface.
In an announcement yesterday, Google, Facebook, and Plaxo joined the 
Mad Money's, Jim Cramer, was on the Today Show yesterday. As part of his predictions for 2008, the money man told host, Meredith Viera, that Google was a favorite of 2007 and that there would be a whole new generation of Google users this year. He didn't expound on this but it seems like Jim is betting his money on another up year for the search giant. In the short segment, Cramer didn't mention any other tech stocks. There was no ranting and raving involved :). (Image source: Time, CNBC/AP)
Yahoo's Chief Performance Officer (CPO), 
Japan's top mobile phone carrier NTT DoCoMo is reportedly teaming up with Google to offer search and email on the company's handsets. Users will soon be able to access Google search, email, scehduling and photo-saving through NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode Internet network. The company is also looking at using Google's free OS for mobile devices to create the next gen handset which could result in a host of new services being rolled out by the two giants as early as mid '08.
Google Adwords which allows you to place ads on Google SERP pages has renamed the feature formerly known as "site targeting" to "
Back in November, I 
Google Profile is the new online calling card for users which will soon link up for use on multiple Google products. "A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you're all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you'd like." Anyone can see your Google Profile and it may be searchable if "you put your full name in the Nickname field, pages on which your profile appears may be returned as results by Google".
Profiles contain information such as a nickname (your real name is displayed only to your contacts), occupation, location, links, photo, and biographical info about yourself. Profiles are already available for Google Maps, Reader, and Shared Stuff.
In a bid to claim more of the mobile market and to catch up to competitors, Microsoft is reportedly set to launch mobile advertising on Monday on the U.S. version of MSN Mobile. Mini banners and text ads will be displayed on the MSN Mobile portal along with news, weather, stock, and movie info, search, email (Hotmail), IM (Messenger), and Microsoft's blogging and social networking platform (Live Spaces). They apprently already run ads in other global markets. As you may recall Microsoft bought online advertising company aQuantive in May for $6 billion in response to Google's Doubleclick purchase for $3 billion.
Yesterday, Gmail announced the next evolution of labels for your Gmail Inbox, the colored label. Labels are used to tag and categorize your email for easy access similar to the folders concept but emails are not actually removed from your inbox into a label. In its previous iteration, labels were shrowded in green; with the new version, users will be able to color code their email by colors meaningful to them. For example, a red label might denote something urgent, green for bills, and yellow for a friend. 
The latest feature coming out from Blogger is OpenID commenting. Blogger in draft, the experimental version of the popular blogging platform, Blogger, has just announced that they are now enabling 
Google Labs is experimenting with new features designed to improve users' search experience. The features will appear on search results pages and help users customize and personalize their search experience.
Fortune Magazine has come out with a list of the 25 most powerful people in business. At the top of the list is Apple's, Steve Jobs. Also in the top five are Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin of Google. 
Zoho, a provider of a suite of productivity web applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation tools announced that it has made its word processing app, Zoho Writer, available offline.
Just did a Google search for Thanksgiving and noticed that the link for "Video" which used to be on the top left has been surreptitiously replaced with "Products". It appears on the homepage as well as on search results pages. "Video" has now been down-levelled to the "more" pulldown which is an alpha listing thereby, positioning Video at the bottom of the list. Ouch! If you click on Products, the two links switch places with Products moving into the pulldown and Video appearing at the top of the page in its previous position...seems like that shouldn't happen. This is a clear indication of lesser emphasis being placed on Google Video which has really been phased into YouTube and a greater emphasis on business and commerce. Can you say cha Checkout?!
It is being reported by ValleyWag that the long awaited Googlephone will be making its debut next month and will run on any OS including the Google 
Google calling! It is being reported that screenshots of the much anticipated Google Phone have been leaked. Based on screenshots of the app, the interface suggests that aside from basic phone capabilities, the gPhone provides:
Google is reportedly now using their own machine translator technology on 
There is the 
There is the 
There has been so much talk about the Google GPhone (NASDAQ: GOOG), that I feel like I have one. Google has also assembled many of the requirements for a next generation internet mobile company such as mobile search, mobile maps, web based voice mail, voice enable directory service, mobile advertising and many other offerings that I am probably not aware of. So a device is not that much of a stretch. Google could give a struggling device manufacturer a significant boost in distribution. Google could offer free calls anywhere in the world subsidized by ads of course, and running off its massive internet backbone. I already use GrandCentral and it is an amazing tool. For more on GrandCentral please Google it. Also, does Apple know something we don't? Is the gphone launch imminent or are the cutting the price of the 8G iPhone simply because it is not moving? In the meantime I am Gruuving with my iPhone and GServices.
