Phil's Techno Talk » google

Google v Apple: A matter of philosophy

Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Blogs) — Fri, 21 May 2010 16:41:29 +0000

These two companies used to be best buddies; one CEO was even on the board of the other firm. But now Google appears to be sniping at Apple almost every day. The reason is simple - after years when they had very different ambitions, the two are now competing on the same ground. With Android, Google has already made a land-grab for leadership in the smartphone business; yesterday it made clear its ambitions to advance on Apple's digital music and video territory. As the battle hots up, the philosophical divisions between the two firms become clearer. So, Google TV is a somewhat hazy plan to integrate television and the web, which will see Google provide the software and the likes of Sony and Logitech make hardware. What it won't be, insists Google, is a producer or owner of content - merely a platform for others to use. The Apple TV system, which even Steve Jobs admits has not really taken off, locks users into content from the company's own iTunes store, and doesn't make it easy to roam the web in search of other video content. That may of course be more attractive to TV firms who may worry that Google's offering will simply be a conduit bringing unauthorised copies of their content to the big screen. In music, Google plans to tackle one of the deficiencies of Android phones: the trickiness of getting easy access to your digital music collection, which is still much easier with an iPhone. It's launching an Android music store in the cloud, with an easy option to sync your music wirelessly to your phone. Wireless syncing is, of course, not available on the iPhone - indeed Apple blocked an app that made it possible from its store - but there are rumours that the company is soon to launch its own iTunes streaming service in the cloud. In every area where it's now confronting Apple, Google is determined to paint a picture of itself as the friendly, open giant which just wants to help content owners and users meet each other to the benefit of all. By contrast, it implies that Apple is now becoming a locked-down, closed-minded bully, telling everyone what they can and can't do online. Just look at this video from the Google I/O event, where Vic Gundotra quotes the boss of Android Andy Rubin warning of "a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice. That's a future we don't want!" Now which man and which device could he be referring to? Apple's belief is that for most customers, ease of use is the top priority, and they're happy to hand over some control to the company if that's going to make the products easier to use. So far, that strategy seems to be working with sales of the locked-down iPhone and iPad booming. But Google believes it can draw a far bigger crowd with its apparently more open philosophy. Let's see if either proves to be right.

Google and privacy: What crisis?

Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Blogs) — Wed, 19 May 2010 08:15:19 +0000

Crisis? What crisis? The two men sitting at a table in a country house hotel in Hertfordshire seemed very relaxed about another confrontation with European regulators over the internet's thorniest issue. Mind you, if you are the billionaire bosses of a massive moneymaking machine like Google there can't be much that keeps you awake at night. When co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt met journalists at their company's annual European Zeitgeist summit yesterday evening, talk turned immediately to privacy. The incident which saw Google Streetview cars scrape data from private wi-fi networks as they roamed across Europe has put the company right in the firing-line of regulators already concerned about its general attitude to users' data. But Mr Schmidt was clear: "No harm, no foul," was his explanation of why he did not expect the incident to lead to any criminal prosecution. He insisted that as none of the data had been used or lost, nobody had been harmed by the affair though he accepted there was damage to his company's reputation. Larry Page went further, claiming there had never been a single case of anyone suffering harm because of data kept on Google logs, while there had been plenty of instances where people had shared too much of their own data online with disastrous consequences. When I suggested that the privacy issue was something of a crisis for the whole internet industry, Mr Schmidt smiled and indicated that I was indulging in journalistic hyperbole. Then he quickly changed tack: "This is a very serious issue," he said "and we are not in a state of denial." Larry Page went on to make the point that society as a whole had to start a debate about privacy as we all realised just how much data we were putting online. "It's not going to go away and it's likely to get much more interesting," he said. "Interesting is a euphemism," cut in Eric Schmidt. To the relief, no doubt, of the two Google bosses, we went on to talk of other things. We asked about the negotiations with News Corp over newspaper paywalls and about Apple's apparent reluctance to allow Google apps onto the iPhone - both Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs are perfectly easy to talk to, according to Mr Schmidt. We heard about the extraordinary technology which is bringing instant translation to many Google products, from subtitles on YouTube videos to a function which allows you to take a picture of a foreign menu on an Android phone and find out that carre d'agneau is rack of lamb. We tried to ask about Google's plan to launch a smart TV with Intel - and were told to wait until Thursday for more details on that. And we heard about Google's huge cash pile, with Larry Page musing about all the things he could spend it on and Eric Schmidt acting the sensible uncle. We came away with the impression of a confident company with virtually limitless ambitions advancing on all fronts. The two men make an engaging double act, interrupting and teasing each other, and keeping on answering questions well after our allotted time was up. But the privacy issue is not going to go away - Europe's data regulators may prove even harder to charm than a roomful of cynical journalists

Conan O’Brien gets Googled

Maggie Shiels (BBC Blogs) — Mon, 10 May 2010 09:34:24 +0000

We know that the Googleplex has long been a must on the campaign trail for politicians; Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Jimmy Carter have all made the pilgrimage to the Mountain View HQ of arguably the world's biggest internet company. It has also been a big draw for Hollywood celebs and musicians notching up visits from Coldplay and Gwyneth Paltrow and recently Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. The latest big-name star to visit was late-night funnyman Conan O'Brien, who recently got ditched from the Tonight Show when former host Jay Leno bagged his old job back. For weeks, the controversy raged on TV stations, newspaper columns and the internet as Mr O'Brien was forced to make way for Mr Leno. Mr O'Brien has since signed a deal to host a show on TBS and is presently in the middle of a comedy tour of America called The Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour. Well as part of that tour, he has been doing the rounds here in Silicon Valley. Last month, he visited the Twitter HQ to thank the company for helping to save his career because, during the Tonight Show debacle, the Twitter faithful rallied to his support. You can see photos on the Twitter/Flickr feed of that event. And then last week there was a "show" at the Googleplex where hundreds of Googlers piled in to watch him do his thing. Mr O'Brien is introduced by a tartan-clad piper and vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra acts as MC and on-stage interviewer. Watch Mr O'Brien re-name Googlers as G-Men, accept a job offer at Google (around 10:00), do a dance with Mr Gundotra (11:30) talk about the power of the internet when he was asked to move aside to let Jay Leno take over his old Tonight Show slot (15:00), and how Twitter helped him sell out his show in hours (18:00). Later (22:00), Mr O'Brien ribs on Jay Leno - well, kind of, given the legal restrictions - as well as Yahoo (28:00) and Google bathrooms (29:00). And my favourite part, when a Googler gets to rub up against the funnyman and goes head to head. Watch the video to understand. It's about 23 minutes, 40 seconds in.

Google search redesign

Maggie Shiels (BBC Blogs) — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:39:24 +0000

The folks at Google have been tinkering again, and this time they think the changes they have made to their search page will "make it easier to access relevant search results and tools," says product manager Nundu Janakiram. He also told the BBC that the new upgrades would make everything "look cleaner and clearer for the user". Throughout our conversation, the buzzword was "relevancy" and how the changes are part of an effort to understand more fully what people are looking for. In a series of slides, Google takes a trip down Memory Lane and as this image shows, the search box back in the early days was oh-so-different from today. Or, as Mr Janakiram says: "Back in 1999, it looked strange but oddly familiar at the same time". One of the big milestones, he reckons, came in 2007 with universal search where a search query included things like images, maps, blogs, news and so forth. "That was a big dramatic change to bring in all these different content types into search." And so to today. The new design features will be rolled out throughout the day in 37 languages; the following couple of slides shows you how engineers have tried to deliver more relevant results depending on your query. If you put "string theory" into the search box, you will now see a menu on the left-hand side offering more relevant content types that users can drill down into further. This becomes more apparent when Google demonstrates what happens when a user tries to make a search for, say, "red shoes". The content types up for grabs are completely different and clearly more suited to the topic being searched for. Added to this, says Mr Janakiram, Google is introducing "a new piece of technology to understand spikes in content that breaks down into date ranges" . In this slide for the NFL draft, users can see the peaks and troughs in a story. "This is a really exciting piece of tech because date and time is hard to express in a query. How I want to see pictures of stories about Icelandic volcanoes in the last two days is easy in your head but hard for search," said Mr Janakiram. Other upgrades include query-related search tools and the ability to put a specific date on something. This slide demonstrates what Mr Janakiram said is the search engine's ability to "not only dig deeper but to explore more broadly the connection between different concepts and different entities." In this case, users can see not just search results for the Rolling Stones but also suggestions for other rock bands. Google has also tweaked its logo as this image shows so that it no longer has shadows and just looks a little bit different. Mr Janakiram says these new changes have come about following months and months of testing among users and inside Google among its 20,000-strong employee base. "This is one of the largest user interface experiments we have ever run at Google," he says. Mr Janakiram says hundreds of different designs and web pages were pored over and many confined to the dustbin. "The web is getting more complex and users demand more from search engines and our challenge is to solve that complexity in a clean and simple way." Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land applauds the new changes. "They are clean, clear and easy to use and I think it will encourage users to explore those specialised options they haven't noticed before," he says. "It is a nice interface and makes a lot of sense. The only downside is if someone doesn't like this, they are stuck because there is no way to turn it off." Update 1742: There's now a post on the changes at the Official Google Blog, A spring metamorphosis.

Getting organised the Google way

Maggie Shiels (BBC Blogs) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:45:10 +0000

Information can be the bane of our lives. While the right kind of information at a given moment is extremely empowering, there is little doubt that we are drowning in the stuff. Douglas Merrill knows this all too well. He is the former chief information officer of Google, the company that wants to take all that information and make it universally accessible. He was with the company for five years, from when it was a mere fledgling with a few hundred staff to when it hit the 19,000 mark. "The Library of Congress was founded in 1800. It took 200 years to fill it. Since 2000 there has been so much information on the web that it could fill 40,000 Libraries of Congress," explains Mr Merrill. Even though we have the web, and we have Google to "organise the world's information" for us, our tendency to become overwhelmed is not our fault. No, says Mr Merrill, chalk that one up to Mother Nature:

"We are just not very good at remembering things, by and large. Our short-term memory can only hold between five and nine things at a time. And our brain weighs three pounds (1.4kg) and is just larger than the average chicken. "Yet it is pretty fantastic. It can identify gender, how old someone is just by looking at a photograph of someone's nose and even recognise a song after hearing just a few notes."

Mr Merrill points out in his book Getting Organized in the Google Era that "your brain was developed eons ago primarily to prevent you from being eaten by carnivorous beasts - not to memorise lists or store facts." That's me off the hook. Mr Merrill is dyslexic and was forced to find ways to cope with remembering things. He notes that the "psychology of how people learn is through stories, not facts". His tips include building a story around a fact or set of facts and learning them through repetition. Mr Merrill also expounds the view that trying to juggle or multi-task is a complete waste of time, not a display of organisational prowess. I am probably not unlike a lot of people with two computers on my desk, a tape machine with an interview I am listening to, two landlines, my mobile phone, a TV in the background and a radio on low. Then there are Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn beeping in every time a status update drops. And depending on what time of day or night it is, I have my four-year-old and partner vying for attention. "Multi-tasking is a waste of time and effort. It just doesn't work," says Mr Merrill. In his book he writes that "when you multi-task, you're interfering with your brain's efforts to put information into short-term memory - a process that is fragile enough to begin with. And if the information doesn't make it into short-term memory, you won't be able to recall it later." This premise is borne out by recent study undertaken by French scientists which shows that our brain more-or-less maxes out when we try to do too much at once. Mr Merrill says that even at Google, there was a slow realisation that multi-tasking during meetings meant people were missing important information. The company eventually declared some meetings "laptop-free". The final whammy of this trio is that along with having a poor memory and not being good at multi-tasking, Mr Merrill says our brains are not good at making decisions. This, he says, has a lot to do with being swamped by choice and cites examples like walking down the cereal aisle and finding it impossible to pick a new breakfast from the scores of brightly coloured boxes. Mr Merrill says the way around this is to understand what your goals are and put them in order of priority. He describes a trick his wife Sonya uses: visualising all the options of a decision. Mr Merrill describes this as "living" with a decision. Not surprisingly, when it comes to technological solutions, Mr Merrill errs on the side of Google. For example, he tells me that "search is the oxygen of today's world". By that, he means that there is no need to remember everything because we can search for it. Take e-mail. Forget trying to purge old messages and reach the holy grail of an empty inbox. It's a waste of time, energy and effort, says Mr Merrill, and only causes us more angst. He says the tendency of people to file e-mail under some useful heading doesn't work because most messages need to be filed under several headings and because it is easier to search for what you want instead of trying to remember a bunch of related filenames.

"This notion of a clean desk or a clean inbox is deep inside of all of us - but just because it has always been done that way, doesn't mean you should do it. "We need to examine why we do something and choose to make a change. It is more effective not to delete inbox e-mail if you have a search function that works."

Mr Merrill also notes that there is no need to try and hang onto a host of facts because technology allows us to store so much and to do it relatively cheaply. Examples like cloud computing mean we may be able to access our information anywhere at any time. Video-conferencing saves travel time and using voicemail-to-text transcription is more convenient, useful and searchable. The hardest piece of advice for a journalist to follow is Mr Merrill's suggestion to just do one thing at a time. In fact, he says that we all need to switch off our e-mail and phones and that by being able to concentrate on one task we can achieve better results. With so much noise and the feeling that we always need to stay connected in case we miss something, it is a big ask.

Rupert Murdoch Accuses Google of Theft

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:09:56 +0000

Rupert Murdoch has said that Google are stealing content from his news sites and that they should pay for it.

If you visit http://news.google.com/ you can see a selection of news items aggregated from a selection of news sources. When news items from any of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation sites appear in these pages, he believes that Google should be paying him.

It seems that Mr Murdoch isn’t seeing the big picture. All you see on the Google News pages are headlines a a single sentence from the editorial. To read the entire story, you have to click on the link which takes you to the originating site. So anyone wanting to read a story related to headlines taken from a News Corporation site will actually be taken to that site.

Google are, in fact, driving traffic to those news sites. Personally, I never choose to visit any of Rupert Murdoch’s sites, but I do look at Google News. If I’m interested in a story, I’ll click the link and may end up at one of his sites. Therefore he gained a visitor who wouldn’t choose to visit. Heck! Shouldn’t Rupert Murdoch be paying Google for that service?

Any website owner can prevent Google from indexing their site by adding the two lines of code:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /
to their “robots.txt” file. It’s unlikely that the News Corporation webmasters are unaware of this, which suggests to me that they are simply trying it on by suggesting that Google should pay.

If I owned Google, I would simply drop the News Corporation sites from the search database. After all, I’m sure there are plenty of other news services out there who are only too happy to have links to their stories featured in Google.
I would be delighted if Google featured stories from one of my blogs!

Google’s Chrome OS – Is it a Windows Slayer?

admin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:14:41 +0000

Google have announced their intention to release a new operating system, Chrome OS. It will be fast and lightweight, and less liable to virus attacks than Windows. But is it really a replacement for Windows or Mac OS?

Chrome will be based on the Linux kernel, just as Mac Os is, but it’s not going to give you the same functionality as Mac OS or any of the popular versions of Linux. Chrome OS is really very little more than a dedicated browser, so it is targeted at people who do little more than work online. Of course, it will do the usual online tasks such as web surfing, emailing, social networking, Twittering etc., but what else will it do?

The first thing to realise is that all applications that you run must be capable of running within a web browser. This can be fairly limiting, although the number of web-based applications available is increasing all the time. However, performance of web-based applications is usually much lower than their native counterparts.

Serious gaming is not going to be an option. You’re not going to be able to run those super-high-resolution, fast, shoot-’em up action games. Browser applications just haven’t reached that level of capability yet.

And the big killer – Chrome OS is unlikely to be able to run any of the Windows or Mac OS applications you’ve already invested so much money in.

I’m not writing off Chrome OS before it’s released – I’m just making you aware that it will not be a replacement for Windows or Mac OS.

There are plenty of advantages to using Chrome OS though. It will be small and fast. When you switch on your PC, it will take just seconds to boot up, and assuming you have an Internet connection available, you’ll be online as soon as it has finished booting. It will be ideal for wi-fi enabled, sub-notebook computers, especially for use by people on the move.

Another good thing about this announcement is that it will probably spawn a whole new interest in developing good quality, browser-based applications; something that really could do with a shot in the arm.

The best feature of all though, is the price. Just like all the various versions of Linux, Chrome OS will be free to download and install.

But I’ll bet dollars to donuts that Google will still make a lot of money off the back of it. After all, Chrome OS steeers you straight into the web. Where Google lives and thrives.

Is it a Windows slayer? No. Not by a long way. Will it take off? Probably. Especially if Google can cut a deal to pre-load it on some sub-notebook, ultra-portable PCs. They definitely have the financial clout to do that, and they control one of the most popular online advertising networks, so getting it out there is not going to be a difficult task for them.