Tag: google

Yahoo! Directory comes to an early end

Yahoo! closes down its directory service five days early with a warning for today’s internet giants

After twenty years the Yahoo! Directory closed down five days early reports Search Engine Land.

The rise and and fall of Yahoo!’s core product illustrates both the volatility of the web and how the underlying dynamics of the internet has changed; at the time Yahoo! Directory was launched, we were struggling the task of keeping track of all the information being posted online.

Even in those early days it was clear that task was becoming unmanageable and this was the problem Google set out to solve and its success destroyed the directory business along with a whole range of other industries.

Yahoo! Directories’ demise needs to be noted by today’s web and social media giants; just as these technologies are disrupting old industries, new businesses aren’t immune to those changes.

 

Designing the self driving car

Does a driverless car need to look like the vehicles we’re used to?

“It certainly looks like an engineer designed it,” was one of the first reactions to Google’s announcement of its first full prototype self driving car.

Certainly Google’s driverless vehicle looks odd, sort of like an overgrown carnival dodgem or an cartoon character police car.

One of the interesting aspects of the driverless car is that many features into today’s automobiles aren’t necessary if you don’t have a driver – the obvious aspects being that a steering wheel, handbrakes and dashboard displays become unnecessary.

Google have a video from earlier in the year showing the design and unveiling of the prototype. One of the fascinating aspects of the new device is how Google propose it can empower the sight impaired and disabled.

The prototypes are stripped down vehicles with only a top speed of 25mph, with only two seats and little, if any luggage space. As the Oatmeal reports, riding in them is a little boring after the first few minutes.

Looking at the Google vehicles it’s difficult not to think we could design something radically different if we moved away from our own prejudices of what a car should look like.

At the beginning of last century, motor cars looked similar to the horse carts that were the standard transportation of the day; it was only in the 1930s the automobile fully took the form we recognise today.

So it’s worth considering how we can optimise these vehicles to meet our needs and comfort rather than build them around the requirements of Twentieth Century technologies and usage.

Tomorrow’s driverless cars will probably look very different to today’s vehicles and similarly our communities will adapt to a very different way of travelling. We will almost certainly find our cities will be very different when the driverless car becomes the norm.

We need to think how to design them for that future, however far away it may be.

Apple looks dangerous in the payment wars

Apple Pay is making big gains in the online space, however the battle is far from over.

Apple are making great gains in the online payment space but the battle with Google Android, PayPal and the banks to control the market is far from over.

One of the biggest business struggles this blog has been watching for the last five years is the battle over payment systems as banks, credit card companies, telcos and technologies vendors have jostled for control of what will probably the world’s most lucrative market by the end of the decade.

Apple were late to that fight with their Pay service only being released a few months ago however according to a report by ITG Investment Apple’s service is already ahead of PayPal in terms of usage among new adopters.

While PayPal have an impressive range of technologies, it’s clear they have found themselves wrong footed by Apple and have new companies like Stripe also challenging their market position.

Apple Pay may be getting the headlines, but at present Google Android still dominates the mobile commerce industry according to another research company Criteo.

In their State of Mobile Commerce report, Criteo claims that globally Android is well ahead in smartphone transactions. An interesting aspect of Criteo’s report is how far behind many nations such as Japan, South Korea and Germany the United States is in the take up of mobile commerce.

Criteo’s report shows the battle to control the e-commerce space is far from over, however if Apple Pay can grab a large chunk of the payments market then the company will have a strong hold on key part of global industry. It remains a high stakes and uncertain battle.

A dog fight in the clouds

Microsoft’s network of distributors is the company’s greatest defence believes Corporate Vice President John Case

“Productivity is our life blood,” says John Case, Microsoft’s Corporate VP for the company’s Office product line. “It’s part of the company that we say is our mission.”

Case was speaking at a media briefing ahead of Microsoft’s launch of their Australian Cloud Solution Provider program for resellers with the company making the case for integrators and IT support businesses to sell the Microsoft Cloud Services.

For Microsoft this is part of the evolution from the 1990s “PC on every desk” strategy to a mobile and cloud first service.

This shift doesn’t come without pain for Microsoft and it’s resellers, the cloud is a fiendishly competitive space with Amazon regularly dropping prices and Google steadily eating into the productivity suite market.

Making matters worse for Microsoft are that Google are moving into their hosted server space with the announcement that Google’s Cloud Platform now supports Microsoft Server.

Case though is sanguine though about the threats from Google, particularly the increased commissions being paid to resellers which will only put more pressure on Microsoft as resellers consider the options.

Probably the toughest part of the shift for Microsoft are the reduced margins – although for resellers the change is far more wrenching as the profits from cloud services are far lower than installing servers.

For Microsoft the key to success in the cloud depends upon the confidence of customers; security and trust are going to make and break all cloud services, something that Case acknowledges.

Ultimately though Case sees Microsoft’s network of resellers and partners as being the company’s best defense against Google and the shift to the cloud. Whether that network is strong enough to overcome a structural shift in the market place remains to be seen.

Productivity may be the lifeblood of Microsoft’s business but as margins erode, it may be that that market is not longer lucrative enough to sustain a $400 billion dollar business. Microsoft’s fight for survival is on in the cloud.

Google moves deeper into the smarthome

Google Nest’s acquisition of Revolv is about further locking in the smarthome market

Since Google bought smart smoke detector company Nest earlier this year it’s become apparent that the search engine giant sees the smarthome as one of its big marketplaces in the near future.

Nest’s acquisition of smarthome automation company Revolv yesterday illustrates this and shows that Nest is Google’s smarthome division.

As the smarthome becomes more common, the value of controlling the systems that run the connected home’s devices becomes greater. So the positions being taken by Apple, Google and Samsung are going to be important as the marketplace develops.

The latter relationship — Google and Samsung — is particularly fascinating as Samsung’s smartphones and tablets are locked into the Google Android system which makes it harder for the Korean industrial giant to strike off in an independent path.

All of this of course is based upon homeowners being happy with having their smarthomes locked into one vendor’s platform. We may yet see the market rebel against the internet giant’s ambitions to carve up the connected world.

Apple launch a local listing service to succeed where Google and Facebook failed

Apple may be able to succeed in small business listings where Google and Facebook failed.

They are late to the party, but given both Google and Facebook have missed the opportunity to grab the local listings market, Apple just might be the company that gets it.

Revitalising the tablet market

Ahead of tomorrow’s announcements by Apple, the strategic leaks are happening fast on both the next version of the iPad and Google’s Nexus appearing in the media today.

The problem for tablet manufacturers is that sales have stagnated in recent times with the products no longer flying off the shelves.

Part of the reason for this is customers are happy with their existing products; a three year old tablet will do most of things a brand new one will do so there’s little reason for upgrading.

For vendors like Apple and Google it’s further proof that the PC industry model of three year upgrades is firmly dead, the sector will need something more than planned obsolescence to drive growth.

Google expands its campus program

Google expands its Campus program to new cities

One of the reasons for the success of London’s Silicon Roundabout neighbourhood was the Google Campus that provided a drop in centre and community venue for the growing tech hub.

It turns out the success of London’s Google Campus can be replicated, as shown by the Tel Aviv outpost having similar results.

As a consequence Google are now opening new campuses in Warsaw, São Paulo, Seoul and Madrid.

Whether these cities will have the same success as London and Tel Aviv, both had a thriving tech start up community before their Google Campuses opened, remains to be soon.

One thing is for sure, we’ll see other cities’ governments and tech communities lobbying Google to base a Campus in their tech neighbourhood. It may be worthwhile they have a look at the London one to see what works and how they can set their own local hub.

A land of grace and favors

The quiet abandonment of Google Authorship once again shows why businesses and creative workers shouldn’t trust online services to reward their work.

Yesterday the Search Engine Land website broke the news that Google Authorship is dead.

The quiet abandonment of Google Authorship once again shows why businesses and creative workers shouldn’t trust online services to reward their work.

Google Authorship was a subset of the company’s Google Plus service that let writers and journalist claim their work.

For authors Google Authorship was a useful tool in the battle against the verminous ‘content scrapers’ whose business lies in stealing other peoples’work. It was also a good way of building an online portfolio.

Google benefited from a huge improvement in the quality of its data as its algorithms authorship made it easier for the algorithm to identify original sources.

Using Google’s Authorship tool wasn’t easy, like many of the company’s services it was cumbersome to setup, opaque and subject to arbitrary rules.

Many journalists, bloggers and writers went through the process however as they saw the benefits and trusted Google to maintain the service.

Trusting Google to maintain any service is risky with the company’s well deserved reputation of axing services the moment management’s attention turns to the next shiny thing.

Which is exactly what’s happened to those who’ve invested their time in Google Authorship and they join the disillusioned masses who’ve been burned by the company previously with services like Google Wave.

The lessons from Google’s dropping of Authorship shouldn’t be lost on those working hard to build Google Plus profiles.

Right now, despite the propaganda for those with a lot invested in the service, Google Plus is not travelling well and it’s in a dangerous zone within the company with the departure of its internal management champion Vic Gundotra earlier this year.

The risk of investing too much time on Google Plus is clear, however it would be unfair to single Google out as being alone in presenting this risk.

Every social media service and publishing platform carries the same risk.

Those spending hours creating Facebook communities or carefully crafting LinkedIn or Medium posts need to remember they are only their by the grace and favor of the service.

Nothing replaces your own website as an online property. Your mission is to drive as much traffic to it as possible. Social media platforms can help you do this, but they are not your friends or business partners.

Don’t forget this.

Standing up to the giants – why the big software companies don’t always win

The survival of QNX illustrates how big companies don’t always prevail on the internet

In the latest Networked Globe post I have an interview with QNX founder Dan Dodge on how BlackBerry wants to be at the heart of the Internet of Things.

One of the things Dodge discusses is how twenty years ago Microsoft told QNX they would be driven out of business by the software giant’s Windows CE operating system.

As it turned out Microsoft failed dismally.

QNX’s survival in face of a big competitor is similar to Google’s failed attempts to enter various industries. Everyone assumes Google will succeed against the smaller players because they are rich and smart.

Often however the rich player doesn’t win because the smaller incumbent is savvy, focused and knows their market well.

Sometimes bigger is not always better in the software industry.

Amazon learns that profits matter

One of the leaders of the disruptive economy, Amazon, feeling the heat as other deep pocketed rivals put pressure on its businesses.

It’s typical for a new businesses to go several years making losses but Amazon has barely made a profit over the last twenty years despite being valued at $150 billion by the stockmarket.

That luck could be running out though as the Amazon’s stock fell nearly 10% last week after the company announced it had slipped back into losses last quarter.

Amazon’s losses are largely due to Google starting a price war on web services which is a warning that other deep pocketed web giants are now lining up for the company.

Google’s actions in crippling Amazon are somewhat ironic given how Amazon disrupted the publishing industry by using its deep pockets to subsidise its loss making bookselling business.

Amazon’s problem is it operates in commoditised industries where deep pocketed players are prepared to challenge the company’s market position.

Companies like Google and Apple have incredibly profitable products like Adwords and the iPhone while Amazon relies on the largesse of investors hoping to turn a future profit, that is a clear weakness against strong, well funded businesses.

For a tech company, twenty years is clearly the future and now Amazon has to define exactly where the profits are in its business.

Sometimes, just being a disruptor isn’t enough.

Smartphone safety and online trust – ABC Nightlife technology

The July ABC Nightlife radio segment looks at how elusive the truth can be online along with smartphones and sight impaired tech.

Smartphones for the vision impaired, malware on portable devices and online trust were the topics of the July technology spot on  Tony Delroy’s Nightlife along with why a restaurant claims Google sent it broke and how we can’t always trust what we hear online.

If you missed the show, you can download the program from the website.

For sight impaired smartphone users both Doug and Nick called in to suggest Vision Australia’s services. The organisation has a page dedicated to smartphone and tablet resources.

Nick and Peter asked about malware protection for Android smartphones. Both Intel’s McAfee Mobile Security and Sophos’ Mobile Security for Android are free for home users.

The next spot is scheduled for 4 September, if you have any topics you’d like to discuss contact me or the Nightlife producers.