Category Archives: Google

Is YouTube really a threat to conventional TV?

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From my piece in yesterday’s Observer.

The big question is whether YouTube poses a strategic threat to the traditional television industry. Up to now, most observers have been sceptical about that. They see conventional TV and YouTube as inhabitants of parallel universes. TV is all about marshalling scarce and expensive resources, exerting tight editorial control and charging for content. YouTube is all about the absence of editorial control, not charging for content, harnessing the abundance of free, user-generated (and sometimes copyrighted) material and extracting value from it by attaching personalised advertising to video clips.

The parallel-universes theory appears to be supported by comparisons of how people use YouTube and conventional TV. While a lot of people visit YouTube every day, they stay, on average, for only 15 minutes. Conventional television viewing, on the other hand, at between four and five hours a day in the US, seems to be holding up quite well. On the basis of these numbers, can TV executives continue to sleep easily?

Maybe. But Google, which owns YouTube, has plans to increase the “stickiness” of YouTube by getting into the content-creation business…

If Car Companies Were Run Like Tech Companies

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Lovely spoof by David Pogue.

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 9 — Here at the annual Consumer Electronic Automotive Show, the largest trade show in the world, the carheads have again made their annual pilgrimage to see what new breakthrough vehicles will be finding their way into American garages in the new year.

Axxle, the Cupertino, Calif., automaker, is again notable by its absence. But even though its perfectionist founder, Steve Hubs, recently died, the company’s impact was everywhere at the show.

When Axxle announced its sleek, simple-to-drive iCar last year, automotive blogs like Gizmoto and Engearjet savaged it for its lack of a windshield, doors, roof and body. “Only the fanboys would want to drive a flat glass surfboard,” went a typical remark.

Once the iCar went on sale, however, it rapidly became the fastest-selling new vehicle in history. And at this year’s show, imitators are everywhere. Many are based on Andrive, a design offered by the mobile billboard giant Gogle (whose unofficial motto is, “Don’t be civil”). Andrive is regarded as a less polished but free chassis that closely resembles the iCar.

The First Law of Internet services: no free lunch

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This morning’s Observer column.

Physics has Newton’s first law (“Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed”). The equivalent for internet services is simpler, though just as general in its applicability: it says that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The strange thing is that most users of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other “free” services seem to be only dimly aware of this law…

Hey Google, we want our screens back

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Excellent post by Andy Hairgrove.

Google’s new designs WASTE vertical space. It is as if they designed their applications for a monitor/screen that is set on it's side (720 wide X 1280 high instead of 1280 wide X 720 high).

He’s right — as the illustrations in his post explain.

So why did Google pay $12.5 billion for Motorola?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last month, there was much hullabaloo because Nortel, a bankrupt Canadian telecommunications manufacturer, put its hoard of 6,000 wireless patents and patent applications up for auction. The scent attracted a herd of corporate mastodons – Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony – which eventually won the auction with a $4.5bn joint bid.

This attracted much attention from the commentariat, which interpreted it as a slap in the eye for Google, perceived as a rogue participant because it had made a series of apparently fatuous bids for the patents. At one point, for example, Google bid $1,902,160,540. At another, its bid was $2,614,972,128. And when the herd’s bid reached $3bn, Google countered with $3.14159bn.

Commentators were baffled by these numbers until mathematicians came to the rescue. The bids were, in fact, celebrated constants in number theory. The first is Brun’s constant, the number towards which the sum of the reciprocals of twin primes converge. The second was the Meissel-Mertens constant (which also involves prime numbers). And the third, as every schoolboy knows, represented the first six digits of pi. At this point, the penny dropped. Perhaps the Google guys were playing silly buggers – but with a serious motive, namely to inflate the price that the herd would have to pay. And so it proved.

Then, last week, Google dropped a bombshell…

LATER: Steve Lohr has a good piece about the takeover in the NYT which starts from Nick Negroponte’s vision for the digital world as one where people will ship bits rather than atoms. Google has not real experience with retailing atoms, and its experiment with selling the Nexus One handset was a disaster — though the product itself was (and remains) nicer than most Android phones. One lesson of Android is that not having control over handset hardware can lead to disappointing (or even maddening) performance for users (as I found when trying to find an Android bar-code reader App that would work with the camera on my HTC handset). That’s the problem that Apple cracked by having tight control over both device software and hardware. So one question raised by Larry Page’s promise to “create amazing user experiences” is whether Google actually plans to replicate Apple’s seamless control with Motorola handsets? And, if so, what will other Android manufacturers make of that?

Is Google+ a minus?

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This morning’s Observer column.

To read some of the excited commentary on these innovations you’d think that teleportation had actually arrived. Watching people salivate over Circles and, er, Hangouts helps to explain how the ancient Egyptians came to worship an insect. It also reminds one of the astonishing power that large corporations possess to create a reality-distortion field around them which, among other things, disables the capacity to believe that these organisations might sometimes do very silly things indeed. There was a time, for example, when Microsoft’s every move was greeted with the hushed reverence with which devout Catholics greet papal utterances. Grown men swoon whenever Steve Jobs appears in public. And it’s not that long ago since Google launched its incomprehensible “Wave” service (now defunct) and an idiotic venture called “Buzz” – things that excited geeks but left the rest of the world unmoved.

So the question du jour is whether Google+ is an electric wok or not…

Why isn’t Amazon stamping out Kindlespam?

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Further to my Observer column about Kindlespam, I’ve been brooding on the subject.

The most obvious question is why Amazon doesn’t do something about it. After all, the Kindle is now the company’s key product, and the stench of corruption coming from Kindlespam must pose a strategic threat. Users can’t do much about it — other than by ignoring the avalanche of fake ‘eBooks’ on the site. And it’s very difficult (if not virtually impossible) for an author who suspects that his or her content is being ripped off to check, because she can’t inspect the content without buying and downloading the suspected rip-off. So any comprehensive trawl for infringing content would be prohibitively expensive and tedious. The only outfit that can check stuff before it’s published on the site is Amazon. So why aren’t isn’t the company doing it?

At first, I thought that Amazon’s rationale might be similar to the one Google takes on the issue of infringing or objectionable YouTube content: given that 48-hours’-worth of video is being uploaded every minute, it simply isn’t feasible to pre-scan stuff before it’s published. But Google will take it down on receipt of a complaint. That won’t get Amazon off the Kindlespam hook for two reasons: (1) Compared with video, pre-scanning of text is perfectly feasible, and computationally not that difficult; Amazon could easily do it. (2) Detection of infringing content in Kindlespam by rights holders is very difficult for the reasons outlined earlier, so while a take-down-upon-complaint policy is perfectly feasible, complaints will be much less frequent than they are on YouTube.

So we’re left with a puzzle. Pre-scanning for crap, spam and infringing content in Kindlespam is perfectly feasible — and indeed only Amazon can do it effectively. Yet it does not do it. Why?

One answer (suggested in my column) is that the company is making too much money from Kindlespam. (After all, Amazon get a 30 per cent slice on every bit of Kindlespam sold.) But another answer has just occurred to me. (I’m slow on the uptake.) If Amazon did pre-scan all the self-published stuff on the Kindle store, then it might have to take legal responsibility for the resulting content. It might have to take on the liabilities of a publisher, in other words.

So at the moment, Amazon is trying to have it both ways. It provides a platform (Kindle self-publishing) from which it rakes in dosh, but takes no responsibility for the avalanche of crap that the platform enables. Experience with conventional spam suggests, though, that this can’t continue: in the end the textual bindweed will choke the plant. And then what will Amazon do?

LATER: Behind all this is the whole problem of so-called content-farms — some of which are now probably using the Kindle as one of their outlets. They have been a scourge of the Web for a while, because essentially they are parasitic on Google’s AdSense system. The company has finally responded to the problem in classic Google style — with an algorithm, codenamed Panda. Virginia Heffernan has a good piece about this in today’s NYT. The headline — “Google’s War on Nonsense” — says it all.

Chromebook: Pogue’s verdict

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Good review of the Chromebook by David Pogue. His conclusion:

Maybe the Chromebook concept would fly if it cost $180 instead of $500. Maybe it makes more sense if you rent it (students and corporations can lease Chromebooks for $20 to $30 a month). Maybe it will fly once this country gets free coast-to-coast 4G cellular Internet, which should be just after hell freezes over.

For now, though, you should praise Google for its noble experiment. You should thrill to the possibilities of the online future. You should exult that somebody’s trying to shake up the operating system wars.

But unless you’re an early-adopter masochist with money to burn, you probably shouldn’t buy a Chromebook.

His main complaint is that the assumption of ubiquitous Internet connectivity on which the Chromebook depends simply doesn’t correspond with everyday reality. Sad but true.

On the other hand, some of his criticisms of the device in its first-release state could also have been levelled at Apple’s iPad when it first appeared (and indeed were levelled by me). But the avalanche of useful Apps that subsequently arrived had the effect of offsetting many of the device’s original limitations. This will also happen with the Chromebook.