Category Archives: Google

Why Louis Grey turned In his iPhone and went for Android

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Long, thoughtful post by Louis Gray.

For me, more than the over-used phrase of "open", the promise of true multitasking, and the platform's integration with Google Apps, was one word – "Choice". Choice of handsets. Choice of carriers. Choice of manufacturers. Second behind the word choice has to be "Momentum". I can see that Android has momentum in terms of improved quality, in terms of the number of devices sold and users, and yes, applications, which are growing in quantity, soon to be followed by quality. I really do believe that if Android does not already have a market share lead over Apple yet in this discussion, they soon will. It is inevitable. The growth in the number of handsets, carriers and users will drive more developers to the platform, and the holdouts who are not there will eventually make the move. And yes, third is "Cloud" – the idea that I don't need to be tied to my desktop computer to manage data on the phone, but instead, the phone is built to tap into data stored on the Web. Fourth is "Capability". The Android platform, as the Droid commercials offer, simply does more. The power of the mobile hotspot cannot be understated, and the iPhone is a zero there…

Worth reading in full.

Why the YouTube-Viacom ruling is good news

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From The Atlantic Wire.

For three years, media and legal observers have been anticipating the outcome of Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google's video site, YouTube. Viacom, which owns MTV, Paramount Pictures and programs such as South Park and The Daily Show, alleged that YouTube willingly exploited its copyrighted content. Google, on the other hand, maintained that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act relieves it from checking user-generated material before it's posted.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton ruled in favor of Google, saying that when YouTube received "specific notice that a particular item infringed a copyright, they swiftly removed it." While Viacom promises to appeal the ruling, its prospects don't look promising. Web enthusiasts and legal experts, meanwhile, are musing about what this means for the Web at large.

At the moment, these views are:

  • The judgment “reinforces the pro-sharing ethos of the Web”
  • It “ensures YouTube’s long-term survival” by easing Google’s caution about where it places ads on the service
  • It “loosens the rules on content-hosting sites”. (Er, except in Italy, perhaps)
  • It represents a major setback for media companies

    • All true. The big story is that while Viacom may be big, Google is bigger. There’s a new 800-lb gorilla on the block.

    Google knows your MAC address

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    Interesting Telegraph report.

    Every WiFi wireless router – the device that links most computer owners to the internet – in every home has been entered into a Google database.

    The information was collected by radio aerials on their Street View cars, which have now photographed almost every home in the country.

    Interesting. I wonder what would happen if I went about the streets running Macstumbler. How long would it be before Inspector Knacker began to take an interest in me? After all, he’s already obsessively interested in my street photography.

    It’s television, Eric, but not as we know it

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    And now for something completely different: Google TV. Yes, you read that correctly: Google TV. Now I know what you’re thinking. You already have enough TV channels, most of them running Friends, Desperate Housewives or reruns of Top Gear. Why on earth would you want to watch a channel in which a T-shirted nerd with an IQ in the low thousands explains how to code an algorithm for complex linear programming in seven lines of Perl while behind him one of his more subversive colleagues is gleefully demonstrating on a whiteboard how it can be done in four?

    Relax. Google TV is not a channel, it’s a platform, ie a base on which things can be built. In ordinary life, platforms are physical objects, such as the drilling rig that is causing BP such grief, but the Google guys don’t do physical. They’re geeks, so their idea of a platform is a large piece of software called an operating system. A while back, they created such a platform for mobile phones…

    So what is Google TV, exactly?

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    Engadget’s answer.

    Google TV isn't a single product — it's a platform that will eventually run on many products, from TVs to Blu-ray players to set-top boxes. The platform is based on Android, but instead of the Android browser it runs Google's Chrome browser as well as a full version of Flash Player 10.1. That means Google TV devices can browse to almost any site on the web and play video — Hulu included, provided it doesn't get blocked. It also means that Google TV devices can run almost all Android apps that don't require phone hardware. You'll still need to keep your existing cable or satellite box, however — most Google TV devices won't actually have any facility for tuning TV at launch, instead relying on your existing gear plugged in over HDMI to do the job. There's a lot of potential for clunkiness with that kind of setup, so we'll have to see how it works in person.

    Yep. Judging from my experience with the (deeply flawed) T-mobile Pulse Android phone, we certainly will. Here’s my prediction: common platform, lots of different hardware, nobody taking responsibility for ensuring that the thing works as a whole, millions of pissed-off customers.

    What Google did next (and how it knew what you were going to do before you did)

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    Wow! Google Prediction API. Announced this week:

    The Prediction API enables access to Google's machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes. Upload your data to Google Storage for Developers, then use the Prediction API to make real-time decisions in your applications. The Prediction API implements supervised learning algorithms as a RESTful web service to let you leverage patterns in your data, providing more relevant information to your users. Run your predictions on Google's infrastructure and scale effortlessly as your data grows in size and complexity.

    Thanks to my colleague Tony Hirst for his skilled distillation of what Google announced.

    Life in the Googleplex

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    From Tim Bray, who has recently started at Google.

    I woke up before the alarm went off in the Google Apartment where I was staying, not far off Castro street in Mountain View. The apartments are comfy but don’t have a lot of personality. Each has good WiFi, two bedrooms and two bathrooms; my flatmate was a taciturn Czech who worked on “data security”. Tim, curious: “What sort of data security work?” Heavy Czech accent: “Every sort of data security.” [Silence falls.]

    I didn’t allow time for more than showering and dressing; headed out in the morning cool from the Google Apartment to pick up the early Google Bus on Mercy Street, didn’t Peter Gabriel write a nice song about that? An extremely multinational sprinkling of fellow Googlers boarded with me, but at that hour there wasn’t much chatter. That particular route is circular, the long way around the circle on the way in so I opened the laptop and did some morning input using the Google WiFi on the Google Bus.

    At Sun, my closest collaborators tended to be at points east, often across the Atlantic, so when I woke up there was usually lots of email waiting for me. Google is sufficiently West-Coast-centric that it’s not uncommon for the morning harvest to be just routine mailing-list traffic; feels weird. But this particular morning I had an early call with Reto in London.

    By the time that was finished, breakfast was in full swing at the Google cafés; I favor one across the street from the building where I sit. When breakfast starts they put on weird cheery eclectic music; cowboy stuff last Wednesday. I lean to the Google bacon, fresh fruit, a little wee scoop of hash browns, and Google coffee, which is perfectly OK.

    I didn’t see anyone I knew, so I was one of the substantial proportion of solitary breakfasters, reading feeds and poking at the weird Java introspection hairball that I’d failed to sort out before bedtime…

    Google makes its first UK acquisition

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    According to Good Morning Silicon Valley, Google’s made its first UK acquisition — a visual search startup founded by two Oxford students who developed an Android App that claims to enable you to identify a work of art by snapping it with your phone’s camera. [Grouse: doesn’t work on my T-mobile Pulse — but then nothing involving that wretched device’s camera seems to work. Growl!]

    Plink is just four months removed from the public launch of its only product: PlinkArt, an Android app that lets users find out more information about a piece of art just by taking a picture of it. That single app, however, was impressive enough to win the $100,000 top prize in the Education/Reference category in last year’s Android Developer Challenge and it put the company on Google’s shopping list. Plink’s founders, Oxford PhD students Mark Cummins and James Philbin, will have to get acclimated [acclimatised? – ed.] to the sunshine in Santa Monica, where they’ll join the team working on Google Goggles, the company’s in-house visual search app. Said the founders in a blog post, “The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go. We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you.”

    New business model: start a company with the aim of being acquired by the Big G. Time was, Microsoft was the desired shopper. How things change.

    Google learns to dog-whistle

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Another sign of Google’s growing political sophistication is the way it has started to translate its Chinese difficulties into terms that the US government takes seriously, namely trade. “Since services and information are our most successful exports,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the Guardian, “if regulations in China… prevent us from being competitive, then they are a trade barrier.”

    This is pure dog-whistle politics. Western governments, especially in the US, engage in endless posturing about human rights, but rarely do anything to endanger their economic interests. But governments do care about restraints on trade and are minded to take action to deal with them. As General de Gaulle, paraphrasing Lord Palmerston, once observed: “Great nations do not have friends; they only have interests.” By aligning their company’s commercial interests with the wider economic interest of the US, the Google boys have begun to recruit powerful allies…