Category Archives: Google

Paradigm shifting

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column…

It’s interesting how phrases take on a life of their own. Take, for example, ‘paradigm shift’ – originally coined in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, to describe the transition of a scientific community from one theoretical framework to another. The phrase was quickly recognised as a Big Idea by people in all walks of life because they could use it as a metaphor for describing traumatic or difficult transitions in worldviews and mindsets.

As a result, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – in which Kuhn first sketched out the concept – has never been out of print and is among the 10 most cited books of all time. A quick search on Google for ‘paradigm shift’ brings up 1,240,000 hits. And an investigation using Amazon’s useful ‘search inside’ facility reveals that ‘paradigm shift’ occurs in over 23,000 books on Amazon’s virtual shelves, from all over the disciplinary spectrum. Truly, Kuhn’s phrase has entered our collective unconscious…

Loadsamoney 2.0

Posted on by

From ye olde New York Times

Everyone suspected that the investors, founders and early employees of YouTube made tidy sums when it was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in stock late last year.

But until yesterday, few knew just how tidy those sums were. The answer, which Google delivered in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is now in: The sums are big enough to spark a new wave of envy across Silicon Valley.

The biggest windfalls went, not surprisingly, to the company’s three founders and to Sequoia Capital, the main financial backer of YouTube, the popular video-sharing site.

A founder and YouTube’s chief executive Chad Hurley received 694,087 shares of Google and an additional 41,232 in a trust. Based on Google’s closing price yesterday of $470.01, the shares are worth more than $345 million.

Another founder, Steven Chen, received 625,366 shares and an additional 68,721 in a trust, for more than $326 million.

Sequoia Capital XI, the Sequoia fund that invested close to $11.5 million in YouTube from November 2005 to April 2006, was listed as having 941,027 shares, which are valued at more than $442 million.

The filing lists a Sequoia Capital XI Principals Fund owning 102,376 shares, valued at more than $48 million, and Sequoia Technology Partners XI with 29,724 shares, valued at nearly $14 million.

Sequoia, considered one of the most successful venture capital firms in the country, was also a principal investor in Google.

The third founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, who left the company early on to pursue a graduate degree in computer science, received 137,443 shares worth more than $64 million.

In addition, several funds affiliated with Artis Capital Management, a San Francisco hedge fund managed by Stuart L. Peterson that was a co-investor with Sequoia, were listed as having received 176,621 shares, valued at $83 million.

When the deal was announced in October, YouTube was less than two years old and had about 70 employees. Several of the early employees are listed in the filing statement as owning thousands of Google shares.

Mesh networking: another disruptive technology

Posted on by

Jon Hannibal Stokes has a thoughtful piece on ArsTechnica about Meraki Networks, a start-up which is commercialising networking technology that emerged from the MIT Roofnet project.

In a nutshell, MIT’s Roofnet allows people in and around Central Square in Cambridge to gang together their wireless access points into a kind of wireless cloud that anyone with a WiFi device can access if they’re in range. There are some specifics I’m leaving out—you have to use a particular model of router, and you have to sign up for the program—but you get the general idea.

There are two ways to participate in Roofnet as a wireless access provider: as a node on the mesh, or as a gateway. If you participate as a node, then all you do is put the right model of wireless router running the right software in your window and turn it on. The router connects to other, nearby wireless routers, and it routes packets for the network and acts as an access point for end users. Of course, there have to be wired connections providing Internet connectivity somewhere in the mesh, and that’s where the gateways come in. If you participate in Roofnet as a gateway, then you’re sharing your own personal cable or DSL bandwidth with the rest of the network.

Meraki Networks plans to commercialize this mesh network model by offering a small, cheap ($50) wireless router, the Meraki Mini, that comes pre-loaded with the mesh network software. You can use the Mini to launch your own wireless network by just plugging it into your own broadband connection. The Mini’s software lets you do traffic monitoring and shaping, branding, and billing, so that you’re essentially reselling the bandwidth of a company like Comcast or AT&T. (Yeah, the telcos are gonna love that idea, but more on that in a moment.) Other users with Minis can connect to your router and extend the network outwards, choosing to participate as nodes or as gateways. With enough of these devices, you could cover a whole apartment building, or a whole block, with wireless… that is, if they don’t step on each other.

As Stokes points out, there are lots of interesting potential problems here. Some are technical — e.g. what happens when the mesh becomes very dense and interference starts to become a real problem? But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to spot the other, more intractable, problems.

As for the legal challenges, everyone from the federal government to the RIAA to your broadband provider are going to want a piece of you the moment you hang out an ISP shingle and start billing customers. Will you be obliged to comply with CALEA if you choose to route VoIP traffic? Will your (quasi?) official status as an “ISP” grant you immunity to RIAA lawsuits while making you the target of subpoenas instead? Is Comcast really going to sit still while the number of wired Internet connections in an apartment block drops by half or more, with their remaining customers acting as competition by reselling Comcast’s own bandwidth to former customers?

Of course, not all ISPs are like Comcast and Verizon, which forbid sharing your wireless connection with others. Speakeasy, for instance, actively encourages their users to share their connection with the public. I think ISPs could get creative and ask for a cut of the proceeds that users get from reselling bandwidth, in effect making their end users authorized bandwidth resellers. But that idea makes sense, and when it comes to anything that smells of “P2P” and “grassroots,” rationality rarely prevails in the boardroom.

There’s an extra angle to this in the UK, in that I think that it’s actually illegal under the provisions of one of the Communications Acts for an ordinary person to sell bandwidth. (I can freely share my wireless network with my neighbour, but I couldn’t sell him airtime.)

Of course the guys who set up Meraki know all this, which is where the interesting bit comes in. The NYT reports that Google and Sequoia Capital have invested in the company.

Stay tuned.

Google does Viacom’s bidding?

Posted on by

Hmmm… The NYT is reporting that:

In a sign of the growing tension between old-line media and the new Internet behemoths, Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, demanded yesterday that YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google, remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming.

Viacom, along with other major media companies, including the News Corporation and NBC Universal, has become increasingly frustrated with YouTube as it has amassed a vast library of copyrighted clips, placed on the site by its users.

While such companies regularly ask YouTube to remove their material, Viacom’s demand, which it disclosed in a statement circulated by e-mail, was the most militant and public move of its kind so far.

As it has with the similar request from other companies, Google removed the Viacom clips from the YouTube site yesterday…

So no more clips from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show then? Er, apparently not. For example, a few days ago I blogged Bill Gates’s appearance on the show. I’ve just checked (on Saturday 3 February, 09:55) — and it’s still on YouTube! Maybe Google isn’t quite as efficient as we think.

You just can’t please some people

Posted on by

From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Turns out Google’s investors are as maddeningly difficult to impress as the company’s founders themselves. After market close Wednesday, the search giant announced fourth-quarter profits that nearly tripled, handily beating analysts’ expectations, but astonishingly not those of investors. Though it was nearly impossible to find anything worrisome in Google’s numbers, disappointed investors sold the stock off anyway. (Oh, I suppose company’s growth is clearly slowing; it was ONLY 70 percent year over year. Talk about letdowns …). Google is trading at $494.44 as I write this — off nearly 2 percent. This, despite a $1.03 billion profit on a 67 percent jump in revenues, to $3.2 billion. Said Scott Devitt, an analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus, “Expectations got ahead of themselves.”

Yes, just a little, I think. “Their performance is extraordinary even in absolute terms,” Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Derek Brown told the New York Times, “but particularly in comparison with the companies they are competing with.”

The end of Googlebombing?

Posted on by

Interesting Guardian piece ny Nick Carr…

Last week, after years of taking a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward Googlebombing, Google decided to put an end to the popular sport. It incorporated into its search engine a Googlebomb-sniffing algorithm that somehow manages to identify and neutralise any concerted effort to skew search results for a word or phrase.

Googlebombing was amusing at first, but it got old fast. So I’m perfectly happy that Google is giving it the heave-ho. It’s like scrubbing graffiti off the side of a subway car.

But there’s a deeper story here, and it lies in Google’s explanation for why it finally decided to defuse Googlebombs. You might assume the company was acting out of a desire to present better results, or to counter internet vandalism, or simply to serve the public interest. But you’d be wrong.

What drove Google to act was its fear that Googlebombing was tarnishing its painstakingly controlled image.

One of the company’s top engineers, Matt Cutts, explained the move on a Google blog: “Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.”

Good piece. Comes to the right conclusion too.

Google’s software has become much more complicated over the years.

Its search engine operates according to an array of sophisticated and secret algorithms crafted by the company’s brilliant coders.

It’s a machine that’s been tweaked to do precisely what Google instructs it to do, even if that might mean filtering results to protect the company’s reputation.

Google may have good in its heart. It may, for the time being anyway, be fighting on our behalf to bring order to a chaotic internet. But let’s not forget that Google’s machine is not our machine. It’s Google’s, for better or worse.

Gmail and docs

Posted on by

Here’s an interesting development. If you have a Gmail account and receive (or send yourself) a Word or RTF document as an attachment, Gmail will now offer you the option of opening it as a “Google document” — which immediately makes it shareable (enabling other people to work on it collaboratively). And it’s seamless. Very neat — and immediately useful for people like me.

Wikipedia, you are the strongest link

Posted on by

That’s the headline some clever Observer sub-editor put on this morning’s column…

There are two kinds of people in the world – those who think Wikipedia is amazing, wonderful, or inspiring; and those who simply cannot understand how a reference work compiled by thousands of ‘amateurs’ (and capable of being edited by any Tom, Dick or Harry) should be taken seriously. Brisk, vigorous and enjoyable arguments rage between these two camps, and provide useful diversion on long winter evenings.

What’s more interesting is the way Wikipedia entries have risen in Google’s page-ranking system so that the results of many searches now include a Wikipedia page in the first few hits…

How Yahoo Blew It

Posted on by

Nice piece by Fred Vogelstein in Wired…

Terry Semel was pissed. The Yahoo CEO had offered to buy Google for roughly $3 billion, but the young Internet search firm wasn’t interested. Once upon a time, Google’s founders had come to Yahoo for an infusion of cash; now they were turning up their noses at what Semel believed was a perfectly reasonable offer. Worse, Semel’s lieutenants were telling him that, in fact, Google was probably worth at least $5 billion.

This was way back in the summer of 2002, two years before Google went public. An age before Google’s stock soared above $500 a share, giving the company a market value of $147 billion — right behind Chevron and just ahead of Intel.

As Semel and his top staff sat around the table in a corporate conference room named after a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor (Phish Food), $5 billion sounded unacceptably high. Google’s revenue stood at a measly $240 million a year. Yahoo’s was about $837 million. And yet, with Yahoo’s stock price still hovering at a bubble-busted $7 a share, a $5 billion purchase price would essentially mean that Yahoo would have to spend its entire market value to swing the deal. It would be a merger of equals, not a purchase.

Terry Semel — a legendary Hollywood dealmaker, a guy who didn’t even use email — had not come to Silicon Valley to meekly merge with the geeky boys of Google. He had come to turn Yahoo into the next great media giant. Which might explain why the face of the famously serene CEO was slowly turning the color of Yahoo’s purple logo, exclamation point included. “Five billion dollars, 7 billion, 10 billion. I don’t know what they’re really worth — and you don’t either,” he told his staff. “There’s no fucking way we’re going to do this!”

Note for UK readers: When Americans say ‘pissed’ they do not mean ‘drunk and incapable’ but ‘cheesed off’. I write with feeling, having once been caught up in a trans-Atlantic misunderstanding of the phrase.