Fortune on Google

Interesting piece. First, the good news…

“When the numbers pertain to Google, they look very, very good. In 18 months the company has quadrupled in size, now employing more than 1,300 people. Annualized revenues have sextupled, to about $900 million. Annualized pretax profits have grown by a factor of 23, to about $350 million, according to a handful of people who have been told the figures. Only a few high-tech companies in history, like Apple, Compaq, Sun, and more recently Amazon.com, have generated that kind of revenue growth so fast. None has made as much money doing it — not even Netscape, which grew faster than Google has but made money in only one of its years. “

Then the bad news…

“Google has grown arrogant, making some of its executives as frustrating to deal with in negotiations as AOL’s cowboy salesmen during the bubble. It has grown so fast that employees and business partners are often confused about who does what. A rise of stock- and option-stoked greed is creating rifts within the company. Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways. And talk swirls over the question of who’s really in charge: CEO Schmidt or co-founders Brin and Page?

Such travails are hardly surprising in a startup that has grown so big and so fast. But now is a particularly unfortunate time for Google to be facing them. Competitors –the biggest and most powerful on the Net — are coming on strong. Microsoft is spending billions to build its own search engine that will be incorporated in both its online service MSN and its new operating system, due in 2006. That could push Google off tens of millions of PCs. Yahoo in the past year has methodically acquired the other top search engine companies — Inktomi and Overture Services — and is believed to be weeks away from ending its long partnership with Google so that it can compete head-to-head. Other heavyweights — AOL, eBay, and Amazon — are also drawing battle plans. All are aiming for what they see as Google’s weak spot: lack of customer lock-in. Though its search engine is a wonderful tool for using the Net, what happens when a better search engine comes along? Or just a good-enough search engine in the hands of a powerful rival? Is there anything to keep users wedded to Google? “Google has a lot of momentum, but its current position is probably not defensible,” says an investor.”

This is typical business-magazine hooey. The only thing that will stop people using Google is if someone comes along with a search engine that WORKS better.

Now listen heyah y’all

“Are yew jus’ tryin’ to git me to talk, is that the ah-deah?” [Quote from dialogue overhead on a Texas college radion station.] Today’s NYT has a report about a serious academic study of the way my fellow Stetson-wearers talk and what it says about their sense of place! Extract:

Among the unexpected findings, said Guy Bailey, a linguistics professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a leading scholar in the studies with his wife, Jan Tillery, is that in Texas more than elsewhere, how you talk says a lot about how you feel about your home state.

“Those who think Texas is a good place to live adopt the flat `I’ [~] it’s like the badge of Texas,” said Dr. Bailey, 53, provost and executive vice president of the university and a transplanted Alabamian married to a Lubbock native, also 53.

So if you love Texas, they say, be fixin’ to say “naht” for “night,” “rahd” for “ride” and “raht” for “right.”

And by all means say “all” for “oil.”

RFID tags going in Euro banknotes?

Yep. The European Central Bank has a secret project to do just that, according to this report.

“The European Central Bank is working with technology partners on a hush-hush project to embed radio frequency identification tags into the very fibers of euro bank notes by 2005, EE Times has learned. Intended to foil counterfeiters, the project is developing as Europe prepares for a massive changeover to the euro, and would create an instant mass market for RFID chips, which have long sought profitable application.

The banking community and chip suppliers say the integration of an RFID antenna and chip on a bank note is technically possible, but no bank notes in the world today employ such a technology. Critics say it’s unclear if the technology can be implemented at a cost that can justify the effort, and question whether it is robust enough to survive the rough-and-tumble life span of paper money.

A spokesman for the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, Germany confirmed the existence of a project, but was careful not to comment on its technologies. At least two European semiconductor makers contacted by EE Times, Philips Semiconductors and Infineon Technologies, acknowledged their awareness of the ECB project but said they are under strict nondisclosure agreements.”

[Thanks to Brian for the link.]

Guardian story of about Tesco’s use of RFID

Slightly late (it was on Slashdot a while ago) but nevertheless welcome mainstream article about how RFID tags on Gillette blades in Tesco’s Bar Hill store are used to trigger video cameras.

Bloom or bust

Must-see Department. Joseph Strick made a valiant attempt decades ago to film my favourite book, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Now, an extraordinary Irish film-maker has had another go. The film is being premiered at the Foyle Film Festival in Derry tonight. Wish I could have been there.

Is RFID Technology Easy to Foil?

Er, that’s a pun. Wired is reporting that aluminum foil will block the signals emitted by the radio tags that will replace bar-code labels on consumer goods. Some quotes:

Makers of RFID (or radio frequency identification) tags, along with the retailers and suppliers who plan to use them, are saying the technology they spent millions of dollars developing is too weak to threaten consumer privacy. Metals, plastics and liquids, they say, all block radio signals before they reach RFID reader devices.

“Any conductive material can shield the radio signals,” said Matt Reynolds, a principal at ThingMagic, which develops RFID systems. “There are all kinds of ways to render the tags inoperable.”

That means Coca-Cola, which eventually wants to put an RFID tag on every can of soda it sells, will have a hard time getting around the metals, plastics and liquids that block the radio signals from the tags.

Reynolds was speaking this weekend at MIT’s RFID privacy workshop, where privacy advocates squared off with companies planning to replace bar-code labels on their goods with stamp-sized RFID tags. He was one of several speakers downplaying the threat to consumer privacy posed by the tags, which assign a unique identifying code to each item.

Engineers at the meeting also presented proposals for devices that could deny RFID readers access to a tag’s information, or disable the readers by overwhelming them with useless data. They also demonstrated a device that could be used to disable, or “kill,” RFID tags at store exits.

Spam names

The incomparable Karlin Lillington has been saving some of the funnier or more amusing names in the ‘From:’ field of spam messages. Here’s her list:

Amparo K. Kilgore
Trinidad Early
Kendall Boudreaux
Kermit Tran
Constructs G. Heads (really, I swear)
Amos Bullock
Lynn L. Reenacted
Vilma Lockwood
Outage T. Prowling
Lakisha Tobin
Sterling McMullan
Judson Kilgore (clearly related to Amparo, above)
Wooding H. Pagodas
Milford N. Minor (potential presidential candidate?)
Wolan Pagan

and finally, her two favourites:

Conjurers H. Seraph
China J. Bedraggling

I particularly like Outage T. Prowling. Might use him in a novel I’m planning. I used to have a character called Mountstuart Elphinstone until I discovered that that was the name of a famous Victorian colonial administrator. Then I switched to Hiram B. Schnickelheimer III. China J. Bedraggling isn’t bad, either.

Web users still find sites difficult to use

According to Jakob Nielsen, “when public website users perform simple Internet tasks, they’re successful two-thirds of the time on average. In other words, users fail 35% of the time.”

Speaking Texan — a clarification

Further to my observation that “I might buy me a ranch” to go with my new Stetson hat, I should point out (in response to readers who accuse me of hubris) that ‘ranch’ is of course a tool used for tightening nuts.

RFID privacy fears begin to reach public attention

According to ZDnet, “A global alliance of opponents to the rollout of radio frequency identification tagging systems are demanding that companies stop deploying them until crucial issues such as privacy are addressed.

Over 30 civil liberties and privacy groups have demanded a suspension to the deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging systems until a number of issues surrounding the controversial technology have been addressed.” [ More]