Clearwire will migrate its customers to Google Apps including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk.
Clearwire’s move, announced Tuesday, isn’t a big deal since the WiMax carrier only had 348,000 total subscribers as of Sept. 30, but does represent a nice proof of concept win for Google Apps.
In a statement, Clearwire noted that it will migrate […]
Google Maps has joined forces with The Weather Channel to offer a new My Maps overlay of current weather conditions and forecasts. Just head to Google Maps, click the My Maps tab, and select The Weather Channel from the list of maps. You can turn on different overlays (like clouds and radar) and highlight different points of interest. My Maps has lots of other worthwhile featured content, like Gas Prices from GasBuddy, Google Real Estate Search, and geotagged photos from Picasa Web Albums. If you haven’t already taken a closer look at the impressive range of features offered by Google Maps’ My Maps feature, these built-in maps are a good place to start.
Google already released a fast and friendly optimized mobile page for iPhone and iPod touch users, but now they’re at it again. The mobile page is sporting an updated look, faster navigating, and improved auto-complete suggestions for everything from search to Gmail contacts. You can also customize tabs and use your iGoogle homepage from the mobile interface. You may be wondering why Google is so gaga for iPhone interfaces, but the fact is, when Google’s Andriod phones hit the streets, they’ll be running a similar WebKit-based browser, so even if you’re not looking to buy an Apple product anytime soon, this interface may be in your future.
As seen in our iGoogle show and tell in June, personalized Google start pages can be both useful and highly customized. The folks at Google have opened the door to far more customization and choice with the launch of an iGoogle Themes directory, as well as a guide for designing your own theme. A few new themes are already present in the directory, but many more are likely just around the corner. Those unsatisfied with the picks so far can always check out the iGoogle Skins gadget for a little DIY theming.
A few times a week I get email from some sorry Outlook/Exchange user which contains a dreaded winmail.dat file. Being a Thunderbird user, this presents a bit of a problem–one that has been well documented in Dealing with the winmail.dat file and unreadable attachments and How to Prevent the Winmail.dat File from Being Sent to Internet Users.
The are various “free” winmail.dat readers around, but this is 2008 not 1998. I shouldn’t have to install the email equivalent of a “helper application” to read a fucking word doc that crappy email software couldn’t encode in a sane format.
So anyway, I got one today and actually needed to read it. And I hadn’t installed one of those stupid winmail.dat decoders since I had my laptop replaced. Faced with the prospect of actually installing software I wondered what’d happen if I forwarded a copy of the message to my Gmail account.
Well, wouldn’t ya know it? The damned thing came through just fine. I was able to extract the attachment and open it faster than you can google “free winmail.dat decoder.”
Kick Ass.
Just for kicks, I sent it to my dormant Yahoo! Mail account too… and it was also able to extract the Word document from the winmail.dat file.
Now why on earth hasn’t this functionality been built into Thunderbird? Or Windows for that matter?
It’s days like this that I might confuse my laptop for a stone tablet… just for a moment or two.
(comments)
Cowen & Co. outlined its top 10 potential technology surprises for 2008 and a slowdown in software as a services is front and center on the list. There are also a few wild-cards such as Google Apps adoption and AMD giving up on the market share war.
Cowen ranked its surprises based on events most likely […]
Google confirmed Monday what most watchers of the search giant have known for weeks if not months–the company is doubling down on the iPhone.
Garett Rogers has been keeping tabs on Google’s iPhone efforts with the most recent item being the addition of iGoogle. In addition in recent weeks Google has tied together Search, Gmail, Calendar […]
Guest post: Chris Matyszczyk follows on my review of Nick Carr’s new book with the saga of his own trying exegesis of the text.
“You’re obsessed with sex,” said my ZDNet handler, looking angrier than a caucuser who had just switched his vote from Chris Dodd to Hillary.
“But sex gets page views. And you […]
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
California-based a la Mobile has crafted a somewhat complete set of phone apps in prototype form — you know, the most basic kinds of things you’d need on a smartphone to make it usable — on top of Android, claiming it’s the first group to show off a fully functional prototype. The firm installed its goodies on a Qtek 9090, a rather ancient, janky HTC device from days gone by, proving that a wide swath of devices already in the marketplace will be ripe targets for Android transplants once solid, fully functional code is widely available. Though no one in the 34 member strong Open Handset Alliance has publicly committed to a particular Android software stack — let alone a particular hardware design — a la Mobile says that it’s making a play among OHA member manufacturers to take a good, hard look at its wares as they navigate the process. The head of the LiMo Foundation, a sorta-competitor to the Open Handset Alliance, naturally downplayed a la Mobile’s efforts, calling Android “just like a big lab experiment” — though he did manage to call the prototype “interesting.” How about we keep the verbal volleys to a minimum and get some friggin’ Linux in the mainstream, ladies and gentlemen?
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Google is hiring an “investigator/threat analyst” in what could be an indicator that it is worried about insider threats.
The job posting, pointed out by Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand, outlines the following role:
Working with the Director of Corporate Safety & Security, the Investigator/Threat Analyst will be responsible for investigating deviations from company policies or acts against […]
Update: Countrywide Financial is being acquired by Bank of America and when the deal closes the second largest Web advertiser will disappear. It’s highly unlikely that Bank of America will spend so lavishly on online advertising.
Most folks know that mortgage giant was on the ropes. Bankruptcy rumors and persistent worries about the company’s health never […]
Firefox with Greasemonkey: Free Greasemonkey user script Google Account Multi-Login adds a simple drop-down menu to Google pages (including Gmail) for quick switching between your different user accounts. Just install the script, reload the page, and you can start adding your Google accounts to the drop-down. It’s simple to use and it’s a huge timesaver for anyone who actively uses different Google usernames and passwords. It’s probably not the most secure place to put your passwords, but if that doesn’t bother you, this script may come in very handy. The Google Account Multi-Login script is free, requires Firefox with Greasemonkey.
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
Google told us that we wouldn’t see any Android devices until the end of the year, but a funny thing happens when you put up the entire SDK and an emulator for a platform — all them crazy hackers start hacking. Apparently Android was natively booted on a Freescale-based dev board called the Armadillo 500 back in November, but the floodgates were really opened when a Hungarian group called Eu.Edge discovered that basically any device with an ARMv5TE chip could run Google’s baby. Armed (heh!) with that information, tinkerers around the world have gotten a variety of Sharp devices running Android: the SL-C760, C3000M, SL-C3000 series, and the SL-6000 have all been confirmed running the OS. Hopefully that means we’ll be seeing a lot more unofficial Android devices soon — check a couple videos after the break.
Read - Overview of Android hacks
Read - Instructions on booting the Sharp Zaurus SL-C760
Read - Instructions on booting the Sharp SL-C3000 series
Continue reading Android hacked to run on real hardware
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During a panel discussion at CES, Owen Van Natta, chief revenue officer at Facebook, said, “We believe that social network is not building a new niche or vertical but it will permeate everything on Web and unlock things we don’t do today.” All roads lead to the social Web.
Over the last few years, the Web […]
In July 2008, Bill Gates officially hands off the sceptre of Microsoft church of software to Ray Ozzie (chief software architect) and Craig Mundie (chief research and strategy officer).
The transition has been underway for 18 months, and I wouldn’t expect any bumps in the road other than those that already exist for Microsoft. Ozzie, Mundie […]
Ken Auletta’s “The Search Party: Google squares off with its Capital Hill critics” article in the recent New Yorker has some good tidbits about how Google operates. He sits in on a product review meeting and speaks with numerous people at Google and close to company to paint a picture of Google “think.”
On Capital […]
Frontline Wireless’ decision to bow out of the 700 MHz auction proves that in the Wild West of spectrum speculation, only the bold need apply. Frontline dropped out of the auction after finding it difficult to raise enough money to cover a $128 million up-front payment on the spectrum.
Backers of Frontline included former FCC chairman Reed Hundt; some of Silicon Valley’s most elite investors, such as John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins; and angel investor K. Ram Shriram. These are smart guys who presumably knew what they were getting into, but the reasoned approach to high-risk investing, as practiced by VCs, is nothing like the wildcatter mentality needed by spectrum investors.
The proceeds from this auction are expected to range between $10 billion and $30 billion, and the cost of building out a network using that spectrum might reach $10 billion. If Frontline couldn’t meet a $128 million payment, it’s best they got out early.
The 700MHz spectrum licensed at auction may go to the telecommunications carriers with large pockets and an established business, but just in case Google still has plans to make a play, it’s worth reviewing some recent spectrum speculation history to show the Googlers what might be in store for them.
Aloha Partners is one of the freshest success stories of spectrum speculation. AT&T offered $2.5 billion for its 700MHz spectrum in October. Aloha bid for its licenses in 2002 and paid $29 million for them.
Aloha got its spectrum on the cheap, but Craig McCaw, the head of Clearwire Communications, has raised more than $1.6 billion (including a $600 million public offering) to build out a wireless network on the WiMax standard using 2.5 GHz spectrum. Clearwire hasn’t talked about its total spectrum costs, and its stock is off 44 percent from its IPO, but when McCaw sells a company, he tends to make the big bucks.
There’s also the rather repetitive history of the satellite industry, which is littered with investment, bankruptcy and buyouts. When it comes to spectrum, you have to pay to play, and even that won’t guarantee success.
The Google Operating System blog has a helpful, quick guide on how to enable Google Web History for more than just Google searches without having to make the usual Google Toolbar installation, using JavaScript-based tools like Greasemonkey for Firefox, Trixie for Internet Explorer, and Safari, Opera, and Konquerer (KDE Linux) also. You still need to be logged into a Google account to enable history tracking, but it could be a real help to those using alternative browsers for which the Toolbar isn’t offered. And while many users certainly still have their privacy concerns about Google knowing everywhere you’ve been browsing, disabling the non-Google portion is as simple as turning off the script.
Bankers’ optimism about technology M&A is starting to wane, according to a newly issued report from tech research shop The 451 Group. The firm’s analysis calls for “slowing expansion” in 2008, due primarily to the credit crunch, which is having a dampening effect on the number of leveraged buyouts sought by private equity firms.
While two-thirds of bankers expect an expansion in their deal flow in 2008, a mere 13 percent (or four times as many as last year) are forecasting a decline in their business. And although corporate buyers still plan on picking up customers and new technology through acquisitions, with 45 percent expecting to increase their M&A activity, prices are likely to drop. For second-tier and me-too startups and their venture investors, that means the end of the Web 2.0 gravy train could be fast approaching.
Most of this will be driven by the tepid nature of the buyout markets, as private equity firms pull back on their deal-making. After hitting a high of $172 billion in deals in 2007, 37 percent of bankers expect their private equity deal flow to decrease. Bankers hate sloping trend lines — and few will tell you the truth in a slowing economy — which is why 45 percent say they think the amount of private equity will rise. But given that the number of buyout deals have dropped significantly in the last two quarters, I’m in the decline camp.
This should have multiple effects on tech startups. When the guys making billion-dollar deals sober up, prices tend to return to normal, and without speculation that buyouts await large technology firms, their stock prices may drop. The big guys can certainly handle it, despite their own business declines, but their M&A budgets will likely get toned down — soon they will pay a multiple based on sales or profits rather than one based solely on hype. Unless it’s Microsoft, who will pay a multiple of what Google would.
Setting up a custom Google search engine for selected sites by hand is tedious, but now you can make one in a instant based on all the links on a page. Enter the URL of a page with lots of related links you’d like to search (like lifehacker.com) and a search term into the Custom Search Engine On-the-fly page. You’ll get results from both the linking page, and the pages it links. Here’s a search for Tina Fey on all the sites with Lifehacker links, which includes results from our celeb-obsessed sibling sites.
Microsoft said Tuesday that it will offer $1.2 billion in cash for Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), a big player in the enterprise search market.
The move is sure to shake up the enterprise search market, which thus far has been dominated by a series of smaller players like FAST, Autonomy and Vivisimo. Google has made […]
Champions of a more open Internet could take a small bit of cheer from Yahoo’s plans, unveiled today, to open up its mobile platform to third-party developers. But the lack of a service-provider partner to endorse the idea is one clear sign that chief Yahoo Jerry Yang and all the other exclamation-pointers have a long way to go before they can expect to have a major impact on the growing market of the mobile web.
To be sure, plans like Yahoo’s Go or Google’s Android, which aim to bring the power of the open Internet to your handheld device, seem a preferable future than locked-in services like Verizon’s VCast. But without a service-provider partner to watch its back, Yahoo (YHOO) seems unable to answer a big looming question for open-Internet apps accessed via a cellular phone: How fast will the app perform, and how much will it cost to download the data?
Here at CES this year, there’s evidence of a trend toward more single-purpose devices or agreements (like Sony’s Skype/PSP deal, which has BT as the phone power behind it) that are complete with the service necessary to deliver the goods.
On the video side, LG has an interesting plan to give existing broadcasters a mobile outlet, just another one of the competing methods arising to bring TV to places you never thought possible. But like Yahoo’s ideas, such plans don’t mean a whole lot unless the service providers play along.
Since we weren’t able to view the Yang speech live here at CES (long bus lines and the absence of transporter technology kept us from getting from the Sands to the LVCC in time), we weren’t able to question Yahoo folks afterwards about service-provider buy-in for Go 3.0. But there’s plenty of time ahead for answers.
Paul Kapustka, former managing editor for GigaOM, now has his own blog at Sidecut Reports.
netbuzz writes “Merely hiring a blackhat practitioner of search-engine optimization may be indicative of a willingness to ‘cut corners’ — the kind that land business executives behind bars — says Matt Cutts, Google’s top cop regarding such matters. It’s an interesting theory, as generalizations go, but there would seem to be quite a leap between risking the death penalty from Google and risking a stint in prison.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Japanese manufacturer Matsushita (Panasonic) has signed a deal with Google that will see the company launch flat panel television sets that allow users to access YouTube and other Google services such as Picasa Web Albums.
The deal is said to be non-exclusive with the first units set to be launched in the United States in Spring.
The deal isn’t the first internet enabled television to be manufactured, but it is the first time Google has signed a deal in this space. Internet in the lounge room has long been a hyped technology that despite various platforms (including Windows MCE) has failed to capture the publics imagination, particularly given the need for a computer or internet specific device to connect. TV with internet access built in, if it’s delivered without any major premium over existing television sets has the potential of finally delivering mass market convergence. Having YouTube access built into sets as a default would also be a positive for Google as it continues to work towards strengthen YouTube’s long term dominance in light of increased competition.
(CNN via Gooruze)
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
In another move to strengthen the anti-YouTube coalition, Viacom is syndicating its videos (from Comedy Central, MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, and Atom Films, among other properties) to a whole new slew of video-sharing Websites. The new recipients of Viacom’s video love are Dailymotion, Veoh (which already has Hulu and CBS videos), imeem, GoFish, and MeeVee. They join AOL, Bebo, Joost, MSN, and Comcast’s Fancast in gaining access to Viacom’s video library.
Viacom obviously wants to strengthen the hand of other video Websites against Youtube by spreading its videos everywhere except on YouTube. Viacom has a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement and yanked its videos from the site last year. As Comedy Central’s own Jon Stewart said last night regarding his parent company’s lawsuit against YouTube, “A billion dollars? What are they four-year olds?”
I’ve embedded the clip below (which is mostly about the Hollywood writer’s strike) from The Daily Show’s Website. The comment is about four minutes in:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
After publishing an invitation to Facebook to join the DataPortability Working Group January 4, we never thought that Facebook would accept it. Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before, because today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.
Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have previously joined together for platforms such as OpenSocial it’s not that significant, but Facebook is another matter. On January 4 Michael sort of defended Facebook’s stance against Plaxo pulling data from Facebook on the grounds that “Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses - user privacy.” Today, by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards.
I spoke with the head of the DataPortability Group Chris Saad prior to this post (Chris is also the CEO of Faraday Media.) After about 24 hours of correspondence, the following are to join the working group as official representatives of their respective companies: Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook).
The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.
There has been no shortage of people who have knocked Facebook for their closed standards prior to today, perhaps many of whom had a legitimate point. Today Facebook has taken the first step towards open standards and data portability, and despite those previous gripes they should be congratulated for it.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Google is God?
(via Point-Oh)
Googling Yourself writes “Researchers in the UK plan to use Google’s PageRank algorithm to find how super-bugs like MRSA spread in a hospital setting. Previous studies have discovered how particular objects, like doctors’ neckties, can harbor infection, but little is known about the network routes by which bugs spread. Mathematician Simon Shepherd plans to build a matrix describing all interactions between people and objects in a hospital ward, based on observing normal daily activity.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, should go public, cash in on its browser success and grab more resources to fight Microsoft. At least that’s Henry Blodget’s theory.
Blodget argues that Mozilla could be worth a lot on the public market and may go public this year or next. While acknowledging the perils of going public– primarily […]
Filed under: CES, Misc. Gadgets
We’ve certainly seen some fairly interesting dedicated handset buttons before, but it’s hard to argue with the functionality of a standalone GOOG-411 key. Apparently, Thomson has teamed up with Google to integrate the “first ever one-touch, auto-dial GOOG-411 button” into over a dozen of its GE-branded DECT 6.0 phones. In case you’ve been chilling under a stone of late, GOOG-411 is the search giant’s “free, voice-activated, business directory assistance service,” and it will be within reach on a slew of April-bound home phones. For more details on specific models as well as pricing information, head on down to the read link.
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When it comes to the Google search box, you already know the tricks: like searching for exact phrases in quotes like "so say we all" or searching a single site using site:lifehacker.com gmail. But there are many more oblique, clever, and lesser-known search recipes and operators that work from that unassuming little text box. Dozens of Google search guides detail the tips you already know, but today we’re skipping the obvious and highlighting our favorite obscure Google web search tricks.
What time is it in Bangkok right now? Ask Google. Enter simply what time is it to get the local time in big cities around the world, or add the locale at the end of your query, like what time is it hong kong to get the local time there.
Enter the airline and flight number into the Google search box and get back the arrival and departure times right inside Google’s search results.
Google’s powerful built-in converter calculator can help you out whether you’re cooking dinner, traveling abroad, or building a PC. Find out how many teaspoons are in a quarter cup (quarter cup in teaspoons) or how many seconds there are in a year (seconds in a year) or how many euros there are to five dollars (5 USD in Euro). For the geekier set, bits in kilobytes (155473 bytes in kilobytes) and numbers in hex or binary (19 in binary) are also pretty useful.
Reader Adam taps the wisdom of the crowds by searching for like items using key phrases. He writes in:
Simply search for, in quotes: “better than _keyword_”
Some example results:
Results 1 - 100 of about 550 English pages for ” better than WinAmp”.
Results 1 - 57 of 57 English pages for ” better than mIRC”.
Results 1 - 100 of about 17,500 English pages for ” better than Digg”. (Wow. Poor Digg.)
The results will almost always lead you to discovering alternatives to whatever it is you’re searching for. Using the same concept, you can use this trick to discover new music or movies. For example, ” reminds me of _someband_” or “sounds like _someband_” will pull up artists people have thought sounded similar to the one you typed in. This is also a great way to find good, no-name musicians you’d probably never know of otherwise.
Examples:
Results 1 - 88 of 88 English pages for ” reminds me of Metallica”.
Results 1 - 36 of 36 English pages for ” similar to Garden State”.
Results 1 - 66 of 66 English pages for ” sounds like The Shins”.
Just get creative and you’ll, without a doubt, find cool new stuff you probably never knew existed.
What, your company blocks that hip new web site just because it drops the F bomb occasionally? Use Google’s cache to take a peek even when the originating site’s being blocked, with cache:example.com.
When you’re sick of seeing duplicate product search results from the likes of eBay, Bizrate, Pricerunner, and Shopping.com, clear ‘em out by stacking up the -site:ebay.com -site:bizrate.com -site:shopping.com operator. Alternately, check out Give Me Back My Google (original post), a service that does all that known reseller cleaning up for you when you search for products. Compare this GMBMG search for a Cruzer 1GB flash drive to the regular Google results.
Ok, this one’s direct from any straight-up advanced search operator cheat sheet, but it’s still one of the lesser-used tricks in the book. Adding a tilde (~) to a search term will return related terms. For example, Googling ~nutrition returns results with the words nutrition, food, and health in them.
Using a combination of advanced search operators that specify music files available in an Apache directory listing, you can turn Google into your personal Napster. Go ahead, try this search for Nirvana tracks: -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Nirvana". (Sub out Nirvana for the band you’re interested in; use this one in conjunction with number 7 to find new music, too.) The same type of search recipe can find comic books as well.
Google Image search results show you instead of tell you about a word. Don’t know what jicama looks like? Not sure if the person named “Priti” who you’re emailing with is a woman or a man? Spanish rusty and you forgot what “corazon” is? Pop your term into Google Image Search (or type image jicama into the regular search box) to see what your term’s about.
If you’re doing an image search for Paris Hilton and don’t want any of the French city, a special URL parameter in Google’s Image search will do the trick. Add &imgtype=face to the end of your image search to just get images of faces, without any inanimate objects. Try it out with a search for rose (which returns many photos of flowers) versus rose with the face parameter.
What’s your favorite ninja Google search technique? Tell us about it in the comments.
Glyn Moody writes “Google always plays down suggestions that there’s any looming clash of the titans between itself and Microsoft. Meanwhile, the search giant is pushing open source in every way it can. They’re contributing directly by contributing code to projects and employing top hackers like Andrew Morton, Jeremy Allison and Guido van Rossum, and indirectly through the $60 million fees it pays Mozilla, its Summer of Code scheme and various open source summits held at its offices. Google+OSS: could this be the killer combination that finally breaks Microsoft?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Googling Yourself writes “Lifehacker has an interesting blog post on the “Top 10 Google Products You Forgot All About” that includes stalwarts like Google Trends and Google Alerts and a few others that may not be quite so familiar like Google Personals, Google’s WYSIWYG web site creation tool, and Flight Simulator for Google Earth.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read tomorrow when you’re nursing your hangover - it’ll certainly make more sense then.
Filed under Do As I Say, Not As I Do:
Filed under The Lord Works In Mysterious Ways:
Filed under The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall:
Filed under More Than You Bargained For:
and…
Filed under That Overpriced Conditioner Won’t Help:
Tagged: China, Google, housing, iPod, knots, Wordpress
For something I’m working on, I compiled a bunch of stats on Google (sorry, I didn’t intend to blog it and so I didn’t capture all the links, but I found the collection so compelling I thought I’d share it):
• Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06
• Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise.
• Google was searched 4.4 billion times in the U.S. alone in October, 2007 (three times Yahoo), says Nielsen. Average searches per searcher: 40.7.
• Google’s sites had 112 million U.S. visitors in November, 2007, says Nielsen.
• Google’s traffic was up 22.4% in 2007 over 2006, according to Comscore.
• Google earned $15 billion revenue and $6.4 billion profit in 2007, a profit margin of 26.9%. Its revenue was up 57% in the last quarter of 2007 over 2006, says Yahoo Finance. As of late 2007, its stock was up 53% in a year. The company has a market capitalization of $207.6 billion.
• Google controls 79% of the pay-per-click ad market, according to RimmKaufman. It controls 40% of all online advertising, according to web site HipMojo.
• Google employed almost 16,000 people at the end of 2007, a 50% increase over the year before.
• Google became the No. 1 brand in the world in 2007, according to Millward Brown Brandz Top 100.
Not that we didn’t know this already. But the stats still amaze me.
If you’ve thought about the damage of having your Google account disabled or hijacked—like with the script vulnerability that left one designer completely out of the loop—it might be time to do something to ensure all your Google tools can’t be taken away in one fell swoop. The Google Operating System blog recommends a few moves to ensure uninterrupted access to your web apps, such as cloning your email into a new account, sharing Google Calendar and Reader, and creating extra authorized accounts. It’s not a total solution, but as the author points out:
… You’ll still be able to read your email, send messages, post blog posts, check your calendar, add new events, access important documents etc.
Those who want physical copies of their Google data should check out Adam’s guide to backing up your Google apps.
It seems like everyone is just dying to add social features to their online tools these days. One example: Google recent move to expose your “shared” items from Google Reader to your Gmail contacts. Actually, I don’t think that this is such a bad idea, but there are other opinions about that. […]
The team at Earth2Tech has put together a nice Google Maps mash-up that shows coal plants that have been cancelled due to concerns over climate change and global warming.
As privacy issues continue to monopolize our national conversation, sparked by everything from Google’s proposed takeover of DoubleClick to Facebook’s Beacon advertising platform to warrantless wiretapping by the NSA and various other activities that bring to mind tinfoil hats and black helicopters, I’ve started to wonder: How does one attain some semblance of privacy on the Internet? For while I can live with the fact that national security concerns may warrant some invasion of privacy at some point, I am not comfortable giving up personal information as to how I think for the sake of companies and their marketing departments serving me relevant advertising.
I know I am a part of a specific targeted demographic and I realize that marketers value, above all, the ability to understanding the basic incentives of targeted demographics. Further, I realize that it is exceptionally difficult to live in society today without being classified for marketing purposes – i.e. I am a male living in Silicon Valley and working in venture capital– and that this practice has been done for years via credit card purchases, mortgage information and other sources of data. What bothers me is that gathering my personal data gives marketers access to my personal habits, which they can then analyze in an attempt to understand why I do what I do and use their conclusions to serve me up [what they hope is] more relevant advertising. And what scares me is that some people call this a feature and are willing to grant access to their private digital footprint in return for this so-called relevant advertising.
To borrow an example from a friend of mine, I don’t care if my local grocery chain store knows that skirt steak and Corona beer are usually purchased together by males between 24 and 42 years of age. However, I do care if a search engine company knows that I purchased these items at the grocery chain store at four in the afternoon on Saturday, recently bought a round-trip ticket to Argentina and returned an item to the Macy’s in Union Square last weekend. Do they serve my needs any better by inserting advertising for Niman Ranch beef, hotel discounts in Buenos Aires and Macy’s latest sale on my Facebook page? I understand why, in terms of advertising rates, this is good for Facebook, but why am I giving up my privacy for this service?
So here are some ways to regain a reasonable facsimile of privacy on the Internet — or at least attempt to give marketers the most limited amount of personal information possible. Some of these are fairly practical and easily accomplished while others, admittedly, are way off the fairway and only for the serious privacy advocates and full-blown conspiracy theorists.
Feeling Practical But Not Paranoid?
Do not use desktop search tools like Google Desktop or Microsoft Desktop Search. A full index of every keyword on your hard drive in the hands of marketers is very useful for the purposes of targeted advertising.
Do not use webmail from a service provider like AT&T, Google or Microsoft. Same reason as above, except here it applies to every email you send or receive.
Do not use browser toolbars or desktop gadgets. Both of these types of add-ons from companies like Yahoo and Google are known to gather information on your online activity for marketing purposes.
Remove all social network accounts. There is loads of good information there that can be used for targeting and correlation. At the very least, remove all personal information and have a username that does not give any clues to your true identity.
Clear your browser cookies after every session. Alternatively, only search using Ask.com and enable AskEraser. To take erasing your footprint a step further, do not accept any browser cookies by default. This additional step will make web surfing slower and more intrusive as you will have to manually accept or deny cookies. That being said, if you surf for an hour without accepting cookies by default you will become much more aware of them, and that in and of itself could prove enlightening.
Change your local username daily. Browsers and other software have been known to pass local usernames to servers as part of their operation. If your username is something like “first.lastname” this is clearly useful information for data collection purposes.
Use Opera. With Opera, you can mimic another browser’s identification string, which helps mask your browser’s settings and reduces the information that you send to a web site when you visit.
Paranoid and Happy to Admit It:
Do not make international phone calls. Even if warrantless wiretapping by the NSA does not concern you, you need to be aware of Echelon.
Do not have a home broadband connection. If you have a home broadband connection, a network service provider can map your name to your IP address to your physical location. Again, your name, where you live and your Internet activity is all useful information for marketers.
Use free Wi-Fi. If you don’t have a home broadband connection but you will still want to be connected, find a free wireless access point at a local coffee shop. To further hide your existence, every time your computer associates with a wireless access point, manually change your MAC address.
Install a host-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) like OSSEC. Assuming that you are already using a personal firewall, anti-spam and anti-spy software, a host-based IDS will ensure your computer isn’t being used without your knowledge. For an additional level of security, you could block all Internet traffic except for HTTP (port 80) and then log and trap anything else.
If you’re not satisfied being paranoid and want to venture into the land of Ted Kaczynski, you should give up on email, not have a home phone, use a pre-paid mobile phone that you change frequently, get all of your physical mail at a P.O. box and do every transaction (including buying a home or cabin in the woods) with cash.
But perhaps you want to live in our society, write on popular blogs — even have a public profile. I do, which means that I have a public presence for marketers to analyze. But I also follow most of the practical advice that I give above, because the only way to maintain a semblance of privacy on the Internet is to take responsibility for guarding your information – to whatever degree you see fit.
In a declaration marked by his characteristic passive-aggressiveness, Marc Canter is predicting big changes for social networking in 2008. Canter’s swaggering aside, the man knows a thing or two about social networks. It was almost 18 months ago when he started talking about how social networks will become a feature of many web apps; it took me a lot longer to figure that one out. He is being similarly astute in his 2008 outlook.
Canter, who runs an often overlooked social software company called Broadband Mechanics, believes social networks will become more open in 2008, and the world at large will come to realize the benefits of interoperability between various nets.
OpenID2, oAuth and APML - are the names of the standards which we’ll be using to build this inter-connected mesh. … So 2008 will see a growth in the ability of end-users to freely move between networks - taking their social graphs with them.
Canter is right on the money. Just as IM networks went from being silos to loose federations, so much social nets. Remember when mobile carriers got their SMS systems to interoperate? The usage exploded and everyone made money — never mind the millions of somewhat happy customers.
Canter also predicts that digital life aggregators will be big in 2008.
..this is a term I use to refer to Portals 2.0. This is what NetVibes is, iGoogle and what AOL and Microsoft are doing. Facebook is redefining DLAs and MySpace has their own notion as well. The best part of DLAs is that they’re not set in stone and that each vendor can add their own twist, feature set and attitude towards them, while still adhering to the principles of the idea.
In his end-of-the-year update, he lets us know that he has raised $400,000 in angel money, has at least eight live social networks using his software (which he also offers as a service) and is currently working with Bell Canada on an experimental social network.
White labeling gives us an opportunity to build a stable, profitable business not beholden upon VC funding which of course will make us a great investment for some large institution or private equity fund.
Did I mention he was passive-aggressive?
