Google Nexus One

From Tim O’Reilly, who noticed and amplified the buzz around Web 2.0 four years ago:

Picasa and iPhoto both sport image recognition, but Apple has to train its algorithms on sample data sets, while Google gets to train Picasa on billions of user images. As Peter Norvig, Google’s chief scientist, once said to me, “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.” Collective intelligence is the secret sauce of Web 2.0, and the future of all computing, and by locking user data into individual devices, Apple cuts itself off from this future. Rather than having MobileMe as a separate revenue add-on, Apple needs to make all of its applications web-connected by default, so that they can learn from all their users.

What we see then is a collision of paradigms, perhaps as profound as the transition between the character-based era of computing and the GUI based era of the Mac and Windows. We’re moving from the era in which the device is primary and the web is an add-on, to the era in which a device and its applications are fundamentally dependent on the internet operating system that provides location, speech recognition, image recognition, social network awareness, and other fundamental data services.

We’re in for an interesting ride. – Tim O’Reilly

Good to see Tim quote Peter Norvig, who is an expert in AI. However, I think Norvig understates one of Google’s keystone algorithms: Machine Learning.

From David Pogue (Pogue is wrong, the machine doesn’t lack a multi-touch screen – it’s software disabled, but Pogue has some insights too):

But at the start, at least, the results are a pair of head-scratchers. The Nexus One is an excellent app phone, fast and powerful but marred by some glitches and missing features — a worthy competitor to the Droid, if not the iPhone. The Google phone store is a neat, centralized place to buy phones, but so far, it offers zero advantages over buying a T-Mobile phone any other way.

Even so, you should root for the Google Store’s success, because the obnoxious policies and fees of the American cellphone companies have gotten out of control. Anything with even a fighting chance of putting power and choice back in your hands is cause for celebration.- David Pogue

From Jon Stokes, comes a highly insightful take on how this disrupts the existing status quo that the marriage of carrier-subsidized handsets creates relative to telecommunications quality:

Right now, with specific phone models available only on specific carriers, consumers must pick a carrier and phone combination. Many consumers actually pick a phone first, and then pick their carrier based on it (witness the mass customer defection to AT&T when the iPhone was announced). If you want to keep using that phone, you have to keep using that carrier. If you want to switch phones without incurring a huge early termination fee (ETF), then you’re limited to the selection that your carrier offers in your area.

This is bad for consumers, but it’s great for carriers. Carriers don’t have to compete solely on network quality; rather, they compete based on a combination of network quality and phone selection. And because they compete partly (mostly?) on phone selection, their incentives are twofold:

They want to offer the largest number of attractive, leading-edge phones in order to attract a user base, and
They want to wring the most money out of that user base for the lowest possible cost.
Incentive number 2 is why wireless networks have performance issues, and why AT&T’s network gets more complaints than all others. Call it the “iPhone curse,” after the “resource curse” that seems to leave oil-rich nations mired in petty tyranny. Because AT&T has ensnared—and locked in—legions of consumers with the iPhone, the company’s incentive is to minimize their infrastructure spending so that they can maximize per-user profits. AT&T also has a motive to nickel-and-dime you to death, because it has you locked in with that amazing phone and its accompanying ETF.

In sum, as long as Apple’s red-hot iPhone keeps new customers coming to AT&T and keeps existing customers around in spite of the poor service quality, the carrier has little incentive to actually improve its network, and every incentive to cram as many iPhone users as possible onto each cell tower.

If Google’s carrier-independent store succeeds spectacularly, it could break the curse. If the idea behind it succeeds, that could break the curse as well. Wouldn’t it be great if Apple ran a similarly carrier-independent iPhone store, or Nokia did the same with its smartphone lineup? I, for one, want to live in a world where a carrier competes for my business by being cheaper and faster than the next guy, and not because it has a phone I want. That’s why I’m rooting for Google’s store idea to catch on, regardless of what the Nexus One kills or doesn’t kill.

Other interesting articles out yesterday and today which talk about mobile telecom industry disruption from Google, which I foretold in 2007 myself:

A week after my “Clash of the Titans – Google vs Apple in 2010 and beyond”, The Financial Times has an article today by John Gapper, called “Google’s open battle with Apple”, which delves into how open or closed each company is.

One thing both Apple and Google have learned is that a solely proprietary strategy has flaws, just as one of pure openness does. They compete by openly expanding their reach while staying partly closed.

So take with a pinch of salt all manifestos about complete openness. Any company that is as valuable as Google is wilier than that. – John Gapper

The thing is, in reality, it has always been true to compete aggressively around your core strengths in business. The fact that Google highly leverages open-source contributions bi-directionally gives it an optimizing edge that Apple does not have in the long-term.

In other news, Apple ditches Intel for Qualcomm’s SnapDragon platform (update: actually, this links, says it’s NOT a SnapDragon), which already powers the Nexus One. Big win for Qualcomm, but also for ARM…

Additional good news for ARM: Marvell shows the first quad-core ARM-powered chip (Fortune/GigaOM).

This does not bode well for Intel, which already had troubles launching the Larrabee chip, but also has a few lawsuits to contend with, including the notion of making its compiler work well only on its own chips.

Bloomberg has a good article on the chip wars today and “How Intel is vulnerable now as people shift to mobile phones to surf”.

Why Google trumps Microsoft on the Web, even if Microsoft buys Yahoo.

Scott Karp, a professional blogger, has a good explanation: “Google is a web-native company”.

The Wallstrip Edge – Howard Linzon

Substitute MS for Apple above?

2010 is turning out every bit as exciting as I thought it would be.

Mobile Telecommunications

On January 5th, Google will most probably announce the availability of its own Google-branded phone, the Nexus One. Already billed as an iPhone-killer, it is going to be no small feat for Google to overtake Apple’s established dominance.

However, ‘no small feat’ does not mean that Google cannot make it. Actually, I don’t think Google is actively pursuing gaining market share from Apple in Mobile Telecommunications. In reality, Google is pursuing a vision, the efficiency and immediacy of a digital lifestyle optimized by Google Engineers. That this pits Google against Apple within the Mobile Telecommunication space is coincidental, an emergent phenomenon.

Some people are questioning that Google’s move into the handset branding will kill its own partners who manufacture handsets. I don’t think this is the case since the hardware itself is built by HTC and all the software enhancements can trickle to other manufacturers. Here, I have the distinct impression that Gartner analysts do not get open-source or the implications within Google’s own eco-system.

Although the inroads by Apple with the iPhone and the iPhone O.S.-based iPod Touch are amazing, Apple breaks Google’s services on their devices. Ever tried using Google Analytics or Google Finance on an iPhone or iPod touch? They don’t work as Apple restricts Flash.

Apple’s machines have sub-standard multi-tasking, and Apple does not like handing control or enhancements to the open-source community. Google, on the other hand, will have good multi-tasking out-of-the-box and loves open-source. To be successful in Technology and Business in this day and age, I advise that you build ‘hackability’ into your product or service. Let it be open and allow other people to build on it.

Here, my preference goes to Google although I appreciate Apple bringing such an impressive multi-touch screen and UI to the masses and I expect Google to subsidize a Telecommunication service through ads as they usually do. I just hope that the FCC and other organizations don’t block the acquisition of AdMob further.

It will hard to resist the brand appeal and a phone which reminds you simultaneously of BladeRunner and Tron.

Mobile computing – Netbooks and smartbooks

Apple has enjoyed enormous success with its laptops. The latest machines are innovative, with the multi-touch trackpad, the amazing screens and 64-bit Snow Leopard with Grand Central Dispatch (easily dispatch computing to several cores) and OpenCL (harness the GPU for computing).

With Google-branded notebooks rumoured for the end of next year, I expect the two to clash again in the mobile computing space.

It will all boil down to what value the end-user derives when on-the-go. Do you derive more value from using the Web and connecting to your social networking applications than doing hard computing?

If so, Google will eat up market share, as it will be cheaper. The rumoured specifications are superlative, with SSD being the norm as well as computing power by ARM and graphics powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra. With no moving parts and a higher throughput, Google’s machine can be faster and optimized for the Web.

It is still open whether Apple’s own tablet (an Apple announcement for the 26th of January is planned) will contain the iPhone O.S. or Snow Leopard but that device will also compete in a similar space. No doubt this will pitch Apple into the eBook industry and Google already occupies some of the space here because of their Book digitizing activities.

I love the Apple machines and Snow Leopard 64-bit, and for the moment I give them the edge, but I am open to the fact that Google could wow us all at the end of 2010.

If there is one thing that Google should do, it’s not to reinvent the wheel but rather leverage Linux for the computing intensive applications.

The Cloud

Google has optimized data centers around the world and scalable architecture, built on customized open-source GNU/Linux. Google’s cost of development of Operating System and software is minimized as it highly leverages existing Open-source code and volunteers around the world. Google has its core operating architecture optimized even down to the level of hard disk drivers.

Google optimized DNS resolution, optimized JavaScript, owns dark fiber, builds one of the fastest JavaScript browsers ever, is preparing a Chrome-based Operating System, etc…

What does Apple have?

Google unquestionably has the edge for the Cloud. And I argue that Google’s edge in Cloud computing goes beyond any other cloud computing offering in the world because it is the better engineered solution.

Videos

Google has YouTube, which reigns supreme with the user-generated content/’Broadcast Yourself’ crowd. The addition of HD videos on YouTube has increased the quality level very much. Being free because of ad-subsidization is a boon,but can also be a distraction.

Here, however, I would prefer buying HD from Apple, as my user experience would be better – I don’t get ads unless the ads are product placement inside the content, not inside the player.

Music

With iTunes, the Apple Store and such a wonderful experience finding songs, being recommended new artists, albums and songs by Genius and purchasing songs immediately downloaded, Apple has an edge.

However, Google potentially has better algorithms for recommendations for music. Apple grabbed Lala as well and is targeting music streaming from the cloud, so Apple is leading the way here.

It remains to be seen how Google manages this space.

Google vs Apple

Conclusion

All in all, 2010 and the next decade will be a fantastic time to watch these two companies and their leaders compete. To me, Google has the better algorithms and engineered products at the software engineering level while Apple has better hardware, design and user experience.

1. Google Telecom, Hello! – July 2nd, 2007

Google

I envisioned then as TechCrunch had featured a rumour that Google was going to buy GrandCentral, that Google was bent on becoming a Telco or ISP themselves.

The acquisition of GrandCentral and mobile ambitions – The Google phone?

GrandCentral provides you with one phone number linked to all your existing phone numbers, and many other features (thanks to Techcrunch for this great overview) through its website and also through your mobile.

There have been rumors of the Google phone before, and such a device with the mobile Google applications, linked to all the Google integrated goodies mentioned above would be pure bliss for managing and sharing data and event information with contacts when either online or offline thanks to Google Gears.

Google’s killer move

Here is what I predict will happen with Google Telecom. Based on the current state of Telecom, i.e. VOIP disrupting the industry with the old Telcos still charging too much while there are cheaper VOIP offers like the Gizmo Project, Skype, VBuzzer and Jajah, Google will adopt a similar strategy to Google Apps. With Google Apps, Google has a tiered access: free access for users and paid access for businesses.

I believe Google Telecom will offer free calls locally and worldwide to fixed telephone lines and mobiles to individual users and basic paid access for businesses and bring a more severe disruption of the Telecom industry as it will rely on getting more advertising through these channels. Alternately, Google could use the Google Web infrastructure to position itself as an ISP and offer free Internet access to all too.

That’s a killer strategy, and they can pull it off. Beautifully at that.

2. How Apple will revolutionize music-making – March 11th, 2007

Apple

Months before the launch of the iPhone, I foresaw how the multi-touch device will change the way we make music, essentially because multi-touch is organic and enables the use of the device as Midi controllers.

However, the iPhone and the iPod Touch are a little too small for a big revolution. The forthcoming tablet will be different. Being bigger, we can expect many more practical uses like playing virtual instruments live, using the tablet as a virtual mixer and sequencer and so on.

Conclusion

The whole experience of how you make music within a sequencer with virtual instruments is about to be revolutionized by Apple with a forthcoming combination of multi-touch hardware and software based on Logic and running on at least Leopard.

The very act of recording, manipulating and producing music on a computer will become an organic performance in itself.

I don’t know when it’s coming, but I do know it’s soon, probably this year, and it’s going to be Apple and Leopard+.

The Next three ones come from a long post called The Web O.S., Web 2.0, yubnub and YashNub dated October 10th, 2005.

A revolution is under way. It is one of those times when technologies developed separately converge and congeal. From this emerges a new system that is better than the sum of its parts.

3. The Web O.S. / The Cloud – October 10th, 2005

This begs the question of how to propagate technical requirements to an underlying platform to enhance the end-user’s experience with Web 2.0.

The first point of contact is the user’s browser.
…

My view of the Web OS is that it must be a combination of the computer’s OS and the browser. …

Given Firefox and AJAX and great web services, there will be an increasing migration of desktop applications to remotely hosted locations on the web. Of course, not all applications can be hosted this way yet – desktop installed apps will still be around for a long time.

But assuming increased hosted services, it is a simple and logical step to envision that the computer OS can itself be tweaked for Web 2.0 usage. In other words, you could enhance existing Web support, but in addition, you could also strip an existing computer OS from any superfluous capabilities and code. You would then obtain a low-cost alternative to the bloated (and sometimes expensive) OSes currently available.

These WebOS 2.0 PC’s, being cheaper, could be used to power schools, especially in developing and third world countries and businesses alike.

Businesses would also benefit of broadband connections to leverage hosted services.

Although schools in poor areas may have broadband, they would still benefit of the network architecture: imagine just one server providing the necessary web services to a class of pupils. They could all be writing their assignment with a software like Writely.

The whole of the software service maintenance is outsourced – this is less costly in time and money for anyone using a PC with Web OS.

Of note recently is the announcement of the partnership between Google and Sun for cross-marketing of their services. This fuelled a lot of speculation about whether a Web version of StarOffice would be in the works. In addition, people have been talking about a possible Google browser and GoogleOS.

I envision the future Web O.S. to be a stripped down Linux distribution with subsequent enhancements. And the single distribution which is poised as the best contender has to be Mark Shuttleworth’s forever free Ubuntu Linux.

Based on the above, I don’t think Google is preparing a browser or O.S. Because both the browser (Firefox) and the Computer OS (Ubuntu Linux) already exist, it doesn’t seem to be a good strategy to me.

4. Firefox – October 20th, 2005

In December 2009, Firefox overtakes IE 7 to become the Word’s most popular browser.

Firefox

…
My weapon of choice in this area is Firefox and it should be yours too. Mozilla’s awesome open-source browser is highly customizable through a variety of extensions. A personal favourite is GreaseMonkey which allows you to install scripts that personalize the browsing experience of some sites, removing annoyances in some cases or enhancing functionality in others.

My view of the Web OS is that it must be a combination of the computer’s OS and the browser. The advantage with a browser like Firefox is that it is already cross-platform and standards-based. It is therefore a candidate of choice for basing any development of the Web 2.0 services.

I also praised Firefox in this other post in November 2005 – Firefox, the world best browser.

Not only that, but the Mozilla team, true to Open Source spirit, regularly updated the browser. More specifically, they patched any flaw very rapidly.

5. Ruby on Rails – October 10th, 2005

Twitter

Thanks to launching with Ruby on Rails, Twitter has managed to raise $25M at the end of this year.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a Rapid Web Development framework built using Ruby, an open-source and truly object-oriented programming language.

Ruby

I am quite fond of Matsumoto-san’s Ruby language and hence I founded a local Ruby user Group.

Ruby on Rails has made the development of new web services a disarmingly simple thing to do. The very implementation of the Rails framework enables you not to have to repeat yourself in your code. Actually, a lot of the code is automatically generated.

Thanks to David Heinemeier Hansson and thousand of other contributors, RoR is and will continue to be a driving force for evolving Web 2.0 because it’s now easy and fast to build new applications. It’s also worth mentioning that RoR now incorporates AJAX functionality by default.

6. Open-source

I have been involved in Linux User Groups and the open-source community for more than a decade and I use and recommend open-source software for that much to enterprises and individuals alike.

Open-source continues to grow as an influential way of building technology and businesses. Sometimes, the open-source product is better engineered than the commercial product, since:

Therefore, building proprietary solutions from scratch is an increasingly losing battle. It is much better to build around open-source software and open standards, ensuring interoperability and robustness.

Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Ubuntu, Google, Apple Mac OS X are all built with or around open-source software.

By the way, Eric Raymond, the term ‘open source’ won – we rarely hear of Free Software anymore. However, let’s not forget the seminal work of Richard Stallman.

At the close of 2009, one of the most impressive companies of the decade relies heavily on Open-source software, contributes heavily to the Open-Source community and has evolved into a major player in several industries by building a hybrid business model:

Proprietary or closed-sourced core algorithms and technology
+
Heavily leverage open-source technology and contribute back to the community

That company is Google and is a great model for merging technology and business and succeeding in the digital age and the knowledge economy. Note that to replicate Google’s success, you also have to rely heavily on Engineers and Engineering in Computer Science.

It was a fun DemoCampMontreal3. Without further ado, here is what happened at the event.

1. Evan Prodromou, Nicolas Ritoux – Vinismo

Evan and Nicolas presented a new website, a guide for Wine connoisseurs, based on MediaWiki. Evan described how his experience with WikiTravel allowed him to build upon the core engine used there for Vinismo. The latter’s MediaWiki site is customized heavily. There is an integrated open-id extension among others, and the site also outputs semantic data through RDF. You could see that a lot of thought had gone into the underlying architecture of the system.

Nicolas also took a turn at presenting, this time in French, and spoke about how the site had been structured. The logo and the site design were made here in Montreal. The Vinismo team came to DemoCampMontreal3 with a powerful argument about the subject as no less than nine bottles of the finest wines were available freely (‘free’ as in ‘free wine’) at the SAT bar.

Update: Evan wrote in to mention they paid the SAQ retail for the wines.

Dedicated to accurate reporting, I duly sacrificed myself to sample some of the wines in between demonstrations.

Simon and some other people were convinced I was next to present. They confused me with Heri somehow. It could have been the wine.

2. Heri Rakotomalala – WorkCruncher

Heri demonstrated his online application for daily tasks. It’s a simple application with tasks that gets reinitialized each day. This means there’s some pressure involved for you to actually finish those tasks the same day. Heri emphasized that it wasn’t a feature-packed application, but a simple tool for personal productivity. Workcruncher would be available later as private beta.

Workcruncher allows teams to work together as you can assign tasks to a team member. There are also ‘followers’ who are people who can have a look at the tasks and the advancement, but to whom tasks cannot be assigned.

It’s a simple, even simplistic application which is easily built with Ruby on Rails and I’m sure Heri used RoR.

3. Mat Balez, Carl Mercier – Defensio

Mat started the presentation while Carl demonstrated an incarnation of Defensio, their learning spam-fighting software, as a WordPress plugin. Mat compared Defensio to Wordpress’s standard spam-filter, Akismet. Defensio has a ’spaminess’ level, which enables one to specify a threshold above which the spam entries are hidden on your administrative page. This helps identify false-positives and thus letting your genuine comments through. There’s also the option of hiding the spam content, which helps.

At this point, to me these were only additional features that could be implemented anytime within the Akismet source code. however, when Carl described Defensio in more detail, I realized there are additional advantages to the system. For instance, they have gone further with their API than Akismet’s. In addition, Defensio can run as a web service and protect anytime there’s an input of data on a web-form somewhere.

Technology used: Ruby on Rails.

To the absolute and audible horror of the audience, the Defensio team presented a few slides! Gasp! This means that they’ll have to pay some beers around to atone for their sins (the ‘no-slide’ rule of DemoCamp is a definite no-no). Simon was aghast, but had to regain composure quickly as he was presenting next, spurred on and introduced by Tamu, in a ravishing red summer dress.

4. Simon Law – Building a Revolutionary Magnet-Based Anti-Aging Device using a Cheap Wall Clock (Made in China)

The internet was abuzz with the possibility of Simon Law’s extremely controversial demo because of the totally ludicrous claims that it violated some well-established laws of science and provided a clean, free, means of reversing aging by drawing energy from the ether.

We scientists are known to cry “hogwash” to such claims as we dutifully follow our own laws. Anything else would be too high a cognitive dissonance for us to continue to function properly in this world. Understandably, the scientific community was skeptical of the claims about the magnet-based device.

Undaunted, Simon had built up a select panel of PhD-level scientists to explore the device’s capabilities under NDA and try to contradict his outrageous claims.

Besides, to demonstrate his seriousness, Simon had stopped taking investments from interested investors, and lately had stopped eating altogether until he could demonstrate in a foolproof manner the mythical device at work. Maybe that’s why he confused me with Heri earlier – everything’s a blur on an empty stomach.

To put a final nail in the coffin of skepticism, Simon had scheduled a highly-conspicuous televised and webcasted demonstration of how to build the device at the SAT, replete with real-time video cameras and onlookers in the flesh, knowing perfectly well that there would be reports of DemoCampMontreal3 all around the net in a jiffy.

Well, who knows? Tesla did something similar I gather, so he might be onto something.

Skeptic: “But it violates the Second Law of Ther…:”
Simon: “My NAME is Law!”

And besides, people do the strangest of things with magnets.

Simon dived right into the presentation, and my friend Philippe Chrun could hear me laughing all the time because it was reminiscent of Simon’s previous Omelette-Engineering presentation at DemoCampCUSEC1, and I was asking myself “Now what??!!”.

At one point in time though, Simon had his notepad filmed with the device’s structure drawn in pen on paper. This caused further outraged in the already weary (and wine-induced ethanol torpor) audience.

“Isn’t that a similar thing as a Powerpoint slide?!!!!”

Some boos ensued. They were friendly boos though, we’re a small community here. Simon will have to pay some beer next time. I mean he has to show the good example and be the first to be punished for infringing the rules he probably set himself. How else are we going to convince Mat to pay his beer otherwise?

Simon proceeded, but the final test before completely reassembling the device failed.

Phew! We would have been in for a big surprise with a demonstrated violation of the arrow of time, but…

But… were we really safe? Strange things were happening in the SAT, as a wall clock behind the bar was turning backwards while Simon reassured the audience that he would get the demo unit working at the end of DemoCampMontreal3!

Still, at the end of his presentation, there was applause (with airs of “I told you so” and “let’s taste some other wine”), despite the failure.

Quizzed as to what could be the cause of failure of the demo of the polemical technology, Simon had this to say:

“Er, I think it could be the searing heat of the S.A.T. spotlights reflecting on my glasses which damaged the clock’s delicate mechanism. It’s delicate you know…like… CLOCKWORK! HAHAHAHAHA!!”

Fellow member of the Montreal Tech community, Hugh McGuire, a stalwart believer of the prevailing laws, shared this observation through a Twitter post:

“I believe Simon really saw what he says he saw, but I’m afraid this might be a case of prolonged self-delusion.”

Subsequently, Simon suffered some backlash from Engadget which had previously blogged enthusiastically about his demonstration. Fear not, insider sources have just revealed that a full-blown interview with Simon is also under way.

5. J̩r̫me Paradis РCharterWeb

Jérôme, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at YULbiz (the meeting of business bloggers in Montreal), was at his first attendance of DemoCampMontreal, and he was presenting. That’s quite a feat! He presented a project codenamed CharterWeb, which he built in collaboration with François Aubin, of Cognitive Group, who couldn’t attend.

CharterWeb is a Web 2.0 application built for V1 Jets to enable the discovery and reservation of Jets. The application relies on Google Maps to display the maps as well as the draggable routes for each Jet. In addition, the app. can show the relevant details about each Jet and flight. There is a possibility of browsing through different available flights on different days so that should you be unsatisfied with the actual routes and schedules, you can find a similar one easily.

CharterWeb also incorporates the capacity to detect important information within emails through a recognition algorithm, and then interface that with the online application.

Having talked extensively with Jérôme last time, I guess he used Microsoft .Net to build part of the application.

Thanks to Sponsors

Simon took some time to thanks the sponsors of the event: Akoha, Standout Jobs, Garage Technology Ventures Canada, and the S.A.T., our hosts.

Thanks for the wine as well, Vinismo team.

As a grand finale, Simon demonstrated the cheap wall-clock running backwards! The arrow of time was successfully reversed and therefore, all of the DemoCampMontreal3 attendants were youthful again. Or maybe it was the resveratrol.

It was great to meet with Mat Balez, Adrien, Chris Scott and Pierre Phaneuf (the power of Facebook!), Carl Mercier, Kim Vallée, Amélie Racine, Mark, Philippe Chrun, Angelo, Fred, Julie, Simon, Tamu, Roberto Rocha, Alok Mohindra, Martin Dufort, Sébastien Paquet, and others.

Update: As I am finishing this post, Google has just confirmed the acquisition of GrandCentral.

What positions Google superbly in this sector is:

That’s a huge advantage marketing-wise. Google has enormous mind share and an extended honeymoon period which gives it a significant business edge.

1. Google acquired a bunch of dark fiber and thus could manage and optimize its own high-bandwidth Internet infrastructure, an alternate Google Web that would enable it to cut down on costs.

2. Google has built and dispatched a staggering number of huge Google data centers around the US. As you may have read in my post on The essence of Google’s success, each of these data centers is powered by a highly-optimized cluster of low-cost PCs running Linux in a fast network, and with customized device drivers for high-speed hard-disk i/o.

Google Talk allows Voice over IP and Internet messaging. More recently, a Google Gadget for Google Talk has been available. Thus, Google Talk capabilities can be integrated into the iGoogle page so that a user from any OS can use it through the browser.

Already, Google Talk allows the integration of Voice Messages into GMail (up to 10 minutes of recorded voice messages in mp3 format), and also file sharing.

Future enhancements include the support for the SIP protocol for VOIP.

GMail already integrates the messaging part of Google Talk so that you can chat with your peers, but more integration of your data within Google apps and services could potentially be achieved. For instance, one can imagine the automatic recognition of event data within Google Talk messages (text or audio) to be added to Google Calendar.

GMail already does this for text with Google Calendar, but the integration of Google Talk VOIP and messaging into Calendaring will bring about much business value in event sharing and invitation as well as resource reservation and general scheduling.

Example of GMail and Google Calendar integration:

I have sent myself an email with the details of the ‘party’ in the subject line.

Within the “More actions” combo box, I select Create New Event. The Google Calendar event details form is automatically populated with the correct information. Note that even the date of this Friday is correctly abstracted. Amazing, isn’t it?

On adding the event, since I have two-way synchronization between Google Calendar and Thunderbird and Lightning, the event appears in both!

Moreover, you could imagine sharing all your files within Google Docs and Spreadsheets with your friends and business contacts from within Google. The new interface for Google Docs and Spreadsheets has a folder-view which allows easy file management within the browser.

The potential for collaborative work within this integrated Google infrastructure is amazing for several reasons. One, is the fact that Google is reliable and fast so that you don’t have to manage the actual infrastructure, but remember also that Google gives you a lot of space online and has the best search capabilities.

It would be interesting to know where the Jotspot wiki technology is heading and how it could also be used with the above-mentioned Google technologies as a collaborative tool.

With all the above and the freshly announced Google Gadget Ventures which will reward developers for the most successful Google Gadgets, it is obvious that Google has on its hands an extremely powerful collaborative developer platform.

Besides, this allows external developers to freely extend Google’s software capabilities using open-source tools.

GrandCentral provides you with one phone number linked to all your existing phone numbers, and many other features (thanks to Techcrunch for this great overview) through its website and also through your mobile.

There have been rumors of the Google phone before, and such a device with the mobile Google applications, linked to all the Google integrated goodies mentioned above would be pure bliss for managing and sharing data and event information with contacts when either online or offline thanks to Google Gears.

To fuel these Telco ambitions, Google has all the money it needs. Its stock has now risen above $500 and this trend shown no sign of abating. Google has the money especially because of its inroad in highly-targeted advertising which brings the bulk of the revenues and profits.

Here is what I predict will happen with Google Telecom. Based on the current state of Telecom, i.e. VOIP disrupting the industry with the old Telcos still charging too much while there are cheaper VOIP offers like the Gizmo Project, Skype, VBuzzer and Jajah, Google will adopt a similar strategy to Google Apps. With Google Apps, Google has a tiered access: free access for users and paid access for businesses.

I believe Google Telecom will offer free calls locally and worldwide to fixed telephone lines and mobiles to individual users and basic paid access for businesses and bring a more severe disruption of the Telecom industry as it will rely on getting more advertising through these channels. Alternately, Google could use the Google Web infrastructure to position itself as an ISP and offer free Internet access to all too.

That’s a killer strategy, and they can pull it off. Beautifully at that.

Peter Nowak from the Financial Post probably has the best article about this.

On logging in, I accessed the sleek but simple AJAX interface. The left pane contains a syntax-highlighted editor, and on the right there is a list of sample projects and an entry for my own.

Once I have programmed my own mashup, I can test it in the sandbox. When satisfied, I can save my mashup and also publish it. A simple RSS feed test was published at http://rssfeedtest.googlemashups.com/ for instance.

I can also publish my mashup as a Google Gadget for incorporation into iGoogle.

Brickhouse is Yahoo’s internal startup. Internal, you ask? Yes, because someone cleverly understood that having an internal ’startup’ is much less expensive than buying an external one. I guess this was made possible by Caterina Fake based on what I read.

Yahoo Pipes is a type of Visual Rapid Wed Development Tool for creating mashups. Pipes is based on the UNIX piping system from which little programs can be chained to make some bigger processing possible.

In Yahoo Pipes, you work in a visual environment to build and test your mashup by connecting different modules together. I wonder if the interface is built with OpenLaszlo.

Once your pipe is working, you can even subscribe to its output feed by RSS.

With pipes, you can do more with less code. In short, Brilliant.

Could that be a new trend in business now? Gather some intelligent, creative minds internally. Shelter them from the core bureaucracy and internal politics and give them plenty of time and tools to come up with something great.

Nicely done, Yahoo and Brickhouse!

I would have expected something like this to come from Google, wouldn’t you?

Read Curt Hibbs’ post RubyConf 2005 was amazing!. The first three links are repeated below for convenience.

1. RubyConf for stragglers. Also check out the corresponding Odeo channel for podcasts, both courtesy of Ezra Zygmuntowicz.

2. Jutopia. Look for the RubyConf days coverage.

3. Look for the RubyConf panel entries on Mundane Essays

4. RubyConf 2005 presentation slides hosted by Zenspider

5. Snowblink’s account.

6. ActiveState/EricP. There will be more entries.

7. Kevin Clarke’s blog for links to photos and writeups on the presentations.

8. Facebook of attendants at RubyGarden.

9. del.icio.us links by James Britts

His new project is named Squidoo:

Squidoo makes it easy for you to create, share and discover meaning online. It’s a co-op of everyday experts, called lensmasters, who build lenses on topics they care about. What’s your topic?

He develops his ideas in his ebook “Everyone is an expert”.

Briefly put, Godin believes anyone knows and loves a certain subject and can help present and transmit this knowledge to others.

Godin calls the outcome of such a labour of love is called a “lens”.

In Squidoo, lenses will be evaluated with an internal lensrank algorithm and other members will also have a way to rank lenses.

Members will be able to earn money through ads related to their lenses or, if provide money to charities if they prefer.

I believe that Squidoo fits nicely in web 2.0 because of the social aspect of building and refining meaning. The Squidoo platform will also make use of AJAX.

What I really like is Seth mentioning charity again. He has already contributed greatly to the building of a school in Nepal by harnessing his knowledge of how internet marketing works. His project, “The Big Moo”, which gathered 33 authors enabled the raising of a substantial amount of money which was converted into the above-mentioned concrete and beneficial project among others.

The beta test of Squidoo starts today and you can also sign up for a testing queue at the site.

I don’t know the Squidoo platform will actually look both on the administrative and the user side. But I believe it will be important for success that Squidoo enables a learning mindset, among other aspects, to lenses.

Yahoo Research is testing a new tool called Mindset which uses machine learning. There is a slider (AJAX at work, no doubt) which enables you to specify how much of a ’shopping mindset’ you are in relative to a ‘research mindset’. The results update automatically.

But you see, be it with a music software or programming with Ruby, I agree with both Seth and Yahoo: first and foremost I need a kind of overview, I need to grok the meaning of it, I need to make sense of it.

However, just having a well-made lens or reference about a subject is not enough. It depends on my intent, doesn’t it? Once I know enough about what Ruby means, maybe I need to find the best way to learn it.

And the best way to learn a subject is not necessarily the best reference information. Reference info is not necessarily pedagogically written nor structured.

The Yahoo Mindset tool shows part of the answer for smarter searches, but the Learning Mindset parameter is as yet missing.

Similarly, for me, a Squidoo lens about Ruby which gives a wonderful set of links and information about the language, platform, tools and reference books would be lacking a crucial piece of the puzzle. It would lack the lens to magnify all Ruby lenses, the lens about the best way to learn Ruby.

The Ruby and Ruby on Rails learning lenses would be what’s needed to bootstrap or accelerate adoption of the language, platform and framework in Web 2.0 in my opinion.

I hope Seth has thought about the learning mindset this for Squidoo’s lenses. Or that Yahoo adds this essential third dimension to Mindset.

And more than that, netizens of Web 2.0 want it all. Give the texts, the images, the IRC channels, the podcasts and screencasts. Give me all of that in an easily accessible area where all the information is:

Update: The Squidoo team has just made some sample lenses available but the actual format and content are expected to evolve or change with individual experts.

Instant Rails is a free one-stop shop installation for RoR on Windows.

With it come
1. Ruby – the free and Open Source programming language and tools
2. Rails – the free and Open Source web development framework for RWD (Rapid Web Dev)
3. MySQL – the free and Open Source database, and
4. Apache – the free and Open Source web server

Do you notice a trend here?

This is tremendously important because it enables you to get up-and-running with RoR swiftly instead of having to search for separate packages and install them one at a time.

Note that this is a preview release.

Read Curt’s blog entry and say hi and thanks.

Read the Instant Rails wiki.

Download the Instant Rails preview.

I do hope FreeRIDE and other Ruby-based IDEs will rapidly incorporate Rails Dev and MySQL DB design.

There are currently two IDE project for Rails, one integrated to Eclipse (the RDT) and the other based on Eclipse (RadRails). This is all good, but when developing in another language, you lose many of the software engineering advantages of developing in Ruby: leaner code, cleaner syntax imply lower maintenance cost, faster development.

Bravo Curt, et merci beaucoup!