Google

Dear Google: My Name is Not Monday

October 11, 2009 by Kirk Biglione

I used to think of Google as a friend in my personal battle against spam. The company has done an exceptional job of keeping my inbox free of unwanted pharmaceutical ads. Unfortunately, I’ve recently come to realize that Google may have a double standard when it comes to physical junk mail.

Over the past few weeks I’ve received several marketing letters from Google by way of the U.S. postal service. Each letter was unremarkable by itself. Each included an identical offer of credit towards the Google AdWords service. The only thing notable about these letters is that each one was addressed to:

Monday February
Captain Copyright Has Left the Building
Medialoper

If I understand this correctly, someone at Google thinks that Monday February is a person who works in the Captain Copyright Has Left the Building department at Medialoper.

The first time around I found the letter amusing. The second time I began to wonder how a Google bot could make such a careless parsing error. By the time I received the third letter I became convinced that something truly odd was happening. [Read more…] about Dear Google: My Name is Not Monday

Waiting for Google’s Kindle Killer

October 30, 2008 by Kirk Biglione

During an onstage interview with Chris Anderson at this year’s BEA, Jeff Bezos described his vision of a world where any book ever published would be available anywhere, at any time. At the time it seemed like one of those distant fantasies that might be decades away. Bezos acknowledged that there was a lot of work to be done before that vision would ever become a reality. Little did he know at the time…

With the Google Book Search agreement Bezos’ vision has come much closer to being a reality. The problem for Bezos is that he was hoping that vision would be realized through the Kindle. While the Kindle promises to put a whole bookstore in the palm of your hand, a Google powered reader could put the Library of Congress in the palm of your hand.

Kindle’s 190,000 available titles pale in comparison to the millions of titles Google has just been granted access to. But Amazon still holds a couple of obvious advantages over Google: [Read more…] about Waiting for Google’s Kindle Killer

Why I’m Thinking About Abandoning My iPhone

September 25, 2008 by Jim Connelly

I have an iPhone. Old-school, 4GB, purchased on a whim last summer and, despite a glitch here and there, it’s been an amazingly handy and even transformative device.

That said, I’m dumping it because now that the T-Mobile Google Android-based G1 is out, I’m over the iPhone, which sucks sucks sucks. Not really, though I’m assuming that some of the comments on this article will act as if I said just that.

What is true is this: I didn’t purchase a 3G; and when my original AT&T contract is up next year, I’m going to take a good hard look at whichever version of the G1 is out there vs. whichever version of the iPhone is out there.

And here are some reasons why.

Potpourri: Download Service Explosion, Miss South Carolina, iPhone Hacking

August 29, 2007 by Jim Connelly

I don’t have the juice to go in-depth about anything this week, so I thought that I’d take a few swipes at some things:

Download Service Explosion — With Nokia’s recent announcement announcement of their download service on the heels of CD Baby and Wal-Mart’s services, it looks like we are in another round of download service offerings. Add these to the DRM-free service that Universal announced last month, and the long-rumoured Amazon download stores, and consumers will have every type of choice.

Why Universal’s Dissing of iTunes Doesn’t Really Matter

August 15, 2007 by Jim Connelly

One of the biggest pieces of news about digital music last week was that Universal Music was going to deign to sell their music without DRM. This is, of course, a good thing for consumers, especially in a week where Google Video’s wholesale abandonment of their service showed just how fracked-up DRM schemes actually are.

The other big news in Universal’s announcement is, of course, that they aren’t going through iTunes to sell the DRM-free music, despite the reported success of EMI’s non-DRM’d tunes. This is widely seen as the latest dick-wave in an ongoing pissing contest between Universal and Ap–

Quick, name three Universal Music artists!!

Google Video Debacle Demonstrates the Need for Consumer Protection Laws

August 13, 2007 by Kirk Biglione

Imagine the outrage that would occur if one day every commercially manufactured DVD suddenly stopped working. The media would have a field day interviewing parents with crying children, upset because they can’t watch Finding Nemo for the 200th time. Congressional hearings would be scheduled to solve the “DVD problem”. Consumer rights advocates would mobilize urging media companies to do the right thing and either fix the problem or provide consumers with a full cash refund for every DVD purchased.

It’s an unthinkable scenario that is highly improbable in a world of physical media products like DVDs. And yet, it is exactly the sort of thing that can happen in a world of digital media products protected by proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes. In fact, it’s a scenario that’s playing out right now. Late last week consumers who had purchased videos from the marketplace on Google Video received notice that their videos will become unplayable on August 15th.

There’s no indication of how many videos Google actually sold, although based on the failure of the service we can speculate that the number was quite low. Regardless of whether Google sold one video or one million videos they should make a commitment to adequately compensate consumers who were lead to believe that they were purchasing a perpetual license to watch the videos.

Google’s Next Five Killer Applications

May 31, 2007 by Kirk Biglione

Earlier this week Google unveiled the new Street View feature on Google Maps. Street View takes the mapping service to a whole new level. Where previously we were awed by the detail of the aerial photography overlaid on Google’s mapping system, now users can zoom down to street level to see exactly what’s happening in any given neighborhood. It’s all there in Google Street View — every car, every pedestrian, every stray tabby.

Not surprisingly, the feature has met with mixed reviews. While most people are appropriately impressed by the technology, more than a few people are concerned by the privacy implications. Yesterday Boing Boing kept tabs on all of the interesting discoveries bloggers were able to find in just the first day of the Street View’s availability. There was a crazy lady concerned that her cat had been photographed, a guy walking out of a strip club on O’Farrel Street, and loads of innocent bystanders who just happened to be out walking around the day the Google van rolled through their neighborhood.

Predictably, “concerned citizens” are crawling out of the woodwork complaining that Google is on the verge of becoming Big Brother. Some fear that Google has access to too much information. I say that’s Nonsense. If anything, Google doesn’t have access to enough information. In the near future, when Google has access to ALL data, we’ll finally see some really innovative applications and services.

Like these:

My Problem With The Pew High-Tech Survey

May 8, 2007 by Jim Connelly

A lot of hay was made yesterday about a wide-reaching survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. For example, one of the things that got serious play was that about half of the people out there still don’t live their lives around high-tech products.

Instead, I guess, they are living their lives around such mundane things as their jobs, their churches, their families and so forth. Then the survey broke down the actual users into sub-groups, and explained various things about the sub-groups. It was all very interesting and informative, and then I got to the very end . . .

How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Shortage?

February 15, 2007 by Kirk Biglione

I’ve spent most of my adult life assuming that technology was in an endless upward spiral that would always provide me with a never ending supply of a) fast computers, b) cheap storage, and c) massive bandwidth. You can imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that we are apparently on the verge of a global bandwidth shortage. If true, that would certainly change most of my assumptions about the future of media, computing, and civilization as we know it.

My first inkling that we might have a serious problem came last week when a Google representative, speaking at the Cable Europe Congress, announced:

The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect.

What Ever Happened To Google Book Search

January 3, 2007 by Kassia Krozser

One of the great, sort-of-under the mainstream media’s radar stories of this past year was/is Google Book Search. If you hang around publishing circles (which, well, I do), it’s been a blip on the screen, but if you’re looking at big media stories, this one just seems to escape the big press.

Maybe it’s just that books aren’t as glamorous as movies, I don’t know. But while the major studios and music labels try — and I use the word very deliberately — to wrap their minds around the concept of digitizing and distributing content, Google (and, to be fair, Microsoft and Amazon) has pushed forward with its plan. As I type, I can access digitized books and make decisions about their usefulness in my current research. As more product gets added to the search engine, I find myself using this feature of Google more and more. I have actually made one purchase based on this feature. Not a bad return on investment, considering I never would have found this book on Amazon. I tried; Amazon’s search functionality denied me, time and again. Google, however, was more than happy to offer the book up right away.
[Read more…] about What Ever Happened To Google Book Search