Soon when Zoho makes it big with revenues, I'll be proud that I predicted this company's potential early on itself. Not that I contribute anything to it.
Now, Zoho has added an online presentation software to its suite of business software. It's got most of the features of MS PPT, and Google is gonna have to catch up with their online presentation tool, Presently. Here's a video showing off the capability of Zoho Show 2.0:
There's this Greasemonkey script I just found out about, and wish I knew about it all along! I've been an avid user of Google Reader in the past, but found it too much effort to keep logging in and out of Reader. Now, I have the perfect feature to help me keep up with feeds! You'll need to install Greasemonkey before you can use this.
This script adds a 'Feeds' link to your Gmail inbox, and clicking on it shows you the feeds you subscribed for right ininside your Gmail account! It saves me a lot of time from logging in and out of Reader, and from excessive scrolling thro feeds in Google Reader.
This should be a feature in Gmail, but then there'd be hardly a need to have a separate Google Reader account.
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This is another big move for Google to own the most advanced technology around (specifically in the advertising, and media industry). This will help Google test and grow their AdSense for Feeds program, which places ads in between each post in a feed subscription.
FeedBurner is the largest feed aggregator on the Web, and feeds are the trend for accessing information over the net. As Internet users find more complex ways to access information, feeds will be the norm for all users.
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A few days ago, Yahoo announced that they're teaming with eBay's PayPal, the most popular online transaction system, to compete with Google Checkout. The main features are freakishly similar to Google Checkout. Here are some of the similarities that stand out:
1. The badge next to the ads (Google's now changed to a bigger, and more colorful badge)
2. Free processing till December, '07 (exactly the same as Google)
What does this mean? I think it means, PayPal realizes that Google's innovative promotion of their service is working, and is eating into their share. For Yahoo, this is just a way of countering Google's service even if they don't want to invest in creating a new competitor.
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A web-based presentation software which will be added to its existing suite of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. With this Google will have an online competitor for the three major MS Office components (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint)
The main benefit that Google boasts of is the collaboration aspect. I assume users will be able to view and edit the presentation online at the same time, and it'll have a chat area included to facilitate collaboration.
Other advantages include access to the data from anywhere if you're connected to the Internet. You won't have to back up the files on every one of your devices. And on a minor level, storage will not be a concern.
"It does not have all the functionality nor is it intended to have all functionality of Microsoft Office," he said, but quickly added, "It seems to be a better fit to how people use the Web."Teaser: Google's Q1 earnings will be announced tomorrow, so stay tuned
- Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google
Continuing from my post on 4 April, Google acquired Doubleclick for $3.1 billion this week. The most recent update on this is that Microsoft, and AT&T are unhappy about the outcome. MS has requested that Antitrust Officials review the deal for attempting to create a monopoly. It may be too late to reverse the deal now, and it's funny to see these two companies talking about 'monopoly'. Microsoft that wanted their software on every computer in the world, and AT&T that opposes net neutrality.
It's true that Google does have the bulk share of the online advertising industry industry, but the right attitude would be to either beat 'em, or beat it.
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Viacom made their advertising preferences very clear yesterday when they chose Yahoo! over Google to partner with and serve ads for their popular entertainment websites for MTV, VH1, and Nickelodeon. This is a multi-year contract, and could be expanded to more than the already mentioned websites.
This is a big deal for Yahoo! considering the growing gap between them and online advertising leader Google. Viacom has also sued Google last month over copyright infrignment with YouTube videos. Partnering is the way to go in today's businesses. Technology companies realize that the attention of their audience is spread over a large spectrum of websites, and applications. Gone are the days when portals ruled user behavior, and were the 'be all' and 'end all' in user choice.
Google provides advertising services for AOL, MySpace, and Ask.com. We hope Yahoo! can leverage its newly released Panama project, and increase the competition for the online ad revenue.
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I'm sure you've heard of the kiss analogy - keep it short and sweet. Yahoo! made a pretty long blog post that they would be limiting the length of text in their ads to 70 characters from this May.
Yahoo's comment: "We’ve found that ads written more concisely give users a better experience and perform better for advertisers."
I think it could turn out good for Yahoo!, and for users too. A small ad would catch my attention more than one with many lines of text. It's something like Google's homepage - the brevity, and emptiness on the page is something that users love. Webmasters know that cluttering a page reduces its effectiveness. We want information quick, accurate, and brief. I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo! reports a revenue rise after implementing this change.
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1. Recently, Dave Sifry (CEO, Technorati) made an announcement about Technorati's increase in traffic, and unique pageviews, sparking speculation of the organization being up for sale. Sifry commented on Michael Arrington's post saying "I’ll be very clear about it - Technorati isn’t for sale. We’re very happy doing what we’re doing, and we’ve been seeing significant growth." However, even this is not enough to quell the rumors. 
2. DoubleClick is also up for sale, and this is confirmed unlike the former. Microsoft, AOL, and Time Warner are known contenders, but recently it was announced that Google has joined the auction too.
Currently, $2 billion is the estimated price of DoubleClick, which serves advertising for MySpace, and AOL. We expect an announcement about the aquisition in a few days from now, so stay tuned
Just when we have an overload of information from every kind of social networking site, Yahoo! comes up with a site that's based on Yahoo! News, and is customized for the "fringe cultures". It aims at sharing videos, music, pics, and text about things that social freaks do.
I see the direction Yahoo! is going in - the huge success of Yahoo! Answers makes them long for a repeat act. That said, Yahoo! could have made Underground more unique. But let's wait and see if this site picks up any momentum.
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OK, Google got me on April Fool's Day. Below, is my original post as proof.
Today Google announced that it's attempting to give homes across the US, and Canada broadband access, but you'll never in your wildest dreams imagine how they plan to do it. They'll send you a kit with a fiber cable, and you'll need to send a spindle attached to that cable down your pottie. It then opens up inside the sewage, and you plug the other end of this cable to a wireless router which comes along with the package. You'll need to run the installation CD, which will compulsorily install the Google Toolbar to your browser, and after an hour you'll have free broadband internet access! I'll leave the 'eeewww's or 'wow's up to you to decide.
The catch is to allow Google to gather information about you from your excreta. Information such as your "culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward."
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Today Microsoft announced a new web browser for mobile devices called Deepfish. It aims at bringing the same experience you have on your desktop to your mobile phone. What it does is, it downloads just the thumbnail of a webpage, which is very compressed. Then it allows users to move to any part of the web page and zoom in/out for detail. The main difference this will make is reduced scrolling thro the page.
The background seems to be the launch of Apple's iPhone. This is Microsoft saying 'Hey, we want to give you what the iPhone promises, on your own phone - a great browsing experience'. Only the trial version is out at this time, and the response thus far sounds great.
Have you ever run out of space on your PC, or Laptop, and knew it's going to take some time before you upgraded to a bigger hard drive? Ever wished you could access your files from anywhere? Ever tried sending a file via email and found out it's too big? If you answered yes to one of these, you should try box.net.
I found it while Googling today, and was very impressed with the simplicity, ease of use, and how intuitive it is. I tried uploading a file as a trial, and was very impressed with the navigation, and speed. Once you upload your files, you can send links to your friends to download them, or you can embed them on your blog, or you can log into your account from anywhere and download your files.
My only wish is for box.net to take off the size limit for individual files (it's currently at 500MB). Otherwise, I totally recommend this site to anyone looking for easy, and quick file sharing. You'll have 1 GB alloted for your files, and it's free!
From it's 1GB limit, Yahoo! Mail has just announced that it will now offer users unlimited storage starting May, '07. According to Yahoo!, the spike in picture sharing via email in recent times is one of the reasons for this upgrade. The transition will take a month to reach all users, and is not effective in China, and Japan.
This comes almost a month after Rediffmail offered unlimited storage to their users. Are we going to see GMail, and Hotmail follow trend? I guess so, and welcome the lifting of limits. Currently, Hotmail has a limit of 2GB, and the GMail counter is at 2833.418816MB (2.7GB) as I write this.
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Today Adobe launches its Creative Suite 3 software. It's the most complete application for designing yet, and is considered the biggest launch that Adobe has ever made. You can watch the launch live at the Adobe website at 3.30pm EDT.
With the explosion of video content on the Net, the Adobe flash player has been the most used in it's segment. The launch of CS 3 comes at just the right time for Adobe. It allows developers and designers to create content for every form of media (web, mobile, print, film, etc.,)
The software is priced at a steep $1599 to start with. From the first reviews, it seems the improvements in CS 3 are worth the money.
"Our customer is not typically price sensitive. The cost of the tool isn't what's critical -- it's the productivity and what their output can be." - Bruce Chizen, CEO, Adobe
IBM plans to show off their newest chip at the Optical Fiber Conference. It'll be a giant leap for average users if it can reach down to everyone. Imagine downloading your movies in a second instead of 30 minutes.
This chip is said to have a transfer speed of (hold on to your seats) 160 Gigabits per second! And all that with an optical tube 1/5th the thickness of a 10 cent coin. It promises wide usage because of its low cost.
"The explosion in the amount of data being transferred, when downloading movies, TV shows, music or photos, is creating demand for greater bandwidth and higher speeds in connectivity"
- Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science & Technology, IBM Research.
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Major media companies, and technology companies are teaming up to share the revenue in the online video sector. News Corp, and NBC are starting out an unnamed project code-named 'Caterpillar' that will show the companies' TV shows for free on sites like AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and of course MySpace.
5 Outcomes from This Deal:
1. For Internet Users - More great quality videos to watch
2. For Copyright Owners - An opportunity to make money online
3. For the Host Websites - An opportunity to catch up with YouTube
4. For the Host Websites - Users spend more time on their websites
5. For Advertisers - The next big thing after pay-per-click advertising
More from The New York Times
Don't be mistaken by the name Apple TV, it's not a television, instead it's an advanced set-top box. The silvery 7" gadget can store video, audio, and images from a computer (or network), and play them on your TV. The cool part of it is that it gets data from your computer wirelessly, and can work over long distances. The 40GB hard drive can store videos for up to 50 hours of viewing.
The connectivity is the most impressive feature of the Apple TV. As the iTunes software is updated, you can set what data you want to transfer and store on your Apple TV wirelessly. On the downside, would you want to pay $300 to watch videos on a bigger screen (even that doesn't hold good if you can get a big monitor for your comp).
We can only appreciate the simplicity, style, and class that all Apple products have. And the Apple TV is nothing short of that.
Google announced recently that it has acquired Trendalyzer, a tool used to convert numerical data to graphics. It seems that Google's intention in this acquision is to improve user experience. This tool was developed by a company called Gapminder. I suspect it will be incorprated with Google Spreadsheets, and maybe Google Trends.
Numbers are not for the average person, and systems make best use of numbers. Giving the same numbers form will make them more useful and presentable to users. The image on the left side is an example of how the data looks after being converted.
Read more from the Google Blog
SkypeFind is an attempt by Skype to organize business listings. It allows users of Skype to add, and edit information about local businesses. You can add the information only after downloading the Skype software, not online.
Wikiseek is a new search engine for Wikipedia from SearchMe, and is an improved search for Wikipedia information. I took a look at it and really liked the categories at the top of the page. For example, if I search for 'Ipod' I get suggestions like Apple Computer, consumer electronics, audio codecs, and a variety of other options.
This is close to a normal search engine showing snippets of each article. This is an improvement from the narrow Wikipedia that we are used to, but if your query is something unique, you may want to try one of the web search engines instead.
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Recently we've heard of so many search engines trying new things to make information more organized, vast, and available. One attempt is Wikia Search a couple of months ago, which aimed at using users to develop their search engine. And now, we have Freebase (Free+Database) with a somewhat similar approach.
The search engine is not available for use yet, it will be launched tomorrow. Its technology is something similar to Wikipedia, or Web 2.0, in which users control, add, and edit data. It would recognize how systems interact and find meaning in the data (Semantic web).
If this works, and gains momentum, it'll be a huge phenomenon in the search engine world, but the challenge lies in getting users to add to the information. Can it repeat Wikipedia's success? Let's wait for the launch tomorrow...
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It appears Google is not happy with just the desk, they want the couch too! In an article by WSJ today, it was reported that Google has begun a small experiment with TV ads in Concord, CA. This is part of Google's effort to have a broad variety of advertising.
TV ads have always been delivered to the mass, with no way of tracking the ROI. It'll be interesting to see if Google can bring some sort of reporting to TV ads, and maybe a way to target your audience more effectively. So far, the most targeted a TV commercial can get is to guess the rough age range of the viewers of a program, and show ads that they'd be interested in.
Google has shown it's innovative edge in online advertising, but will they be able to spread this success to radio, and TV too.. only time will tell. Stay tuned for more developments.
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Due to video wars between Turk and Greek users of YouTube, the Turkish court has blocked YouTube from being accessible in the country. The videos were targeted at political heads in both countries, and though they were taken off YouTube servers, it was too late.
Earlier this week, YouTube and BBC made a deal to show content from 3 of BBCs television channels - BBC, BBC Worldwide, and BBC News. The first two are entertainment channels, and the third is obvious. BBC's intention is to cash in on the huge, and fanatical online audience. For YouTube it's a big win after our next point..
Last week, Viacom demanded that YouTube remove 100,000 videos from it's website due to copyright violation. Among the videos that were taken down are the thousands of clips of Southpark. CEO Eric Schmidt, of Google, appeals to media companies to view this situation as an opportunity for them to monetize their online media.
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Rediffmail now offers unlimited storage! But is the user experience in Rediffmail good enough?
The way the competition is going, it seems like the winner will be the one who can add the most features with the simplest interface to their email product. Huge storage has become a basic feature with the launch of Gmail 3 years ago. After my switch to Gmail from Yahoo Mail, I've never been at ease with the latter. The speed, search features, simiplicity, and organization of Gmail is on another level compared to other email products.
This advertising alternative is another one that shows auctions on Ebay, and pays publishers for an action that's completed on Ebay. There have been other such programs such as BooBox, and more recently, EcomAdNet.
The cost-per-action model on Ebay seems like it may not be that paying for a publisher. But that also depends on the kind of products that appear for auction. I took a look at a sample ad and thought it was pretty neat. It had a picture of the article that was on auction, 1 line stating the current bid, and 1 lines of description of the product. The picture especially will draw users' attention.
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If you've been surfing online advertising sites, you're sure to have heard that the future of online advertising is in mobile phones. Nokia seems to have found that out, and has made its move into the advertising business with Nokia Ad Service, and Nokia Advertising Connector. This is a major shift for them, as it's their first step out of the hardware business, but a wise one IMO.
Nokia has a huge market share in mobile devices, and will be able to ride off that platform at least initially. The ads will be delivered to users while they're reading a newspaper, watching TV, or listening to music according to sources. I wonder how broad, and opportunistic these channels could be for online advertising.
Nokia doesn't have web properties on which to show ads to users as do Google, and Yahoo through their search engines. It'll take a lot of momentum to be able to make their ads visible to users while they surf the net, because only a small percentage of users would watch videos, or read newspapers. For now, it seems they're more focussed on delivering ads from applications such as media players, and readers and from browser windows. Let's wait and watch..
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We've already heard rumours of Google working with Orange to bring out a cost-effective phone made exclusively to bring the power of the internet to the cell phone. In an interview, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google hinted that Google is working with Apple on some projects: “I will tell you that Google and Apple are doing more and more things together through the normal course of communications ... We have similar goals and similar competitors.”
With Apple's IPhone scheduled to launch in May this year, I wonder if we'll see some unexpected integration of Google software on the phone. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with.
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Software has been going through a phase of being moved from the traditional desktop to the internet. Some common examples include web-based email providers like yahoo, gmail, and hotmail, and online word documents and spreadsheets like Windows Office Live, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Adobe is planning to go online with their highly successful photo editing software, Photoshop. Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen informed CNET of this in an interview. It is speculated that Photoshop's competition will come from Picasa (from Google). However, Picasa does not have the option of editing pictures online, you'll need to edit them in the Picasa software and then upload them. That's where Photoshop could have an advantage.
Adobe plans to support this product by advertising revenue, and keep it free for use. I think it will gain traction initially because of the brand, but sustaining that initial pace will be important for this product to be a success. We'll wait and see what it looks like once the launch is announced.
I have to start by saying that I'm a fan of AMD processors. I know Intel has more advanced products, and is the industry leader for ages now, but AMD has my vote because of it's energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness. That said, here are the newbies:
AMD Athlon 64 single-core processors 3500+
AMD Athlon 64 single-core processors 3800+
AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor 6000+
The first two are made for cost efficiency, selling at $88 and $93 respectively. The third one is made for high performance and sells at $464. It boasts of great graphics, and video capability, and is based on the 65nm technology for more efficient use of processors.
MSN today made Soapbox, their Youtube rival, available to the public. Youtube began the online video phenomenon in February, 2005, and was bought by Google in November, 2006 (after their futile attempts to catch up in Google Video).
And thinking of how Google Video faired, with all it's brand appeal, and few better features over Youtube, I highly doubt that Soapbox will be a threat to Youtube. Soapbox has a 100mb filesize limit just like Youtube.
I watched a couple of videos, and the performance was satisfactory. However, the interface could do better, I don't like the striking blue color. They've tried something new by placing the video to the right of the screen, and the data on the left side of the screen. We'll wait and watch how Soapbox does from here...
Don't you get a kick out of reading the visitors to your website, or clicks on your ads? Well, Google Reader gives you another feature to boost your feel-good-factor - you can now find out how many people have subscribed to your feed. I'm an avid user of Google Reader, and I think it's a great way to organize your information.
BTW, Feedburner already allows their users to view the number of subscribers to their feed. Something I need to do is get a feedburner account for this page, and I encourage you to do so if you have a web page and want returning users.
In a previous post I told you about the 3GSM mobile conference in Barcelona. This is a follow up to announce the winners of the Global Mobile Award winners of 2007. The best GSM mobile phones for this year are:
1. Samsung D900
2. Sony Ericsson K800 Cyber-Shot
3. Samsung Z560
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Yahoo! today launched a new product called Autos which helps you do research on cars. I think it's cool to have a product help you do research on what to buy, but one product dedicated to automobile research is kinda small minded for a company like Yahoo! in my opinion. However, I'm sure to a person who's about to buy a car it makes a world of a difference.
Check out Yahoo! Autos
Yahoo's taken some blows for copying the model from Digg. You have to check out this thread at a Digg forum
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After GMail hit the web-based email market on April Fool's Day, 2004 its huge success has come from people sending out invites to each other. Although this hasn't protected GMail inboxes from spammers, it sure has kept us wondering how big its user base would grow if it opened subscriptions to all.
Key Features of GMail: Single email thread, speed, search, chat from inbox
Let's wait and see how much the usage increases from here. And go get your GMail ID if you don't have one!
Barcelona hosts the 2007 3GSM conference for mobile phones, and has all the big guns of mobile devices and networks speaking. There are representatives of Ericsson, Vodafone, Yahoo, Orange, Nokia, and even Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
With all the 3G mobiles already hitting the market fast, I'm curious to see what major trends and devices come from this conference. There's also the Global Mobile Awards '07. You can see the list of award winning mobiles for '06 here.
New Kids on the Block:
Nokia announces 3 new E-series phones at the conference. Stay tuned for more..
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I tried finding out what this new product of Yahoo! is, but the page was down. It's only available to a few countries at this time.
From my research, it seems like this tool will make RSS feeds a lot more fun. It allows you to set manipulate your feeds for a set of trimmed results. I've already been having a lot of fun using Google Reader, and I can't wait to try out Yahoo! Pipes.
From Yahoo!:
"Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line."
"pipes let you combine small command-line tools easily by routing the output of one tool into the input of another tool. For example “cat census-names | cut -d’,’ -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg” might take a list of peoples’ names, extract just the last names, sort the list, unique-ify the list and produce a count of how many times each name occurred, then sort by the biggest number. Voilà, from a raw list of names you’ve now got a list of the most popular last names." - Matt Cutts
TechCrunch Review
Jeremy Zawodny's Review
Matt Cutts' Review
Keep watching for more after the international launch of Yahoo! Pipes.
Today Yahoo! begins migration of it's advertising model from Overture's to its own Panama.
Changes: Focus on quality plus bids (not just bids)
For Users: Instant keyword activation, improved interface
When: Complete by March, '07
Sepculation: Good, but not enough to catch Google AdWords
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Ranking #1 in wi-fi production, and #2 with Bluetooth, is enough pedigree for Broadcom to put together a chip combining wi-fi, Bluetooth, and FM all onto one chip.
Impact - Saves space, reduces cost, and increases power efficiency in devices
Uses - In mobile phones, mp3 players, portable gaming devices, etc.
For users - Breakthrough in connectivity with other users, and devices
Availability - Early 2008
Quote - "Integrating multiple wireless technologies onto a single chip is a landmark achievement that will be welcomed by mobile device manufacturers due to the inherent cost, space and power savings it will enable" - Stuart Carlaw, Wireless Research Director at ABI Research
More on this topic
Zoho has launched a great looking web-based notebook, and it looks loaded with every feature you can think of.
- Upload images, audio, video files, and embed videos from video sites
- Advanced sharing features - for example, share only one part of a page with someone even if there's lots of other content on the page
I like the simplicity of the interface, and think it's very well integrated for such a complex tool. Let's wait and see how it takes on Google Notebook. Meanwhile, here's a video showing a demo of the Zoho Notebook.
This is my first post to this blog, and what a way to get it started. Google's Q4 earnings were out today. Here are the figures:
Total revenue - $3.21 billion
Total expenses - $862 million
From Google websites - $1.98 billion
From AdSense network - $1.20 billion
44% of revenue came from outside of the USA
