On September 8th, the London Stock Exchange suffered its second black eye in eight years, as a network glitch caused trading to grind to a halt. The system went down about one hour into the trading day, and was only fixed at 4:30 p.m. – leaving only thirty minutes for traders to complete their trades for the day. Adding insult to injury, Monday’s glitch effectively shut out much of the European market from participating in the broad-market rally after the U.S. Treasury Department’s backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Fortunately, European traders had recourse in several new electronic exchanges, such as Chi-x and Turquoise. After imagining huddled masses of traders without their exchange, I took some solace that they had those alternatives (even though they come with their own liquidity issues).
Then I got to thinking: what about other mission critical functions that companies and people have come to rely on? Namely those with systems beyond the control of an IT manager just a four-digit extension away? SaaS comes with its well-documented benefits of low capital costs and more, but what about uptime and reliability? The LSE hiccup isn’t exactly SaaS, but it is an example of a centralized service that is crucial day-to-day going awry.
I think one of the most remarkable things about the web over the last 5 years or so has been Google’s continued dominance of the search space… and how such a dominant company has emerged from a patented algortihm system called PageRank. What makes it so remarkable for me is this nibbling feeling is that Google search isn’t really that good. That’s not to say there are other search engines out there that are far superior, but rather that I just feel there should be far better search capabilities available to us by now.
To give an example of what I’m talking about, I’m a pretty big basketball fan. I also know a lot of other pretty big basketball fans. Over the years I think I’ve probably been to every basketball related news site that exists, and I have a pretty good idea of which ones seem the best, and a lot of other people seem to have similar ideas. If I was to give a short list off the top of my head, InsideHoops, HoopsHype, and RealGM are among the better daily news aggregation sites, sites like ESPN and Yahoo! remain quite strong, some blogs like True Hoop on ESPN are particularly good as well, and of course NBA.com is the primary site for the world’s dominant league. I could go into far greater detail, but you get the idea. At minimum, I think I can tell a good and popular news site from a bad one.
In turn, if I type the term “basketball news” into the Google search engine, I expect to be directed towards these type of sites in one order or another. Instead, here is what I get on the first page: Read More »
How do you set the techsphere ablaze with cries of foulplay?One sure-fire way is to proclaim the cutback of famed employee perks at darling Google. Whether founded or not, Silicon Valley gossip blog, Valleywag, has on a number of occasions claimed that one of Google’s most-beloved perks – free food – was to some extent, on the chopping block. (Check out the “food” pictured in hyperlink number - I’m not sure that can classify as a “perk” unless you’re an enterprising cardio surgeon.)
When the rumour again surfaced today, bolstered by the over-played (and incorrect) fault of a weakened stock price, the response was as expected, with many jumping on the bandwagon claiming Googlers are a(n overly-) pampered bunch, who’ve got nothing to complain about, even if their free dinners were to be taken away.
Whether the rumour is in fact true or not (seems to be an exaggeration of one single cafeteria being cut back) this raises a hot topic that many organizations are still struggling with, and the billion dollar management challenge of finding the right balance for employee rewards.While Google is certainly the crown jewel of “total rewards”, there are many other organizations with very progressive, company-appropriate rewards programs who seem to be getting it right, day after day (albeit not many as all-encompassing, but then again, not everyone’s sitting on seven billion or so in cash).
For me, I suppose the question with such full employee “perks” has always been: is it really a “perk”, when I don’t have to leave the office to enjoy some of the luxuries, and even the ennui, of everyday life?While it would be neat to have my dry cleaning left, and picked up, at the office, I’ve got a great place just down the street from my house, where the banter alone is sometimes worth the extra time/money spent.Read More »
Google Docs are not new. All the same, last week Caleb, Will, Jude, Ben and I decided to try using them for a project at the office. Up until then, I had only ever used Google Spreadsheets as an in-the-cloud host for files I was working on, or to share files with people easily for asynchronous editing. This was not the case for our project. Instead, we used it synchonously.
The project was to go through our research catalogue and back-tag existing content with a standard set of tags. To accomplish this, we needed to define the standard set of tags in a way that was easily accessible for all of us, and somehow it didn’t seem like that we’d enjoy much success copying and pasting from a physical whiteboard. So, we figured we’d try out Google Spreadsheets for an in-office project. It was awesome. Read More »
Last night, there was a huge explosion at propane factory here in Toronto. News stories here, here, and here.
As ususal, the Internet turned out to be the best place to keep up to date on the explosion and the impact including eyewitness accounts, evacuation information, relevant blog posts and lots of multimedia. Click here for the Google maps mashup.
If you’ve been able to get through the high traffic loads on cuil.com (pronounced “cool”, meaning “knowledge” in Gaelic) today, you’ve been one of the first to use the world’s newest search engine that is (in its own words) poised to dethrone the undisputed king of search.
Self-proclaimed to have indexed three times more pages than Google and 10 times more pages than Microsoft, Cuil is the brainchild of Tom Costello, Anna Patterson and Russell Power, formerly of IBM and Google. With some pretty direct attacks on other unnamed search engines that “rely on superficial popularity metrics,” Cuil’s philosophy is “to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.”
While I was unable to complete many searches effectively today due to overwhelming traffic to the site, Cuil appears to have great potential and I am intrigued by the service’s promise to “guide [me] towards answers to the questions [I'm] not even sure how to ask.”
Another advertised feature that is sure to attract attention is cuil’s privacy policy that can be summed up in short by their tagline “your search history is your business, not ours.” (It should be interesting to see how long this lasts.) Read More »
There is a great debate raging all over the blogosphere, and more traditional media for that matter, in regards to the effect the Internet is having on the “wiring” of our brains, and more specifically our collective reading skills. We’ve recently written about it here, here, here, and here, Nicholas Carr had a great piece published in the Atlantic Monthly called “Is Google Making us Stupid“, Clay Shirky has an excellent response on the Britannica Blog entitled “Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr“, and a variety of other well thought out replies to Carr’s article can be found here.
Personally, I find that the quality of the debate itself runs somewhat counter to the thesis that Google, Digg, blogs, and other social media tools are making us stupider (or stoopider, if you prefer) - it’s pretty hard to read everything that I’ve linked to above and not come out feeling a little smarter for the time invested. However, such articles are by no means representative of what most people typically spend time reading online, so I certainly see value in the debate continuing to evolve - which is where this recent NY TImes piece comes in.
Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes (and I really like the first couple as thought starters in terms of how brains are being wired differently, in a way that could be construed as both good and bad): Read More »
Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj just shared this discovery over at the Google Blog. The numbers are staggering: in ‘96, the Internet contained ~26 million pages, then the count hit a billion in the year 2000. Just eight years later, that number has balooned to 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs. This number leaves out pages that are automatically generated, or are very similar to other pages — if these results were left in, the total count could effectively be undefined. All of this information is continuously indexed:
Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.
I’m starting to think that this internets thing just might catch on.
Courtesy my Facebook feed and District of Columbia CTO Vivek Kundra here’s a fantastic example of a government agency actively trying to stimulate new ideas and innovation. Yesterday Kundra’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) released data representing more than 84,000 3D buildings for inclusion in Google Earths’ Cities in 3D program.
The release is meant to allow citizens, whether development experts or simply concerned city dwellers, a greater role in conversations and plans about the city’s future. Want to propose a new development? These 3D images should go a long way in allowing all parties a better, and simpler, platform upon which to build.
Over at the Google Earth blog, Barney Krucoff, the GIS Manager for OCTO, highlights why they released the data. I’ve cut the highlights of his remarks - visit the LatLong blog for the full version:
1. It is the right thing to do. Fundamentally, the District Government believes that data created with public funds should be available to the public. Read More »
It’s pretty humorous (and either slightly sad given what doesn’t happen despite the available tools or slightly scary to think that Steve Jobs may be planning a coup).
My favourites:
There would be a three hour wait to get the latest $5 bill. It would also feature a web 2.0 gradient.
Instead of a Social Security number, all newborns would receive a free MobileMe account.
The cabinet would add the Department for Ergonomic Design, including a new position called theSecretary of Feng Shui. The office would debate the merits of using Arial versus Helvetica on street signs. Additionally, the Lincoln Bedroom would be upgraded with a mini rock waterfall and tiny Bonsai trees.
Steve Jobs’ face would inexplicably appear next to Roosevelt’s on Mt. Rushmore.
“In God We Trust” would be changed to “Getting Things Done”.
I thought I’d take it one step further and theorize what would happen “if the United Nations were run by Google.”
The Chinese and Russians would withdraw their vetoes against sanctions on Zimbabwe after Googling “Mugabe” ….
The Kyoto Protocol would be restructured with targets for member nations tied to the number of servers each country possesses.
The Russians would attempt to buy Google with oil money.
The Security Council would fail to come to agreement on “Don’t be evil” and would instead adopt “Google first, Act later.”
*Authors’ note: The Promethean Institute is a libertarian public policy think tank based in Orange County, California. I am neither libertarian nor Californian and by virtue of being Canadian, less good looking but definitely more in-touch with my socialist side.
It appears that Google has discontinued its use of Browser Sync, an extension for Firefox that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. After the announcement, many requested that they release the code for further development. And that’s precisely what they did. Available at code.google.com, you can keep working on it. And if you want to work with it on Firefox 3, you’ll need to work on it. The app isn’t supported yet.
Why would Google dump this? They claim that it was so they could focus efforts on other products, like Toolbar and Gears, and to extend the capability of multiple browsers. I wonder though, is this really the reason? Think about it. With with the ever-increasing prevalence of mobile computing, and with social bookmarking managers such as del.icio.us, will people in the near future really need to be able to access the same bookmarks on the same browser? Information is voluntarily placed in (organized?) repositories in a centralized databases with better searching capabilities from individual access points.
The other issue is without Google hosting the information any more, you will need to host it on your own, or find someone you can trust with your information. The thread on Slashdot where I picked this up is pretty funny. Chrisq makes a point of stating,
with Google you knew where you stood. They might use your info to to target advertising. They might reveal it to the government if ordered to do so. They would not be likely to sell it to spammers or pass on lists…
I do think the best line though is about releasing Windows ME in the interest of tragic comedy!
Interesting story in the Wall St. Journal about language training company Rosetta Stone suing a competitor who has bought Google Ad words that encourage users to visit sites such as “Don’t Buy Rosetta Software,” and “Rosetta Spanish a Scam?”
From the article:
some of Google’s biggest advertisers are growing angry over “piggybacking,” a practice in which smaller advertisers use the trademarked words of big brands in the text of search ads to divert traffic from the sites of bigger advertisers to their own sites.
Now Rosetta Stone — the company that runs print ads about a small-town boy who must learn Italian in time to impress a model — is taking its gripe to court. But rather than going after Google, Rosetta Stone is suing Rocket Languages (and others), the company that it claims is “piggybacking” its Internet advertising on Rosetta Stone’s name.
In a complaint filed in California federal court, Rosetta Stone alleges that members of an advertising program affiliated with Rocket Languages purchase and use, without authorization, the Rosetta Stone trademark, or confusingly similar variations. Rosetta Stone also alleges that affiliates of Rocket Languages use their Web sites to post “comparison reviews” of Rosetta Stone products and competing foreign language software products, without disclosing that the sources of the reviews are paid by Rocket Languages.
Being clever with Google adwords is one thing, but piggybacking in this manner (including fake reviews and calling your competitor’s product a scam) is beyond the ethical line. Rosetta Stone pays a lot for traditional advertising (full page ads in major magazines), kiosks in airports etc. Rocket Languages, in effect, gets auxilliary benefit from these expenditures because it creates demand for the whole market. Not happy with that, they are launching sneaky attacks.
Wikinomics blog readers, what are you thoughts? Is all fair in (Adwords) love and war?
By the way, the Wikipedia entry for the actual Rosetta Stone is quite well written.
Remember the UI that Tom Cruise uses in Minority Report.
This isn’t far off.
Although it is not actually in 3D, as it is still on a screen (2D), the third dimension is still implied.
Created by LM3Labs, the technology comes from UbiqWindow and involves combining two 2D mid-air projections systems with motion systems in order to create gesture based interface for exploring the world in 3D.
Last week, The New York Times covered a new project by Google: having targeted, text-based advertisements that are influenced by past user search history. With this new program, a user who makes separate searches for “golf” and “shoes” is more likely to see ads for golf shoes during subsequent searches - reminiscent of how Amazon recommends products based on past searches and purchases.
Google, already owning two-thirds of the search market, has an advertising relationship with many businesses. These businesses only pay Google when their ads get clicked. So far the system has been beneficial and lucrative for both Google and their advertisers. By integrating past search data with current contextual advertisements, Google is greatly
expanding the context within which they can display ads. Google can therefore improve the relevance of ads, increasing the chance that users will click them.
If this model is successful, users become more than one-time search results; they could develop robust profiles of interests to allow very specific, tailored selection of advertisements. But does such a collection of user-interest data pose privacy concerns?
The argument in favor of new advertising approaches like this is that this data can be used to display advertisements that, far from being annoying or distracting, actually offer useful solutions and products to consumers at exactly the right time in exactly the right place. Personally, I don’t even notice a lot of ads on websites that I view just because I’m so used to seeing ads for products that don’t interest me at all. I’ve grown immune to ads but if they are going to be tailored to my interests, I may actually start noticing and clicking these ads now.
Is Google the right company to implement this? Already, people seem very quick to trust Google, but it seems to me that there should be limits on how much information any one company can have about their users, and those limits should be set by the users themselves. I get the feeling that many users just don’t comprehend or realize how much information of theirs can be tracked via programs like these.
What level of transparency are you prepared to offer up to Google?
It’s no secret that Google sees mobile phones as an emerging frontier for search; as smart phones (and carriers’ data plans) become more sophisticated, it becomes possible to interactively exchange data in new and innovative ways, while also allowing people to tap into existing sources of information, such as the Internet. Google recognizes that the cell phone is developing along the same path that the personal computer did – it is a tool that we increasingly use to connect ourselves to people and relevant information, wherever we go. The question for Google then becomes, in what ways can it enable people by connecting them with the information that they need, as well as advertisements that provide relevant solutions. Read More »
According to defense attorney Lawrence Walter’s evidence presented in a deposition in pornographic Web site case, more people in Pensacola, Fla. Google “orgy” than “apple pie.” Why is Walters comparing porn to apple pie? Because apple pie is wholesome, nostalgic, and All-American. For Walters, apple pie represents traditional values in America and this data proves that more people are interested in sex than pie. Read More »
Last Thursday, Google introduced its GOOG-411 service in Canada, the first non-U.S. country to have the free phone directory service. If you’re like me and detest being charged high fees for services that could be free, (such as ATM transactions and in this case, directory assistance) than GOOG-411 may be just the service for you.
Enabled by Google’s tremendous index of online data, mobile and landline users can now call 1-800-GOOG-411 and by following the queued prompts, receive the phone number, address and even a map of a desired business anywhere in the United States and Canada.
One of the first questions that came to mind when reading about this service when it was launched in 2007 was “What’s in it for Google?“ Despite the fact that the retrieval of such data is a natural extension using Google’s readily-available data and capabilities, it was not immediately clear why Google would provide such a service for free when local phone providers charge anywhere from $0.75 to $1.50 for similar, if not lesser services. Read More »
The Gov 2.0 team is in Cambridge this week hosting our Government 2.0: Wikinomics ,Government and Democracy community at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Rather than try and parse out some of the key insights myself I thought I’d point our audience to this quick hit list of insights from one of our collaborators and partners, Ian Ketcheson, who’s done the job for me.
Perhaps the most interesting presentation was our tour through Virtual Alabama with Alabama’s Director of Homeland Security James Walker.
Nicholas Carr has written an unreadably long article (just kidding, it’s worth the read) about the effect that the Internet is having on our ability to concentrate. His argument is that for the Internet to be useful, it needs to appropriate new content, and integrate this content its existing body of knowledge. This newly assimilated content is then changed by the Internet to be displayed as all media online is displayed: surrounded by ads, on top of layers of other content, and endlessly interlinked with other content. The process of gathering and processing information has become an exercise in distraction.
I was just loading up Google maps to figure out where to meet a friend when I noticed a new feature: community uploaded photos, and Wikipedia location tagging.
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
