Earlier this year there was some guessing as to when Google would make something of the slice of AOL they purchased. Nathan had a tidbit of news and a realistic idea as to what Google might be working on. The idea was to marry AOL Instant Messenger, aka AIM, into the same chat interface found in Gmail. That way Gmail users could also chat with their AIM buddies without having to sign into AIM using their external chat client.
Well, nearly a year later, two years after a joint press release said something like this would happen, that idea has become a reailty. First thing this morning when I signed into Gmail and went to set my online status to unavailable, I found a familiar icon in my list of options. The AIM icon shows up near the bottom of the menu, allowing Gmail users to sign into AIM and access their buddy list in the same Chat area of Gmail.
Once you have selected “Sign into AIM”, a small new pop window appears. Simply sign in using your AIM username and password and your buddy list will be imported into your Chat list. When you are all finished or wish to sign out of AIM, click the drop down arrow to change your status and the text changes to “Sign out of AIM”.
If a user in your Chat list is online using AIM, you will see the AIM icon to the right, and if they are using an away message you will see their status color as orange and their away message will display below if applicable. This new addition to Gmail brings Google another step closer to simplifying, yet improving the online user experience. This is useful for the user who is not on their own computer, i.e., at the library, in a computer lab or a friend’s house. It would also not require users to have the AIM client installed on their computer.
Ryan Douglas manages Paid Search and Comparison Shopping Engines for PlumberSurplus.com, an online retailer of home improvement products including Bathtubs, Sump Pumps, and Bathroom Sinks.
December 5th, 2007
Posted by
Ryan Douglas |
Products, Talk, Services, AOL, Gmail, Email |
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Google is in middle of sending out their holiday gifts to AdWords advertisers and AdSense publishers, a great tradition by the company. This year’s gift is dissapointing a few, a strange card that apparently flips out a USB connecter so you can use its 2 gigabytes of storage space. Besides the relatively small storage space (I’ve gotten 6 gig mini hard drives at press events), the large size of it makes it inconvenient, except for keeping in a wallet.
Still, a free gift is a free gift, which is nice, but an SD card of the same size would have been more useful.
Here’s another photo:
Apparently, the Indian postal service stole Amit’s.
December 5th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
AdSense, AdWords, Advertising |
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Google confirmed over the weekend its plans to participate in the FCC’s auction for the 700 megahertz wireless specturm being vacated by analog TV. Google says that regardless of if it wins, consumers will win because it convinced the FCC to allocate a slice of the spectrum for open devices and open applications.
Google has put together a neat timeline explaining the auction process, starting with this past Monday’s submission deadline (and the beginning of the anti-collusion rules which prevent anyone involved, including Google, from discussing the auction):
December 3: By Monday, would-be applicants must file their applications to participate in the auction (FCC Form 175), which remain confidential until the FCC makes them available.
Mid-December: Once all the applications have been fully reviewed, the FCC will release a public list of eligible bidders in the auction. Each bidder must then make a monetary deposit no later than December 28, depending on which licenses they plan to bid on. The more spectrum blocks an applicant is deemed eligible to bid on, the greater the amount they must deposit.
January 24, 2008: The auction begins, with each bidder using an electronic bidding process. Since this auction is anonymous (a rule that we think makes the auction more competitive and therefore better for consumers), the FCC will not publicly identify which parties have made which bid until after the auction is over.
Bidding rounds: The auction bidding occurs in stages established by the FCC, with the likely number of rounds per day increasing as bidding activity decreases. The FCC announces results at the end of each round, including the highest bid at that point, the minimum acceptable bid for the following round, and the amounts of all bids placed during the round. The FCC does not disclose bidders’ names, and bidders are not allowed to disclose publicly whether they are still in the running or not.
Auction end: The auction will end when there are no new bids and all the spectrum blocks have been sold (many experts believe this auction could last until March 2008). If the reserve price of any spectrum block is not met, the FCC will conduct a re-auction of that block. Following the end of the auction, the FCC announces which bidders have secured licenses to which pieces of spectrum and requires winning bidders to submit the balance of the payments for the licenses.
Brian White speculates that Google could team up with Apple to combine their bids for the spectrum. Google could use the spectrum for its mobile aspirations, and Apple could use it for VoIP in order to escape the need to partner with AT&T on the iPhone.
December 5th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Android, Mobile, Apple |
no comments
Verizon has done a surprising about-face, joining up with Google instead of becoming their biggest enemy, at least when it comes to Google’s Android mobile phone operating system. Verizon says it is joining up in order to reduce customer service costs, as in an open architecture, it would only be responsible for making sure the phones can make calls, and not tech support for any other aspect of the handset or software.
When Verizon Wireless was founded in 2000, it ran 27 call centers to provide customer service. The company cut back to as few as 17 centers at one point, but the count is now back to 25, each with about a thousand employees. The company’s 2,300 stores, staffed by 20,000 employees, are also costly. While workers in those stores used to spend nearly the entire day signing up new customers, now only a tenth of their time is consumed by new subscribers. Instead, the bulk of their energy goes to helping current subscribers with questions and problems. McAdam & Co. decided the business model was not sustainable. “If we get to 150 million customers, boy, that’s a lot of overhead,” says McAdam.
In an open-access model, though, Verizon Wireless won’t offer the same level of customer service as it does for the roughly 50 phone models featured in its handset lineup. Though the company will insist on testing all phones developed to run on its network in the open-access program, Verizon plans only to ensure the wireless connection is working for customers who buy those devices. “They have to talk to their handset provider or their application provider if they have particular issues,” McAdam says.
If that’s Verizon’s only motivation, it’s a smart one. Reducing customer support costs and handset subsidies ultimately is great for Verizon and for the consumer, turning the industry on its head and reducing the “free phone, two year contract” mentality that is ruing the wireless industry. Verizon has been making some good moves towards openness lately, ones that may mean the company is finally wising up.
On the other hand, those of us who have followed and dealt with Verizon over the years know that, at its core, Verizon is definitely one of those “evil” companies with little regard for anything except revenue growth. Most likely Verizon isn’t trying to be the good guy, it’s trying to go with the “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, then use your insider knowledge to destroy them”.
If Google and Android winds up with an edge, Verizon can combat it, exploit it, or as a provider for it, control the spin of a competitor (for example, painting Android phones as low end and its own phones as high end). Google has to sit back and be all buddy/buddy with Verizon, and Verizon can stab Google in the back while still selling Google’s devices.
Is Verizon an undeniably evil company? Can this leopard change its red-and-black spots? No matter what, Google gets a very important network (with excellent call quality in many areas) for its platform, even if it has to fight off that network. The way to look at it? Everybody wins, and everybody’s keeping their enemies closer.
photo, titled “This is what evil looks like…“, by About The Music
December 5th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Android, Mobile, Products |
one comment
Google and NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) are joining together to use Google Maps and Google Earth on Christmas to track Santa Claus as he goes around the world delivering gifts. YouTube is involved somehow too, plus there’s an iGoogle Gadget, and from now until then you can go to noradsanta.com to play a different Flash game every day. Today’s game involves playing Jingle Bells by hitting specific bells in order (pictured above).
Play the games here.
Get the iGoogle Gadget here.
I love the Santa biography NORAD gives:
About Santa
Santa maintains a huge list of children who have been good throughout the year. The list even includes addresses, ZIP codes and postal codes. The list, of course, gets bigger each year by virtue of the world’s increasing population. This year’s population right now is 6,634,570,959!
Santa has had to adapt over the years to having less and less time to deliver his toys. If one were to assume he works in the realm of standard time, as we know it, clearly he would have perhaps two to three ten-thousandths of a second to deliver his toys to each child’s home he visits!
The fact that Santa Claus is more than 15 centuries old and does not appear to age is our biggest clue that he does not work within time, as we know it. His Christmas Eve trip may seem to take around 24 hours, but to Santa it could be that it lasts days, weeks or months in standard time. Santa would not want to rush the important job of bringing Christmas happiness to a child, so the only logical conclusion is that Santa somehow functions on a different time and space continuum.
Questions for Santa
As you know, this is Santa’s busiest time of the year. But if it’s really important, click here to send Santa an email. His elves, Chuckles and Buckley, will be sure he gets your mail!
Reads like a solid CIA dossier. There’s also a solid “Is He Real?” page.
baby Santa photo by n3sp1r1t under CC license
December 5th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
iGoogle, YouTube, Google Earth, Google Maps, Products, Services |
no comments
