 Web2.0, Google Applications. |
| Geniuses at Play, on the Job By David Pogue Published: February 25, 2009 |
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| Unless you're just off the shuttle from Alpha Centauri, you're already aware of the product that made Google famous: its Search box. It's become the card catalog for the Internet (and a whopping moneymaker for Google). But any time you cram some 20,000 of the world's smartest people into one company, you can expect to grow a garden of unrelated ideas. Especially when you give some of those geniuses one workday a week — Google's famous "20 percent time"— to work on whatever projects fan their passions. And especially when you create Google Labs (labs.google.com), a Web site where the public can kick the tires on half-baked Google creations. Some Labs projects go on to become real Google services, and others are quietly snuffed out. Such innovations — and a number of smart acquisitions — have led to hits like Google Earth, Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, Google Calendar and others. But they have also cultivated a vast jungle of lesser-known features. Unfortunately, it's so vast, you'd need a professional tour guide to help you find the gems. Hello, my name is David. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times. IGOOGLE Google.com became famous for its minimalist look. It loaded quickly in the days when dial-up modems ruled the earth. Today, at iGoogle (google.com/ig), you can dress up all that white space with useful miniboxes containing additional info. Hundreds of useful displays are available: a clock, local weather, movie listings, incoming e-mail, news, daily horoscope, to-do list, Twitter updates and whatever-of-the-day (joke, vocabulary word, quotation, Bible verse and so on). The best part: this stuff doesn't slow you down. You can type in and execute a quick Google search before all those widgets have appeared. GOOGLE READER Why spend your time finding and navigating to the Web sites that cover your favorite topics? They can all come to you — all nicely congregated on a single page, called Google Reader (reader.google.com). Technically, Reader is what's called an RSS feed reader, but you don't need to know that. You type in a topic, inspect the search results, and click the Subscribe buttons that look interesting. After that, Reader displays the first paragraph from each site or blog; click to read more. Star items to read later, or pass along your favorites to friends. Fantastic. FLU TRENDS One of Google's geniuses figured out that whenever people get sick, they use Google to search for more information. By collating these searches, Google has created an early-warning system for flu outbreaks in your area, with color-coded graphs. Google says that Flu Trends (google.org/flutrends) has recognized outbreaks two weeks sooner than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has. GOOGLE MAPS It's driving directions on steroids (maps.google.com). Choose the directions you want: by car, by public transit or on foot. Drag the path line with your mouse around construction sites or down interesting streets. View current traffic conditions. Turn on Street View to see actual photographs of your destination. Way, way better than MapQuest. |
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| GMAIL LABS Gmail is already the world's best free Web-based e-mail service, with terrific organization tools and a superb spam blocker. But if you click Settings and then Labs, you find a huge list of on/off switches for cool enhancements. There's Text Message in Chat (send text messages to your friends' cellphones from within Google Chat or Gmail); Offline Mail (work on Gmail when you're not online); Canned Responses (build a menu of stock answers to your mail); Multiple Inboxes (manages mail by auto-creating multiple mail folders); and the delightful Send & Archive (one click sends your reply and removes the original from the list). Here, too, is Mail Goggles, which is intended to avert the kind of personal disaster that can result when you send mail while drunk. During periods that you specify (for example, weekend nights from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.), this feature prevents you from sending mail until you've answered five mental math problems in 60 seconds. (But those Google geniuses can probably do it even after a few pitchers of margaritas.) QUICK SEARCH BOX Here's a promising Google Labs project indeed (code.google.com/p/qsb-mac): a sweet, fast little Mac program that opens when you press the Command key twice. Opens programs, searches your Mac, searches the address book, searches the Web, looks up words or weather, and more. And since it's open source, more people will add even more features. TRANSLATOR Translate any text or Web page to or from 40 languages (translate.google.com). It's not perfect, but you'll get the gist of that spam from Russia. 800-GOOG-411 Possibly the best voice-recognition cellphone service in existence. Call the number, say what you're looking for ("comedy clubs, Chicago" or "Domino's Pizza, Cleveland"), and Google's auto-voice reads off the closest eight matches. You can speak the number of the one you want, and he'll connect your call automatically — no charge. You never know or care what the phone number was; it's like having a personal secretary. Or you can say "text message" at any time to have the address and phone number zapped to your cellphone in one second. GOOGLE SMS Send a message to GOOGL (46645). GOOGLE ALERTS Keep tabs on what the world is saying about you, your company or your interests. At Google.com/alerts, type the search phrase (like your name), and specify which channels you want to monitor (blogs, Web pages, discussion groups and so on). When someone mentions you online, you hear about it in an e-mail alert. It's a personal clipping service — no charge. GOOGLE SETS At labs.google.com/sets, type in several items in a series (like "cleveland browns" and "dallas cowboys"); Google fleshes out the list with others like it (all the other football teams). Great when something's on the tip of your tongue (a kind of fruit, president, car, holiday, currency) but can remember only something like it. SECRETS OF THE SEARCH BOX Usually, whatever you type into Google's Search box is treated as a quest for Web pages. Certain kinds of information, however, get special treatment.
Oh, dear, look at that — the end of the column is approaching, and we haven't even mentioned:
But that's all right. Already, that's enough good free stuff to last you a lifetime. Or at least 20 percent of one. |
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Saturday, February 28, 2009
Aplicaciones Web de Google.
Servicio de mapas en directorio de páginas amarillas por Internet
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Televisón por Internet. Hulu.com
 Online streaming video |
| Feb 5th 2009 | SAN FRANCISCO Hulu who? From The Economist print edition After much confusion, it is becoming clear what works in online video |
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IN THE spring of 2007 Jason Kilar was trying to beef up the video offerings of his employer, Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, when he got a call from a headhunting firm. Would he consider running Hulu, a new joint venture by two "old media" giants, NBC Universal and News Corp? The idea was to enter the confusing online-video market by starting a service from scratch—and doing it properly. Mr Kilar said yes. He showed up in his new office in Santa Monica, near Los Angeles, and with his small team started scribbling ideas on the "whiteboard" wallpaper. The excitement as well as the confusion had started in 2006, when a young website, YouTube, shot out of nowhere to become that year's "next big thing". Within months, YouTube sold itself to Google, the world's largest internet firm. YouTube had risen so fast by making it easy to watch and share videos in any web browser, and by making it almost as easy to upload home-made videos to its site. Such "user-generated content" seemed to be the future. In one sense this turned out to be correct. YouTube went on to dominate web video as measured by the number of videos that users watch (see chart). Its social and even political importance are hard to overstate. From "Obama Girl" videos and tutorials about tying shoelaces or folding origami to Yoga and aerobics instruction, YouTube has changed lives. But there was a catch. Advertisers, by and large, will not touch user-generated content with a barge pole. Its quality is variable, to say the least; its content occasionally off-putting. No brand wants to be near it. And much of it is illegal—pirated from large media companies and uploaded by fans. Media giants, led by Viacom, were suing. So there was a threat of costs and no promise of revenues. YouTube is undoubtedly a phenomenon, but it is not a business. So others showed up hoping to fill that gap. Until recently, says Shahid Khan, a video analyst at IBB Consulting, there were only question-marks. Did a new service need user-generated content as well as professional videos? Was it better to aggregate the content of many media companies or to be an outlet for just one? Would people prefer to download films or television shows to their computers, then transfer them to their iPods, as Apple was betting? Or would they prefer "streaming" a video just once? If so, might they be persuaded to install a bespoke video application onto their computers, or would they insist on watching videos inside their web browsers? Would they pay to watch, or would advertising provide the revenues? Almost every permutation has been tried. From Amazon to Apple, from Netflix to Joost, from ABC to CBS's TV.com, companies old and young started serving videos over the internet. Into this mess Mr Kilar tried to enter with the service that was to be Hulu. The bloggers at first scoffed: it turns out that Hulu can mean "cease and desist" in Swahili. But then they started paying attention. |
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Tune in for the answers Today, even though advertising is destined for a depression, Hulu appears to have clarified much of the confusion. Mr Kilar will not say what revenue or profit Hulu is making. But it seems to be successful by any measure. Although Hulu is still far behind YouTube (see chart), users have been flocking to it, watching 216m videos in December. Just as importantly, Hulu's inventory for advertisers appears to be sold out. So Hulu is in the rare position of being able to increase inventory (through new content and more views) and make money from it. Hulu now has more than 100 advertisers, including big brands such as McDonald's, Bank of America and Best Buy. It therefore appears that Mr Kilar has, in effect, answered a lot of the questions. He contemplated user-generated content, then decided that "the world didn't need yet another" YouTube; so Hulu has only professional content, and advertisers love it. He also talked with his bosses at NBC Universal and Fox and agreed that aggregating the content of many was "something potentially much larger" than piping out the videos of just two. Hulu now offers content from more than 110 partners. Mr Kilar also bet on streaming via the web, rather than letting users download. Rivals such as Joost have made the same choice. Films and TV differ from music, says Mike Volpi, Joost's boss, in that people watching tend to sit still, whereas people listening tend to move; and people usually watch a show only once but listen to a song again and again. There is a place for Apple's model of downloading and buying videos—children, for example, like to watch the same TV programme many times—but that market is likely to be smaller. Mr Kilar was also early to choose the right way of streaming video: through the browser, with a simple and sleek design. He began, he says, with the idea that the site should "not look like Tokyo at night"—in other words, it should be as simple as YouTube is cluttered. And the service should be so easy to use that "my mother would be proficient on it in 15 seconds or less, with no help from me." Mr Kilar, who began his career at Walt Disney, wanted Hulu to offer the same rich-but-clean experience as Disney's theme parks do. Accordingly, he decided against making users download a special piece of software, which would not have "passed the mom test." This turned out to be correct. Joost started by offering video through its own software application, but lost out to Hulu and did an about-face. A few weeks ago it discontinued its downloadable application and began streaming only through the browser. This late conversion was Joost's "biggest flaw", says IBB's Mr Khan, and now leaves it far behind. The browser-based approach favours streaming rather than downloads, but that does not mean that the paid-for download model is dead. Mr Khan thinks that some viewers will want to own content, and that may become a premium option on free services such as Hulu. But the bigger lesson from Hulu's success is that supporting streamed video with advertising, rather than charging for downloads, turns out to work very well. Hulu's ads are few and short, with a subtle countdown timer that makes them even more bearable. In some cases viewers can even choose which ad to watch, so it is more likely to be relevant to their interests. And people tend to remember the advertisements they see on Hulu much better than they recall television ads, says Mr Kilar, so advertisers are pleased. It is too early to declare Hulu the winner. It "has done a very good job," admits Joost's Mr Volpi, but "the die has not been cast yet." Mr Khan thinks Amazon's offering may become more compelling, and that TV.com, formerly a provider of television listings and now a streaming site owned by CBS, may yet come from behind. But for the moment it appears that YouTube proved that people would watch videos online—whereas Hulu is proving that advertisers will foot the bill. |
Open article at "The Economist" Web Site |
 Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2007. All rights reserved. |
Monday, February 23, 2009
Comunidad Web con celulares inteligentes.
Tecnology. |
| Sharing Consumers' Tastes in Cellphone Web Surfing By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER Published: February 22, 2009 |
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| On Monday, a Denver-based start-up, Buzzwire, is unveiling a new site for cellphone users that will tap their collective preferences to create a guide to the best Web content for mobile users. Buzzwire began in 2006 as a service to help wireless carriers and video producers play videos on mobile phones. With its new site, which users can reach on their mobile browsers at m.buzzwire.com, it hopes to expand its reach. By 2012, "people will be browsing the Web more on their phones than on PCs or laptops," said Greg Osberg, Buzzwire's chief executive. "This is the first site 100 percent dedicated to the best of the mobile Web, with nothing to do with the PC Web." The number of people who surf the Internet on phones has doubled since 2006, according to Nielsen Mobile, to 40 million. Still, only 16 percent of people with cellphones use them to go online, and those that do visit an average of six sites a month, versus 100 on their computers. Mr. Osberg wants to change that. He joined Buzzwire in November after leaving as president and worldwide publisher of Newsweek, where he revamped the magazine's Web site and started its mobile site. Similar to Digg, which lists stories recommended by Digg users, Buzzwire readers will pick stories they want to appear on the site by sending a text message or e-mail message or clicking on a Buzzwire button at the bottom of a story. Unlike Digg, Buzzwire has four editors who also cull articles from around the mobile Web. Readers can scan the 20 most popular stories; navigate by topic, such as the Academy Awards, politics or health; or see the most recent links. They can also keep a list of stories they want to read later and, à la Twitter, follow their friends to see what they are reading and watching. Buzzwire aims to direct readers to the best content on the mobile Web and help publishers that have struggled to lure readers, Mr. Osberg said. TVGuide.com gets 16 million visitors each month but its mobile Web site gets only 500,000. Joining with Buzzwire "is part of a larger strategy of making sure we reach consumers wherever they are," said Paul Greenberg, general manager of TVGuide.com. Buzzwire makes money by licensing its mobile video technology, which Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Alltel already use. It will also sell ads on the site. The Deutsch advertising agency has bought all the ad space for 90 days and will run banner and video ads for clients that include DirecTV and Kodak, said Peter Gardiner, the agency's chief media officer. Advertisers have had a hard time figuring out how to reach people on their phones, he said, because TV and Web ads do not work well on phones and advertisers are wary of assaulting readers on such a personal device. "These are fears in the mobile industry," he said. "The reason we're getting involved with these guys so deeply is it's a chance to test different approaches and see what consumers like and don't like." |
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