Tag Archive for 'google'

First Gphones shipping?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/10/2007
in mobile
. 0 Comments

Rumour has it that the first 50,000 Gphones will ship from Taiwanese handset-maker HTC’s manufacturing facility before the end of the year.

While 50,000 may seem like a modest number,

“These initial phones are not going to be for sale,” Benjamin Schachter, one of the [UBS] analysts who worked on the report, said in a phone call earlier today. “These are going to be available for developers only to understand how the software works.”

There’s all kinds of speculation about the Gphone and the business model which will come with it. Some are postulating that it will be free but will display ads.

There’s no news yet on if/when it will come to Europe.

The mobile space is a no-brainer for Google though. Of the 6.billion people on the planet, only 1 billion have easy Internet access. Google’s long-term intention is to use these phones as a cheap way to Internet enable billions more people.

Google launch video ads (kinda)

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/10/2007
in advertising and video
. 1 Comment

Good friend Marshall Kirkpatrick broke the news yesterday that Google were going to start offering video ads to people publishing ads using Google’s Adsense program. I use Adsense to publish the few ads that are on this site.

Adsense video ads

The official announcement on the Adsense blog contains a non-functioning video (not a good start) and the following caveats:

Video units will be live in AdSense accounts later today (10/9). Currently this feature is open only to publishers located in the United States with English-language websites.

How well this works will depend very much on the targeting, I suspect. Video ads for cool new gadgets would do far better on this site than video ads for, say, Shiseido’s latest age re-perfect, vitamin enhanced, moisturiser.

I’ll have to consider, if I roll this out, where to place it in the page’s design.

Congrats to the guys in Jaiku

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 10/10/2007
in IT@Cork, Web 2.0, social media and social networks
. 4 Comments

I see Jaiku were bought by Google yesterday. What is Jaiku? Jaiku is what Twitter would be if it worked reliably and had neat functionality. I’m delighted for them.

If you don’t currently have a Jaiku account then you may be out of luck because in the notification email sent out by Jaiku last night they said:

In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not! All our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will continue to be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.

I’m not sure what happens to people who are invited in this period, do they go into a holding pattern, or are they left in but the amount of invites is limited. The faq is no help there.

This is great play by Google who are demonstrating that they have their finger on the pulse. I can’t wait to see what other announcements they are going to make in this space - Robert Scoble is hinting at big news in the Orkut arena in early November.

Jyri Engstrom, Jaiku’s founder gave a great talk at Reboot and I tried to get him to come to speak at the it@cork conference this November. Unfortunately he was busy (now I can see why!). Maybe next year Jyri!

WordPress 2.3 upgrade breaks RSS feed

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/9/2007
in Blogging, RSS, WordPress and blogs
. 4 Comments

Sean McNamara alerted me via the comments on this blog that my RSS feed was broken (thanks a million Sean). I sorted that out this morning so it should be good again and Google Reader is certainly having no problem seeing my posts now.

So what happened? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure (!) but I think it had more to do with my FeedBurner account than WordPress, per se.

The sequence of events was along the lines of

Then I saw Sean’s comment. Uh oh! I went over to Google Reader and sure enough no posts for the last couple of days were present, d’oh!

I checked back my FeedBurner Plugin config and while all seemed ok, when I checked the “create a FeedBurner feed for …” link, it looks like that the updated plugin created a new feed for the blog.

This meant I had to head over to the FeedBurner site and set up the new feed from scratch - a considerable annoyance. All my stats on my old feed are no longer associated with the new one.

Strictly, this wasn’t a WordPress issue, more of a left-field issue associated with upgrading the FeedBurner plugin. However, the lack of support by WordPress for older plugins is the only reason I upgraded - triggering the loss of my RSS feed.

Google Facebook offline?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/8/2007
in Browsers and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

Facebook apps are the hot thing at the minute. Everyone who has any kind of a Web 2.0 site has either created one or is in the process of.

When I saw this morning that Google were after creating a Facebook app, I was quite curious. According to the article:

Google made a lovely app for Facebook that lets you search the web and share the results with your friends. Your queries are automatically included in Facebook’s mini-feed, so your web history can be shared with your friends. There’s also a page that showcases popular results found by other Facebook users.

Interesting (and potentially dangerous!) - unfortunately when I clicked on the link I was presented with the following screen:
Google Facebook app offline

Anyone know what’s going on there?

Mac version of Google Earth now showing Manhattan in space?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 22/8/2007
in Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

Google upgraded their amazing Google Earth application overnight to now include the objects in the night sky as well (Google Earth & Sky!).

The Sky part of the application holds a host of information about stars, planets and constellations.

I’m a little confused though as to how Manhattan island appears to have been re-positioned near the Gemini Constellation in my Mac-based Google Earth (but not on the PC curiously).

Google Earth (now with sky!)

My friends in Manhattan will be surprised ;-)

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