Tag Archives | Google

Fire at Google UK HQ Blamed on Barbecue

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 27, 2009 at 9:16 am

Google Logo Google’s UK headquarters in London were evacuated Thursday afternoon local time after a barbecue on the bulding’s roof caught fire and burned out of control. No injuries have been reported, and damage seems to be contained to the portion of the roof where the barbecue was located. In total, four fire engines and 20 firefighters responded to fight the blaze.

What may have accelerated the fire was the fact that a portion of the terrace on the roof is wooden. While an investigation of what happened is still ongoing, it’s pretty safe to assume this caught fire easily and was a main source of the flames seen in several pictures seen across the Internet, such as the one seen here.

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Whose iPhone is It Anyway?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 21, 2009 at 6:05 pm

tugofwar The great silence is over. Apple has responded to the FCC’s questions about the Google Voice app in particular and the iPhone App Store in general–and it not only sent its answers to the feds, but published them on the Web. It’s the first time the company has talked about App Store procedures and processes in public. And Engadget has posted the letters Google and AT&T sent to the FCC. All of a sudden, we know way more about what’s been going on behind the scenes.

Some of the tidbits in the three letters reconfirm stuff that was already known, such as Sling’s SlingPlayer being crippled because of concerns over network congestion in general and violation of AT&T’s terms of service in specific. Others make the obvious official, such as AT&T’s statement that it does not like the idea of VoIP services such as Skype running over its 3G network. Apple’s statement emphasizes the good news about App Store approval–95% of apps get the okay within two weeks–and stresses that most rejections are because of bugs. It also says that the App Store gets 8500 new apps and updates a week, that there are more than 40 full-time reviewers, and that every app is checked by two reviewers. Assuming that the average reviewer puts in a ten hour workday (not including lunch) that would mean that he or she must crank through around eight apps an hour–which means that the average inspection must be profoundly superficial, and that most must involve snap judgements that may be prone to error. (We kind of knew that already.)

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5Words for Tuesday, August 18th 2009

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 18, 2009 at 8:30 am

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Chrome bookmark syncing is coming.

Are your iPhone e-mails gone?

Microsoft introduces a 720p Webcam.

Apple sells 25% of songs.

Exploding iPhones are “isolated cases.”

Update on Twitter hacker defense.

Verizon’s making progress on LTE.

Pre developers can sell apps.

Flickr users love the iPhone.

Satisfaction: Apple slips, others gain.

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Building an Android-Based iPhone Killer: Doable?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 17, 2009 at 10:51 am

androidquestions Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has a smart post up exhorting somebody–anybody–to build an Android phone that’s better than the iPhone. As far as I can tell, no manufacturer of Android-based phones has set out to do that–Android phones are getting better, as shown by the significant improvement that T-Mobile’s myTouch 3G represents over the first-generation G1. And some Android phones sport better specs in certain areas than the iPhone, or features that the iPhone doesn’t have. But nobody’s used Android to get to an overall phone experience that’s neck-and-neck with the iPhone yet. (And the overall iPhone experience remains so remarkable that folks are willing to forgive the phone for its many limitations.)

Android has gotten off to a slower start than I expected; even so, I still think it’s likely that it’ll provide the iPhone with its stiffest competition in terms of sheer market share in the years to come. I’m less optimistic about there being lots of Android phones which are just as good as the iPhone, for the same reason that there aren’t lots of Windows PCs that are just as good as Macs–the PC-like business model behind Android encourages manufacturers to build commodity products (albeit potentially good ones), not unique and ambitious ones of the sort Gruber is hoping for.

(Which doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to build something unique on Android; the best Windows laptops, such as Voodoo PC’s Envy 133, use the platform for products of Apple-like refinement and creativity. It’s just that the economics of building products on a common platform encourages those products to be…common.)

As of right now, the iPhone’s most formidable competitor in terms of overall experience is unquestionably Palm’s Pre. It’s anything but a coincidence that it’s also the smartphone that came out of the design process most similar to Apple’s approach, with one company designing the software and hardware from scratch. Very few companies will ever get that ambitious. But I hope that many companies do the next best thing: build Android phones that are so thoughtfully designed and customized that you forget they run an OS that’s available on scads of phones from scads of manufacturers.

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Is Google Too Powerful?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 17, 2009 at 9:59 am

Over at TechFlash, Galen Ward of real-estate search company Estately has blogged about the way that Google integrates results and promotions for its various features (such as Google Maps, YouTube, Google Checkout, and real estate search) into its search results. He says the practice makes it hard for other companies that compete with Google–and which might even offer superior services–to succeed, and that it therefore hurts consumers. He goes so far as to wave an obvious red flag by comparing Google today to Microsoft in the 1990s. (He also says that if the government interfered with Google, it would probably make the situation even worse.)

The question “Is Google too powerful?” is as big and complicated as Google itself. I’ll try to blog some thoughts about it soon. But for the moment, I want to take your pulse in the form of today’s T-Poll:

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Bing Shows Signs of Life in the US

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 12, 2009 at 10:47 am

You might have noticed that Microsoft’s ads for its Bing search engine have become much more frequent on our pages as of late. I’ve noticed elsewhere a marked increase in advertisements for the service, which seems to imply that Microsoft may be staging another offensive in the war over search.

Data from StatCounter shows that Bing had an fairly impressive 13.2 percent share on Tuesday, its highest point in over two months — which was shortly after launch — and continuing a marked uptrend that began on Monday. It appears that Bing’s new-found traffic is generally coming from Google, as Yahoo has generally maintained its share throughout Bing’s rises and falls.

(That said, Google still dominates about 75 percent of the search market in the US, with Yahoo around 10 percent as of Tuesday.)

What remains to be seen is whether Microsoft can hold onto these gains. Given its past history, it probably won’t, although it seems that its wild swings are beginning to smooth out over the past few weeks. This is probably a result of more web consumers settling into using Bing on a regular basis rather than flipping back and forth between its competitors.

Microsoft may also be noticing this stabilization, and may see it as a good time to attempt to pry more eyes away from Google, thus the increase in Bing ads once again.

In any case, the service still has a far way to go before it can be considered relevant in the search engine space. With Google so dominant, especially worldwide, Microsoft has a lot of work to do.

Note that worldwide Google has 88.6 percent of the market, dwarfing Bing and Yahoo’s shares which are roughly tied at 4.7 percent each.

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Wave vs. the Web

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 7, 2009 at 1:46 pm

Anil Dash has a good post up about Google Wave in which he expresses concerns about its wild ambition that are in some ways a developer-focused corollary to my concerns that it may be the first Google project that suffers from Microsoftian bloat.

Anil:

And people aren’t looking for a replacement for email, or instant messaging, or blogs, or wikis. Those tools all work great for their intended purposes, and whatever technology augments them will likely offer a different combination of persistence and immediacy than those systems. Right now, Wave evokes all of them without being its own distinctive thing. Which means it’s most useful in providing reference implementations of particular new features.

Like Anil, I’ll be delighted if Wave proves that my skepticism was misplaced. Right now, though, it does feel like a mishmosh of multiple interesting ideas, implemented on an epic scale. And most new things that have caught on on the Web (including Web sites themselves) started out simple, even if they eventually grew powerful and complex….

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Google Acquisition Could Move HTML 5 Ahead

Posted by David Worthington on August 5, 2009 at 8:36 pm

Google and On2 Google’s $106.5 million acquisition of video technology maker On2 Technologies today could signal that it intends to make technology freely available for the next version of HTML, someday eliminating the need for plug-ins such as Flash for video playback on the Web.

On2 Technologies is best known for its VP7 and VP8 video codecs. The codecs could be used to enable seamless video playback within HTML 5 compatible Web browsers such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5, Opera, and Safari.

HTML 5 is an upcoming version of the HTML standard that has support for audio, graphics and video, as well as interactive document editing. It is incomplete, and has been implemented in browsers in a piecemeal fashion.

HTML is the lingua franca of the Web, but the Web had changed a great deal since HTML 4 was published in December 1997. Industry powerhouses have been plugging away at the HTML 5 draft specification ever since.

The scope of the next-generation Web protocol is very ambitious, and not surprisingly, it has not been without controversy. HTML 5 includes a video element to enable playback without requiring any additional plug-ins or software, and the HTML 5 working group has been split over what uniform video codec should be used.

The working group’s inability to move beyond the impasse has threatened the inclusion of the video element in HTML 5. One camp (that includes Apple and Google) has supported H.264, a codec that requires implementers to pay patent licensing royalties. Others, including Mozilla and Opera, favor Ogg Theora, an open source solution.

Google has already incorporated elements of HTML 5 into its Chrome Web browser, and has begun to utilize it in its Web applications. It has also been experimenting with an HTML 5 edition of YoutTube—sans Flash.

“Today video is an essential part of the Web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the Web platform,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, in a prepared statement. “We are committed to innovation in video quality on the Web, and we believe that On2’s team and technology will help us further that goal.”

HTML is obviously a part of the company’s long term technology plan, and ushering it along by releasing the On2 codecs into the public domain would be compatible with that goal.

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Chrome Gets a New Version. No, Not for the Mac.

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2009 at 9:39 am

chromelogo5 Google has released a new beta of the Windows version of its Chrome browser. The company says it’s faster, and it’s also added basic skinning, an improved New Tab feature, tweaks to the Omnibox address bar, and more HTML 5 support.

I say “the Windows version,” but that’s the only version of Chrome to receive a formal release to date, more than eleven months after Google got into the browser business. Developers builds of the OS X version are increasingly polished, though. Wouldn’t it be cool if Google celebrated the browser’s first birthday by finally bringing it to Mac users? (For now, Chrome is the browser I use most often these days when I’m using one of my Windows PCs; when I’m on a Mac, I’m usually a Firefox person.)