G1 vs Jesus-phone

Ah, the mighty battle between T-Mobile’s G1 and Apple’s jesus-phone.

Yesterday morning (having finally made a decision between them) I took delivery of the G1. Tomorrow they’re coming to take it away again.

Now don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot to love about the G1 - but it’s all about the Android platform. The problem is the hardware: there are just too many niggles there to let me feel I’ll be able to stand 18 months of this phone.

Matters came to a head when I had to call T-Mobile’s (excellent) customer service centre… and met with the typical “press 1 for…” numeric menu.

To do this on the G1, you have to take the phone away from your ear, open the keyboard and then hit the appropriate key. Madness!!!

I think Android will win through in the end: it’s early stage, but the interface is intuitive, adaptable, amazingly flexible, powerful and very fast. But it’s a genie trapped in a cracked bottle.

The App Store (Android Market) is a delight to use - even better than the iTunes App Store - and will (I firmly believe) win out when the depth of apps swells to fill it, as it has over at Apple.

Meanwhile, as Martina King, then MD of Yahoo! UK & Ireland, once said to me: “A phone needs just one killer app: it needs to make calls.” Both the G1 and the vast range of windows mobile phones appear not to have picked up on that yet.

Tags: android, android market, app store, apple, G1, google, htc dream, iphone, iTunes, jesus phone, martina king, T-Mobile, windows mobile

"The web organized for you"

Sandlines is slightly green (like Kosmix’s brand colours) to learn that said new search ‘explore’ engine has secured a further $20m funding, led by Time Warner. Not bad in the current funding environment.

Kosmix, for those who’ve not come across it before, is a new launch, currently in “beta-ish”, that seeks to provide inspiration, for want of a better term, for people entering search terms who aren’t looking for a specific answer, but want something less precise.

So the results pages throw up a range of sourced answers, coming from places like Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo Answers, news sources, Google search results, ebay, Amazon, Hulu… a pretty broad spectrum.

Click to go to search results on Kosmix

I checked out a Google phone ‘explore’ to see what I might find - the results are quite interesting. In many ways reminiscent of Google’s own ‘Universal Search’ project, I’m not (yet) convinced that this adds anything beyond the current web capabilities. But people are fickle folk and I don’t believe Google’s near-monopoly on search is invincible or permanent.

Of course, at the moment a lot of the results are very US centric. Hulu’s inclusion (inevitable given the funding) is of course a US only answer at the moment, and the early news feeds are very US-centric. I’ll be trying to get a view from some of my trans-atlantic pals about what their thoughts on it are.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in the future of search and the potential for where Web 3.0 might go, you should have a play. The only thing I ask is - please let us know what you think back here on Sandlines!

Tags: funding, google, Kosmix, recession, search, Time Warner, Yahoo!

I’m a bit of a marketing geek - I freely admit it. In fact, my hiring policy has been based around an idea that a good friend of my wife shared with me a few years back. She believes that for a man to be attractive he has to have 10% geek: no more, no less. I’ve successfully applied that principle to building businesses from scratch and it’s a compelling mix.

But one manifestation of my ‘geek’ (frankly I probably knock the 10% ceiling from time to time) is responding to surveys. I guess it stems from wanting to see what marketers are up to and what they’re asking.

Of course, the cynical view is that surveys will (should) always tell you what you want to hear - and a big contributory factor sits in the way the questions are asked. The link is to a result from Google Book Search, btw. There are any number of illustrations of this point if you ‘conduct a google search‘ to support this further.

But the survey I looked at tonight was a classic case of forcing the answer you want. I was being asked about my view of some sponsored web content. Before I looked at the content, I had to visit the site in question.

During the survey, I was asked if I had visited, enjoyed and would be likely to revisit the content. I’d visited three of the eight content areas… but I was unable to continue with the survey unless I ticked a box that said I’d visited it. I therefore had to lie to proceed.

This is not an uncommon issue: there’s a tendency in surveys to insist on answers to questions, and it is simply a question of the survey authors not thinking through the options.

Research does, of course, have substantial value… but please don’t take it at face value. Sometimes people are less than scruplously honest… and it’s not always their fault.

Tags: geek, google, google book search, market research, survey

I’ve posted before about better pin-pointing of location from devices on the move - and it’s a subject that has long been close to my heart. But thanks to AdViking to drawing my attention to Greg Sterling’s post last week about the inclusion of Geo-tagging in Windows 7.

It’s a natural development from Geode’s firefox plug in - and will further refine the capabilities of tools like Feedjit I noted before.

But this really is going to be an interesting one to watch on the privacy boards: if your operating system will be able to pinpoint your (fairly) precise location - and you’re on, say, a corporate network - then the implications for employers (for example) to check up on all kinds of things gets much more potent.

Now, let’s put this together with some of the commentary last week on Google’s decision to use searches related to ‘flu’ to identify areas where epidemics might arise. One of the more interesting responses came from The Register:

“The problem, (Marc) Rotenberg says, is that data aggregation calls attention to specific data stored on Google’s servers, making it that much more vulnerable to, say, a subpoena or a national security letter. “Let’s say that instead of Flu Trends, Google’s doing SARS Trends - tracking a very serious communicable disease,” he explains. “If there’s a big SARS upsurge somewhere, the government would be at Google’s door asking where did that data come from.” “

So this goes a step further: it’s not just about what you type into Google, I wonder if this could lead to any information on your computer being fed back to the authorities and then triangulated back to a pretty accurate location. What will the privacy/amnesty international take on that be? I watch with interest…

Tags: EPIC, feedjit, firefox, flu trends, geode, google, mozilla labs, windows 7

I opened my copy of the Economist today and read yet another plea for Jerry Yang to step down as CEO of Yahoo!

I’ve rehearsed the arguments on this question before, but I’m more interested today in the subtext to this story: the extent to which Yahoo!’s reliance on display advertising is going to hurt them during the current economic difficulties.

It’s chastening to think how much of digital’s growth in revenue is purely from search - and yet that’s just the beginning of what the medium can deliver.

Search marketing words (both SEM and SEO) because it is by some distance the most effective way to introduce someone to what you are offering/saying… providing that they are already in the market for it. It’s all about steering someone toward your version of what they already know they want. Powerful, cost-effective and an essential weaon in the marketing arsenal. And almost totally transactional.

But what about the other side of the line?

For most businesses, it’s not just the first sale that matters - it’s the ongoing relationship that the first sale might lead to. This is very strongly the case with subscription-type businesses (e.g. utilities, mobile phones, satellite tv, magazines etc). It is also central to FMCG (or CPG as they call it in the US) marketing.

But it’s also the basis of what your local retail outlet hopes for. Or what your window cleaner relies on. In fact most businesses in the real world tend to prize the ongoing relationship past the first sale very highly.

So why has the digital economy been so hung up on the idea of paying Google (or their affiliate marketing partner) every time they want to conclude another transaction?

Of course, this is still very different from the display advertising model that Yahoo! and the like espouse. But it is, for me, crucial to digital marketing’s success in this recession - and to the rosier times that will sooner or later follow it.

If you haven’t already, start planning for it now! Google is NOT the only show in town.

Tags: affiliate marketing, aol, CPG, display advertising, FMCG, google, Jerry Yang, sem, seo, Yahoo!

JY in happier days (this January!)

Jerry Yang is taking time out from his Microsoft flip-flopping and Google adventures to visit London. He’s been speaking today at the IAB Engage conference here. Unsurprisingly he takes the view that the current recession is going to make ‘digital’ stronger.

Sandlines agrees whole-heartedly - and I’ve been saying this for some time now.

However, I can’t help but thing it will finish Yahoo! - or at least Yang’s stewardship of the once-mighty purple monster - once and for all.

What price the offer Microsoft made earlier this year? It was $35 a share. That looked rich in the spring, but now Yahoo is trading at a few cents over $10.

Tags: google, IAB, IAB Engage, Jerry Yang, Microsoft, recession, Yahoo!

Breaking up?

I’ve borrowed the Ya-Who bit from AdViking… as mentioned over there (and a few other places!) the collapse of the Google/Yahoo! partnership bodes ill for the latter’s long term survival. I wonder if they’ll still be there in 5 years time.

Sandlines can’t help but wonder if Google entered the discussions in similar tone to how they entered the bidding for a wireless spectrum licence earlier this year. In Planet Google, Stross notes that a Google manager described his team’s anxiety that they might win, after placing the $4.71 billion bid: “We kept hitting the ‘refresh’ button on the browser to see if other companies had bid higher…”

Might Google have entered the deal feeling - “If it goes through, great, if it doesn’t: even better”. It certainly broke up the Microsoft / Yahoo! party and leaves Yahoo! needing a white knight. It will be interesting to see if Steve Ballmer still wants to play. If he does, it would speak to Microsoft’s despair in the battle against Google.

Tags: google, Microsoft, planet google, Yahoo!

Over on Razorshine, my old pal Kanani has been shopping - in the real world - and hoping that Google would help him. As the organisation dedicated to ‘…organi(sing) the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” this is perhaps not an unreasonable expectation. Especially when, as Riaz says, the new Westfield Shopping Centre has linked to Google Maps to show us how to find them. Ah well.

It raises a question that someone asked me a couple of weeks ago over a pint - and which has come up several times recently: is it possible to go up against Google and win?

Privately, many inside Microsoft would say that perhaps it isn’t - at least for Microsoft.

So if you’re going into business doing anything around the ‘organisation’ and provision of information, does that mean you should pack up and go home?

No.

Google does an outstanding job most of the time - but they are not perfect, or infallible. And, for all their 16,000+ employees, they still cannot do everything. At least, not all right now. Pick the right one of those areas and you’re in business… perhaps.

Then there’s the new semantic search technologies that are touted as the foundation of a ‘web 3.0′ world. Google, of course, will play in this sandpit, but it’s a different approach to presenting information than that which is hard coded into Google’s corporate psyche, so the jury is not quite in yet as to whether they’ll rise to the challenge.

Of course, there is also the entire ecosystem that has sprung up around the way Google makes money. One friend of mine calls this ‘feeding the monster’. Shopping comparison and much affiliate marketing could be described as falling into this bucket. And it’s a healthy one, even in a downturn.

But one of the more interesting perspectives is coming from a book I’m reading at the moment - Randall Stoss has published a near-insider’s view of Google in ‘Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know” ( I link to the ebook, but you can get it on Amazon too). And it’s a compelling view. Doubtless I will mention it again over the coming days.

It’s curious in how it compares Google’s ‘open’ view of the world with the essentially closed environment that social networking (well, mainly Facebook) is once again introducing to the web.

Just as Google wins the legal battle to index the content of pretty much any published book it likes - and extend beyond the virtual world - it’s curious that its biggest threat may well come from the web itself. Food for thought.

Tags: google, google books, google maps, Microsoft, planet google, randall stross, razorshine, semantic search, web 3.0, westfield

Yahoo!: What does fast mean?

When I worked at Yahoo! during the bubble burst of 2002/3, there was much made of the outward positioning of the company as an innovator. Privately, however, key personnel would declare that, while Yahoo! was crammed with innovation (blah, blah… but defensible then), it was just as valuable to be a fast follower.

I agree.

So when I read this story over on ClickZ just now I had to go to dictionary.com and check out the definition of ‘fast’. Turns out ‘fast’ can also mean “…held or caught firmly, so as to be unable to escape or be extricated.”

I wonder if that’s what they meant… It’s certainly how they’ve looked to me this past year or two.

Tags: google, Google Analytics, Yahoo!

In these days of pervasive internet, it’s increasingly easy for more and more people to email anywhere. Like on the train on the way home from the pub. Or in the office, a little worse for wear (check out this story on AdViking).

But Google have an answer to this - as it seems they do for everything nowadays. Mail Goggles. According to Wired Mag, their new service ‘prevents drunk emailing‘. Wow.

Nominate who you think should overcome this obstacle before emailing!

It works by requiring the user to solve a series of mathematics problems before the email can be sent. It only kicks in on weekend evenings.

Of course, it leaves me thinking that it should possibly be rolled out to larger audiences on corporate email exchanges… particularly at times of sensitive announcements. Or financial crises.

Tags: google, mail goggles; gmail; email