10. Your kids still believe the Googlebot is bringing the Christmas presents.

9. Your reply to “How are you” is “I’m feeling lucky”, combined with a clicking gesture.

8. You shout at the librarian when she takes more than 0.1 seconds to find your book.

7. You just lost a case in court to name your newborn son “Google”.

6. You think of Google as your second-best friend, but lately consider it to get into first position.

5. Your Google shirt is losing color.

4. When people talk to you, you try to optimize their keywords.

3. Your last three Sunday family trips have been to the Googleplex.

2. You are convinced “What’s your PageRank?” is a good pick-up line.

And the number one sign you are addicted to Google:

1. You are completely clueless without a computer.

Source: E-Marketing Blog

Ajit Balakrishnan is perhaps one of the most tech-savvy entrepreneurs in the country. And his IT-savvy does not lie in using technology for its own sake, but using it to create services for the consumer. Always striving to create technologically sophisticated platforms but with a penchant for user-friendly and simple interfaces, Ajit is a part of important think tanks such as the review committee on Indian Information Technology Act and Confederation of Indian Industry s (CII) task force on e-Commerce.

In a no holds barred interview with Tabrez Khan, the Rediff CEO almost manages to give one a feeling of a virtual tour of IT’s evolution in the Indian Industry.

What are the key factors that determine success in your industry? How are you as a company responding to these challenges?

We are a consumer business in the sense that we deal with users. In India there are 30 million PC users and 100 million on the mobile phone. Success is not essentially about technology but figuring out what are the real issues people have in life and trying to solve them through innovative use of technology.

For example recently when the CAT results were announced, 300,000 candidates and their multiple relatives wanted to simultaneously know how they had fared. We responded by enabling CAT results on the mobile phone, which meant that candidates or their well-wishers just had to send an SMS with their roll numbers and they would get the results by SMS.

So a lot of it depends on quickly responding technologically to an existing demand, which solves people s anxieties. Soon after Mumbai terror attacks we had a facility where people could upload videos, and some of them were quite remarkable.

Increasingly we see our role as a media entity is to provide a platform which is technologically sophisticated but at the same time simple to use. If you have a thought to express which is political, post it on a message board, if you want to meet people with similar views with one click connect to them. If you have a video you want the world to see for social justice reasons or entertainment or for any other reason, we have a platform which lets you do that.

So all these are recurring themes, mobile, PC, user generated content, collective intelligence of people brought to bear on a particular topic, all this generates the cutting edge. But this has to be done in an absolutely simple and user-friendly way. They call me the chief simplicity officer here, because with every new product we make I question my team, will my mother be able to use that? If the answer is no, we need to make it simpler.

What has been impact of the US meltdown on your business? How are you coping with the current recessionary business climate?

I keep telling my younger colleagues that this is the seventh recession of my work life, since I graduated from IIM Calcutta in 1971. We have roughly one recession every 4 years or so. So we have the recession now driven largely by the Wall Street crisis, before that we had one in 2000 when the dotcom bubble burst, in 1996-97 which was led by the Asian financial crisis and we had a horrible one in 1989-90 that led to India becoming bankrupt. And we had a few before that. So recessions come and they last typically for two years.

Each time we were faced with a recession it looked like the world was going to end, but like the sun sets recessions also go away. However as long as it lasts, revenue becomes hard to get, you no longer grow at the breathtaking pace as during a boom, forget growth even remaining at the same place becomes a challenge, very often you see declines. If you are staying at the same place during a recession often you are doing very well, it is foolish to try and grow by spending more on advertising and distribution. But the other feature of recession is that costs also go down.

Like recently we had to shift our office in New York from one location to another. We got it for the equivalent of Rs 65 per square feet, air-conditioned and fully done-up and for a period of 10 years. What that means is that in Mumbai real estate prices have to go down to Rs 40 per square feet. So the point is that costs go down during a recession and these are opportunities. Sometimes you bring down costs to such an extent that in the first year after recession you witness a bumper profit. But you need not always control costs by firing people, if they are incompetent you would fire them anyway, recession or no recession.

Also during times of boom there s a lot of irrational exuberance, which gets dealt with during a recession?

Yes, very true. Recessions are often the midwives for the transition from one economic era to the other. So during the transition from one economic era to another, the revenue hit you take is the least of your problems. Actually your business model might be becoming out of date and you have to watch out for that.

For instance, investment banks in New York and elsewhere did good business for 5-7 years on a business model that comprised borrowing $35 for each $ that they owned and taking bets on derivatives, which is a good thing to do, but whose risks they did not fully understand. And they discovered that their business model had become outdated.

Over the last ten years large enterprises have automated their business processes and increased their efficiencies by deploying information technology, what has been your own experience in this regard?

We are centered on technology so acceptance of technology here is universal, sometimes too much. We are at the leading edge of technology adoption in India.

Some of the things we are doing might sound arcane, nonetheless what keeps us awake at nights is to make sure everything we create is visible on every device such as PCs, mobiles, a Nokia or a Microsoft smart phone or a Google android phone. In the US they have 250 different types of mobile phones and four to five different PC types so how to design sites and make them work across different devices is a challenge which we just conquered. Our editors can now publish an item and it gets distributed across devices, as a result none of the device has a more than eight percent market share.

The other thing is that Internet penetration in India has a lot to do with languages. So we are working to ensure that we have a technological solution which enables conversion of content we create to multiple languages and its distribution. This is our other preoccupation.

Thirdly, we have been great supporters of Open Source. All our services run on open source software. Also things like Semantic tagging are gaining traction but they are very specific to us. Besides that we have converted all our internal services into web services. Recently I was asked to speak an audience of CIOs on web-enabling of services and I found a very skeptical audience to whom I was trying to explain that I am not a technology vendor dishing out marketing hype. So I have a feeling that Indian IT folks are 5 years behind time.

Moving forward do you see technology becoming increasingly critical to business success?

In India we have changed our views about technology quite historically since the 1980 s and 90 s when technology was supposed to be a job destroyer. In the 80s and early 90s we used to have periodic strikes against automation in LIC or railways offices because people perceived automation as something that took their jobs away. But then the IT services boom happened, people realized technology was not a job destroyer but job creator. You had iconic companies like Satyam and Infosys come up and people hoped to get jobs in them.
The positive feel was further enhanced when these companies announced adding thousands of employees each year. Indian policymakers then started to think technology meant jobs while in the US they took an exactly opposite view. In my personal view neither of this can be the reason why you adopt technology. The real reason should be convenience, benefits for users and use of technology to extend services to users. For instance ATMs enable you to save time and effort by avoiding going to bank branches and the railway reservation system is similarly convenient. I am a great fan of using technology to extend services to people and make their lives easier.

As an industry person who has observed Indian industry closely, do you think Indian businesses use IT strategically or just as a tactical tool?

I don’t think in India they use it strategically. For instance take this example of a leader of a large enterprise which is known for extending technology to rural areas. I met him once at an event and while interacting with him found out that he does not have an e-mail id. His secretary receives his e-mail and prints it out for him to read everyday. And this for the leader of a company that has a specialized IT division, is known for rural extension of technology and even has a Harvard Business School case study done on it for innovative use of technology.

So Indian business executives who are currently at the top, have not had to learn anything technologically, it has not been important. They have grown in the licence-permit raj by their ability to get licences from government or getting government to deny licences to competitors or being able to raise capital quickly or raiding the stock markets. But using technology to shape things is something that has not mattered really to many companies in India. I think all this will change as competition intensifies.

What about your own use of technology? Is it strategic or merely tactical?

For us it has to be strategic because our business is centered on that. For me to say anything else would not be correct.

What are your expectations from somebody who handles IT in your organization?

One issue we have is when we recruit people for finance or other functional areas, it is hard to find those who are IT-savvy. Today when everything is digital, people in all functional areas need to be IT-savvy. For instance in order to implement Sarbanes Oxley controls you have to do it digitally.

On the other hand, we have a lot of IITians who are very IT-savvy; they know data mining and computer science but lack the business or marketing skills. Our education system and the curriculums we set have a lot to answer for this. For instance, the IT syllabus for Chartered Accountancy courses is 15 years behind time. If you look at some of the leading business schools, including the IIMs, and I am on the board of IIM Calcutta so I have seen it closely, they have heavy duty IT and marketing courses, but nothing that intersects both.

Personally, are you gadget-savvy? What are the gadgets you use?

I personally love gadgets and the most exciting thing about them is that now you can do a lot many smart things on smartphones like iPhone and Android. Anything that provides applications comparable to a PC, I find exciting, not just for productivity purposes but also for fun. I think the action arena in the future is clearly going to be mobiles.

Source: CXOToday

An original post by Keith! I think it’s one of the best guide to someone who doesn’t know what Twitter is!

Twitter is hard to explain to those that aren’t using it.  For a long time I have avoided sites like MySpace and Facebook but I’ve always had a blog, a cell phone, and email.  Those three items made me feel connected.  If I had something to say, I’d blog it.  If someone wanted to reach me electronically they could send a text message or email.  Lastly they could just call me.  Little did I realize how disconnected I was until later on.  It took Twitter to really show me how disconnected I was.  After becoming a Twitter fan I started to spread the word.  Some people I convinced to start using it.  Others are still holding out.  Maybe this will be enough to put them over the edge.

Not Until They Use It

I remember when I first told Alan Stevens about Twitter.Com.  He reluctantly joined and said "oh great, another social networking site".  It wasn’t long until he started to see Twitter’s potential though.  Alan’s first tweet was on Oct. 25th at 11:04 PM.  About a day later he said this and as we can see he was starting to get it and work his way through it.

I met Alan at the TechEd conference in Orlando, FL earlier in in June.  We met up again at DevLink in Nashville, TN and we talked a lot in the speaker’s room as a matter of fact.  After Alan joined Twitter I started to get to know him better.  I think his major break through with Twitter came about a month later. 

By the way, for those of you that aren’t computer programmers, TDD stands for test driven development.  It is a methodology that developers should use to test their code, but a lot don’t.  Alan’s point is that until people use it, they won’t get it.  I guess he was doing some self retrospection at that moment.

The Twitter Battle

A few weeks ago I found myself in a battle of sorts.  It was a Friday night and several of us were hanging out the night before a conference.  Twitter kept dominating the conversation.  It was amazing at how much more stuff I knew that was going on around me just because of Twitter.  During the conversation I picked my phone up and tweeted (the action for posting to twitter) that I was down the street from the hotel hanging with a few fellow speakers.  In literally 1-2 minutes later my phone rang.  It was Alan Stevens who was also speaking at the conference.  "Dude where are you guys at?", he said.  I told him and within a few minutes later Alan and another speaker Michael Neel showed up to join us.  Wow.  Name me another medium that connects people that way so quickly.

Once Alan and Michael got there (both twitterholics), the conversation was twitter, twitter, twitter.  Doug Turnure finally caved and said he would give it another go.  A few days ago he posted this to his blog:

After a lengthy discussion, and Keith’s *value prop* on it, I’m twittering again. I haven’t decided whether to thank Keith or yell at him about it. But it’s a lot of fun, especially when you’re at an event and trying to find people.

Doug was at Mix08, a large Microsoft conference in Vegas, when he wrote that.  Are you starting to see the connections now?  Twitter is about "What you are doing".  For me Twitter is about what I am thinking, or what I am reading, or what I think about given a certain topic.  Sometimes I post links I find interesting.  Sometimes Twitter is conversational if someone posts something that is controversial.  Sometimes it is about replying to friends with one liners (cough cough, @RossCode and @mjeaton).  It is what you make out of it in a sense. 

How Twitter Has Changed

My Twitterversary (the anniversary date you joined Twitter) will be on May 18th of this year.  I can’t believe it has been almost a year.  Since I joined Twitter it has evolved into a lot of things.  There are desktop applications like Witty Twitter which is an open source project several of us contribute to.  I even made a simple one click install of it so anyone that wants to install it can. Click the link below (it will install Witty Twitter and keep itself up to date on your machine).

http://keithelder.net/software/witty/witty.application (requires .Net 3.0 BTW!)

Having a single URL people can go to to use Twitter has proven very handy in getting people to adopt it.  There are also mobile applications like Tiny Twitter for Windows Mobile and even spin off sites like http://tffratio.com which allows users to track their friend-follower ratio.  A couple of my Tweeps (friends you follow on twitter) came up with it and started it.  We haven’t seen the end yet, more sites and ideas are popping up everywhere.

Tagging

Recently at the Mix 08 conference (which I didn’t attend) I was following key notes as they happened and knew where friends were hanging out and which sessions they were going to.  How?  Hashtags.org.  A Twitter hash tag is a pound sign in front of a noun.  Like #mix08 or #food and so on.  Hastags.Org organizes all the things people twitter about into one place.  I doubt we see many more #mix08 tags since #mix08 is now a thing of the past.  What is interesting about the Mix08 tags is how it spiked and then disappeared a few days later.

Not Enough Reasons?

I’ve already given anyone with a sense of curiosity enough reasons to give Twitter a try.  However, I know there are those of you that are holding out.  For those of you, I give you the best video I have found that explains Twitter.  Just remember that no matter how much stuff you read about it, you won’t get it UNTIL you start using it. 

Source: The Elder

Since 2004, when Google began to have annual reports, Larry and I have taken turns writing an annual letter. I never imagined I would be writing one in the midst of an economic crisis unlike any we have seen in decades. As I write this, search queries are reflecting economic hardship, the major market indexes are one half of what they were less than 18 months ago, and unemployment is at record levels.

Nonetheless, I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge. While much smaller in scale than today’s global collapse, the dot-com bust of 2000-2002 pushed Google and others in the industry to take some tough decisions – and we all emerged stronger as a result.

This new crisis punctuates the end of our first decade as a company, a decade that has brought great change to Google, the web and the Internet as a whole. As I reflect on this short time period, our accomplishments and our shortcomings, I am very excited about what the next ten years may bring.

But let me start a little farther back – in 1990, the very first web page was created at http://info.cern.ch/. By late 1992, there were only 26 websites in the world so there was not much need for a search engine. When NCSA Mosaic (the first widely used web browser) came out in 1993, every new website that was created would get posted to its "What’s New" page at a rate of about one a day: http://www.dejavu.org/prep_whatsnew.htm. Just five years later, in 1998, web pages numbered in the tens of millions, and search became crucial. At this point, Google was a small research project at Stanford; later that year it became a tiny startup. The search index sat on a small number of disk drives enclosed within Lego-like blocks. Perhaps a few thousand people, mostly academics, used the service.

Fast-forward to today, the changes in scale are striking. The web itself has grown by about a factor of 10,000, as has our search index. The number of people who use Google’s services every day is now in the hundreds of millions. More importantly, billions of people now have access to the Internet via computers and mobile phones. Like many other web companies, the vast majority of our services are available worldwide and free to users because they are supported by ads. So a child in an Internet cafe in a developing nation can use the same online tools as the wealthiest person in the world. I am proud of the small role Google has played in the democratization of information, but there is much more left to do.

Search

Search remains at the very core of what we do at Google, just as it has been from our earliest days. As the scale has changed dramatically over the years, the presentation and quality of our search results have also undergone many changes since 1998. In the past year alone we have made 359 changes to our web search – nearly one per day. Some are not easy to spot, such as changes in ranking based on personalization (launched broadly in 2005) but they are important in getting the most relevant search results. Others are very easy to see and improve search efficiency in a very clear way, such as spelling correction, annotations, and suggestions.

While I am proud of what has been accomplished in search over the past decade, there are important areas in which I wish we had made more progress. Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that "understands" more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google’s systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be. Part of the reason is the dramatic growth of the web – for any particular query, it is likely there are many documents on the topic using the exact same vocabulary. And as the web grows, so does the breadth and depth of the curiosity of those searching. I expect our search engine to become much "smarter" in the coming decade.

So too will the interfaces by which users look for and receive information. While many things have changed, the basic structure of Google search results today is fairly similar to how it was ten years ago. This is partly because of the benefits of simplicity; in fact, the Google homepage has become increasingly simple over the years: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-04-21-n63.html. But we are starting to see more significant changes in search interfaces. Today you can search from your cell phone by just speaking into it and Google Reader can suggest interesting blogs without any query at all. It is my expectation that in the next decade our searches and results will look very different than they do today.

One of the most striking changes that has happened in the past few years is that search results are no longer just web pages. They include images, videos, books, maps, and more. From the outset, we realized that to have comprehensive search we would have to venture beyond web pages. In 2001, we launched Google Image Search and via Google Groups we made available and searchable the most comprehensive archive of Usenet postings ever assembled (800 million messages dating back to 1981).

Just this past fall we expanded Image Search to include the LIFE Magazine photo archive. This is a collection of 10 million photos, more than 95 percent of which have never been seen before, and includes historical pictures such as the Skylab space station orbiting above Earth and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Integrating images into search remains a challenge, primarily because we are so reliant on the surrounding text to gauge a picture’s relevance. In the future, using enhanced computer vision technology, we hope to be able to understand what’s depicted in the image itself.

YouTube

Video is often thought of as an entertainment medium, but it is also a very important source of high-quality information. Some queries seem like natural choices to show video results, such as for sports and travel destinations. Yet videos are also great resources for topics such as computer hardware and software (I bought my last RAID based on a video review), scientific experiments, and education such as courses on quantum mechanics.

Google Video was first launched in 2005 as a search service for television content because TV close-captioning made search possible and user-generated video had yet to take off. But it subsequently evolved to a site where individuals and corporations alike could post their own videos. Today Google Video searches many different video hosting sites, the largest of which is YouTube, which we acquired in 2006.

Every minute, 15 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube – the equivalent of 86,000 new full length movies every week. YouTube channels now include world leaders (the President of the United States and prime ministers of Japan, the UK and Australia), royalty (the Queen of England and Queen Rania of Jordan), religious leaders (the Pope), and those seeking free expression (when Venezuelan broadcaster El Observador was shut down by the government, it started broadcasting on YouTube).

When it began, online video was associated with small fuzzy images. Today, many of our uploads are in HD quality (720 rows and greater) and can be streamed to computers, televisions, and mobile phones with increasing fidelity (thanks to improvements in video compression). In the future, vast libraries of movie-theater-quality video (4000+ columns) will be available instantly on any device.

Books

Books are one of the greatest sources of information in the world and from the earliest days of Google we hoped to eventually incorporate them into our search corpus. Within a couple of years, Larry was experimenting with digitizing books using a jury-rigged contraption in our office. By 2003, we launched Google Print, now called Google Book Search. Today, we are able to search the full text of almost 10 million books. Moreover, in October we reached a landmark agreement with a broad class of authors and publishers, including the Authors’ Guild and the Association of American Publishers. If approved by the Court, this deal will make millions of in-copyright, out-of-print books available for U.S. readers to search, preview, and buy online – something that has been simply unavailable to date. Many of these books are difficult, if not impossible, to find because they are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves; yet they make up the vast majority of books in existence. The agreement also provides other important public benefits, including increased access to users with disabilities, the creation of a non-profit registry to help others license these books, the creation of a corpus to promote basic research, and free access to full texts at a kiosk in every public library in the United States.

Geo

While digitizing all the world’s books is an ambitious project, digitizing the world is even more challenging. Beginning with our acquisition of Keyhole (the basis of Google Earth) in October 2004, it has been our goal to provide high-quality information for geographic needs. By offering both Google Earth and Google Maps, we aim to provide a comprehensive world model encompassing all geographic information including imagery, topography, road, buildings, and annotations. Today we stitch together images from satellites, airplanes, cars, and user uploads, as well as collect important data, such as roads, from numerous different sources including governments, companies, and directly from users. After the launch of Google Map Maker in Pakistan, users mapped 25,000 kilometers of uncharted road in just two months.

Ads

We always believed that we could have an advertising system that would add value not only to our bottom line but also to the quality of our search result pages. Rather than relying on distracting flashy ads, we developed relevant, clearly marked text-based ads above and to the right of our search results. After a number of early experiments, the first self-service system known as AdWords launched in 2000 starting with 350 advertisers. While these ads yielded small amounts of money compared to banner ads at the time, as the dot-com bubble burst, this system became our life preserver. As we syndicated it to EarthLink and then AOL, it became an important source of revenue for other companies as well.

Today, AdWords has grown beyond just being a feature of Google. It is a vast ecosystem that provides valuable traffic and leads to hundreds of thousands of businesses: indeed in many ways it has helped democratize access to advertising, by creating an open marketplace where small business and start-ups can compete with well-established, well-funded companies. AdWords is also an important source of revenue for websites that create the content that we all search. Last year, AdSense (our publisher-facing program) generated more than $5 billion dollars of revenue for our many publishing partners.

Also in the last year we ventured further into other advertising formats with the acquisition of DoubleClick. This may seem at odds with the value we place on relevant text-based ads. However, we have found that richer ad formats have their place such as video ads within YouTube and dynamic ads on game websites. In fact, we also now serve video ads on television with our AdSense for TV product. Our goal is to match advertisers and publishers using the formats and mediums most appropriate to their goals and audience.

Despite the progress in our advertising systems and the growth of our base of advertisers, I believe there are significant improvements still to be made. While our ad system has powerful features, it is also complex, and can confuse many small and local advertisers whose products and services could be very useful to our users. Furthermore, the presentation formats of our advertisements are not the optimal way to peruse through large numbers of products. In the next decade, I hope we can more effectively incorporate commercial offerings from the tens of millions of businesses worldwide and present them to consumers when and where they are most useful.

Apps

Within a couple of years of our founding, a number of colleagues and I were starting to hit the limitations of our traditional email clients. Our mailboxes were too big for them to handle speedily and reliably. It was challenging or impossible to have email available and synchronized when switching between different computers and platforms. Furthermore, email access required VPN (virtual private networks) so everyone was always VPN’ing, thereby creating extra security risks. Searching mail was slow, awkward, and cumbersome.

By the end of 2001 we had a prototype of Gmail that was used internally. Like several existing services at the time, it was web-based. But unlike those services it was designed for power users with high volumes of email. While our initial focus was on internal usage, it soon became clear we had something of value for the whole world. When Gmail was launched externally, in 2004, other top webmail sites offered 2MB and 4MB mailboxes, less than the size of a single attachment I might find in a message today. Gmail offered 1 Gigabyte at launch, included full-text search, and a host of other features not previously found in webmail. Since then Gmail has continued to push the envelope of email systems, including functionality such as instant messaging, video-conferencing, and offline access (launched in Gmail Labs this past January). Today some Googlers have more than 25 gigabytes of email going back nearly 10 years that they can search through in seconds. By the time you read this, you should be able to receive emails written in French and read them in English.

The benefits of web-based services, also known as cloud computing, are clear. There is no installation. All data is stored safely in a data center (no worries if your hard drive crashes). It can be accessed anytime, anywhere there is a working web browser and Internet connection (and sometimes even if there is not one – see below).

Perhaps even more importantly, new forms of communication and collaboration become possible. I am writing this letter using Google Docs. There are several other people helping me edit it simultaneously. Moments ago I stepped away and worked on it on a laptop. Without having to hit save or manage any synchronization all the changes appeared in seconds on the desktop that I am back to using now. In fact, today I have worked on this document using three different operating systems and two different web browsers, all without any special software or complex logistics.

In addition to Gmail and Google Docs, the Google Apps suite of products now includes Spreadsheets, Calendar, Sites, and more. It is also now available to companies, universities, and other organizations. In fact, more than 1 million organizations use Google Apps today, including Genentech, the Washington D.C. city government, the University of Arizona, and Gothenburg University in Sweden.

Because tens of millions of consumers already use our products, it is easy for organizations – from businesses to non-profits – to adopt them. Very little training is required and the passionate Google users already in these organizations are usually excited to help those who need a hand. In many ways, Google Apps are even more powerful in a business or group than they are for individuals because Apps can change the way businesses operate and the speed at which they move. For example, with Google Apps Web Forms we innovated by addressing the key problem of distributed data collection, making it incredibly simple to collect survey data from within the enterprise – a critical feature for collecting internal feedback we use extensively when "dogfooding" all of our products.

There are a number of things we could improve about these web services. For example, since they have arisen from different groups and acquisitions, there is less uniformity across them than there should be. For example, they can have different sharing models and chat capabilities. We are working to shift all of our applications to a common infrastructure. I believe we will achieve this soon, creating greater uniformity and capability across all of them

Chrome

We have found the web-based service model to have significant advantages. But it also comes with its own set of challenges, primarily related to web browsers, which can be slow, unreliable, and unable to function offline. Rather than accept these shortcomings, we have sought to remedy them in a number of ways. We have contributed code and generated revenue for several existing web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, enabling them to invest more in their software. We have also developed extensions such as Google Gears, which allows a browser to function offline.

In the past couple of years, however, we decided that we wanted to make some substantial architectural changes to how web browsers work. For example, we felt that different tabs should be segregated into separate sandboxes so that one poorly functioning website does not take down the whole browser. We also felt that for us to continue to build great web services we needed much faster Javascript performance than current browsers offered.

To address these issues we have created a new browser, called Google Chrome. It has a multiprocess model and a very fast JavaScript engine we call V8. There are many other notable features, so I invite you to try it out for yourself. Chrome is not yet available on Mac and Linux so many of us, myself included, are not able to use it on a regular basis. If all goes well, this should be addressed later this year. Of course, this is just the start, and Chrome will continue to evolve. Furthermore, other web browsers have been spurred on by Chrome in areas such as JavaScript performance, making everyone better off.

Android

We first created mobile search for Google back in 2000 and then we started to create progressively more tailored and complex mobile offerings. Today, the phone I carry in my pocket is more powerful than the desktop computer I used in 1998. It is possible that this year, more Internet-capable smartphones will ship than desktop PCs. In fact, your most "personal" computer, the one that you carry with you in your pocket, is the smartphone. Today, almost a third of all Google searches in Japan are coming from mobile devices – a leading indicator of where the rest of the world will soon be.

However, mobile software development has been challenging. There are different mobile platforms, customized differently to each device and carrier combination. Furthermore, deploying mobile applications can require separate business arrangements with individual carriers and manufacturers. While the rise of app stores from Apple, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, and others as well as the adoption of HTML 5 on mobile platforms have helped, it is still very difficult to provide a service to the largest group of network-connected people in the world.

We acquired the startup Android in 2005 and set about the ambitious goal of creating a new mobile operating system that would allow open interoperation across carriers and manufacturers. Last year, after a lot of hard work, we released Android to the world. As it is open source, anyone is free to use it and modify it. We look forward to seeing how this open platform will spur greater innovation. Furthermore, Android allows for easy creation of applications which can be deployed on any Android device. To date, more than 1000 apps have been uploaded to the Android Market including Shop Savvy (which reads bar codes and then compares prices), our own Latitude, and Guitar Hero World Tour.

AI

The past decade has seen tremendous changes in computing power amplified by the continued growth of Google’s data centers. It has enabled the growth and processing of increasingly large data sets such as the web, the world’s books, and video. This in turn has allowed problems once considered to be in the fantasy realm of artificial intelligence to come closer to reality.

Google Translate supports automatic machine translation between 1640 language pairs. This is made possible by large computer clusters and vast repositories of monolingual and multilingual texts: http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html. This technology also allows us to support translated search where the query gets translated to another language and the results get translated back.

While the earliest Google Voice Search ran as a crude demo in 2001, today our own speech recognition technology powers GOOG411, the voice search feature of the Google Mobile App, and Google Voice. It, too, takes advantage of large training sets and significant computing capability. Last year, PicasaWeb, our photo hosting site, released face recognition, bringing a technology that is on the cutting edge of computer science to a consumer web service.

Just a few months ago we released Google Flu Trends, a service that uses our logs data (without revealing personally identifiable information) to predict flu incidence weeks ahead of estimates by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It is amazing how an existing data set typically used for improving search quality can be brought to bear on a seemingly unrelated issue and can help to save lives. I believe this sort of approach can do even more – going beyond monitoring to inferring potential causes and cures of disease. This is just one example of how large data sets such as search logs coupled with powerful data mining can improve the world while safe guarding privacy.

Conclusion

Given the tremendous pace of technology, it is impossible to predict far into the future. However, I think the past decade tells us some things to expect in the next. Computers will be 100 times faster still and storage will be 100 times cheaper. Many of the problems that we call artificial intelligence today will become accepted as standard computational capabilities, including image processing, speech recognition, and natural language processing. New and amazing computational capabilities will be born that we cannot even imagine today.

While about half the people in the world are online today via computers and mobile phones, the Internet will reach billions more in the coming decade. I expect that by using simple yet powerful models of computing such as web services, everyone will be more productive. These tools enable individuals, small groups, and small businesses to accomplish tasks that only large corporations could achieve before, whether it is making and releasing a movie, marketing a product, or reporting on a war.

When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds. The dark clouds currently looming over the world economy are a hardship for us all, but by the time today’s children grow up, this recession will be a footnote in history. Yet the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life.

Source: Official Google Blog

Other notable tech companies that made the top 10 in this years most valuable brands list were IBM (no. 4, valuation: $66.6B), Apple (no. 6, Valuation: $63.1B), China Mobile (no. 7, Valuation: $61.2B), and Vodafone (no. 9, valuation: $53.7B). Ten of the top 25 brands are technology brands. Amazon is no. 26, AT&T is no. 28, Cisco is no. 30, eBay is no. 54 and Yahoo is no. 81, falling from no. 62 last year. Yahoo’s brand value went from $11.5B to $7.9B.

Here’s Top 20:

1. Google ($100 B)
2. Microsoft ($76.2 B)
3. Coca-Cola ($67.6 B)
4. IBM ($66.6 B)
5. McDonalds ($66.5 B)
6. Apple ($66.1 B)
7. China Mobile ($61.2 B)
8. GE ($59.7 B)
9. Vodafone ($53.7 B)
10. Marlboro ($49.4 B)
11. Walmart ($41 B)
12. ICBC ($35 B)
13. Nokia ($35.1 B)
14. Toyota ($29.9 B)
15. UPS ($27.8 B)
16. Blackberry ($27.4 B)
17. HP ($26.7 B)
18. BMW ($23.9 B)
19. SAP ($23.6 B)
20. Disney ($23.1 B)
21. Tesco ($22.9 B)
22. Gillete ($22.9 B)
23. Intel ($22.8 B)
24. China Construction Bank ($22.8 B)
25. Oracle ($21.4 B)

Source: TechCrunch

Moniker made more than $2 million in domain names at the TRAFFIC auction, with Ad.com taking the highest bid. Bottledwater.com took the no. 2 spot at $45,000 and Athletic.com received the third highest amount, selling for $40,000.

$1.4 million may sound like a lot to spend on a domain, especially given the current state of the economy. But Ad.com is a two-letter domain that is easily pronouncable and actually means something, so it’s definitely valuable in the domain market. And a recession doesn’t seem to be stopping companies from spending the big bucks for desirable domain names so Turakhia may be able to flip Ad.com for a profit. Travelzoo bought Fly.com for $1.8 million in January. Vibrators.com was sold for $1 million a back in November and A&T’s YellowPages.com paid $3.85 million for YP.com in December.

Source: TechCrunch

What is POP3? It is a protocol that allows retrieval of your emails in almost any email program that you’ve installed on your mobile phone or PC. Here’s all the information you might need when setting this up in your email program:

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)  
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25 or 587)  
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

In addition to POP3, Microsoft offers additional technologies that can provide you with an even richer experience of your E-mail. Try viewing your Hotmail using Windows Live Mail, Microsoft Office Outlook via the Outlook Connector, or Windows Live for Windows Mobile phone.

Looking for help with Hotmail? Visit the Windows Live Hotmail Solution Center! The Solution Center has instructions on how to set up your e-mail software to send and receive Windows Live Hotmail messages using POP3. You’ll also find instructions on how to set up Hotmail on the web to give you POP3 access to a non-Windows Live e-mail account. If you have problems using POP3 access, Windows Live Hotmail Solution Center also has links to report a problem with Hotmail.

Source: LiveSide

Apple has just brought out a brand-new third-generation iPod shuffle that is almost twice as small as the previous model. The device also has an exclusive new feature called VoiceOver that allows your shuffle to speak song, artist and playlist names to you.

The new iPod shuffle looks nothing like its predecessor. It comes in two shades – silver or black – and has no more buttons! (It looks a bit like a fancy cigarette lighter.)

The new shuffle is truly tiny: smaller than an AA battery and the redesign means that all of the controls are now placed on the earphone cord instead of the body.

The VoiceOver feature speaks 14 languages, including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish, and even tells you how much battery life you have left.

Priced at 75 Euro including VAT, the new 4GB shuffle holds up to 1,000 songs and starts shipping today.

Source: SiliconRepublic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s

Notice the “#t=31m08s” on the end of the URL? That link will take you 31 minutes and 8 seconds into that video. Linking to a particular minute and second can be really helpful – for example, that link takes you straight to where someone asks Eric Schmidt a question about Twitter. From there, you can listen to his answer, where he says (among other things):

“We’re in favor of all of these new communications mechanisms. I think the innovation is great, Twitter’s success is wonderful, and I think it shows you that there are many, many new ways to communicate, especially if you’re willing to do so publicly.”

Source: Matt Cutts

YouTube also led the large growth in online video watching, accounting for 91 percent of the incremental gain in the number of videos viewed compared to December. Fox’s MySpace also experienced large growth: from 444 million videos viewed in December 2008 to 552 million in January 2009, with Yahoo, Viacom and Microsoft’s properties following in places three to five.

The alleged YouTube killer, Hulu, is also growing, but at a much slower rate: from 240 million videos viewed in December 2008 to 250 million in January 2009. Hulu is still closed for most international viewers, and the lack of global buzz around the service might ultimately hamper its overall growth. If we compare the number of videos viewed, in just one month, YouTube has grown nearly two Hulus in size, so there’s a lot of catching up to do for Hulu.

Source: Mashable