Tag - web

The big US telecoms don’t want to play with the neighborhood kids anymore. They’re basically taking their ball and going home, and asking the US Congress for permission.

This, of course, has caused a major kafuffle among the techgentsia, who are worried that the Internet will balkanize into tiny little 1980s-ish feifdoms … a little piece here, and a toll to cross that bridge, and another little piece there.

Well, granny Smith may not know what TCP/IP is, but she cares about being able to get to eBay and bid on her favorite woollen undies. And if a new-born Ma Bell gets in her way, she’s going to get just a little put out. In fact, she might even look for another way to get her computer onto the web (previously known as the world wide web).

So I’m not too worried about the telecoms. They have lots of upstart challengers.

But it’s interesting to note that just a day or two after this story broke, HP announced that it has done exactly the same thing.

HP’s new videoconferencing service will not run on the internet per se. Rather, it’ll go over a private network. It’s easy to understand why when you see the scope of their system:

To receive the service requires H-P to install a Halo room on the premises at a cost of $550,000. The service, including a dedicated T3 line, costs $18,000 a month. The rooms, designed for just six people, have three screens that allow conferees to appear life-sized. A fourth high-definition screen is used to share documents or products or most anything.

Something that pushes that many bits around needs to have dedicated pipe. High-def screens, life-sized … that’s big bandwidth. Huge bandwidth.

HP didn’t feel like it needed to ask permission to create a new network. Their network is a piece of a dedicated, single-use solution.

But if the telecoms create a new network and expect paying customers to be OK with the fact that certain major pieces of the web “don’t work,” they’re smoking some BC bud. And they’ll lose heavily in the one place that matters to them: the marketplace.

(Just like HP will with an incredibly over-priced solution, btw.)

I recently saw a link for a Mac OS X version of Google Earth, which I immediately followed and downloaded.

There are a bunch of links to get it at now, but this morning the only one I could find was at some hosting/file-sharing company called RapidShare.

I love their slogan: “The world’s biggest 1-Click Webhoster.”

It’s an ad-supported file hosting and download service – and ads are plastered over so much of every window, it’s hard to find the actual functionality.

And the famous 1 click? Maybe for subscribers – I had to click at least 4 times to find the file to download.

Annoying!

I guess it’s a good reminder that there’s room for more than one big fish in the World Wide Web … Yahoo! has been doing some really, really fascinating things lately.

Buying Flickr and now del.icio.us are just two of the most visible ones. Other moves include the new Ajax’ed Yahoo! Mail.

Google does have some blog search capability, but I wonder if Yahoo! is not developing more time-sensitive searching&reporting capability.

We live in interesting times!

I can’t say I expected this … a new service from Google that connects advertisers and buyers via the phone.

We’re testing a new product that gives you a free and fast way to speak directly to the advertiser you found on a Google search results page – over the phone.

Here’s how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click ‘Connect For Free,’ Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party. Then, chat away on our dime.

We won’t share your telephone number with anyone, including the advertiser. When you’re connected with the advertiser, your number is blocked so the advertiser can’t see it. In addition, we’ll delete the number from our servers after a short period of time.

Interesting!

I just threw this on my blog during a coffee break at work, but now that I’m back home, the thing that strikes me as really brilliant about Google click-to-call is that it provides a whole new way for the industry previously known as telemarketing to grow into something entirely different, new, and better.

Telemarketing will accomplish essentially the same purpose – sell stuff – but much more efficiently, because prospects will be pre-qualified. In fact, they’ll qualify themselves.

(OK, so that’s the rose-tinted glasses version. The reality will be somewhat less.)

However, there is no question in my mind that this is the future of telemarketing … just when that industry is entering it’s toughest days with the introduction of the national do-not-call registry in the US.

Saw it first here.

Well, I hope you’ve got a great idea. ‘Cause unless you do, you’re sunk.

But if you do … it’s really cheap to start companies these days.

(That’s a link to a Paul Kedrosky presentation that I saw at a Vancouver Enterprise Forum session on Web 2.0.)

Supposedly Google and Microsoft are in the battle to buy AOL.

Nonsense.

Google just wants Microsoft to pay more, that’s all. So they’re staying in the game to up the ante … and they’ll duck out when it’s high enough and Microsoft wastes as much money as possible.

Google wouldn’t know what to do with AOL. It’d be a disaster. They’d break it to pieces and completely revamp its revenue streams. And it’d be the right thing to do.

But client lists can be fragile things. Particularly when the ship’s been sinking for a couple of years. Google’s growth rate would falter, if not stagnate, while the minnow swallows the whale.

And that would be a tough pill for Wall Street to swallow.

All the speculation and rumors about Google base is hitting the web right now, and I’m as intrigued about this as most.

But lots of people are looking at this and ‘finding’ evidence of a master plan … that Google is going to marry this with Froogle and start competing with Craigslist and eBay etc. etc.

Well, that may be, down the road, but I think strategically that’s a fundamental misreading of the company.

Sure, Google has plans. But I think they’re much more about doing cool stuff and seeing what sticks than generating some incredible master plan for world domination and following it to its conclusion.

I think that letting lots of smart cool people do lots of smart cool stuff (the famous one day a week at Google you work on some personal project) results in lots of smart cool projects.

And I think that we see these start to launch when their stock (literally) gets high enough within Google.