Finding your location without GPS

Google introduced a new "My Location" feature in version 2.0 of Google Maps for mobile that will help alleviate my map reading and orientation problems. It offers GPS-like positioning by using cell tower ID information and algorithms to approximate location. It's not as accurate as GPS (within about 1000 meters on average, according to Google), which is supported on less than 15 percent of phones sold this year. But, it's free, faster and consumes less power compared to GPS-enabled devices, Google said. Google makes a point that the location data is anonymous--the data is not personally identifiable but it does go into the great Google bit bucket to be mined. My Location is supported on most smartphone devices--unfortunately not on... more

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Google confirms JotSpot will replace Google Pages

Last week people start talking about some interesting clues that suggested Google Pages would be replaced by something Google purchased a while ago called JotSpot. JotSpot is a tool that people have been using for quite a while to help them create collaborative websites like intranets, project management tracking, and customer extranets. It turns out that during an event hosted by Google in partnership with the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce, Scott Johnston spilled the beans on some of Google's plans for 2008. Among them was confirmation that "Google Sites" will replace Google Pages. Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration...

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Fotolog’s $90 Million Acquisition Completed

French Internet company Hi-Media, operator of one of Europe’s largest ad networks and micro-payment services, completed its acquisition today of Fotolog. The $90 million deal was first announced last August. Since then, Fotolog has added two million more members for a total of 13 million, and claims 3.9 billion page views a month. Fotolog trails behind MySpace’s PhotoBucket and Yahoo’s Flickr.

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Social Site Rankings (October, 2007)

LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Imeem, and AIM Pages are all growing more than 100 percent year-over-year.

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Circular Money: Facebook And Yahoo Advertise Their Advertising Platforms On Google

If you need any further proof that Google flat out owns the online advertising space, just look to the right. Both Yahoo and Facebook are using Google Adwords to advertise their competing advertising platforms.

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Yahoo Offers Contextual Advertising In PDFs; Yes, PDFs

Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to give publishers the ability to offer contextual advertising as part of their PDF document downloads.

Users upload their PDFs to Yahoo’s ad network and then Yahoo hosts the document for download and serves up contextual advertising in a panel to the right of the given document’s content.

According to CNet, sites participating in the current closed beta include IDG’s InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation and Reed Elsevier. No word as yet as to when it might be broadly available, although if it is eventually rolled out as part of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) it will be a US residents only service.

On one hand contextual advertising in PDFs probably falls into the “why didn’t they think of that before” category, but on the other hand there’s probably a reason this is a new concept, because I can’t see there being a stampede of people wanting to use the service. It will be interesting to see however whether the ads convert, and it may provide an additional revenue stream for ebook sellers and similar online users and creators who regularly provide PDF downloads to visitors.

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Straight Out Of Left Field: Google Experimenting With Digg Style Voting On Search Results

If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

The program, part of Google Labs, works like this:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.

At the moment the results of the program will only be stored per user and not applied to the general search index, so that sites buried (”I don’t like”) will not appear in future results for the user, where as sites voted up will stay up. Google Labs notes that “this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks,” still, who would have thought that Google would even experiment with Digg style social voting.

Screen shot below directly from the programs site here.

via Googlified/ Paris Lemon

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3G iPhone On Track For Next Year

In remarks at the Churchill Club, AT&T’s CEO confirmed what most Apple-watchers have been suspecting: a 3G iPhone will come out next year. Sounds like they fixed that battery-drain problem. Hopefully, these things won’t start exploding like those laptops a year ago.

Mike makes fun of me for toting around a Blackberry, but I’d rather wait for the 3G version of the iPhone to come out before thinking about switching. AT&T’s slow-as-molasses EDGE data network cripples the current iPhone (IMHO). The WiFi option for surfing the Web on the iPhone today is a nice backup, but you can’t really count on it for constant mobile connectivity. A 3G iPhone would certainly become yet another Apple lust object/upgrade, but will it be enough to accelerate sales to hit the 10-million mark Steve Jobs set as a goal for next year. It all depends on the price, and you can be sure that isn’t going to be cheap. A guess is $599.

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Microsoft Acquires Mobile Focused Social Networking Site WebFives

Microsoft has acquired Seattle based social networking site WebFives.

WebFives was initially founded in 2004 by former Microsoft engineer Mike Toutonghi as Vizrea and offers social networking with a focus of mobile media, including video, music and photos. Users are provided with standard social networking profile pages complete with blogging, and have the option of accessing their sites via computer or via a WAP specific page.

According to The Seattle Times, Toutonghi told WebFives users that the service will stop at the end of the year because of the Microsoft acquisition, making the acquisition a technology buy as opposed to a community buy. Toutonghi went on to encourage users to sign up to MSN Spaces and/or Windows Live for their social networking experience.

Price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

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Google Reveals 2008 Plans For Google Apps

Google is usually fairly tight lipped about future product releases. But they were surprisingly revealing about upcoming plans for Google Apps at an event in Ann Arbor earlier this week. Blogger Andrew Miller took some great notes from a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston, the VP of Product Development at wiki startup Jotspot prior to their acquisition by Google a little over a year ago.

First, Google Sites, an evolution of Google Page Creator, will launch in 2008. Google Sites will be based on JotSpot collaboration tools and will allow businesses to create intranets, project management tracking, extranets and other custom sites.

We should also expect Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar to soon work offline via Google Gears. This has been widely predicted, but it’s good to see it coming more formally from Google (note that Zoho, a Google Docs competitor, already has offline functionality via Google Gears).

Some of the other stuff is more speculative, but worth the read (pivot tables on Google Spreadsheets? I doubt it).

* Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

* Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.

* What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.

* Will Google docs have OCR capabilities for importing .pdfs or other graphical files? Not yet, but perhaps someday. Scott couldn’t comment on the “roadmap” for future enhancements. However, the collaborative Google Sites (based on JotSpot) will allow for upload and storage of any file type.

* Will GrandCentral be integrated into Google Apps? If so, when? Again, Scott didn’t comment on the timing but said they are working on it and it is a “huge priority” for them.

* Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.

* Will Google Apps support video conferencing in addition to Google Talk and Chat? Scott’s answer, “Not yet”. I got the impression from his body language that it’ll come someday, but nothing more was said.

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Google Reader Gets Recommendations, Drag-and-Drop

Google has released two new features for its RSS reading product, Recommendations and Drag-and-Drop.

The Discovery recommendation feature suggests new sites a user may wish to read based on current subscriptions and (interestingly) browsing history. Google has previously offered feed bundles based on subjects, but this is the first time it has offered customized recommendations in this way.

The drag-and-drop functionality allows users to re-order or move subscribed feeds within a folder or to another folder. This style of functionality isn’t unique, and as Google itself points out, RSS readers such as Bloglines and NewsGator already provide drag-and-drop functionality.

Google thanks a number of interns and ex-interns for the new features, a nice thing to do.

As a Google Reader user I know I’m certainly going to use the drag-and-drop functionality, and I’m even looking at some of the suggested feeds as well, but I’ve got to ask: how is it that we can get drag-and-drop in Reader and not Gmail? Surely Gmail could do with this functionality. Maybe the Gmail team needs some interns as well

Google Testing OpenID With Blogger, May Offer OpenIDs To Users

Google’s “Blogger in Draft” program that tests functionality for Google’s popular Blogger blogging platform has rolled out OpenID support for comments.

Read complete article here

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Solid State Drives replacing HDD laptops in 2009

Very interesting article discussing the benefits of the new 64GB solid state drives, and just how soon HDD's will be a thing of the past in laptops (just like MP3 players).

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