NI-Limits Blog

In starting our most recent Google Update with some bad news for Grand Central users in America that was reported by TechCrunch:

GrandCentral, Google’s $50 million phone company, has been down all morning (see overview of service here). And that means every single user who has started using their GrandCentral phone number isn’t able to receive any calls. Users are complaining on Twitter, and I’ve confirmed this as well by simply calling friends who use the service. Calls will not go through.

Update: service is back online sometime before noon PST. Still no word from them on the cause of the outage.

Update 2: Co-founder Craig Walker posts the following on the GrandCentral blog:

I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.

Making-up for it by aiding the Amazonian Surui Tribe by tracking illegal deforestation, Mashable covers this story nicely:

Ties between Google and the Surui, whose chief, 34-year-old Almir Narayamoga, “visited the company…to ask it to help monitor the loggers’ incursions” were first established last year. In that time, Google has not only offered the Surui photographic assistance, but will use the Google Earth Outreach initiative to “alert the world” of the ongoing illegal cutting of 600,000 acres of Rondonia forest.

If you’re curious as to how Chief Narayamoga managed to get an audience with Google in the first place, it’s important to know that this isn’t the first time any of the Surui have embarked outside the Amazon. It’s said that the tribe first made contact with “the modern world” in the latter half of the 20th century, and have even recently adopted the use of mobile satellite navigation systems to better navigate trails.

If Google Earth and Google Sky (not to mention Google Street View) were not enough, Mashable reports on their next plan - to map the oceans!

Mind you, this new effort by Google to dip 20,000+ leagues beneath the sea, all around the globe, isn’t necessarily just for entertainment. Unless you’re one to think bathymetry is really damn cool. The company has brought together “an advisory group of oceanography experts” to consult for the project and even invited some specialist researchers to the Googleplex late last year to discuss plans for the service. Sound like serious business?

Google’s most recent attempt to enter the commercial software arena took place recently with it’s re-launch of Postini, as reported by Read / Write Web:

Yesterday Google announced a new product aimed specifically at Google Apps’ enterprise customers. The service, powered by Google acquisition Postini with technology from ScanSafe, is called Google Web Security for Enterprise and it offers real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting. Essentially, it’s a big Google firewall in the cloud.

Google Web Security for Enterprise provides three main areas of protection: 1) web virus and spyware protection, 2) web filtering and content control, and 3) protection for roaming and remote users. Services such as these aren’t anything new to I.T. administrators, but they often come in the form of expensive software suites, hardware appliances, or, more often, a combination of both. With the Google Web Security product, the goal is to provide enterprises with the same type of security and protection that they are used to, but all under the Google brand.

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Highlights Reagarding The Search Giants (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft)

Knowing it’s been quite sometime since we discussed the Search Giants (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft), we figured it best to keep you posted on all three within a single culminated update covering the months past since Microsoft made their unsolicited bid for Yahoo.

The first thing we noticed was that Microsoft did not only bid for Yahoo, because on March the 7th, TechCrunch reported on a bidding war that started with Google over the popular Digg platform:

Digg is prepared to take less than the $300 million Allen & Co. were floating late last year. Google, our source says, will likely bid $200-$225 million, which Digg would likely accept.

Microsoft is looking at a somewhat lower price. That makes sense, since most of Digg’s revenue today comes from a three year advertising deal that Digg signed with Microsoft last year. That deal has revenue guarantees - and Microsoft may be hesitant to value Digg based on revenue that they supply.

Any sale is likely to give Microsoft an option to terminate that advertising deal, which means Google isn’t valuing Digg based on revenue, either. But it is a big slap in the face to Microsoft to steal Digg away, and Google can certainly generate revenue on all those page views.

Despite rumours of packing it in, Yahoo made several interest new developments over the last few months, with Search Monkey being the most important of those and one that certainly brings a bright shinning light to the end of a very, very long tunnel (as reported by TechCrunch):

Yahoo will soon be allowing third parties to enhance the Yahoo Search experience. The new platform, codenamed “SearchMonkey” and officially called Open Search Platform, will consist of a set of APIs that allow third parties to modify search results on Yahoo by adding images, structured data and additional deep links.

The altered results can contain far more information than the current link and a bit of text from the website. For example, Yelp (a user generated local business review site), one of the launch partners, will include a photo, review information and the address and phone number of the business.

As if one could not do something without the other following-suite, TechCrunch also reported on Microsoft’s step forward into the world of OpenSource freedom:

Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.

While Microsoft is not open-sourcing its own software, it is taking dramatic steps to play nice with the open-source community. This is a complete 180-degree turn from its stance of the past. The broad set of interoperability principles it is announcing today will apply to the following products (including future versions): Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The four principles it is declaring are:

(1) ensuring open connections
(2) promoting data portability
(3) enhancing support for industry standards
(4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

It will release documentation for all APIs of the products above, will lay out how it supports industry standards, will create new APIs for Microsoft Office to make it easier for developers to create plug-ins for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and will launch an Open Source Interoperability Initiative to promote interoperability between open-source and Microsoft products.

Not forgetting Google amongst these developments, recent news from Mashable reminded us about their on-going bid to buy the spectrum waves of America several years ago (or so it seemed), which just now appears to have come to an end:

By their own admission, they were aware that the chances of them actually winning the bid were slim, but they had to push it to $4.6 billion, since this price would “trigger the important “open applications” and “open handsets” license conditions.”

To do this, they had to use every trick in the poker book: they were “prepared to gain the nationwide C Block licenses at a price somewhat higher than the reserve price,” and they raised their own bid even though no one was bidding against them “to ensure aggressive bidding on the C Block.” Well played, G.

If Google were willing to bluff their way through a bidding war over spectral fields of invisible light, it has to make one wonder what they would be willing to do in other situations yet to arise…

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un-GrandCentral, The Amazon, Ocean Maps & Commercial Software

There can be no denying that Google News is always the most interesting of news, simply proven by the following updates, which all start with an ever-interesting experiment by Google using Flex and Flash as an alternative engine for search.

Go check-out SearchMash Flash today! Or read more from TechCrunch:

When you mouse over a search result, you get a Snap Shot preview of the Web page in a pane on the right. The Snap Shots are powered by Bill Gross’ search engine Snap.com. (We use Snap Shots on outside links, as do two million other Websites).

Flash is so pretty, but can it truly be as fast as Ajax? Maybe not, but it is getting fast enough for me. SearchMash is playing around with the search interface possibilities of each with two different versions of its site.

With web-based innovations such as these, it is even more amazing when you hear that Japanese manufacturer Matsushita (Panasonic) has signed a deal with Google that will see the company launch flat panel television sets that allow users to access YouTube and other Google services such as Picasa Web Albums - as reported by TechCrunch:

The deal is said to be non-exclusive with the first units set to be launched in the United States in Spring. The deal isn’t the first internet enabled television to be manufactured, but it is the first time Google has signed a deal in this space. Internet in the lounge room has long been a hyped technology that despite various platforms (including Windows MCE) has failed to capture the publics imagination, particularly given the need for a computer or internet specific device to connect.

TV with internet access built in, if it’s delivered without any major premium over existing television sets has the potential of finally delivering mass market convergence. Having YouTube access built into sets as a default would also be a positive for Google as it continues to work towards strengthen YouTube’s long term dominance in light of increased competition.

It is no surprise that TechCrunch informs us of the following:

In the 1990s, we loved to tally up the number of Microsoft millionaires. Now, it’s Google’s turn. The New York Times cites estimates that there are 1,000 Google employees whose stock grants and options are worth more than $5 million. So there are more than 1,000 Google millionaires, including Google’s former masseuse, Bonnie Brown.

By that’s just one thousand employees… What do the over 15,000 do…?

Webware have an excellent article that dives into the subject:

The company added 2,130 workers to its roster, bringing the head count to 15,916. What do nearly 16,000 people do at a company that doesn’t make widgets (at least in the hardware manufacturing sense of the word)…?

That’s an average of about 35 people showing up for their first day of work each business day during the past three months. Granted, that is in offices around the world, but still, that’s impressive. By comparison, Yahoo has 13,600 employees, after hiring 1,200 during the past quarter. (Actually, when you think about it, that’s even more crazy given the need for Yahoo to retrench right now.)

“Half the company has been hired in the last 12 months. That’s chaotic,” he says. “The new employees find it difficult to figure out how to get things done. It’s not a normal company.”

With that many employees, TechCrunch goes-on to investigate the data that that equates too:

A recent white paper by some Google engineers puts some numbers around the massive amount of computation that Google does every day to index the Web, process search results, and serve up ads, among other things. As of last September, Google was processing 20,000 terabytes of data a day. This large-scale computing capability is a big part of Google’s competitive advantage over Yahoo, Microsoft, and everyone else.

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Highlights Reagarding The Search Giants (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft)

un-GrandCentral, The Amazon, Ocean Maps & Commercial Software