Wow! Google is Pitching Nexus One in Maps
I know that Google wants to get the Nexus one out to the masses, but this surprised me. They are pitching the Nexus one from within a map search in my browser. Nothing wrong with using your real estate wisely, but this is a bit aggressive for Google.
It isn’t often that you see Google pitch a product as much as they are with the Nexus One. In fact they are using home page ad space that they don’t often touch. In fact, Eric Schmidt believes they are giving up billions by not doing so. I wonder if he had to twist Marissa Mayer’s arm to push the Nexus One on the home page and in the slots within other Google products.
Think we will see a pitch within Adsense or Adwords soon?
Matt Cutts on SEO
This video has been getting a good deal of press in the SEO community. Matt Cutts is certainly the most visible and well recognized Googler in the webmaster community. Officially, he is head of the webspam team at Google. Matt is an early on Google employee who loves what he does. If you have the opportunity to see Matt speak, you will usually take something away from it that you can use, or stop using.
If you have 45 minutes….
Google Voice = Click to Call Platform
Google Voice = click to call?
Google does some interesting things. Some might think that Google is pulling an Ebay (the Skype purchase) and rolling out Google voice, but they are not. I have been playing around with Google voice for a couple of days and have quickly come to realize that this is a fantastic platform for a click to call campaign. I am running a click to call campaign that runs at DirectoryM and I couldn’t help but feel that the campaign management interface has many similar features with Voice.
Click to call is something that has been talked up for years. Imagine that you could include a call icon in your Adwords ad to capture the person searching for your product or service. With Voice, Google has a platform, the phone numbers and the ability to track campaigns. One of the beauties of Voice is that Google does not have to ask you to change anything that you currently do. They can assign a random phone number, connect to the line of your choice and charge you for that customer action. In the end, everyone wins…maybe.
Is this why Google bought up dark fibre a few years back?
In the end, Google wants to continue to grow search share and is always looking for avenues to display more ads. With Voice, they are probably moving toward the front of the line of a potential shift in ad models. I would expect that we will soon hear about the ability to add a click to call icon in an Adwords ad.
The Google PC
It is getting closer and closer. A Google PC. Competition is good!
Android gains fans. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) is considering whether to use Google’s (GOOG) Android operating software for some of its computers. The software, which is free and open-source, could be a viable platform for netbooks, posing a direct challenge to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows system. Although no PC maker has yet publicly committed to using Android, many in the industry, including Microsoft, consider an Android-run laptop just a matter of time.
This is the most direct move into the space yet. Gears followed by Chrome went a long way, but a light (and free) OS is a giant leap.
Google Shutting down Radio Ads
Google jumped into the radio ad market with a small amount of fanfare back in 2006. If you were someone who gave their radio ads a shot, I would bet that you might have had the same experience. Terrible audience. Well, the radio ad experiment is shutting down.
Radio advertising is like real estate. Location, location, location. If you aren’t tapping into the heart of a market, you aren’t going to provide a good product to the end user. In my market (Buffalo NY) the station mix was very poor. Fringe stations to say the least. Some test campaigns were virtually useless. Advertisers can continue using Google Audio Ads until May 31st.
Google is getting back to its roots and focusing on what comes from that. They are retreating certain fronts (selling radio ads and selling newspaper ads) and continuing to build on search and Adwords and the audience that it brings.
They need to focus on their core for the coming battle in the OS/desktop space.
Let the Traffic Shaping Battles Begin!
Traffic shaping is the practice of a broadband provider determining what data packets, if any, deserve priority. This is at the core of the battle with net neutrality. If providers are allowed to shape, then they will be able to put a throttle on traffic of their competition.
Let’s say that you have a Vonage VOIP service. What if Cox Communications decides that those packets deserve the lowest priority. What do you think would deserve a higher priority? Packets for the Cox VOIP product? Packets for the VOIP product who is paying Cox for the “fast lane” on their network? You bet and of course.
The first public volley was lobbed today (not sure why). Cox announced that they were going to experiment with aggressive traffic shaping. I have assumed that there has been experimentation with less “aggressive” traffic shaping for quite some time now.
This was followed hours later by a release that Google is going to provide tools, in partnership with Measurement lab, to let you check if your broadband connection is being ’shaped’. This could get interesting. In my opinion, the politicians would love to throw this one to the cable and phone companies who line their pockets. However, the outcry from the public, and the market should be loud enough to slow this practice.
Why do these battles generally mean bad news for consumers?
Google Chrome, IE Killer, Nah. Firefox, look out
I am a web developer who uses IE and Firefox. Google Chrome will do more short term damage to Firefox than to IE.
I was very excited to hear about Google Chrome the other day (surprised). I downloaded as soon as it was available and began using. It has a couple of nice features. The import tool worked well and the page rendering was solid. The V8 Javascript engine that Google built certainly makes things faster on a couple of the sites that I visit on a daily basis. There are some simple features that let you modify a form on a web page to make the chore of filling things out a bit easier (You can resize a textarea box to make things more readable).
One of the biggest reasons that I jumped on Chrome was due to the fact that each tab is in its own process and can crash without crashing the entire browser. Of all things GMail doesn’t play nice with Firefox in my setup. It will crash the entire browser. If Chrome can eliminate this, it will make my day a little more productive.
Overall, things aren’t much different than what I am used to in Firefox. By midday, I found myself with Chrome and IE open. No Firefox. Other than the plug ins that I have installed with Firefox, I didn’t miss it. I still had IE open for various reasons but my expectation is that Chrome will replace Firefox once there are sufficient plug ins to make the browser as functional.
Short term, this could put Firefox out. My guess is that Firefox will see this occur and will jump into Google’s (GOOG) arms. Google will be oh so pleased to bring that development team in house.
Long term, Chrome should be able to get some footing when the price of a Windows PC is $70 more than the price of a Google PC. Heck, the $100 PC? Give away the razor to sell the blades (give away the PC to get the Searches)?
This is an interesting play and will force MSFT to once again jump through hoops. Will Bill make a triumphant return? Did he actually ever leave?
Chrome is nice. Not ready to drop IE yet (because Microsoft doesn’t play nice with standards). I expect that the browser market in the next year will be 70% IE, 10% chrome, 12% Firefox, 8% other. We’ll see how this one plays out.