Archive for November, 2009
Great Pictures: Elena Kalis, Alice in Waterland
I never heard of Elena Kalis before today, but I think she did a great job in her photographic project Alice in Waterland.
Below you will find some of the pictures I liked the most. What do you think? Pretty impressive, uh?
Twitter ADs, SSD Disks and Bad Italian Behaviors
Since FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook, Twitter started reducing their access to the tweet stream with the clear intent of penalizing the company. It is obviously a good move from Twitter, and although the authors of TechCrunch complains about it, I can not really see why they should not be doing it.
Apparently the first tier of Last.fm’s servers uses SSD disks to increase throughput of the data. They use those servers as cache, pushing on there the songs that people are likely to listen the most for the day. Not a bad idea, considering that the prices are going down (e.g., about $280 for 160Gb).
IZEA is pushing for its sponsored tweets model. We all knew this moment would have arrived and that is not the first attempt to monetize the stream. People already complain about it but there are already millions of blogs out there created with the sole purpose of making money so what is the difference?
I spent a lot of good summers in a Club Med village in Caprera, an enchanted island of Sardegna. Next to our residence there was a cool-looking US Navy base. In the past few years both sites have been closed with the promise of improvements but everything has yet to happen. Some lights have been on for years by now!
A 25 years old guy in a small town of Italy faked to be sick at work to be visited by the nearby doctor (a female). Once in her clinic he sexually harassed her. How can people think to be able to get away with these things?
Google Latest Releases are Amazing
I am personally really impressed by the folks at Google lately. Sure, they have always been great in search, but in the past few weeks I have seen so many good products, ideas and business deals coming out of their lab which is hard to ignore.
First, they made a deal with Twitter only within hours of the Microsoft-Twitter deal. Our beloved Microsoft probably talked with Twitter for months. Google, once the news came out, probably made it happen in a few phone calls.
A few days later, they became a lot more serious about Google Voice, releasing the product to the general public. I use it (well, just for the voicemail for now). It is not perfect yet, but definitively has the cheapest VoIP fares. And you can’t avoid to be impressed by the voicemail transcription (scarily accurate) and the free SMS (even international). Google Voice was build on top of GrandCentral, and if that was not enough, they recently bought Gizmo5, the biggest VoIP player on the internet.
Recently, they also launched Google Maps Navigation going in direct competition with Garmin and TomTom, which stocks fell of a 12% on the day of the announcement. People seem very happy with this navigation software.
The Google AdSense Platform is already the biggest and most powerful ads platform of the web. Not just for the impression counts: serving their Ads from www.google.com thanks to the clever use of an iFrame, allows them to set a cookie on your browser and practically follow you everywhere even measuring how long you stay on a page. It’s a genius idea for ranking! I remember how a few years ago we were talking in Ask.com about buying DoubleClick exactly for that purpose, but then we did not move on it and Google did. And now, they even conquered the mobile Ads space buying AdMob, the biggest player in the area.
For years people have been talking of a Google OS, and a few months ago the project was confirmed. Apparently, they are only a few weeks away from launch. I can just imagine all the Christmas’ netbooks which will have this OS on top of them. At the same time, their browser Google Chrome, keeps improving and spreading around. I do not use it because I do not want to give all my browsing data to them, but it is the best browser around, especially now that they finalized extensions support.
A few weeks ago they also launched Go, their own programming language. They unfortunately have choosen a bad name because was already used but if the language compiles and performs as they say, it is impressive. There is already a primitive Twitter Status updater written using it! On a similar note, they released also a set of JavaScript libraries to make the life of users easier.
More recently, they updated their Picasa Software to version 3.5. I have to admit, although I hate the lack of a native Linux version (it runs in a special version of Wine for now) it is an amazing piece of software. You can easily add to it all your new pictures, tag them, and create virtual albums which can then be quickly and automatically uploaded on your web account. And the face recognition functionality is just amazing. It is even synced with your Google Mail Addressbook and learns!
Finally, if all this was not enough, they are apparently launching their own phone in January!
If these 593 words were not enough to describe my feelings: I am really impressed. Google, you are good.
