Google acquires Jaiku

Here's the news from the Jaiku team - another interesting piece of the puzzle in the long running Google Phone (probably an OS) speculation...

"Wonderful Jaiku users,

Exciting news, Jaiku is joining Google!

While its too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you'll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together.

In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not! All our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will continue to be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.

We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition at http://jaiku.com/help/google

Jyri Engestrom and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders"

GPhone - more on the Orange & Google rumour

The GPhone – more musings on the Google/Orange tie-up.

Last weekend, the Observer wrote an article igniting a mexican blogwave of excitement about a possible Google phone. The article reported a visit to the Googleplex by “Snr Executives at Orange”. The article went on to suggest that the new device will be manufactured by HTC (long time Orange manufacturer partner of the SPV) and won’t be ready until 2008.

This industry does love a surprise, so in an attempt to excite and without any firm shred of evidence, I predict that the launch date of the GPhone wont be (as suggested in the Observer) in 2008, but in H1 2007!!! Maybe this trip was the latest in a series of Google/Orange meetings that stem from an unconfirmed approach that Google made to Orange last year following some spending on a number of interesting start-ups with a view to launch a GPhone on the Orange network, leveraging Orange’s distribution footprint and processes + their network intelligence (which includes an expensive Location and presence platform from Webraska)....more of that in a bit...

I firmly believe that Google has a lot of ambition in mobile. There are four foundations of evidence to Google’s mobile expertise and ambitions, three of which have been driven through quiet acquisitions over the last couple of years:

1) Android (acquired by Google in 2005) - Mobile hardware and network expertise.

Android, a stealth mode start-up was founded by Andy Rubin and Rich Miner. Mr Rubin is a product guru, who previously Co-founded Danger, makers of the Hip-top device and software which combines consumer hardware with network services in to an integrated communication, content and community experience. Mr Miner was a co-founder of Wildfire, a very cool and pioneering speech based voice assistant that although it was ahead of its time, was successfully acquired by Orange back in to 2000 for just shy of £100m. Miner went on to lead Orange Groups Advanced Service Development team before co-founding Android, selling it to Google and becoming Google’s Wireless Development and Strategy lead. So all in all, there some very close ties between Google and Orange, and a heavy dosage of experience and proven execution in marrying together smart software with mobile hardware.
Apart from those involved, no-one seems to have much of a clue as to what Android sold to Google. I took a punt at a guess last year but hey, what does I or anyone else know! If it hasn’t leaked by now, its unlikely that it will.

2) ReqWireless (acquired by Google in 2005) – Mobile device software expertise

The ReqWireless acquisition brought significant J2ME experience and a development library in to Google along with a suite of products which enabled mobile access to the web and email. The full product line, just prior to the acquisition included:
WebViewer - An HTML Web browser for Java-enabled mobile phones, supporting images, forms, cookies, and security
EmailViewer - A rich email client for Java-enabled mobile phones, including support for HTML-based email, images, and attachments.
GotMailViewer - A rich AOL® Mail client for Java-enabled mobile phones
HotViewer - A rich Hotmail® client for Java-enabled mobile phones,
ReqwirelessWeb - A Web development library for J2ME giving mobile applications the ability to fetch, manipulate and display HTML content on Java-enabled mobile devices.
ReqwirelessEmail - An email development library for J2ME that enables applications to send and receive rich email content on Java-enabled mobile devices.
This acquisition clearly stregthened Googles java expertise giving it a skill set capable of developing a Google mobile software client for non-Google legacy mobile devices
As Om suggests, the fruits of this acquisition can be seen in the sleek, elegant (and small) mobile Gmail app.

3) DodgeBall – (acquired by Google in 2005) Mobile Social Service expertise

Originally a social experiment in SMS, Dodgeball has flourished in to a US community of friends and friends friends, who use the Dodgeball platform to keep one another up to date on where they are (location, venue etc) who they fancy, and what they’re doing. There’s also the ability to get the address of somewhere, get nearby notifications of friends friends and send shouts to all your mates. The main barrier to this service is its usability – being based on solely on SMS, users need to remember commands, instructions and a short code.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all this value add was integrated nicely in to the user interface and application suite of a mobile device….?!

4) Mobile Advertising – very high on the Google agenda?

Google are clearly more capable than doing purely revenue share agreements with mobile operators on Adsense displayed on mobile users search queries. This is step one on the product roadmap and a quick and easy way to establish relationships, build trust and test the waters.
The product roadmap for Google is likely to get a lot cleverer - remember this is a company that generates the majority of revenue from Advertisers paying for placement in web pages. Google must get in to mobile, because CPM rates and the inventory of placement could explode. There are 2 billion mobile device users on this planet all going about their lives in a myriad of different ways, geographies, at different speeds, all with different interests, tastes, friends, preferences, ages and needs. Getting to this audience and helping these users to satisfy those needs must be a very important goal for Google because it represents such a huge revenue opportunity. Most people (apart from myself and my readers) spend a good proportion of their day away from their PC – taking the Adsense model in to mobile enables Google to monetize time away from the PC and improve the accuracy and relevancy of the Google customer experience. Adverts aren’t adverts any more – they become helpful and relevant guidance and advice.


So, the very long and not so short of this is that abigidea? thinks Google are most definitely up to somink - I would be very surprised if their efforts weren’t focused on creating a Webile 1.0 experience (the integration of Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 ;-) – a mobile user experience (be that OS, applications and device + operator network intelligence and web services) that marries location, presence, contacts, communication, content and community in to a rich user experience where contextually relevant advertising disrupts the established mobile operator business model of ambiguous voice and messaging charges, exorbitant (both in price and duration) monthly contracts, and non-open network and service infrastructure. And they may beat Apple to the launch!


Preivous post: Google acquires DodgeBall
Previous post: Google buys Android
Related post: GigaOM - Forget iPhone, think Google Phone
Related post: BusinessWeek: Google buys Android for its Mobile Arsenal
Related post: O’Reilly Emerging Telephony – Is Apple Working on a Phone with Google? (which kindly references abigidea?)

Blogger Beta – Rubbish!

I have been using Blogger to manage this blog since Summer 2004, and have been waiting for a new shiny release to pimp up my posts. Until recently, the only major change to the service was the inclusion of AdSense and the ability to post from a mobile. Over the last few weeks, Blogger has been encouraging users to move over to Blogger Beta. So, I duly signed up to the beta version, and have been using it over the last week or so. Here’s my feedback:

Labels – great new feature (that’s been around for years in TypePad and WordPress) that enables you to add labels (tags) to each of your posts. As a relatively ancient user of the product, I’ve got loads of posts that I want to now add tags to in order to make it easier for readers to see related posts. But if I go in to the post and add a “label”, Blogger Beta updates the publishing date in the RSS feed so anyone reading my RSS feed gets regurgitated posts from several months back. This is a stupid oversight.

New Posts – A couple of days ago, you could create a new post in Blogger Beta and add pictures, change font, add hyperlinks etc at the touch of the button. These buttons have mysteriously disappeared today, allowing only plain text posts. Rubbish.

Display Formatting – I have a pretty standard 17” flat screen display on 1024x768 resolution. If I try and edit my blog in IE, the Manage Posts view only shows “edit” and “view “. You have to scroll to the right of the screen to see the post information and “delete” options.


No web stats? - Every person out there who blogs regularly, likes to occasionally (once every hour ;-) check their visitor stats and referral information (like who visited, where they came from and what search request brought them). I would have expected an updated and revised release of Blogger to include basic web stats, but nope, nothing.

In summary, disappointing. The new Blogger Beta does make it much easier and digestable to add and manage external links, scripts, headers and tags, but the service stinks of a product that hasn’t had enough testing and QA. I know it's Beta, and a few bugs are expected, but come on, this is Google!! I’ve seen much better quality product deliverables coming out of three person start-ups. Pull your socks up Google!

Vodafone and Google team to create innovative mobile search experience for mobile phone users

more here

Mobile Gmail

WAP access to your Gmail account at http://m.gmail.com
Neat features:

• Automatically optimizes the interface for the phone you're using
• Opens the attachments you receive in messages, including photos, Microsoft Word documents and .pdf files
• Lets you reply by call to people whose phone numbers are in your Gmail Contacts list
  

Google Local Mobile

Ive talked too much about Google recently but I kind of cant help it - theyve just launched a beta for Google Local Mobile - which should give mobile industry something to worry about.

Google Talk Video

Festoon Inc (Santa Cruz Networks) have added Google Talk support to their video plug-in so you can now video-chat/call on GTalk.

They also have a neat product called Eyecandy that lets users doing funny backgrounds, effects and overlays. See the demo here

Google Customer Services

A few months back, I wrote a post about a suspected bug in Picasa/Hello (google owned) which enabled me to get hold of the jsalmon.blogspot.com web address. It was previously being used by someone else, but the blog registration process via Hello let me get hold of it. I thought this could be a potentially damaging bug/hole so I wrote to Blogger customer services explaining the problem, and expecting them to get back to me (at some point). Its now 3 months since I wrote to them and I haven't heard a thing.
To date, Google hasn't had to provide much in the way of customer services - a significant expenditure for other service related companies. I'm sure they have a few teams looking after cash-cow adword/adsense clients, but most of their other services don't need much currently in the way of support. However I think this may begin to change and Google is going to have to do something about both its support levels and response times. As our internet usage and destination preference increasingly goes Googles way, we become more reliant on the effectiveness of their product experiences, and product integration points. You can address a lot of potential hiccups with good engineering, rigorous testing and thorough beta phases, but there will inevitably be problems and users will complain. Complaints cost money, both in employing people to deal with them and the negative PR that can generated as a result of a serious hiccup. So Google will need to think how it addresses this, firstly to maintain its brand preference and image and secondly to control and minimise its costs. I hope that it addresses this with its traditional levels of innovation and re-engineers the way that Customer Service Centres are rolled out and operate. Maybe it could create an army of Google "Bees", home workers who are connected to Google customers with Google Talk and Gmail, who are geographically distributed across the globe and able to converse in multiple languages. They could be rated by the customer on their response effectiveness and therefore create a customer-managed workforce. I would also hope that they could respond to a request in less than 3 months!

Google Base

Google are apparently developing a new service that works a bit like a online database publisher. The details are a bit murky, but it sounds like it enables users to post stuff (docs, for sale listings, research, info whatever), add search tags, and then allow the internet community to find this stuff. Could have worrying implications for eBay, and a lot of web hosting companies.....
more info at searchenginewatch and google blogoscoped

Skype may soon have some serious competition....from Google Talk

read this in the LA Times

google buys Android

It turns out that Google acquired Android last month for an undiclosed sum. I had Android on my radar because one of the founders (Rich Miner) used to work at Orange, and i was curious. Android has been in "stealth" mode for the last 2 years, and still no-one seems to have a clue what they've developed. My guess is that its a mobile phone UI/app that ties contact mobility, presence, and location together.
Read more here

Who will Google buy next?

Heres a view from Kuro5shin on who might be in Googles sights...

Google acquires DodgeBall

Dodgeball have been early pioneers of "location sensitive mobile social software" - essentially connecting you to your mates via your mobile, depending where you all are. Its more evidence of Google buying product innovation (rather than creating it in house), but also goes to show that theres some serious thinking going on about how to connect their (currently) disparate product offerings (search, blogger, adsense, picasa, orkut, gmail etc) together. I suspect that for Google, Dodgeball is one piece of a compicated strategic puzzle that they are working on.

Google thinking about VOIP

The Times reckons Google might be looking to launch a Sykpe style VOIP product....
they have an excellent distribution channel, several billion users and loads of cash...makes sense!