A 17 year old named Eric Calisto is about to learn a valuable lesson in dealing with disappointment. He’s asking Google to use a logo that he created on their site on December 2, his birthday, and he’s urging people to call, email and fax Google with their support.
Not going to happen.
But he may make a few dollars on those ads.
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Well, it happened. Google’s voice recognition mobile app finally arrived today on the iPhone App Store. Until today all we had to go by was the demo video that Google created showing it in action.
And that video shows something that quite simply changes the way I’d use the phone. Instead of clicking buttons on the virtual keyboard to search the web or my contacts, I’d just hit a button and use the Google Mobile App. And it really is just one button - it knows, via the accelerometer, when you put the phone to your ear and when you take it away. Voila! Cool stuff happens.
Here’s the video, narrated by Mike LeBeau on the Google Mobile team:
Let’s compare that video to my actual results. First, the big letdown is that you can’t search contacts by voice - you have to type for that, and it’s not really worth using the app just to do that when the normal contact application works just as well.
Also, it’s important that there is very little background noise when you use the app. A steady hum from an electric heater six feet away from me confounded the app on speakerphone. The noise from a car, certainly, will prohibit speakerphone usage while driving. The results below were done in a silent room with the phone held up to my ear, and I spoke as clearly as I am able. The demo results are shown on the left, my actual results are on the right.
First query: Pictures of the Golden Gate bridge at sunset: Results were perfect.
Second Query: How big is a giant squid?: Crazy results - I got “public citizen times square”
Third Query: Movie Showtimes: Results were perfect, and it used my location
25 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit: Results were perfect
The contact search also went exactly as the video showed, but it’s a little misleading. You can’t search contacts by voice, only by typing. The video shows that, but by that point you’re all hopped up on voice goodness and you don’t really realize that its all typing at that point, which is little better than using the normal contact app that comes with the phone.
Overall, other than the one snafu with the giant squid, everything went well. But the voice recognition is far from perfect, as the demo video suggests. And the limitation on contact search is a letdown.
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We all know online advertising decelerated in the third quarter, but how bad was the slowdown overall? To find out, I added up the online advertising revenues for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL, which together account for the majority of online advertising. In the third quarter, growth pretty much ground to a halt. The combined ad revenues of those four Web bellwethers eked out only 0.6 percent growth, quarter over quarter. That sequential growth rate was 12.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, to 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 2008, and 1.1 percent in the second quarter (see chart above).
On an absolute basis, the combined ad revenues for all four companies during the third quarter increased by only $50 million to $8.2 billion. The year-over-year growth rate was still a healthy 18 percent, but those comparisons will likely flatten out as well starting in the fourth quarter.
For the purposes of this analysis, I took the total advertising revenues from both Google and Yahoo, including their network revenues paid to affiliates, the online revenues reported by Microsoft, and only the advertising portion of AOL’s revenues. There were other companies I could have added, but these four serve as good proxy for the overall online advertising market. Below are the absolute revenue numbers, broken down by company:
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Google’s voice recognition search application for the iPhone, originally set for launch on Friday, will likely go live sometime Monday, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the situation.
Google was under the impression that the application would be live on the App Store on Friday (obviously, since they pushed all significant press attention to it). Sometime Friday they found out Apple wouldn’t be pushing it, despite the fact that Google submitted it for review earlier in the week and got a thumbs up for Friday. One source says they’ve had little direct contact with Apple during the review, instead getting their updates via the standard iPhone developer tool, which has said “in review” for the last few days.
Who knows why Apple delayed the application, or why they tend to treat every application developer equally poorly.
But in this case Apple really screwed up in our opinion.
If the application is half as good as the demo video shows, Google has done something pretty amazing with voice recognition and mobile platforms. This application will, quite simply, sell iPhones. Lots of them.
Google faced a decision on which mobile platform to first launch the application - the iPhone or their own Android. The fact that they decided to launch first on the iPhone shows a willingness to embrace what’s right for the user, and it’s something that few other companies would have done. Google could have launched for the Android first and pushed sales of phones on their platform. They didn’t, and Apple should have embraced them for that.
Next time I expect Google won’t be so trusting. And I don’t blame them.
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It’s OpenSocial day today. It’s been roughly one year since the service launched to fight Facebook’s exploding platform product, and the main companies behind OpenSocial are holding an all day press and developer event at MySpace’s San Francisco headquarters.
The presentation above was shown to attendees of the event. See our other coverage as well:
OpenSocial Turns One: My, How You’ve Grown!
Social Network Apps To Finally Monetize Within The Next Year
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Forget those YouTubevertorials. Google is no longer joking around when it comes to turning YouTube into real business that, you know, makes money. YouTube on its own would rank as the second largest search engine after Google. And you know what? Google has already figured out how to make money from search. You sell the top results to the highest bidder.
YouTube has long resisted selling search results, but it has now caved in. Now anyone can promote their YouTube videos for specific search keywords on a pay-per-click basis. This should generate substantial new revenues for Google. YouTube has a lot of search inventory. (Viewers search on the site more than 2.5 billion times per month). This should also generate a lot more spam results.
Google likes to pretend that paid search ads can be just as relevant as organic search results. And in the text world that is sometimes true. But when it comes to video, the sex factor gets magnified, and what you end up with half the time are sex videos no matter what the search term happens to be.
For instance, when I did a search for “sports”, the second top sponsored result was for “WWE Divas, Sexy Sports Girls.” (See screen shot above). I don’t think the girl in the video it links to (titled “Sexy Webcam Girl Hot Babe Big Boobs Huge Tits Nude Ass Gorgeous Butt Glamour Model “) is really a wrestler. YouTube prohibits ads for actual pornography, but videos with girls simulating sex in bikinis is okay.
It doesn’t really matter what the search term is, videos like that are going to get a lot of clicks. There are already plenty of videos like that on YouTube. Now they are going to become even esier to find.
Here’s a video of YouTube founder Chad Hurley with his clothes on explaining why he’s so excited about this new promotional opportunity for YouTubers:
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Google just made the world a slightly smaller place today. They’ve added a feature to their highly popular Google Reader that will auto-translate any site with a feed to your native tongue. Not only that, it’s very easy to use and it works really well.
Just subscribe to a blog or other feed like normal, then pull down the feed settings menu on the right and choose “Translate into my language.” The text is instantly translated.
We tested it with TechCrunch Japan, and the translations came through well enough to understand. Definite winner.
Tell us your favorite foreign language tech blogs in the comments so we can subscribe immediately!
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Slide founder Max Levchin just kicked off a panel called “The Platform Advantage” at the Web 2.0 Summit. Participants include Google’s Vic Gundotra, Microsoft’s David Treadwell, MySpace’s Amit Kapur and Facebook’s Elliot Schrage.
The panel began with a general debate on exactly what a platform is, and how each of the companies play in the space. Kapur says a platform has to create an ecosystem that includes a core base of users, tools to build applications, and an advertising network to monetize the platform. Kapur also let’s something slip - saying that MySpace will soon release a payments platform and a virtual goods platform.
Schrage says the Facebook platform is a place for users to interact, and for developers to take advantage of that social utility.
Treadwell, from Microsoft, is talking about open standards and advanced tools that let developers easily create applications. He highlights the iPhone platform as a great example.
Levchin says that everyone is talking about openness, but in reality every one of the platforms represented on stage are closed to some degree.
Gundotra says you have to disambiguate the term. Schrage focuses on the results - that developers can get far more traffic and engagement on Facebook than they can on their independent web applications.
Kapur says the most important thing is to build developer trust by having clear rules and guidelines - a clear slap at Facebook and their constantly evolving policies that tend to anger developers. Levchin (who runs one of the companies that has been in the middle of the Facebook politics) agrees, and notes that Microsoft’s Windows platform has done a good job over the years with consistency and backwards compatibility.
Schrage weighs in on Facebook’s behalf and distinguishes between technical and policy issues. He says on policy its important to be transparent and tell developers what’s coming. He says Facebook has sometimes failed to communicate changes to their platform and it’s something they’re still working on. He says over 400,000 developers have signed up to Facebook Platform, and they’ve had to scramble to scale. He also highlights the importance of community, and creating opportunities for developers to work with each other.
Gundotra (Google) says Facebook and MySpace aren’t true platforms but are extensible applications, similar to Office in the Windows world. He says the web is the important platform that we are all developing for. Open Social, Gundotra says, is an attempt to focus on the web as the platform.
Schrage says open standards are great, but they take too long to emerge. Experimentation with proprietary formats in the meantime is the right thing to do, he says.
Levchin brings up the next topic, asking how the platforms react to developers that start to make too much money by competing with them (again a slap at Facebook). Kapur says MySpace won’t break developer trust by competing with them.
Gundotra says it’s a recipe for disaster to have a single company control the platform. Innovation slows to a release every five years (referring to Windows). Using the open web allows fast innovation, and no one controls the platform.
Gundotra says “It’s Windows v. the web. And the web has won.”
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