Month: April 2007

Followup: Conversation with Eric

Eric and I had a lively conversation earlier today onstage, many of the questions I asked came from your input, thanks a million. He announced onstage that Google has completed its apps suite with the addition of a presentation component, he told me earlier that they did not have…

Eric and I had a lively conversation earlier today onstage, many of the questions I asked came from your input, thanks a million. He announced onstage that Google has completed its apps suite with the addition of a presentation component, he told me earlier that they did not have a name for it because, in the end, it was a feature of a service, not a product like PowerPoint.

There’s a lot of blog coverage, summarized here and here. More to come…

More: AP Story here.

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GoogleClick Round Up In Advance Of Eric S. Interview

Tuesday morning I am interviewing Eric Schmidt at the Web 2 Expo. Usually I obsess about these interviews, this time, I'm more than obsessing. Why? Today there were 4000 people in the audience, and that's quite something to look out over. And there's much news happening around Google -…

Eric-1

Tuesday morning I am interviewing Eric Schmidt at the Web 2 Expo. Usually I obsess about these interviews, this time, I’m more than obsessing. Why? Today there were 4000 people in the audience, and that’s quite something to look out over. And there’s much news happening around Google – this will be Eric’s first live interview in front of the industry since the DoubleClick deal, and I want to make sure it’s good. So can you help me? I’m reading a lot of stuff on the deal, of course, and still formulating my own thoughts (I think I’ll wait to post till after I talk to him), but here’s what’s on my reading list:

Alarm Clock: Google CEO Eric Schmidt called in on the announcement conference call and explained that Google did a strategic review this year and discovered that the scale of the display ad business was larger than the company had initially thought. To our ears this sounds like spin to justify the deal. Surely Google management knows that brand advertising is big business that Google has had problems with.

WatchMojo: …since the next wave of growth is display/banners at the expense of video (and the one after that being video), Google did not apparently blink today, spending twice what it spent on YouTube to keep DCLK out of the hands of MSFT.

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Bezos at Web 2 Expo….S3 Data

Jeff Bezos just gave out some first look data on his S3 web scale storage business. It's pretty impressive, if hard to fully grok. He said that S3 has scaled to 5 billion objects stored since inception. His presentation on how S3 and EC2 work together was pretty impressive….at…

Jeff Bezos just gave out some first look data on his S3 web scale storage business. It’s pretty impressive, if hard to fully grok. He said that S3 has scaled to 5 billion objects stored since inception. His presentation on how S3 and EC2 work together was pretty impressive….at FM we’re scaling servers and dealing with spiky conditions and man, EC2 sure sounds good…

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Google Secures Clear Channel Inventory

From a release: SAN ANTONIO AND MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 16, 2007 — Clear Channel Radio and Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), today announced a multi-year agreement that enables Google to sell a guaranteed portion of 30- second advertising inventory available on more than 675 of Clear Channel's AM/FM stations….

From a release:

SAN ANTONIO AND MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 16, 2007 — Clear Channel

Radio and Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), today announced a multi-year

agreement that enables Google to sell a guaranteed portion of 30-

second advertising inventory available on more than 675 of Clear

Channel’s AM/FM stations. Specific financial terms are not being

disclosed.

Under the agreement, Google™ Audio Ads advertisers will have national

distribution, enabling them to reach specific audiences, at specific

times, in targeted geographies. For Clear Channel, this agreement

opens up an additional sales channel and provides supplemental revenue

by making Clear Channel inventory available to advertisers who

previously had not used radio.

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The $125 Million Website

Is up. That'd be the site of Portfolio, Conde Nast's business magazine launch. Which cost $125 million, all in (for print and web.) Enjoy….

Portfolio

Is up. That’d be the site of Portfolio, Conde Nast’s business magazine launch. Which cost $125 million, all in (for print and web.) Enjoy.

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Albedo

Back when I fancied myself a writer, but hadn't written a book and therefore had insecurities in calling myself by that moniker, I subscribed to A Word A Day, which sends you, well, a word a day. Most I've seen before (thanks, Mom), but today, wow, a word crossed…

Lemon-Rind

Back when I fancied myself a writer, but hadn’t written a book and therefore had insecurities in calling myself by that moniker, I subscribed to A Word A Day, which sends you, well, a word a day. Most I’ve seen before (thanks, Mom), but today, wow, a word crossed my desk that has all kinds of wonderful possibilities. I love the definitions, but what I really love is the potential. It’s one of those words that, well, shimmers like The Word.

albedo (al-BEE-doh) noun

1. The fraction of light reflected from a body or surface.

For example, earth’s albedo is around 0.39.

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Conversational Search

Is getting closer….Infoweek: Some people read tea leaves to predict the future. Stephen Arnold reads Google patents, and right now he's focusing his attention on United States Patent 7,027,987 voice interface for a search engine. Arnold, a Google expert who has written a book on the search leader, believes…

Data Gets Down

Is getting closer….Infoweek:

Some people read tea leaves to predict the future. Stephen Arnold reads Google patents, and right now he’s focusing his attention on United States Patent 7,027,987 voice interface for a search engine.

Arnold, a Google expert who has written a book on the search leader, believes the patent is a roadmap to Google’s future in voice search applications. He said the patent reveals that the company has plans to use voice search across the board for a wide variety of devices big and small and for an equally wide swath of applications ranging from voice-to-text products to a variety of telecommunications uses.

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It’s the Data, Indeed

Tim posits a theory as to why Google is building at 411 service; To get the data that TellMe and Nuance has. Indeed! … it also seems to me that there's a hidden story here about the speech recognition itself. I was talking recently to Eckart Walther of Yahoo!,…

Tim posits a theory as to why Google is building at 411 service; To get the data that TellMe and Nuance has. Indeed!

… it also seems to me that there’s a hidden story here about the speech recognition itself. I was talking recently to Eckart Walther of Yahoo!, who used to be at Tellme, and he pointed out that speech recognition took a huge leap in capability when automated speech recognition started being used for directory assistance. All of a sudden, there were millions of voices, millions of accents to train speech recognition systems on, and much less need for the individual user to train the system.

This is reminiscent of a comment that Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, made to me last year about automated translation, and why it’s getting better. “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.”

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Google Buys DoubleClick

And I will eat my post before where I said they would not. From the Journal: Google Inc. said Friday that it would purchase Internet services company DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion, marking another big foray into the heart of the Web economy. The price represents a stunning change…

Dbclk

And I will eat my post before where I said they would not. From the Journal:

Google Inc. said Friday that it would purchase Internet services company DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion, marking another big foray into the heart of the Web economy.

The price represents a stunning change in valuation for the company, given that it fetched $1.1 billion in 2005, and has since sold off parts of itself to other parties. Among others, Microsoft Corp., had been vying for control of New York-based DoubleClick, which is controlled by San Francisco private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman.

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