Category: Random, But Interesting

If you have deja vu, then, yes, this story was first discussed by Vint Cerf in his Searchblog interview….Google is – for now anyway – not claiming to have plans for a national Wifi network, even as it launched its Mountain View Wifi net officially today.

Like the folks in the click fraud de-fictionalizing department, Google’s trademark lawyers are only doing their job. But as with so many things when your dorm-room inspired company gets huge, the Doing Of A Job runs entirely counter to the philosophical foundations of the company samesaid trademark lawyers are apparently doing their job to protect.

Allow me to explain (I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, sorry). If you are the holder of a valuable trademark (say, one of the most valuable brands in the world, for example), it’s really, really bad for that same mark to be used casually to indicate an entire process, a process which, in fact, is generic and need not necessarily be tied to your brand or product. It’s the same problem Xerox has with copying, or Kleenex with facial tissue. In short, Google might lose its trademark due to – overwhelming association with the problem its brand solves.

Now, no one at Google had a problem with Google entering the lexicon a few years ago. In fact, it was celebrated inside the ‘plex, as I recall.

Read More

Scoble writes a nice post-Microsoft rant about what’s wrong with his former company, and what the company should pay attention to. The answer: attention data. I agree. Positing a scenario in which he’s looking for an office chair for less than $500, Scoble writes:

When I search on “Office Furniture” why is the first thing I see stores? I don’t wanna see freaking corporate info. I wanna know what HUMANS like to use in their offices.

None of the big search companies have figured out that it’s the humans who “optimize” the Web.

Read More

Still reading this, but for your reading pleasure, this week BizWeek puts Digg on the cover.

Outsell, a research company I’ve come to know over the past year, is looking for an analyst in the search space. CEO Anthea Stratigos was kind enough to ask me to speak at their conference earlier this year, and I found the folks there smart and engaged. From their job posting:

Outsell is looking for an experienced, technologically savvy, and energetic Vice President & Lead Analyst to create innovative research and analysis about the Search, Aggregation & Syndication segment and players in the information industry and to work with our business development team to drive business in the space. As a core member of our market research and advisory business, the successful candidate will work in a collaborative environment and deliver executive-level analysis, including tracking and analyzing SAS companies and their customers and users, and providing strategy analysis and decision support to CEOs, COOs, and Marketing executives and their teams.

To whoever gets that job, I’m looking forward to getting to know you! (And hey, maybe I should start a job board here!)

My coverage of Paul’s post has prompted some very thoughtful discussion in the comments, and I wanted to point it out. An employee from Google and one from Yahoo are discussing the value and approach of R&D, with some great comments thrown in by other readers. Excerpts:

(JG@Yahoo)”Google treats research as an engineering task. And thus really only comes up with engineering solutions. They see some problem that’s slightly broken, so they engineer a slightly better solution. With MS on the other hand, they’ve allowed funding for more pie-in-the-sky, long term projects, such as those that used to happen at PARC and Bell Labs.”

(Random Googler) “I work at Google, and I see an amazing amount of research going on. The entire company is staffed with people with academic backgrounds in disciplines like computer science, computer engineering, mathematics, and so on. To imagine that we’re not doing research constantly seems bizarre to me. The question of “yes, but how much basic research” you’re doing also seems weird to me. When running your company involves solving fundamental problems in computer science and mathematics, that’s what you do as your bread and butter.”

Read More

Paul Kedrosky points to an interesting slide in Microsoft CTO Craig Mundie’s recent analyst day presentation. The subject is R&D, the point Craig is making is that Microsoft is way outspending Google and others.

Paul points out:

Read More