$100 million presumably from those promoted tweets. I never click on ads in general and I’ve certainly never clicked on a promoted tweet so I’m biased but I’d be interested to know what the click through rates are.
09, 27, 2011
Google+ Market Share up to 8th place, 50 million users
Source: Hitwise
On September 20th the Google+ was opened to the public. Since then Google+ made a huge move from nowhere to 8th place in social network market share according to Experian Hitwise. (Who knew Tagged was player.) According to Paul Allen’s estimates the site has gone from 13 million to 42 million in 60 days and added 7 million new users in just two days from 7/21 to 7/23.
Of course the recent increase in users could just be pent-up demand unleashed by the site being opened up. Even with this data it’s still too early to tell if Google+ is going to be a real player. Facebook is still king with it’s 700 million users. If Google+ adds 1 million users a day for a year, which would be astronomical growth even for Google, they still wouldn’t be halfway to Facebook’s numbers (Facebook isn’t going to suddenly stop growing). I still don’t think Google has come up with any massive innovation other than not being jerks about data ownership. And maybe that’s enough. That and no one in a marketplace likes having one dominant player.
09, 21, 2011
It’s Official, Google Wallet Will Survive and Probably Win
Businesswire:
Visa and Google Sign Licensing Deal to Boost Mobile Payment Adoption
“Visa Europe and Google today announced that Google has received a worldwide license to Visa payWave, an innovative NFC-based payment technology. Visa payWave enables consumers to make fast and secure payments at retail locations by waving their mobile phone in front of a payment terminal and is currently accepted at hundreds of thousands of retail locations worldwide.”
09, 20, 2011
Google Wallet May Actually Survive with Visa, MC, Amex on board
Google Wallet was shaping up to be another battle for Google (GOOG) where Google was on one side and EVERYONE ELSE was on the other. Visa (V), MasterCard (MA), Discover (DFS), and American Express (AXP), AT&T (T), T-Mobile (DT), Verizon (VZ) had banded together under ISIS, an alternative to Google Wallet. Things were looking grim. But today Google Wallet launched with Citi and Mastercard. There’s a reference to Visa, Discover, and Amex making “available their NFC specifications that could enable their cards to be added to future versions of Google Wallet”. Not sure what that means. Are they in or out? Sounds like Google is inferring they’re in. If so GWallet actually has a chance or working.
It’s a big deal. In-stat projects mobile payments will hit 375 million users by 2015. Jupiter Research projects it at a $670 billion market by 2015.
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of deal they cut with the banks and card platforms. In a connected world what value does Visa or Mastercard bring other than standardizing purchase insurance?
09, 19, 2011
60% of student computer purchases are Apple
Fortune reported that a tiny survey (158 students across 8 colleges) done by Hudson Square research showed 60% of the students who purchased a computer purchased an Apple. Interesting despite the tiny size of the survey.
08, 31, 2010
Why is Chrome Fast…Peter Kasting explains.
It’s rare that technology companies explain their secret sauce so I’m always psyched when they do. It’s really hard for technology companies to learn best practices from industry leaders so kudos to Google in explaining how they make Chrome so fast. Peter Kasting, an engineer on the Chrome team gives a good talk on how Google has optimized its Chrome browser. Here’s my bullet summary.
- The core mission is fast and pleasant web browsing.
- Chrome should start quickly.
- Always be reactive to anything users do in UI.
- Never hang.
- Actions should seem effortless.
- Do as little as possible at startup. Easy to do lots of things at startup, so it’s easy to make startup slow. Called lazy initialization. Profiling and picking addresses of DLLs where Windows won’t need to relocate is another way to make startup faster.
- Save the user steps. Address bar auto-complete for example. Chrome keeps several data structures in memory.
- A busy tab shouldn’t lock up app. Chrome is multiprocess and multi-threaded. If something hangs, a user can still click on another tab.
- Key threads in multi-threading are UI thread (input and output), IO thread (internal processes, messaging, etc), file thread (write to disk). IO thread is not allowed to do something that takes a long time. If IO is blocked whole app is blocked.
- Multithreading renderers early on were problematic because OS would swap renderers out of memory if they weren’t used for a while. Google created what they call a Backing Store Cache to solve the problem by caching the window paint. A static image is shown while the real-image is loading in background. Not a cure-all, as sometimes it doesn’t work if you’ve resized window for example.
- Resizes on complex pages was solved using trick in backing store. Rate-limiting tactic. They drop unnecessary rendering slimming down the queue.
- Chrome team uses metrics to always make sure browser is faster not slower with each version. They do not allow startup time to regress. Measure whiteout duration to make sure backing store and renderers are working properly as another example of speed metrics.
- In addition to quantitative metrics they use subjective testing by QA for speed.
- Keeping things simple isn’t just a design goal, it drives the overall product mission. Cognitive friction – amount of mental energy required to use UI – is minimized. Reduce amount of time and effort to perform action. Omnibox is an example where there is one box for search or URL. Also short menus and options.
- They also whitelist keystrokes that renderers are unlikely to override and users don’t want to wait on. Ctrl-w is example that doesn’t go to renderer.
- Milliseconds matter.
08, 6, 2010
Wave Goodbye…but it’ll be back
So GOOG is killing Wave. Interesting lesson for those of us building technology companies and trying to innovate. What they’re trying to do – unified, seamless workflow linked by data and semantics – is absolutely correct, IMHO. However they went too far in breaking the existing experience for too little value. There wasn’t a single, simple 10x benefit. However, I’d bet a fair amount of money we see a redo somewhere down the line. It just doesn’t make any sense that continuous, multi-modal workflows are broken across modes of transport.
Also, I do think they’re serious when Eric says failure is part of success and they’re not just putting on a brave face. I think they’ve got that part totally right as well, the failure is part of success thing. That said, got to be a little humbling. Google now has its own Microsoft Bob-like blemish. It’d be interesting to see a balance chart on wins vs losses and how they compare.
01, 29, 2009
Beam me up!
Another one for the “kinda cool” category. A joint team from the University of Maryland and University of Michigan have declared the ability to generate “long-distance” (1-meter) teleportation. They apparently managed to teleport the quantum state of two atoms a meter apart. It reminds me of compact disks coming from Einstein’s work on photons and photoelectric effect. Is it just me or is it really weird and kind of scary that we could possibly harness and use forces we have absolutely no real understanding of.
12, 9, 2008
Really Liking Google Chrome
A new browser was/is not at the top of my wish list. However I’m really enjoying Google Chrome. It’s only game-changing in the sense that Google’s search was game-changing when it came out. It doesn’t cook dinner or anything. It just works better, faster. Faster, however, is the main thing. It is just so much faster than IE, even Firefox. You don’t appreciate it until you try. Now IE seems painfully sluggish in comparison. It definitely makes surfing more pleasurable. It’s not a complete alternative to IE. Just like Firefox, Sharepoint breaks. Also a bunch of css/javascript-filled web sites haven’t been made compatible yet. Nothing major, just some annoying format glitchs from time-to-time. Assuming that over time the web developer community embraces it as a legitimate platform to include when coding, Chrome will probably be my default browser from now on. Which is surprising since I wasn’t looking for a new one.
09, 28, 2008
Is Apple Evil?
Part of me is jealous every time I see someone showing off their sleek Apple notebook or iPhone. They’re so sexy, svelt, and powerful. I’m like a kid who sees that bright red, yellow, and green box of candy. The mouth waters but the eating isn’t as fun as quenching the desire. Now I know Apple theologians will think me an uninformed heretical nut job. They are in love with their MacBooks and iPhones and I’m a just an envious nerd. On the surface they are right. But the 80% rational part of my brain doesn’t want an Apple for one overriding reason: it is a walled garden. The price for beauty, svelt, and power is confinement and I’m just not that psyched to get in, no matter how cool that piece of hardware might make me in the eyes of others.
Perfect example is Wired’s report on applications cast out of iPhonedom embracing Android. It is true Android is playing catch up/me too with iPhone. Apple has the market lead. Apple’s phone is cooler, thinner, sexier. On top of that it has a great application development environment open for anyone who wants to play. But it is also true that it is Apple’s sandbox, not the developers. Just like their hardware, unless your application fits with their world domination plan you’re not allowed in the sandbox. Take your toys and leave please. Now I know Google has its own world domination plan. Call me naive but world domination by Google versus world domination by Apple seems like democracy versus communism, respectively. Both want to rule the world. One just fits what I, the lowly developer, want from that world more than the other. 1984 anyone?
