Archive for Google
Google TV is Coming Soon!
Posted by: | CommentsThe Wall Street Journal’s Jessica E. Vascellaro and Don Clark said “Google is currently planning on sharing some details about the technology with more than 3,000 developers expected to attend its Google I/O conference in San Francisco May 19 and 20.”
And this software has got quite a bit of other big companies very excited. Sony and Intel have already been working with Google on this new software, but now Samsung and Logitech are keen to jump on board too.
Google is apparently keen to iron out all the creases of the final product and launch at the I/O conference, so that the 3000+ developers that are expected at the conference, can help them build applications for the platform.
Google TV is designed to bring Internet-style content, including web search, applications and video entertainment to your living room. The next step would be for the Google TV software to be embedded in the new generation of internet-ready TVs, game consoles, set-top boxes, and Blu-ray players.
Writer’s Bio: Derek Morris is Senior Editor of Vectorwire.com, source for the latest graphic design, web design, web hosting, and technology news and articles.
Hostingcon 2009 – Day 2: The Calm Before the Storm
Posted by: | CommentsThe 2nd day of Hostingcon saw the opening of the Exhibit Hall. This year’s Exhibit Hall is nearly the double the size of the previous year’s hall. However, both halls had the same amount of exhibitors. This translated to many vendors having bigger booths, more walking space, and a larger network lounge and presentation section. Unfortunately, many exhibitors were complaining about the lack of foot traffic. However, if they saw how good the sessions were today I think they would understand why the exhibit hall received few passersby.
Zane Adam from Microsoft began the day with two keynote speeches; one on virtualization and adding software and services to customer plans. The second keynote was a round table that included Antonio Piraino from Tier1, Stephen Cho from Google, Daniel Burton from Salesforce.com, and Emil Sayegh from Rackspace’s Cloud Hosting company Mosso.
My own day began with interviews and therefore I was unable to attend either, However, I do know that the “ban” on Microsoft keynotes by Linux hosts continued this year and that the round table provided some good, if not generalized information.
Day 2 was especially difficult when it came to choosing sessions. The first time slot in fact had four well written and presented sessions. If I were to choose it would have to be a toss up between 20 Ways to Outsmart Your Competitors by Adam Eisner of Tucows and the Accepting Credit Card and PCI/DSS Compliance round table with Curtis R. Curtis moderating.
The second session was calmer with more specialized sessions giving attendees several areas to choose from. Those who use email marketing definitely should have sat in on Jeff Rohrs’ (ExactTarget) Get More From Email Marketing. While those who offer domain name services should have attended It’s No Longer IPv4, Meet IPv6 by Richard Jimmerson of ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers). Lastly, to go with the conference’s theme, Bob Angus of VeriSign presented Selling Premium Services to Cost-conscious Customers.
From this point on the clouds took over. Not just indoors in the conference halls, but outside as well. Though the thunderstorm did not hit, it was beginning to build. Indoors, the individual sessions, the general session, and even the evening’s big networking party all brought cloud computing to mind.
For the non-cloud conscious “Launch Your Product Like a Pro” from NaviSite’s William Toll and Sunmeet Sabharwal.
Figuring out which session to visit at the end of the day was yet another tough decision. All four were extremely good with a star stellar cast of speakers. Gillian Muessig (SEOmoz) delivered High Impact Email, Search, and Social Media Marketing. Neil Daswani from startup Dasient presented Stop Web-based Malware Attacks. Rafael Laguna de la Vera from Open-Xchange discussed messaging through a cloud platform with Driving Cloud Computing with Open Source Messaging. Lastly, Growing Your Business: Getting Upside in a Down Economy from Chris West of CDGcommerce.
With the final general session coming to a close, attendees began shuffling to various places for networking opportunities. For myself, I went to the Microsoft/Parallels Networking Event and had a blast. Afterward I went for a brief stretch of the legs along the Potomac waterfront then headed to bed for another long day. Even with the calmness of the exhibit hall and attendees settling into a rhythm, the rolling clouds in the sky above was a portent for the final day of Hostingcon 2009.
WolframAlpha, Google Killer it is Not, but Still Kinda Cool
Posted by: | CommentsWhenever someone creates a search engine the very first things out of someone’s mouth is, “its a Google Killer.” Sad to say, for those who want a Google Killer, this ain’t it. Be that as it may, I have been fooling around with the Wolfram Alpha search engine for some time now and in many ways I am impressed.
First, interface. I like the output pages a lot. I like how it gives you an interpretation of what you wrote since it allows you to see what you screwed up if the search fails… and fail you will.
The hardest part I hear some people have is getting use to the search query. Well honestly, this is not the type of search engine you will use to grab web sites. It is however, a search engine to grab facts. Such as if you type July 1 Canada, Wolfram Alpha will send you back things such as the format for the date, time difference between today and July 1st, sunrise/sunset times for Ottawa, Canadian holidays for the 1st, etc.
But if I type in something such as “how to make chicken soup,” I get an error. If I type that same line in Google, the first return I get is WikiHow, How to Make Chicken Soup: 10 steps. However, if I type in “canned chunky chicken soup” into WolframAlpha I get the average nutrition content of all canned chunky chicken soups, WolframAlpha has in its database.
Wolfram is meant to be a search engine for all factual data in the world. I read recently that it doesn’t handle sports. So I put it to the test. How will I test for factual data for sports? Easy I will ask for baseball stats, if there is any game more meticulous or analytical on its stat keeping than baseball I haven’t heard of it. I typed in Babe Ruth average ERA (since he was a pitcher at the beginning of his career) and I got nothing. I typed in Babe Ruth homeruns still nothing. I typed in just Babe Ruth and I got back his full name, date and place of birth, and date and place of death.
But type in Internet users and it will spit back the estimated total amount of Internet users in the world, the country with the most and the country with the least among other things.
Wolfram won’t be able to tell you who hit more than 30 homeruns in 1947, but it can solve a variety of mathematic equations. Likewise it won’t be able to tell you how to cook chicken soup, but it will tell you the average nutritional information of it. Wolfram is pretty cool for fooling around, but in its current state it remains nothing more than an idle curiosity.
To have a stab at it yourself go here http://www.wolframalpha.com.
Hosting in the USA…not
Posted by: | CommentsI recently attended the fifth annual WebhostingDay in Bruehl, Germany and figured out that there is an enormous world of web hosting outside the United States. Not only does the International hosting community exist – it is doing quite well. Thomas Strohe is the creator and organizer of WebhostingDay and he explained how ”The event is sold out with about 2,500 registered top-class representatives from the hosting industry and online registration has been closed on March 6. Also both of the Phantasialand hotels as well as our backup hotel in Bruehl are sold out.” I can attest to the fact that WebhostingDay 2009 was indeed very crowded and active with International hosting professionals from across Europe and the world.
What drew so many visitors this year? Mr. Strohe speculates that, ”The reason might be the large number of famous partner companies who contribute with talks and exhibitions. Moreover, it is the great success of the previous events which made many people come back. And in Europe, there is no other event that unites so many top level executives from such great and important companies. It is an ideal opportunity for people from the hosting sector to come together, to network and to form new business relationships.” Saneetha Naik, the co-founder of outsourced technical support company Bobcares speculated that the reason that many attendees came was to step up their marketing in a difficult selling environment. First time attendee Phil Robinson from UK-based hosting company 34SP.com added, ”The opportunity to network with my peers in the hosting industry and to learn from true experts in the field is what attracted me to WebhostingDay this year. I find the hosting professionals to be willing to help me and the vendors are always open to sharing their latest developments as well.”
Here are a few statistics as relayed by Professor Jens Bocker, University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in his opening remarks that bear out the popularity of this year’s WebhostingDay event.
* Attendees and exhibitors were present from more than 40 different countries around the world.
* Registered attendance grew from around 1,000 attendees last year to nearly 2,500 attendees n 2009.
* WebhostingDay 2009 featured 50 speakers from a wide range of hosting-related firms and consultancies.
* There were 45 exhibitors in the exhibit hall this year.
The vast majority of attendees that I ran into were from Europe. That is exactly what you would expect, but it still took a bit of adjustment as I have a very ”USA-centric” worldview. Apparently I am not alone in this, mighty search engine Google skews USA as well. Consider the recent logo and link that Google placed onto Google New Zealand to note the arrival of Fall in that hemisphere. Pretty normal, right? Well, not exactly as the term ”Fall” which was used in the logo and the link is used almost exclusively in the USA. The correct term down under is ”Autumn” and yields distinctly different search results. You can see how this was an affront to the local audience and points out Google’s USA-centric worldview by reading this blog post on the subject.
Which brings me back to the subject of this post – Hosting in the USA…not. I will be attending HostingCon this year as well, and expect to see many of my new friends from the International hosting community in attendance. I will not, however, make the mistake of assuming that the way that we do hosting in the USA – be it marketing, operations, plans types, or operating systems – is the exact right fit for international hosting operations.
Google Chrome Now In OS Flavor
Posted by: Dave | Comments (0)By now you probably have read that Google is developing a new operating system and that most pundits around the Net have said that Google is looking to go head-to-head against Microsoft in the operating system arena, taking the fight to them so it seems.
To get everyone up to speed, Chrome OS will be a Linux distro, this first OS will be focused on Netbooks, completely separate from Android, Web-centric, and lastly is supposed to be secure right out the box.
There have been some stirrings in the open source community that are somewhat disappointed with Google for not using community feedback in their development. However, according to Google’s blog, “we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.”
There has been a lot of talk about how this will affect Microsoft and that this will help empower the Linux community and Microsoft will do whatever it can to squash the operating system.
From what I have seen operating systems are somewhat stagnating. It has been a while since we have seen true innovation and sadly the OS that seems to be leading development is Microsoft. When the imitator becomes the innovator in an industry you know that industry has serious problems. On this fact alone, I can see that Chrome will help the OS industry as a whole. It will even help Microsoft by giving them something to mimic again.
I am quite interested in how Google will face the following:
Microsoft has a lot to gain from Google building an OS. Google spends billions on research and Microsoft can greatly benefit from that research by looking at how Google does things then integrate what they want from it into Windows. Its about time we had some new blood in the OS department and I think the greatest winner of this whole thing will be the consumer since this should (knock on the simulated wood that comprises my desk) start an OS feature war
I honestly think the biggest loser in this will be the Linux community. Chrome will garner some Microsoft users, but I think it will get its largest amount of users from Linux distros and although Linux is about community and if one version of Linux wins than we all win, the bottom line is it will eat at the popularity of the other Linux flavors and that is not a good thing. What if Google doesn’t market it as a Linux OS, does the Linux community still gain from the popularity?