Google Maps knows where you are, even on a desktop
Many people have used Google Maps on mobile phones to find out where they are, helping them home after a long night etc. Now Maps does it on your desktop or laptop.
Just click the new dot under the navigation arrows. You’ll need a recent browser – Chrome 2 or Firefox 3.5 – or to have installed Google Gears (the tool that lets you use enabled web sites offline). That’s it.
The accuracy is unnerving – it uses local wifi hotspots to locate you if possible, or falls back on your network IP address (most of these have been quite accurately mapped).
Privacy? Get over it… you don’t have any, as Scott McNealy said. You can turn it off of course, but you’ll miss out on plenty of useful stuff that will ride on the back of this. And expect ads for the pizza place next door.
Google as Montessori
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Let’s all take a deep breath and get some perspective – the sharpest commentary on Google Chrome OS…
Honestly, Google, is there anyone in charge over there? Is there anyone who knows how to criticize anything in that f***ed up little Montessori preschool of yours? I mean I guess it’s nice that you all get to spend 20 percent of your time dreaming up useless shit, and I guess you have to use the Montessori method and tell everyone that whatever little piece of shit they’ve created is just so wonderful and perfect and beautiful — but really, as I’ve told Eric before, that doesn’t mean you have to release everything these bozos dream up.
And Lionel Ritchie’s role in Unix is revealed.
Google to Windows: you’re history
After years of rumours about a Google operating system, it’s real: Google Chrome OS is coming next year. In a direct shot at Microsoft’s Windows, Google says
the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.
Designed for a web-based world – Gmail, Google Docs, NetSuite, etc – it will be an open source, lightweight operating system, targeted initially at netbooks and based on Linux. Just enough OS to run a browser, but none of the baggage of Windows.
Will Windows 7 have a response? Microsoft have a big announcement scheduled for Monday… But long-term, Google has a strong case: with more and more devices having their own network connections (eg a camera, if you have an iPhone), the old arguments for needing a powerful desktop OS are receding. Go web, young man.
50,000 new customers a day – just by word of mouth
Spotify is a great music service, so good that it’s gaining 50,000 new users every day – without any marketing*.
Get your product or service right, and it’ll be its own sales force. At Conosco, we’ve always told our helpdesk they’re our primary sales team – and they’ve proved to be – but we still have to fund Google’s chocolate factory…
* Oh, they aren’t paying customers, but who wouldn’t be in Spotify’s shoes.
How Dell’s making good commercial use of Twitter
Real Business – Dell turns Twitter pro
They’ve focussed on one of Twitter’s strengths – real-time push communication – and used it to carry their short shelf-life special offers. Obvious – like all good innovations.
YouTube allows off-site links on videos
Surprisingly in our hyperlinked world, YouTube hasn’t allowed videos to contain links. A charity posting an appeal, a politician raising funds, an aspiring cookery writer, none have been able to provide an easy link from their promotional video back to their web site. The best they could do was to put a link in the summary text alongside the video.
From tomorrow, anyone using YouTube’s cost-per-click advertising service* will be able to put a link to their web site directly on the video.
Besides the obvious uses – ‘click now to pledge your donation’ etc – how will people use this? These facilities inevitably get subverted and twisted into new applications…
* US advertisers only at the moment. The service lets you add keywords to your video; when users search on those keywords, or when YouTube shows another video with content related to them. your video appears alongside the search results or related videos; you pay only when users click to view your video.
Browser speedtest – which is fastest in the real SaaS world?
As more people switch to software-as-a-service (SaaS) web applications – web sites like Google Docs, GMail, Salesforce, etc that replace programs installed on your desktop – arguments about web browser speeds are moving from the geeks’ locker-room to the real world. So, with the major browsers recently upgraded, we compared them on a real site.
The result was a surprise. According to the special tests used in developing browsers, Google’s Chrome is the rampant winner, with Safari and Firefox a little way behind and Internet Explorer 8 left in the dust. But these tests aren’t real world – we wanted to know which is fastest in the office.
The web application we chose was NetSuite – it’s what we use at Conosco. An all-in-one ‘SAP for small businesses’ in your web browser, it runs our accounting, helpdesk, projects, CRM, marketing, mail merges and much more; think Sage + Salesforce + Goldmine + Heat +…
NetSuite is great, but like all of these new browser apps it’s a bit slow… any speed improvement is a godsend.
Here are the page load times in seconds for NetSuite’s dashboard – a complex page with plenty of data and some client-side javascript:
IE8 on Windows 7 is the fastest. The “dog” wins.
It feels fast too, like Chrome and Safari which aren’t far behind, but unlike even the latest version of Firefox which lumbers along.
(We took an average of times as measured by NetSuite’s built-in page timer; there wasn’t much variation. We used a fast Mac Pro desktop, with VMWare for Windows.)
What Munich’s Microsoft-to-Linux project was really about
You may remember the early Windows-to-Linux migration story of the City of Munich City in 2003. Some interesting details are emerging from the project (it’s a long one). The key point is that ”it’s all about managing change for and with people”.
- The motivation to switch from Windows was not costs, it was independence from a single supplier. In 03 Munich was using Windows NT4 and was satisfied with it (they’re Germans) when MS announced the end of support for NT4. Being forced to make a change it didn’t want irked Munich so it looked for a way to get independence from software suppliers. The estimated cost for using Linux, including training, was actually 5% higher than the Microsoft upgrade, but deemed worth freedom.
- Users were moved to the new open-source applications on Windows before moving to Linux. This two-phase approach flattened the learning curve for users and made the project more manageable. The key applications were Thunderbird (email), Firefox (browser), OpenOffice (docs).
- They took the opportunity to clean up their document templates and develop a new application to manage them properly (and make mail merges easier). During the project, they found 13,700 document templates, almost one for each of 14,000 users, thanks to a ridiculously decentralised IT infrastructure. Germanic thoroughness to an extreme.
- The migration is very gradual. Less critical departments moved first, and within every department a small ‘germ cell’ of users was moved ahead of the rest to reveal problems and build local champions for the new technologies. From a 2003 start, by 2012 they aim to have 80% of users on Linux.
- Each department has a Windows PC to deal with tricky Office documents that don’t work well in OpenOffice.
Hat tip: SlashDot.
Zoho makes SharePoint useable
Microsoft SharePoint, the powerful but unintuitive filesharing platform* for businesses, has lacked an easy way to edit and collaborate on documents – you were meant to download docs, edit them on your desktop, and upload them again. Not only is this too laborious, but it allowed conflicts between different people editing the same doc.
Now Zoho, the best-featured set of web-based document apps, will integrate with your SharePoint file storage, allowing you to edit docs directly from SharePoint. Looks great (we haven’t tried it yet) and moves SharePoint into the realms of easy useability (if you can figure out how to structure your folder hierarchy in it).
Watch the video -
Sadly for Zoho, I can’t help feeling that, once MS releases its own web-based doc editors, they will get squeezed between MS and Google Apps.
* Yes, it does much more, but the cost of configuring it is far too high for smaller businesses. Just administering the file sharing takes skill and learning.
IT has escaped the toolbox
Good reading from the FT for CIOs and anyone guiding an organisation’s IT strategy - Does business understand technology any more?
The gist, largely from Steve Prentice at Gartner, is that IT’s done automation and productivity, it’s doing optimisation (costs, reliability) and it’s moving into social areas that many at the top don’t get:
Today’s technology is all about communities… a successful organisation today needs to operate in a much more refined and subtle way, which for some could mean fundamental changes to business models. It involves more listening, watching, being in tune and in touch, engaging with every interested party, being responsive to communities.
Success will come from letting go of the message and becoming part of the conversation. Sounds rather familiar – democratisation? – but the technologies that will allow or force it are blossoming fast – Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave…
