Apr 27 2010
Technology

Spotify claims online mixtapes

Much excitement today about the excellent Spotify music service’s latest upgrade – linking into your Facebook profile and allowing deeper interaction with your friends’ playlists and listening. The co-founder says

This is the next generation of mixtapes. What’s a better way to pick songs than by browsing others’ music collections? In the future, you can imagine looking through the favourite songs of celebrities. You could see Bono’s playlist, for example.

More in Times Online. If they could just launch in the US they’d be giving iTunes a good run-in.

Tagged
Apr 26 2010
Technology

Microsoft’s huge online bet

If you thought the days of online services losing buckets of investors’ money went out in the original dotcom boom, look at the Business Insider Chart of the Day for Microsoft’s Online Services Division. $711m lost in the first quarter of 2010, $10bn lost since 1998.

You can see this as partly the flipside of their huge profits on Office – some of these online services are the next, web-based, iteration of Office – but is Google really losing this much on developing Google Apps?

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Mar 29 2010
Technology

50 million viral users can’t be wrong

Why should Microsoft’s Office division worry about a competitor with revenues of just $50 million a year against its $10 billion a year of profit? Because the competitor, Google Apps, is easier to use, ‘good enough’ and free – and 50 million people agree. Although Google Apps has just one million paying users at $50 each a year, the free personal version is already capable enough for most users’ needs.

There’s another factor that Blodget misses: Google Apps is viral. Its online collaboration features allow multiple users to work on the same documents and spreadsheets at the same time. When you invite others to help on a doc, you’re making them Apps users. And the product is so easy and powerful they’ll soon infect others.

As Blodget says

Google Apps, in other words, still look like a classic disruptive technology.  And in their path is a massive Microsoft cash cow, one that accounts for more than half of Microsoft’s profit.

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Mar 26 2010
Technology

Google Chrome is the only safe browser?

The annual browser hacking contest at CanSecWest has seen Internet Explorer 8, Safari 4 and Firefox 3 all hacked. Only Google’s Chrome 4 remains secure, though apparently no-one’s even bothered to try.

So unless you’re into cults like the Opera browser, Chrome looks the safest choice at the moment – and one of the fastest too.

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Mar 16 2010
Economy, Start ups

Tories don’t understand startups – give us your offices instead

Dave Cameron, in a refreshing bit of public politics, says how he’s going to help startups

any new business that starts up, the first ten people they employ, they don’t have to pay National Insurance [payroll tax]

You can tell Dave hasn’t done any startups… the only ones that reach ten people in the first year (see the small print) are well-funded and not going to notice 13% off their payroll bill.

Why not scrap the quangos and bureaucrats and give their offices to startups? That really would help.

Here’s the video – quote at 1:50 and enjoyably direct throughout:

Mar 16 2010
Technology

Apple at war with Google, a Good Thing

There’s a lot of chatter about this post by an engineer who’s joining Google from Oracle. He chose Google because its technologies are open and many of Apple’s are closed

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

So don’t buy an iPhone. Millions of others love the way it just works. We have a choice and the intensifying competition between Apple and Google will only improve it. Oh, and Disney’s quite successful too.

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Mar 16 2010
Economy, Technology

Spooks do IT better than the Government

Is there any IT project they can manage properly? The SCOPE secret communications project, run by the Cabinet Office, has wasted tens of millions. Meanwhile the spooks have been running a little side-project of their own

“We are doing really quite well on this more modest CLiC programme, which is not being run out of the Cabinet Office, it is being run out of SIS and GCHQ” said the head of MI6

“It is regrettable that this same practical and incremental approach was not adopted in the planning of the SCOPE programme” says the parliamentary oversight committee

‘Practical and incremental approach’ – build it in quick manageable pieces, proving and adapting as you go. That’s how today’s leading software companies do it. Our Government is stuck in the last century with the likes of Microsoft and IBM.

Spooks scramble to replace failed secret messaging system – The Register.

Mar 11 2010
Technology

Google Apps Marketplace – the iPhone effect for enterprise software

Google Apps is a threat to much more than Microsoft Office/Exchange. As Apple’s App Store swept the iPhone into markets as diverse as gaming, satnav and epos, so the new Google Apps Marketplace will drive a wildfire through the corporate software landscape.

If you’re a Google Apps user, go to the Marketplace and choose an App – say Manymoon, a web-based project management application. Click ‘Add it now’, go through a couple of confirmation steps, and it’s available in your Google Apps account, integrated with your email, contacts, calendar, documents, etc. The ‘Standard’ edition of Manymoon is free, so I’ve spent five minutes and £0 to get to the same point of trying it for real with live data.

If you’re using Exchange, prepare to spend months finding and testing a project management system, negotiating the licensing, contracting with a systems integrator to integrate it with your Microsoft Exchange servers, doing the integration, testing and debugging. At the end of this huge time and expense, you start using it with live data – and see how it works.

What’s radical about Google Apps isn’t its existence – e.g. Force.com has been around for a while – it’s the point and click ease. Click, try, buy or chuck – in minutes.

Just like the wildly successful Apps on the iPhone.

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Mar 09 2010
Technology

Google makes mobile browsing faster and cheaper

For faster mobile browsing, Google search has a great trick – do a search, click the ‘Options’ link under a search result and click ‘Mobile formatted’.

You’ll go to the site through Google’s servers, which strip the page down to the bare essentials – text and featured photos. This makes it much faster than browsing the normal ‘desktop’ version of the web page – and cheaper if you’re abroad. (If the site actually has a mobile-formatted version, Google may send you there instead.)

Here’s the Economist as it normally shows and via Google – which cuts it down to less than 3% of the original size – 30 times faster and cheaper.

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Mar 05 2010
Technology

Google’s omniscience

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently:

Think of it as an opportunity to instrument the world. These networks are now so pervasive that we can literally know everything if we want to. What people are doing, what people care about, information that’s monitored, we can literally know it if we want to, [pauses, lowers voice] and if people want us to know it.

via Eric Schmidt: we can literally know everything « Tim Anderson’s ITWriting.

The Onion‘s take on it

The company has also encouraged feedback, explaining that users can type any concerns they may still have into any open browser window or, if they are members of Google Voice, “simply speak directly into [their] phones right now.”

Either way, the company said, “We’ll know.”

But another comment by Schmidt Google throws it back on us -

Google will know more about the customer because it benefits the customer if we know more about them.

You don’t have to take these services, but many will make the trade-off. Humans are easy.

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