Three months in, the iPhone is great, but I don't deny that there isn't appeal in an Android phone. Though young and unpolished, Google's mobile OS has, unsurprisingly, tight integration with Google services. Much like my own brain, tightly integrated with Google's mail, calendar, reader, maps, photos, and, oh yeah, search. Synchronization between Google services and Blackberries or iPhones had been weak in the past, but some official and unofficial solutions have emerged.
Gmail access on any smartphone has been easy and supported ever since they implemented IMAP. Their help provides setup information for major devices.
Today Google announced that Google Sync for Blackberry can now synchronize your Gmail contacts, in addition to Google Calendar events and alerts. Any changes made on the Blackberry will sync back to Gmail/Calendar. This also makes moving to a new device easy.
For iPhone users, its slightly harder because Google can't have it's own app running in the background synchronizing changes. NuevaSync is a solution that I've been running without issue for a couple months now. The iPhone supports Microsoft Exchange for mail, calendar, and contacts. NuevaSync acts like a Microsoft Exchange server and serves as a middleman between your phone and Google for bidirectional syncing of calendar and contacts. The service is currently in beta, and also supports syncing contacts from Plaxo.
Google has released a major update to their Google Mobile App for iPhone with a nifty new feature that you'll see geeks demoing at parties for weeks to come. That feature is voice recognition. Launch the app, hold the phone up to your head, speak your search query, and in about six seconds you'll have a list of results. If your query is location-relevant, like, per se, "sushi", you'll be given a list of results that are closest to you. Beyond the voice features, the location-awareness is also unique to the app, as a Google search in Safari has no way of knowing your location. Also, the results page that it returns is better formatted for the mobile screen than searching in the browser.
Is it gimmicky? Somewhat. Is it faster than typing? Generally yes. How well does it work? Acceptably well. Andy Baio of Waxy.org attempts to deconstruct how the voice recognition works. The recognition happens server-side, with the app seemingly sending only 100-300 _bytes_ of pre-processed data.
In my testing, the app worked well with common terms, place names, and names of notable people. Being Google, you can also use it for unit conversions like "100 Canadian dollars in US dollars" or "50 miles in kilometres". Fans of the Simpsons will be amused that it took two tries to get "beat up Martin".
Back in the early days of mobile, I once saw someone walking around proudly talking into a cellphone (the size of a toaster, naturally). Much to his chagrin and my amusement, it rang. Now you too can walk around talking into your phone to no one at all (though admittedly for less lame reasons)! Google's voice-enabled iPhone search, while coming later than Microsoft's TellMe service or Yahoo's oneSearch capability, was launched to the iPhone Apps Store today, though it was earlier announced that it would come out last Friday.
Users speak regularly into the phone with their query, Google's servers process the speech and convert it to text where it is sent to search servers, and then the results are returned to the users on his or her iPhone, often taking advantage of the iPhone's location-determining functionality.
The New York Times reports that "The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone's touch-screen keyboard."
This move could end up spelling big business through advertisements, particularly when used for location-based questions.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. As a first step to fulfilling that mission,... [more]
Google announced today that they are rolling out voice and video chat capability in Gmail chat - expected to be fully functional within the next day or so, it could end up being direct competition for Skype. ollaborating across continents and timezones is a fact of life for us, and it sure is easier (and greener) to click "Start video chat" than to get on a plane."
At the end of October, Google announced that they would soon be offering SMS functionality in Gmail chat (though it hasn't yet happened). Users send messages either via chat or via SMS, and replies sent by SMS appear in the chat window. The plug was promptly pulled after the initial announcement for technical reasons; the Google blog claims that "we found a glitch. When you'd try to turn it on, it wouldn't fully enable. We thought about keeping it out there -- bugs and all -- but the experience wasn't that great." The service should be up and running soon. It looks like Google will be delivering the messages through the carriers rather than using an email gateway.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. As a first step to fulfilling that mission,... [more]
This Small Business Week profile is sponsored by Brother. Comment on this blog post and your name will be entered in a draw to win one of two Brother Colour Multi-Function Centers (model MFC-6490cw) on Nevember 1, 2008. These professional series colour inkjet all-in-one centers allow small business owners to print, copy, scan, and fax wirelessly and retail for $350 each.
Digital Alchemy Entertainment is a creative animation and visual effects studio that has grown from a two man operation to a team of 30 talented artists in a 4500 square foot office in Vancouver’s Gastown. Co-founders, Rob Gandell and Chris Browne are now balancing global relationships on a project that will air internationally. DA’s most recent international effort will be on display in February of 2009 when Zigby, a new animated series aimed at preschoolers, will air on YTV, ABC, Treehouse, and France 5 among others. DA worked For Thunderbird Films on their coproduction with Flying Bark Productions (Australia) and Big Communications (Singapore).
“We were responsible for the integral aspects of the overall look of the show” said Chris Browne, partner and creative director, Digital Alchemy. “We’re really excited about this project because it’s one where we were able to demonstrate our capabilities and creativity.”
Rob Gandell, partner and production designer on Zigby, added, “We have taken advantage of the deep talent pool here in Vancouver and that has given us the capacity to go after, and lead, large, international visual effects and animation projects.”
Look for more from the talented staff at Digital Alchemy Entertainment in the near future as they have recently wrapped on production with Insight Film Studios on their latest picture titled Thirst.
Digital Alchemy Entertainment: A new cutting edge visual effects and animation studio, dedicated to developing stunning visuals for TV, film, games... [more]
Brother International Corporation (Canada) Ltd. markets a range of business machine products known for their originality and creativity. A Japanese... [more]
Partnering up with Amazon.com and Apple's iTunes Music Store, Google has announced their YouTube video sharing property will soon provide online shopping opportunities tied into the video content they display. Located just below the video clips, the purchasing options will link to a variety of products related to the video displayed from movies and music to concert tickets or clothing and accessories. Outside of adwords this will be one of Google's first attempts to monetize the site they paid $1.65 billiion for in 2006, a site that boasts 330,000,000 monthly visitors and almost 13 hours of uploaded video every minute.
The move comes amidst calls from investors to begin raising revenues earned from the popular site after Piper Jaffrey Research predicted only $200 million of Google's estimated $27 billion 2009 revenue would come from the site. YouTube further indicated that more options were forthcoming. "There'll be lots of different solutions for lots of different problems," Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube director of product management, said in an interview. "We've tested a lot of things already, and we're going to be testing more in the future. Some will work, some won't. Some of the options mentioned in the Reuters article included ads along the bottom of the streaming videos, advertiser contests, sponsored homepage videos, and short ads before and/or after uploaded videos.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. As a first step to fulfilling that mission,... [more]
As many do, I like to keep an eye on what Google is doing. Google recently announced a free service called Google SMS Channels that enables, like the name suggests, channels and groups on SMS. Users can receive content from RSS feeds or from Google publishing partners or products like Google News, Blogger and Groups, or they can create channels to publish content, communicatte with groups via SMS.
The service is currently only being offered in India, though Google Labs plans a larger commercial launch in the near future. Google SMS channels is being offered for free, which naturally leads to the question of if--or, more likely, when--Google will be announcing mobile advertising along these SMS channels.
Google India's Prasad Ram insists that “The SMS channel is in line with our endeavor to connect the 250-million mobile subscribers who have no access to information,” but it seems like it is only a matter of time before Google jumps on the mobile advertising bandwagon. Ram admits that “[b]anner advertisement and contextual marketing can be among many ways to monetise this channel.”
A global launch of Google SMS Channels would make inroads into reaching even more of the 3.3 billion cellphones worldwide, 97% of which are SMS enabled.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. As a first step to fulfilling that mission,... [more]
Heather Green at BusinessWeek has posted an article detailing what might be Google's next attempt at effectively monetizing social media traffic as they have web search traffic. Making Social Networks Profitable analyzes Google's pending patent on technology that will rank the most the influential factor of social media participants in much the same way their PageRank technology is able to effectively rank page content. Once the level by which a person is influential to their peers was established the new tech would allow targeted ads to reach people who may be able to push that message out further, going beyond simple adwords and into predictive behaviour paired with possibility of that ad delivery being relayed. Click through for more details and interviews pertaining to the patent filing.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. As a first step to fulfilling that mission,... [more]
It was September 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially incorporated Google, Inc. and began to revolutionize the online experience for millions of surfers. In those 10 years the Internet experience has changed significantly, as has the quantity and quality of search engine use. Ever wished you could go back? Find yourself missing the blink tag? Egosurfing when you could still find yourself online easily? This year marks Google's official 10th birthday and they've gone about celebrating in an assortment of ways. One of the most fun may be offering the opportunity to surf Google in 2001, complete with proper 2001 results. Finding no results for YouTube is only one of the oddities that may help remind you of how it once was. Enjoy!
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. As a first step to fulfilling that mission,... [more]
The Calgary Herald ran an article discussing the "Google gotcha" - federal election candidates that have resigned or faced heat over "controversial" content found about them on the Web.
One Toronto blogger rightly reasoned young candidates in urban ridings would be the most Internet-savvy and most likely to have an electronic trail. His hunch was right. He caught Ryan Warawa, a B.C. candidate who once posted blogs supporting the legalization of marijuana and prostitution. It wouldn't be a problem if he was a Green or NDP candidate, but he's a Conservative and his comments don't exactly reflect party policy. So it's a problem. The jury is still out on Warawa.
In contrast, the knife fell quickly on a Toronto Conservative candidate who used his blog to blame bus passengers for not intervening to stop the beheading of a fellow passenger, saying "this is where socialism has gotten us folks, a castrated effeminate population." Not a great campaign slogan; so he's now gone.
+3 mainstream media points for the phrase "once posted blogs".
Candidates from all parties have been effected. Here on the west coast, NDP candidates Dana Larsen and Kirk Tousaw resigned after online videos surfaced showing them smoking cannabis. This should come as no surprise given their histories in pro-cannabis advocacy. It's unfortunate that they, or any candidate, are being judged on a single act instead of the sum of their character. The trick, it seems, is to get elected first; see BC Premier Gordon Campbell's DUI.
The Internet gives us great power to learn about people and their histories, but nitpicking their every action is unproductive to the political process. How can a candidate be "down to earth" and "in touch with the people" while living the puritanical life necessary to pass these Google litmus tests? If you eliminate any candidate with a less than perfect record, who's left? Liars and Cylons.
The Canadian Federal Election runs October 14, 2008. Elections Canada will tell you all you need to know about register
