www.nickhodge.com

As per yesterday’s post, I am attempt­ing to live out­side desktop applic­a­tions.

Notes

• Signed up for Google Apps for Your Domain. As I am enter­ing a “micro-business”, I really don’t want to set up all the infra­struc­ture. I hope Doc­u­ments, Spread­sheets and soon Google­Share­point (formerly known as Jot­Spot) will flow into these cus­tom apps soon.
• VoIP. Inter­est­ing thing to research: SIP etc. It’s all too hard. I’d like to have a busi­ness phone num­ber, voice­mail, mobile phone redir­ec­tion etc — without adding a new Tel­stra phoneline. Seems more dif­fi­cult than it should at the moment.
• Wire­less 802.11n: these vir­tual machine vir­tual drives are huge, and 802.11g isn’t fast enough to exchange them to/from the server.
• A Google Con­tact List. I’d like my con­tacts some­where safe in Google. Maybe even a small busi­ness CRM, too. Maybe Google should just buy Stikkit
• Google Cal­en­dar on mobile. At the moment, mobile access is via SMS only (if you are in the US). Just like the excel­lent Gmail mobile inter­face, I should be able to see my cal­en­dar online.

Now ABC News is report­ing that Doc­tors use Google to dia­gnose patients. Every time I go to the doc­tor, he tells me not to con­sult the inter­net for med­ical advice.

I’ve always wanted a search engine for just the sites I’ve tagged in del.icio.us.

With Google Cus­tom Search Engine, I’ve added my del.icio.us sub­scrip­tions page to the Included Sites. You could prob­ably do the same thing with Google Marker from your subscriptions.

Yes, a smarter way of set­ting this up could be a dynam­ic­ally gen­er­ated page con­tain­ing just links from your tags.

The simple con­nec­tion method seems to work.

So Google pur­chased You­Tube. US$1.65B in shares, paper-work money or an entry in an SEC filing.

In cold-hard num­bers: You­Tube has a repor­ted 100 mil­lion view­ers per day; based on the pur­chase price, each view equates to US$0.0452 over a year. Or, another way to look at it: as long as Google “earns” US5c for each pair of eye­balls for a few minutes, within a year it is fin­an­cially ahead.

Con­sid­er­ing the cur­rent cost of both text-advertising and TV advert­ising; and the oncom­ing onslaught from com­pet­it­ors such as Microsoft and Yahoo!, US5c per view seems rather attractive.

Oppor­tun­ity cost of not own­ing You­Tube: a com­pet­itor would have pur­chased it, first. Fox had already pur­chased the young Myspace eye­balls; and Microsoft is ser­i­ous about the online world and has all those XBoxen, Vis­tas, Zunes to cap­ture other eye­balls. You­Tube was obvi­ously on the block for sale, and each viewer is val­ued at US$0.0452. US$1.65B is not too much com­pared to a com­pet­itor get­ting the brand. You­Tube maybe the “text break­out” and single product weak­ness that dogged Google in recent months. (Robert Scoble has a per­spect­ive on this, too)

Look­ing into my crys­tal tube: Google’s Video Future: It is all about about the advert­ising. Poten­tial changes to Google Adsense:

• Text links inside an ad (trans­par­ent text on bot­tom); through to top+tail video or sound bytes
• Throw more smart maths at tech­no­logy to recog­nise the con­tent inside video and then attach appro­pri­ate a like advertisement
• The ori­ginal pub­lisher of you­tubes (another verb com­ing on, here?) self-categorises, so advert­ise­ments could sim­il­arly be targeted.
• For you­tubes pos­ted on blogs or other non-Google web sites; under­stand­ing the con­text would per­mit smarter tar­geted Adsense ads

Instead of crawl­ing the inter­net, Google is becom­ing the inter­net. This is rather a scar­ily thought that crossed my mind when read­ing this Wired art­icle (The Inform­a­tion Factor­ies) on their new data cen­ter in Wash­ing­ton state, US. Ulti­mately, it may have been cheaper to buy You­Tube than cre­ate a backing-store to hold indexed video and sound.

So next: watch Apple and Google. Not sale or pur­chase, just closer ties. Apple needs the con­tent, Google needs the hard­ware. Microsoft is the com­mon competitor.

Hav­ing recently used Google Spread­sheets , and the bet­ter fea­tured Edit­Grid : I thought it best to give Google’s Writely a spin.
As a sid­e­note, I am con­tinu­ally impressed with Edit­Grid. The external Web data tool per­mits auto­mated for­eign exchange rate and stock mar­ket updat­ing. Every minute or so, there is a flash­ing in your spread­sheet as the data; includ­ing Aus­tralian Stocks, are updated. Excel­lent for man­aging a port­fo­lio online.
Back to Writely: this post is writ­ten in Writely: nor­mally I use Mars as my blog editor; and this whole “do it in the cloud” is all pretty new to me.
The data from each of these applic­a­tions: Edit­Grid, Writely, Google Spread­sheets: all live in their own clouds, and inter­chan­ging data is copy and paste from win­dow to win­dow. I also have to restart Fire­fox every couple of days as the memory use grows to 1.5Gb. And no, I have dis­abled all Fire­fox 2.0 exten­sions.
My wish is that data lived in the cloud, too. Applic­a­tions could push/pull data in a stand­ard way from the cloud. We are head­ing in that dir­ec­tion. Flickr is the almost the uni­ver­sal static image storer; You­tube the video stor­age “place”. Will an online virutal-file man­ager that ref­er­ences all these formats, no mat­ter the source, be the next ultra-cool Web 2.0 applic­a­tion?
It looks like Google is start­ing to grok: integ­ra­tion is key.

The HTML from Writely is bad. Lots of br’s; cer­tainly not XHTML compliant.

On10.net.

Microsoft on design; but more than sli­cing and dicing Pho­toshop. The big kahuna/picture. More than what it looks ini­tially too.

I am an avid watcher of Google’s EngEd videos (eg: Grid-based Integ­rated Bioin­form­at­ics Sys­tems for High Through­put), and Microsoft’s Channel9 videos (eg: Model driven devel­op­ment in Dynam­ics AX); these provide a visual per­spect­ive on from people who are involved in stuff you may not ever need to know about. But learn­ing is good.

Now wait­ing for Chan­nel 11 that goes up to 11.

Google and Intuit have announced a major part­ner­ship. Along with the Google Maps changes this week where an organ­isa­tion can advert­ise at a loc­a­tion — the world of web applic­a­tions and deeper con­nec­tion between the desktop and inform­a­tion — is at hand.

It would be extremely unlikely in the near-term that a web-based account­ing applic­a­tion for small busi­nesses would fly — as fin­an­cial inform­a­tion is the holy-of-holies for busi­ness. One can just ima­gine the pri­vacy watch­ers hav­ing a field day arguing against sens­it­ive num­bers being scattered through the tubes.

In my mind, being more con­nec­ted with this inform­a­tion aids the flow of busi­ness. The less paper­work in the world is a good thing. But my mind is a not a safe place for ideas such as this.

Back onto Intuit: recently, Aus­tralian retail­ers such as Office­Works and City Soft­ware have been advert­ising Quicken for AU$0.00 (after $99 cash back). Every­one in mar­ket­ing knows that there is never a 100% redemp­tion on these cash back offers; but still the num­bers seemed “odd” to me — didn’t add up to being bene­fi­cial to Intuit at all. If the redemp­tion rate drif­ted above 70% (that is, 70% of pur­chasers sent in their Intuit coupon, the each unit sold would cost more than they received in rev­enue in dir­ect costs)

There are sec­ond­ary rev­enue oppor­tun­it­ies: post-sales sup­port agree­ments and the abil­ity to direct-mail mar­ket future upgrades to the users who have redeemed their cash-back.

With the Google announce­ment, it all falls into place: the rev­enue is either from sup­port agree­ments you would pur­chase to help you determ­ine whether some­thing is an asset or a expense. The second rev­enue source is online, in-your-face, in con­text advertising.

Account­ants and book­keep­ers the world over are now going to see mul­tiple advert­ise­ments whilst send­ing out the day’s invoices.

As the world of pure-in browser applic­a­tions moves to richer cli­ent applic­a­tions, the new rev­enue stream open to smal­ler developers is enticing.

Get­ting mar­ket­ing people into the applic­a­tion as an advert­ising “plat­form” is the chal­lenge. Inter­est­ing world.

Nick Hodge, Flickr.com, Geot­agged: spent the greater part of today geot­ag­ging my images stored in Flickr. Geot­ag­ging is the addi­tion of spa­cial or geo­graph­ical metadata (that is: lat­it­ude and lon­git­ude) to my uploaded images. The four cam­eras I’ve used do not have GPS, so this geot­ag­ging caper is a manual post-processing effort.

The res­ol­u­tion of the Yahoo! Map Images for Sydney and Lon­don are excel­lent, the maps suck (unless you are in the US!). Even Tokyo’s map was strangely low res­ol­u­tion. At the time of writ­ing, 600,000 images have a geotag accord­ing to Flickr. Microsoft’s Local Live and Google’s Google Maps are way better.

Why invest the time?

Some­where, someday, someone is going to use this data to find out where someone was on a cer­tain day. Or, some smart soft­ware is going to cre­ate an inter­est­ing view of our world.
Time has been a part of the EXIF cam­era data for many years. These two dimen­sions are excel­lent for loc­at­ing on a simple 2D map, but do not give enough “res­ol­u­tion” to be for our Vir­tual Future. Apart from the height, the tar­get, tilt and head­ing would provide more data: Ima­gine a Second Life in a fully imaged, geot­agged, Microsoft PhotoSynth’d world. With the data out there in the cloud, we can live out our life in the vir­tu­al­ized clouds.
A most pleas­ant reason is to revisit your travels. Re-orienting your­self, remem­ber­ing the streets of Lon­don without the 28+ hour flight. Fun. Reliv­ing the past, vir­tu­ally. The future will be more out there and immersive.

Google­Park, in the style of South Park; Scoble. OK, you have to be a Web2.0 watcher to get some of it… trust me, it’s funny.

Sick of Google Earth, try a dif­fer­ent body in space: Google Moon.

Thanks to an old friend, Andrew, I now have a gmail.google.com account. Exper­i­ment time.