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The blogosphere is all abuzz over Google’s new browser - Chrome, which has been released today.
Usually I’m critical when a company launches a product for PC-only first, but in this case it plays to Google’s full frontal assault on Microsoft.
While you wait for the Mac version, check out this video about life at Google:
Tags: Chrome
Google’s customer satisfaction rating in 2008 has leapt 10% on the back of its transition from a search engine to a full service portal, according to a report from the University of Michigan.
The annual e-business report measures the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) and Google achieved 86 on the 100-point scale, one of the top ratings for any service company.
Not surprisingly, though, MSN and Yahoo lagged with an unchanged rating and a 3% fall respectively.
You can download the report here.
Google recently released its Insights product, which Andrew Chen describes as an insanely useful product. If you are a trendfollower or coolhunter then this is absolutely true.
Be warned though, as with many things in life, you get out what you put in - read Eric Schonfeld’s take on inputting “twitter” rather than “twitter.com” for a true representation of the microblogging tool’s US coverage.
Tags: Andrew Chen, Eric Schonfeld, Insights, TwitterReading this post from Steven Hodson I am forced to wonder whether putting all my email eggs into Google’s basket is a good idea.
I use gmail almost exclusively these days. I even route my corporate email through Google’s mail solution.
He makes a good point regarding customer service, but as a user, we should also seriously consider some form of redundancy when it comes to the web services we rely on. I don’t have the answer here, but believe this is a very serious issue.
One of the earlier social networking pioneers, Friendster, has continued its Asian-led comeback with a $20 million infusion from IDG Ventures and previous investors [Benchmark, DAG Ventures, Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins].
In addition to the cash Friendster has secured Richard Kimber, formerly Google’s South Asian Regional MD, as CEO.
Also raising $20 million is SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led space transporteer. The round was provided by Founders Fund. Musk is a former South African and founder of Paypal and Tesla. The recent test of their Falcon 1 rocket hit a snag with stage separation lock. This led to the craft not achieving orbit. Elon has unequivocally stated that they are still on track - the message from this funding round backs him up.
Founders Fund are having a busy time of it lately. One of their other portfolio companies, Facebook, is apparently contemplating empowering staff to sell off a portion of their vested stock. This accords with the philisophy of letting founders cash out along the journey, which has been a key Founders Fund differentiator - extending it to all employees is an interesting move.
Incidentally LinkedIn is also reportedly [via VentureBeat] contemplating this route.
Tags: Elon Musk, Facebook, Founders Fund, Friendster, Richard Kimber, SpaceX
Omnisio has been acquired by Google as YouTube’s first acquisition since they were themselves acquired a few years back. You can listen to the recent Metarand Unplugged audio interview with the video annotation startup’s CEO, Ryan Junee, here - in it we talk about the company and their journey through Paul Graham’s Y Combinator program.
Besides Ryan and his two fellow Aussie co-founders, Paul must himself be over the moon — from woe to go this must’ve been one of the quickest exits for Y Combinator. Atherton-based Omnisio launched in March 2008.
The best part - Ryan is a committed serial entrepreneur and I fully expect we’ll be hearing more great things from him in the near future.
While Ryan did not disclose to us the quantum of the deal, Michael Arrington has surmised it as being in the $15 million range.
The entertainment industry has to date taken somewhat of a field of dreams approach to creating content - build it and they will come.
But Google, which up until this point has avowed not to be a content player, is taking a different approach that leverages its existing adsense infrastructure beautifully.
Rather than creating a new comedy series and hoping the audience will come, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has teamed up with Google to distribute his new comedy series exclusively via the web.
Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy will be syndicated to sites that are determined by the Adsense system to be the right profile for the demographic the series is targeted at. Cavalcade video clips, with a variety of pre-roll, banner and other ad formats will be streamed instead of static Adsense ads.
This Google Content Network is both a brilliant way of leveraging an existing infrastructure and a great example of a distributed content model at work.
[via NY Times]
Tags: Family Guy, Google, Seth McFarlaneThis morning I attended the first day of Mobile Content World in Sydney.
It’s an interesting time to have the mobile industry talking about content in Australia, given the pending arrival of the Apple iPhone, especially since it will be supported by no less than three carriers.
The first panel session, after the usual keynotes, was a cacaphony of carrier reps. I couldn’t help feeling, that as much as they tried to stay off the path, they were deer in the iPhone’s headlights. The full browser experience is going to shake their businesses to their foundations.
As Google’s Nick Heller pointed out to me in the break, they are experiencing 10x the amount of search queries via the iPhone compared to any other mobile browser. That is a significant difference and one that will radically shape the user experience and concomitant ARPU for all of the players moving forward. Walled gardens, however much players like Telstra try to argue that they are open gardens, remain… well, …walled gardens and consumers will leave them in droves for the open web.
The mobile browser situation, however, is far from settled. A case in point is the $13M in Series B funding SkyFire has picked up in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to develop a downloadable browser to work across all mobile-device platforms.
This Mountain View company aims to replicate the PC experience on mobile handsets with an everything works mantra - Flash content, Web 2.0, Ajax etc.
Kleiner Perkins-iFund backed Pelago has also raised a $15M Series B to continue developing Whrrl, its mobile social network. MocoNews describes Whrrl as:
a mix between Facebook, City Search and Loopt. The social networking element is that you can share this information with friends, the directory part is that there’s a list of restaurants and events that your friends can rate and say whether they are going to or not, and the Loopt part is you can see what your friends are up to.
Clearly there is much afoot in this space. I’ll watch closely to see how the Australian carriers and mobile players shape up over the coming months as the iPhone permeates their ecosystem. Stay tuned…
[Picture courtesy of heritagefuture]
Tags: iPhone, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Mobile Content World, Pelago, SkyFire
How close are we to true data portability? It depends who is asking the question as to how it gets answered.
As one of the chief catalysts for the current wave of discussion and (some) action, Chris Saad, points out none of the current high profile implementations are completely true to the overall understanding of portability.
Writing on his blog, Chris sees Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect and MySpace’s Data Availability as important first steps. They are the first shots across the bow to the industry that a data portability battle is coming.
That battle will involve a squareoff between the user: me, you - and the networks collectively.
I like Chris’s address book analogy:
DataPortability is about a different social contract - a contract more closely resembling the one found in the email address book.
My address book is my own. When you email me, or when you communicate with me, you are revealing something about yourself. You define a social contract with me that means that I can use your information to contact you whenever and however I like - I could even re-purpose my address book for all manor of other things.
If, however, you violate that trust, either directly or indirectly, you break the social contract and I will tend to not deal with you again. We can not perfectly engineer these sorts of contracts into systems - we can try, but in the end social behavior will be the last mile in enforcing user rights.
Also, the dichotomy between who ‘owns’ the data is false. In my mind there is shared ownership. While you use a service, it is a shared custodianship of the data. By giving the service your data you’re getting something else in return - utility. In many cases free utility.
You personally, however, have shared (and overriding) ownership over your data. This has been declared as universally true by all the vendors I’ve spoken to.
The question is not one of ownership though, it’s one of control. If you own your data but can’t control it as you choose then ownership is a mute point. Further, the question is not one of if you own it, but rather how much of it you own.
For example, do you own your friends profile data since you have access to it via the social tool you are using? Or have they only granted you access within that social context and under that social contract. These considerations blur the analogy of the purely personal address book.
So where does this leave us. The industry continues to engage in discussion and analyse the meaning of both data portability and the current implementations. As long as this dialogue continues the looming squareoff will remain just that - looming. We are in a honeymoon period in which users are coming to grips with their rights and freedoms and comparing the various networks to determing whether and to what extent they are being violated.
For now, data portability continues to have relevancy and I do not believe our rights have been flushed away. However, I would encourage all players to listen very carefully to the conversation going on.
As I’ve said many times: the Internet giveth, the Internet taketh away - and it can do both with blinding speed. This is especially relevant for Facebook, given the current meme around its intentions started by Umair Haque.
UPDATE: Robert Scoble has a sound analysis of the situation, after an initial misunderstanding on his part. Have a read, the best part is him putting his participation on the Gillmor Gang on mute, having a shower and then coming back on the show. I know it’s been hot in the Bay area the last few days, but this is hilarious and about all the GG seems good for - cooling off.
[Picture courtesy of willgrant]
Tags: Chris Saad, Data Availability, DataPortability, Facebook, Facebook Connect, Friend Connect, Google, MySpace, Robert Scoble, Umair Haque
Chris Saad, the CEO of Faraday Media and a Co-Founder of the DataPortability Group, talks about the Group’s journey over the past few months…from logo wars through to an impressive impact on the technology majors like Google and Microsoft.
We also asked him about the amount of time he is spending on DataPortability versus his other projects and he gives a hint of some interesting Faraday developments.
Lastly we discussed how the mobile landscape interfaces with DataPortability’s roadmap.
Stream the session in Quicktime:
Tags: Chris Saad, DataPortability, Faraday Media, Metarand Unpluged