The Drill Down

• • “So while Windows 7 may not right all of Vista’s wrongs, it is absolutely superior to its predecessor. It has three years of improvements, so it can’t help but be better. Windows 7 is, overall, a fantastic OS. It builds on a solid platform, and just makes it even better.”

• Bing / the fight for search revenue

• Google everything

• Wave
  • Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

  “Google Wave was oversold as something you’d use with the public, or at least with large groups of friends, like you use Twitter, email, or Facebook. No. Using it that way is an attention dump and will kill your productivity. Google Wave is actually closer to IM. Great with your very close friends or very active coworkers but horrid for nearly everyone else. Google’s Wave will crash hard onto the beach of overhype.”

• Chrome OS
  • “Let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its post, “However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” Yeah, who do you think they mean by that?”
  • First, it’s all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.
• Real-time search
  • Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.
• Public DNS
  • The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can slow down the browsing experience. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users’ web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable.
• URL shortener

• • First, we think people who use the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner will benefit from a shortener that is easily accessible — making it faster and easier to share, post and email links. Second, we’ve built this on Google’s global infrastructure to offer the following benefits:
  • Stability: Google’s scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
  • Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
  • Speed: At Google we like fast products and we’ve worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We’ll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

• Emergence of Smartphones/App Stores

• • The success of the iPhone App Store surprised everyone, even Apple itself.
    • The 2-billion-apps-sold milestone, reached in late September after just a year and a half of sales, surpassed even the most optimistic expectations inside of Apple. The success of the App Store is attributable to a sort of positive feedback loop among developers and users. Developers created the 100,000+ apps that are currently available, giving users a smartphone platform that is capable of almost limitless functions. The growing user base that was attracted to the selection of apps then provides developers a large potential market to address with new applications.

• • The Google Phone, Unlocked
    • Google is building their own branded phone that they?ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).There won?t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone?s design of features ? Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google?s pure vision of what a phone should be.The phone itself is being built by HTC, with a lot of input from Google.

Lidija

1. Yahoo-Microsoft Deal

2. Internet censorship a go in Oz

3. Steve Jobs takes medical leave

4. Not so much a written story,  more an observation by many and something that has been increasingly more pronounced in 2009: We cant live without twitter.  This especially is noticeable during attacks on twitter… (maybe i’m the only one that notices, but i don’t think so….

JD

1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20091208/tc_pcworld/googlesrealtimesearchreadytochallengebing
2. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125382643140938735.html
3. http://mashable.com/2009/06/21/iran-election-timeline/
4. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Bill-Grants-President-Unprecedented-Cyber-Security-Powers-504520/
5. http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/steve-jobs-is-taking-a-leave-of-absence-from-apple-due-to-healt/