"That could change later this year when more phone makers like Motorola, Samsung, LG, and potentially Dell start selling Android-based phones."

At MWC yesterday, LG announced that they'd be choosing Windows Mobile 6.5 as their primary smartphone platform for all their new phones: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/feb...

That's a big brand explicitly not choosing Android, despite the reputed cost savings, openness, etc. of Android. I guess partnerships still reign supreme...

From a software perspective, there are already file formats that are designed specifically for archiving data: for example, there's a subset of PDF called PDF/A that's an ISO standard.

Of course, the side benefit of this massive increase in data is the increase in metadata (i.e. data about data). In the future, even if you can't read a file format, I'll bet you can find some data to tell you how you could read it...

Jeik - you haven't highlighted the Radiohead 'House of Cards' one... shame on you! ;-)

It kinda blew my mind when I first saw a high quality version of their video, recreating 3D scenes from laser data. Plus, they provide an app and the data so you can do the same. Ace.

Randomly, a colleague and I were doing some research into Spotify last summer because of their user experience. They use some complicated server & P2P streaming behind the scenes but the clever bit is the seeking to any position in a track with little to no delay. It doesn't sound that important but it's a really nice experience.

The trick (I think) is that when you seek to a new position Spotify immediately starts playing sound - its just Brown noise, or something similar - but they blend that into a low-bandwidth version of the song as soon as possible, then into a high bandwidth version. It's all psychoacoustic smoke-and-mirrors, but it's amazing how you can trick your ears into thinking that some random noise is the song you want, so long as it quickly blends seamlessly into the thing you are actually expecting to hear. It's a shame you can't use the same trick with video.

Cool application, but they're being screwed by the labels.

Interesting recent posts on Coding Horror about this.

One from this week entitled The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture.

The other is from 2 years ago and is called, rather ominously If It's Not in Google, Does Your Website Really Exist?

Well worth a read to see the practical impact that Google's 'non-monopoly' has on real businesses. ;-)

I understand it's really just a NAS device... something like a 20GB drive with integrated WiFi for use more as a teaching resource. Will try to dig out the source...

The trick with Google is not to look at their products in isolation: their business model isn't to make revenue on each of GMail, Chrome, Maps, Reader, Earth, etc, so an NPV analysis doesn't make sense here. Their overall strategy is to get people using the Internet more. That's it.

Think about it: their primary revenue remains search ads. To grow that, Google can increase market share (difficult, since they have a 'near monopoly' on online search) or increase market size ('relatively' easy, given social, economic & demographic trends). Providing 'interesting', useful applications - that people wouldn't actually pay cash for - is a way to make the entire Internet experience better and increases usage. Google subsequently captures 8 out of 10 Internet searches that all these Internet newcomers make. Sure, they can do it because they have lots of cash, but it's a virtuous circle they're creating.

Of course, they don't come up with all this stuff themselves. ;-) Like any good tech company, they're an active acquirer:
- Deja was acquired & rebranded Google Groups
- Blogger was acquired
- Picasa was acquired
- Keyhole's Earth Viewer was acquired and rebranded Google Earth
- Android was acquired
- Writely was acquired and became the word processor in Google Docs
- @Last was acquired and became Sketchup
- Youtube was acquired
- etc, etc.

I'd propose that Google have made only 2 important strategic innovations: their original search algortihm, and the subsequent business model. Everything else is tactical.

Most of the reviews I've read of iPhoto's Faces feature consist of people trying to get it to recognize their pet dog... :-)

Ditto - I think about joining but then catch myself with a "Phil, you self-important git. Who the hell wants to listen to your vapid ramblings?". So now I just post in blog comments. :-)

And what the hell has that picture got to do with marketing?

Venkatesh: Dan could become the next Rickroll phenomenon...