So, it appears that Google is populating suggestion searches on Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, but apparently not Islam. At first I was very skeptical of Google censoring after hearing a story on CNN, so I wanted to see if it were true on my own. Well apparently it’s true.
My only guess at why they would be doing is is that they’re trying to avoid radical Muslims calling them out for auto populating searches like “Islam is bullshit”, “Islam (terrorists)”, or other potentially offensive searches. I can understand why they’d want to avoid this but I think by being completely transparent and equal across the board they would avoid the issue with less controversy.
This is a guest post by a very early to the game, iGoogle widget developer who turn a small project into a huge profit. Cameron Hall, a co-worker of mine, and a graduate of Cornell University held onto his widget just long enough so he could use the credibility as a resume builder. He ended up (unintentionally) maximizing the widgets monetary value and getting big cash and was able to land a job with a GE management training program with the story.
In February of 2008, I sold less than 100 lines of public code requiring less than 20 hours of work for $28,000. What started as a personal project to make my Google homepage more personal, turned into a 300,000 user worldwide phenomenon
in less than a year and a half. My post below takes you through the life of my National Geographic Photo of the Day gadget from its creation in mid 2006 to its sale in early 2008.
People think that winning an awards show like The Crunchies makes them a success…false. Along those lines, SO many people consider getting a solid round of venture funding a success…false again.
Why or how is it that a company can be successful without making money (or, creating value)? If you sell your company to Google or Oracle or whoever, then you’re a success. You’ve created an entity that creates value enough for another entity to spend $$$ for what you’ve created. Similarly, if you create an entity that creates value enough so that consumers or other businesses purchase your product, and the money you make from that sale can cover the costs to create that product, then you’re a success. This is business success, very simple.
The notion of winning a venture round = business success, is still being carried over from the dot-com bubble of 2001 and the sooner it dies the better off entrepreneurs and VC’s will be.
I know that every blog on the planet is going to have a post about how Google adds video chat but I thought that if its something that interests me and its something that will change the tools I use to communicate on the web I would still write about it. Bear with me…
Google’s new chat service looks to be amazing. In all of my testing of video chat tools for ActionsTalk I’ve found that iChat on the Mac has the best video quality and Skype video chat is the quickest (less delays). Now I’ve tested Google chat against those two tools on those two criteria and it wins both. The video quality is really amazing especially when you keep the view at the default size (full screen is pretty sweet though). Also, the speed of the video is phenomenal! Blake and I use video chat all the time to collaborate on startup projects and I think we’ve found the tool that will replace the others. We used it for about an hour and it did freeze once though…I hardly consider this a FAIL…it’s early.
I’ve not tested out the record functionality yet but it looks like it is there… and the view yourself window if very flexible with sizing (a plus for recording). I’ll definitely be giving Google video chat my attention over the next few days!
A quick note about Google: They seem to be able to enter a market so quickly and with such huge force. It is very possible that because of the large number of users on Gmail, services like Skype will have significant drops in users. Google is currently and will be for sometime a very scary force for ‘almost’ any startup. A startup can work for months or even years and spend tons of money on developing a product and can be put to rest in a matter of days if Google enters the market, BEWARE. However, startups should also see this as a huge opportunity. Why you ask? Because if Google wants to enter a market and you have a leading product $$$aquisitions bells start ringing$$$. The lesson here is beware and prepare Google ain’t slowin down.
Let me know what you think of the new Google video chat. Better, worse, better in some instances?
This morning I signed a petition for Free the Airwaves that would help the wireless initiatives in the US. Remember the fuzzyness between TV channels, well those radio airwaves are currently controlled by the FCC and in Feb 2009 they are going to decide whether or not they will open up that “white space” spectrum, as it is technically termed, to the public. I’m a huge fan of almost any open wireless initiative. ActionsTalk featured Shaheeb’s project for WireFreeMKE a few months back and as these projects work individually toward the same cause we support less regulation of this potential reality. Free wireless, more internet, happy us.
To the members of the Federal Communications Commission:
I’m writing to urge you to open up currently unused parts of the TV spectrum (the “white spaces”) for wireless broadband and other emerging technologies. I applaud the extraordinary steps the Commission has taken to realize the potential of TV white spaces to date, and encourage you to take the next step at your meeting on November 4.
The potential benefits of freeing up this important public resource, more than three-quarters of which today is unused, are overwhelming.
The white spaces can:
* Pave the way for universal wireless broadband access;
* Extend broadband wireless to rural areas that currently aren’t connected at all;
* Enhance the reliability of public safety communications;
* Enable distance learning for students in remote locations or for whom traditional classroom-based learning is impractical; and,
* Bring high-speed mobile internet access to every high school and middle school in the country.
Opening up unused TV spectrum might be one of our best remaining chances to address the digital divide by creating affordable and truly universal broadband wireless coverage in the U.S.
I urge you to take this rare opportunity to connect millions more people to the Internet.
Now is the time to put the power of better and faster broadband in the hands of innovators and entrepreneurs. At your November 4 meeting, please move forward with rules that make the best possible use of these airwaves.
As I watched my Feedjit widget and keep a close eye on those who show up in MyBlogLog, I saw an significant increase in readers from outside the US. Which is awesome! I love when I got to the blog of someone who’s avatar shows up in MyBlogLog and their blog is in a different language. How cool is it that people are reading my blog in English even though it is their second language, answer = very!
So, in an effort to grow the global reach of Ryan A Graves.com (currently over 3k/month) I’ve added another widget to blog. I’m going to use the Google Translate widget to allow readers from all over the world read this blog. Currently, there is not a way to translate comments but I know Fred Wilson has made that feature request to the Disqus team. I would just like to thank anyone who has been reading this blog with English as a second language. I hope that the translate feature will help you enjoy even more. If you are one of those people I would love for you to leave a comment so that I can get in touch with you.
I love when new tools like this become popular and even the standard on the web. It just re-affirms that the time and effort we are all putting in to grow the web and help people develop a presence on it is not in vain. Obviously this is a great Google tool but these opportunities are out there for startups! Go out there and make a valuable tool!
Lots of schools have similar programs already. They just don’t have huge companies.MSOE will pay for your patents, and still rarely anyone takes them up on it.
Why?
Students aren’t fundamentally trained to think about growing a business using their engineering skills. Initiatives like KEEN aim to change that.
We’ve actually laid a much better framework for the future, but it’s hard to see the benefits in the short run.
We should talk more about the culture that creates this at some point. There are all kinds of startups around Stanford, so they in turn have students creating new businesses. The chicken creates the egg, and the egg creates the chicken. At MSOE (again an example I use because I go there), we’re working hard to create the chicken so that it can create eggs simply by being associated with the school. A culture of entrepreneurship.
If you go south of the border to IIT (not to be confused with ITT). They’re a mile down the road already and creating lots of businesses. Their culture is inspiring MSOE students though. Cooperation between the schools has been great so far.
What we need in the MKE/CHI corridor is one big win. Doesn’t even have to be Google sized, but something that really gets the idea going in people’s heads. Programs like KEEN are already helping to bridge the gaps between institutions so everyone doesn’t need a chicken to get eggs.
A side effect of a successful startup in a city is more startups. We just need that successful startup.
Students create interesting idea using university resources. Students create a company and have an exclusive license to use the technology, which they made at their institution. Institution gets bragging rights and extra revenue for the school. For an entrepreneur to promise a large amount of ROI to their university, without even knowing what to promise, I’m not surprised that Marc Andreesen went west. –from Chicago Tech Report
I have two thoughts on this.
1) Why don’t more schools have this structure set up for companies that are started at the university?
This credibility that Standford gets, especially with a company like Google is huge. Other schools with awesome technology programs like University of Illinois and also University of Wisconsin (Madison) should definitely be taking advantage of this opportunity. A few weeks back Eric Olson wrote about the Midwest brain drain. This is a great opportunity to combat that problem. Here’s what you do, stop the drain even before it becomes a leak, it’s as simple as providing a better opportunity and a better chance for success! That’s the question all ’smart’ entrepreneurs are asking themselves, what position do I have to put my company in to have a better shot at success? The best position for web startups is still either Silicon Valley or NYC but that could change with the increasing number of VC’s in the midwest and hopefully an increase in investment from universities.
2) Would this structure be a deterrent for entrepreneurs at a university program?
The argument here would be, why would I want to give the university a guaranteed piece of the pie? I’ll tell you why, this model is proven. It’s the same decision a company has to make when taking VC money. We give you a portion of our equity and you give us resources. Sometimes those resources come in the form of cash, sometimes in the form of coaching or advice from a board member. Either way, the return that a company gets from taking VC money and having the opportunity to grow, or taking university resources and having the opportunity to start is usually well worth it.
This afternoon I watch the BearHug Camp hosted by Steve Gillmor. The event was focused on the progress of the micro-blogging space. One of the main topics of conversation was around live search of the Twitter data. Currently there is nothing that is “real time” and for political purposes among others this service is much desired.
Evan, Biz, and Alex from Twitter came just before lunch and they really took a lot of heat. Many of the comments online stated that it seemed that Steve set this group up to “gang” up on the Twitter crew. My perception is that this is probably true. The guys were put on the spot big time about how they will listen to the developer community going forward. Alex’s response was that his email is an open door for suggestions, comments, concerns (alex@twitter.com).
In attendance from my point of view (online) was Loic Lemeur (Seesmic), Leo Laporte (TwiT Army) who livestreamed the event, Dave Winer (Scripting.com), Ari Steinberg (Facebook), Kevin Marks (Google Open Social), Angus Logan (Microsoft), identi.ca guys, among a group of developers in their respective fields. There was a lot of talk around XMPP becoming just as common as HTTP so that the web can be much more LIVE!
My take-aways: This event was interesting but the stubbornness of Steve Gillmor and the politically motivated conversations took away from the event. The best part of the event that I enjoyed the most was the time that Evan, Biz, and Alex were there. The conversation although tough for them was the most focused that it had been all day. I see a huge push for the web to become more and more “live”. The web used to be static, now it’s updated, next it will be live!
Last night I had the pleasure of having an extended conversation with the CTO of GE Healthcare, Nevin Zimmermann, about CEO’s and what they are able to accomplish with a given company. We talked about the past CEO of GE Healthcare, Joe Hogan, and the current CEO of GE Healthcare, John Dineen, and their differences. He explained to me that certain leaders are great at leading during certain periods of time in a businesses life. It has to do with their individual leadership styles. It was no secret that Joe Hogan was a phenomenal growth leader taking the business from $8-12 billion to $17 billion in annual revenue, huge growth! But, now that the business climate has changed significantly there have been leadership changes. These changes in leadership styles are essential as a business moves from a “boost profit” mentality to a “cut costs” mentality. No doubt this attitude will switch back and forth, but that is what is required for business growth.
This corporate lesson is a great one for start-up CEO’s. Many times the start-up founders find that they are great at “founding” but not as great at running/growing a company. Many find that they enjoy that starting phases of a start-up but don’t enjoy the growing phases or the process implementation phases. This can be difficult for a start-up founder who is used to having control over almost everything that company does, and now has to begin to give up control and ‘trust’ others with their company. This first starts with the realization that the entity that they have created is now larger than them and that they must act in the best interest of that entity over their own best interest.
Certain leaders are “one trick ponies” in that they can only start, only grow, or only cut costs, but cannot find those other leadership styles needed to lead through multiple business environments. Sometimes that is ok in the corporate world, and sometimes that is ok in the start-up world. After all Larry and Sergey passed Google off to Eric Schmidt when they realized they needed somebody with the business and leadership experience to lead Google into the next growth phases. They made the right decision and it worked. The most important thing is for the start-up founder to be self aware and realize who and how they are as a leader. For a founder to say, “someone else would do this job better than I would” is a very difficult thing, but sometimes it needs to be said for good of the company.
This week is said to be the release of Google Chrome, the much rumored Google web browser. Google released a comic book of all things to tell the tale of why (and how) they’ve built this browser to be the best. One browser to rule them all!At the roots of Google Chrome is the understanding that an increasing number of websites that people run today are applications. Google wants to create a better experience for those users who are increasingly moving apps from the desktop to the browser, Google’s ‘cup-o-tea’.
Also, in standard Google “Be Good” fashion the Chrome browser will be open source in an effort to promote competition on the web. As Google’s Android efforts for the mobile OS are increasingly compared to Microsoft Windows for the PC, Google wants to continue to differentiate themselves from Microsoft by actually promoting competition (see Microsoft anit-trust issues).Google as a company/platform is completely web based. Every service or application they offer relies on the web and the promotion of progress of the internet is key to their success (and continued dominance, in my opinion) in that space. They understand that web innovation is moving at lightning speeds and that keeping things open and usable are key to that progress.Another stand out feature of the Chrome browser is the UI. At first glance you may feel that its interface is “bare boned” but they claimed the the speed that this simplicity allows will out way any concerns.Below is a mock-up of the potential homepage where they will intuitively bring your most visited sites to a “dashboardish” page. On the left will be the pages you visit most (i.e. email, blog, calendar, news, etc.) and on the right will be the search bar for the sites that you search most (i.e. Amazon, IMDB, Wikipedia). They warn that at first you will probably be taken aback by this change but they insist that you will grow to love it! I have faith.
My suggestion is to read the entire comic of how and why the Google Chrome browser is being release but at least now you have a quick overview. The image below (last page of the comic) shows, from beginning to end, why the Chrome browser will be great. With this browser it seems that everything from speed, to development (using Gears), to browsing, to security has been covered. It seems as usual that Google has really dotted each “i” and crossed every “t”.
I’ll definitely be an early adopter on this product!
Update to post: I have downloaded and installed Chrome. The main thing that stands out after about an hour is the speed. It is so FAST!
I love this image because for me it encompasses the way people <bias> should use the internet<bias/>. Personally, these are the three tiers of my web experience. The hardware, the interaction, the information.
Tier #1: Apple
As you probably know if you read this blog regularly I recently purchased a Mac Book Pro and absolutely love it. It is so nice to finally have a machine that I don’t have to worry about it working properly. The suite of applications is just as robust or better than a PC running Windows and is likely better designed. So, let me just dispel the rumor that you won’t be able to find applications for a Mac. I can guarantee if you enjoy being on a computer at all then getting a Mac will exponentially increase that enjoyment. I see Macs continually increasing their market share and thus being the premier computers (mainly laptops) of the future.
Tier #2: Facebook
In my eyes Facebook sort of represents social networking on the web. I was a relatively late adopter to the social web and that was in 2004 when Facebook really started to grow to other universities outside of Harvard. I remember the day that my school, Miami (OH), got Facebook. I joined that day. We had heard about it prior to its arrival because of the stink that MySpace was making. How much better is Facebook?
Obviously there are other social tools out there, that’s not what I’m arguing. I’m merely using Facebook as the poster child for the social web. Social software has changed the general uses of the web. The days of one way information flows on the internet are archaic. The web will can only get more and more interactive.
Tier #3: Google
The top layer of these building blocks is Google. Really it could be the first layer or the middle later but for the sake of this image, its the top. Google is the key to the door that keeps information from the consumer. Can you imaging an internet where you had to guess URLs in order to find good websites? Or a web where only the highest paying websites would come up? You wouldn’t be reading this, that’s for sure (hold comments about wishing you weren’t reading this!) The web is open, accessible, free, opportunistic, all thanks to the guys who wanted to download the internet, Google.
How many of you have never noticed the arrow between the ‘E’ and ‘x’ on the FedEx logo? I bet quite a few. Well you’ll never be able to look at the FedEx logo again and not see that arrow.
This is why graphic designers get paid good money. This logo is phenomenal.
Yesterday I had an opportunity to speak with Gary Reiner, CIO of General Electric and ask him anything that I wanted. It was part of my new gig in a GE leadership training program. I don’t discuss my job here on ActionsTalk but this experience and opportunity forced me to break that rule. Here are my notes from the talk with Gary:
When asked about IT’s contribution to the business, Reiner replied…IT not a contributor or service for the business, IT is the business, fully integrated. Any project that is taken on will fail if it is considered an IT project. A project should only be undertaken if it will improve the business and improve a process that the business executes. These process improvement project will succeed. Along those lines he expanded that the best measure of a process is “cycle time”.
When asked about Open Source products Reiner was very enthusiastic. He was heavily in favor and a current user of products like Skype and OpenOffice. He would even like to incorporate them into the worlds largest company if it wasn’t for issues like security, transition difficulties, and vendor support, all of which are major concerns.
There were other topics discussed that would not be appropriate for me to share on this forum. A few of these topics discussed were emerging new technologies and the companies that are developing these technologies and also many other GE specific topics.
Gary Reiner was incredibly approachable, inquisitive, broad in his knowledge of GE and the world economy and genuinely interested in what we (as low level developing managers) had to contribute. Having an opportunity to speak with Gary was an exceptional experience!
This morning, I needed to access my Google Docs to find a password that I had saved. After trying to open my Google Docs page to access the folder I needed I was unable to access it. It read that it was loading for over 20 minutes…
If Google allows these types of error that limit or deny peoples access to there saved data it will ruin peoples trust in using Google docs. I’m usually a huge supporter of Google but access to ones data is a huge issue that I hope they get worked out.
Have you had problems with Google or Google docs? Leave comments!
Hi. I'm Ryan Graves and this is my personal blog. I'm an entrepreneur living in Chicago, working in San Francisco, but from San Diego. My wife blogs too, and I <3 my family.
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