As Life Goes Digital !!

Google Chrome -- the browser from Google is released for windows and works only for Vista and XP for now and is in beta. I downloaded a copy that is around 475 KB much lesser size than IE and Firefox. It is sleek and loading pages fast. Some of the very useful Firefox add-ins are not available like adblock plus. May be some workaround is present similar to Firefox add-ins. First impressions are good and gotta wait and see if its a memory hog like Firefox when lots of tabs are opened.

Labels: Chrome, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Mozilla FireFox, Web browser, Windows Vista, Windows XP

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A new innovative challenge from Google to increase the user base for Google apps in engineering and MBA colleges.

From India's GoogleApp team :

1. Sign up for the challenge by September 15, 2008.
2. Get approval from your college's administration to implement Google Apps by October 15, 2008.
3. Work with your IT department to implement Google Apps by December 15, 2008.
4. Achieve the highest level of Google Apps usage amongst all participating colleges by January 31, 2009 to be declared the challenge winner!

Here is video of Kellogg ( Northwestern University, Chicago, US) director of technology talks about how they have benefited using Google Apps for their intranet IT solutions:



This in my opinion is good for colleges as Google will assign one Google employee to each team to help answer questions through out the challenge. Drawback is that they are targeting only Engineering and MBA colleges. Google is trying hard to push collaboration tools like its "Google Talk" , "Google Mail" to compete with "Microsoft Instant Messenger", "Outlook" as Microsoft dominates the corporate as well university accounts.

To learn more about GoogleApps watch this video from google - Googleapps Youtube video:

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Labels: Gmail, Google, Google Apps, Google Talk, Googlemail, India, MBA, microsoft, Northwestern University

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Image via WikipediaSummary:

"The cloud" aka "The internet" -- computing is a way to access all your data and even applications from any where via Internet. Google Docs is one of the examples of storing, sharing and retrieving documents by anyone form anywhere with any internet accessible PC. The biggest trend is the separation of hardware from software. Cloud Computing is promising trend that changes the way IS manages technology in next five years. All the IT operations can be run from a third party data centers relieving IT from some of the maintainability/support issues.

Analysis:

Cloud computing will be a big part in future of technology. Instead of storing our information on one computer or device, we store them in the clouds – over the internet and are thus accessible via our work computers, home computers and personal devices.

The growing requirement these days is accessibility of documents or applications in a centralized location. Two or three PCs at home and another PC at work, it is difficult to manage and work on same documents from multiple locations. SaaS -- Software as a Service is next big thing I feel that will avoid document versions clutter by making documents available at centralized location. Adobe made its photoshop software -- "Photoshop Express" available free for all online users. No-installation-required version is easy to access and user will get the same photo editing experience as in an desktop installed version.

Amazon has done a great job in commercializing the idea of cloud computing, and of bringing infrastructure as a service to start ups. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re sizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Does cloud computing makes money for the companies ? May be not for every company that's in cloud computing. Google was able to cash by getting as many people as possible looking at advertising alongside search and other various software offerings.

I think the market is not yet ready for prime time. Free web based apps still lacks some powerful features to replace desktop version. Security is one major area of concern I feel that limits what can be done in "cloud computing".

Source:

What Does Cloud Computing Mean for You?

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Labels: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Cloud computing, Clouds, Google, Google Docs, Software as a service, United States, World Wide Web

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Image by Getty Images via DaylifeGoogle reported that its second quarter profit rose 35% but its flag ship ad business is slowing as the number of paid clicks at the Web giant continued to slow.

Summary:

The #1 search engine that redefined internet is facing legacy system issues as they grow bigger and bigger as company. Getting ad money from YouTube has become a challenge for Google. YouTube with one billion plus page views got a meager $200 million last year. The challenge for Google is take their legacy applications which are popular with text ads to next level i.e. video ads. Besides technology issues the advertisers are hesitant to display their ads besides amateur videos. The lessons learned from Google's issues is that continuous focus is required on legacy systems by improving them to stay on top in the business.

Analysis :

I feel part of the revenue loss can be attributed to the cautious steps that Google is taking as infringement law suits are increasingly filed against YouTube business of Google. It is surprising to note that a world class company like Google lacks fully automated billing system for YouTube and the bills are counted manually. Advertisers had to pore over three separate legal contracts for Google sales people to get back to the advertisers shows how worse is the usability of the legacy system. The team found 105 ad sales problems with YouTube and 24 internal systems are touched to customize to what advertisers need, this shows us the growing problems of complicated system. It is good for Google that it faced similar issues in the past with the "Project Drano" because of overlap of sales database and disparate billing systems. With the current problems the "Project Spaghetti" is aimed to fix the issues and start gaining market share. Combining acquired companies sales systems is always a challenge in acquisitions.

Video:



Source : Google Push to Sell Ads On YouTube Hits Snags

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Labels: Companies, Google, News and Media, Project Spaghetti, Search Engines, Searching, Weblogs, youtube

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Find the location of person like from which town or state or country that he/she is Googling your name. Before knowing Ziggs.com the only other way I know was with Google Alerts which send you a mail of the search made but not the geographic information that you want. Ziggs is a free service and claims it will pinpoint the location of person Googling you from any part of the world.

Ziggs offers a global map pin pointing every location in the world from which you’ve been searched. In Ziggs, click on your Search Alerts link in the *Message Center of your Hub*. This feature requires logging on to Ziggs.com

Labels: Google

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My site has been doing good recently with topping 1670 visits on one weekend. The weekend traffic seems to be higher.The average vistors are around 400 per day.Here is how Google Anaytics shows the visitors count by day.

Thank to all of you who are silently promoting and P.R ing my site to increase traffic.

As one user commented - "Keep it real! Keep it alive!" is my new stolen tag line.

Labels: Google, mysitestatistics

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Today I was searching in Google for MP3 players blog. This caught my attention as one of my search results say "This site may harm your computer" This is a good news that gives me peace of mind in browsing all those search result sites.



Why do some of my search results say "This site may harm your computer?"

This warning message appears with search results that we've identified as sites that may install malicious software on your computer. We want our users to feel safer when they search the web, and we're continuously working to identify such dangerous sites and increase protection for our users.

Happy safe Googling.

Labels: Google, malacious software, This site may harm your computer, warning

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