Where in the World are iPhone and Android Devices?

We often hear statistics about which type of mobile phone is the most used. However, this information always relates to the United States or North America.

Here are some interesting diagrams from AdMob giving more information on the importance of these devices in other parts of the world.

Source: Mashable

Google to offer visual identification to developers

Google’s Goggles product allows people to take a picture using their smartphone (Android only) and perform a search on Google using this picture. For example, taking a picture of the Golden Gate in San Francisco will perform a search for “Golden Gate Bridge” on Google.

Google said they will offer this technology as a platform to developers which will allow all kinds of products and services to be built.

It is very interesting when larger companies offer such services. This allow smaller teams to build very creative products as they only need to focus on the added value they can provide since the heavy-lifting has already been done by someone else.

Nalawadi promises that third-party apps will be able to build on Goggles; “Goggles is not just an app – it’s a platform. Yes, we do plan to open up the platform as an API but we are not sure what the platform should be.

“I’m interested in understanding from developers what are the features and capabilities of Goggles that would be good to expose.”

And that’s when what you could achieve looking at the world through Google Goggles could really change what you see: “What are the interesting apps you can come up with?” Nalawadi asks. “What user experience can you create when you have access to computer vision?”

Source: techradar.com

Microsoft Kin – The Social Phone

TNA: Microsoft introduced their new mobile phones product line: Kin. They have two versions, Kin one and Kin two. While everybody is trying to beat the iPhone, Microsoft is targeting the youth market hoping to be able to conquer this space.

A simple phone that makes it easy to stay connected to your friends and that has an original form-factor, they may have a winner here. This of course depends if they correctly adapted the phone for this market and if they push their product (marketing). However, during the last few days since the Kin has been announced, I haven’t seen much buzz generated by this phone.

Watch a demo video of the Kin

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Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two announced: Windows Phone roots with a social slant

It’s finally official: Microsoft Pink — the product of Redmond’s acquisition of Danger — has just been unveiled as a pair of handsets sourced from Sharp (which made most of Danger’s Sidekicks) known as the Kin One and Kin Two. The devices are being marketed as Windows Phones, and while they’re ultimately based on most of the same underpinnings of Windows Phone 7, it’s a distinctly and totally different experience — the entire user interface is custom to Kin with a heavy social media slant, a custom browser (we’re told it’s based on the Zune’s browser), and surprisingly, zero support for third-party apps. The displays are capacitive with support for multitouch (yes, you can pinch and zoom in the browser), but there’s no support for in-browser Flash or Silverlight.

Kin One — the phone we’d seen rumored as “Turtle” — is basically a curved square slider with a QVGA display, 4GB of internal storage, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and a full QWERTY keyboard. Kin Two, meanwhile, is the phone leaked as the “Pure,” upping the ante with a HVGA display and a more traditional landscape QWERTY slide form factor. It also moves up to an 8 megapixel cam and 8GB of internal storage, but otherwise, the experience is roughly the same as what you get on the One; both phones have WiFi and Bluetooth in addition to their 3G cellular radios. For what it’s worth, Microsoft is emphasizing that internal storage really isn’t a big deal with the Kin phones, because your entire photo and video collection that you capture using the onboard camera is synced seamlessly with your bottomless online storage; you can access the entire collection from your phone at any time by browsing thumbnails, and if you want the full content, you can download it. Kin comes bundled with a desktop web experience that’s entirely based on Silverlight for viewing and sorting just about all of the major stuff that you can see on your phone — contacts, social network status updates, images, and so on — and we’ve got to admit, it looks pretty slick. Keep reading after the break for a lot more info and video!

Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two press shots

A big focus for Microsoft with Kin is the totally new, different, crazy UI, which is based on blocky, simple text, monochromatic elements, and zoomed-in, stylized pictures. The big two features unique to Kin are being called “Spot” and “Loop.” Loop is sort of the Kin’s home screen, aggregating social content from your friends (Twitter, Facebook, and so on) roughly based on order of priority by how you sort your contents, so you don’t have to see as many updates from people you don’t follow too closely. Spot, meanwhile, is an ever-present green dot at the bottom of the screen where you can drag content — just about any content, be it maps, images, status updates, videos — and share it with contacts. Think of it as an “Attach” button in your messaging client, but on steroids.

Both phones have full support for the Zune music and video experience (but not Zune gaming), and it looks like the Zune HD UI we’re accustomed to, just as it does on Windows Phone 7. To loop in the Mac community, Microsoft will be offering a Mac-compatible music side-loader — in other words, it won’t be a true, native Zune client and you won’t be able to use it to shop for music, but it’ll happily connect to iTunes and sync your non-DRM collection. Both phones also support over-the-air firmware updates, so there’ll be no need to tether just for that. Speaking of tethering, data tethering isn’t supported.

Verizon is getting the Kin One and Two in the US in May, while Vodafone has signed on as the European partner for a Fall launch. We’ll update you on specific pricing and availability just as soon as we have it.

Source: Engadget

The magic of content aware image resizing

A few years ago, I saw a demonstration of “content aware image resizing“. This very impressive technique/algorithm allows resizing a picture while keeping the important elements in it. For example, if you resize a picture of someone’s face, the background would be resized while keeping the face intact.

Since then, this technique has been used in many ways, mainly as a resizing technique used in graphics edition software.

Well, content aware image resizing is now available as an iPhone/iPod touch application which gave me a reason to talk about this impressive technology.

Source: appadvice

Browser as an OS: Native Web Apps

TNA: Google is making another move to confirm the web browser as the centerpiece of our computer’s operating systems (when it’s not the OS itself as for Chrome OS). It is preparing a technology allowing to create fast, responsive and powerful web applications using native code instead of javascript.

If this works well, this could help increase the adoption of web applications as it could blur the differences between web and desktop applications for the user.

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Google moves could bring fast Web apps closer

Google’s Native Client project to accelerate Web applications just got a lot more real–and a lot more ambitious.

Browsers today come with increasingly powerful engines to run programs written in JavaScript, but those programs must be translated laboriously into the native instructions a computer understands, typically making them much slower than the software that runs directly on the operating system. Native Client is an attempt to bridge those worlds, letting code downloaded over the Web run fast and natively.

A year and a half ago, when Google announced Native Client, the open-source project could run only 32-bit software for x86 processors. On Wednesday, Google announced fulfillment of plans to build support for Native Client for 64-bit x86 processors and ARM processors. That was technologically challenging, but significant because those are the chips that are in most of today’s PCs and most smartphones, respectively.

But that’s not all. The company also disclosed a plan to shield Native Client programmers from the concerns of specific processors altogether, a move that harkens back to Sun Microsystems’ “write once, run anywhere” philosophy for Java. Native Client is called NaCl for short, and Google details the new Portable Native Client variation, called PNaCl and pronounced “pinnacle,” in a paper (PDF).

“PNaCl should make it easy for developers to write their application once and be confident that it will execute, with identical behavior, on every platform supported by Native Client,” the Google researchers said in the paper. In other words, instead of producing different Native Client modules for each different processor, a Web developer could produce a single PNaCl module that would run on any processor for which Google or some other organization provided the necessary support.

PNaCl is still in prototype form, but its processor flexibility means Google is positioning it as the main way programmers can use the technology. “We’d like PNaCl to be the main way people deploy these applications,” said Brad Chen, Google’s engineering manager of Native Client, in an interview.

That’s important because Google wants the technology to work broadly across the whole Web. Lacking that, developers likely would either ignore Native Client or only use it on various islands, “potentially leading to fragmentation of the Web,” the researchers said.

New Web app brains and brawn

Google has a long way to go with NaCl: it must convince the industry that its security mechanism is sound, woo browser users or makers to adopt the technology, and encourage developers to learn and use it.

But Native Client holds the potential to dramatically change today’s perception of Web applications as useful but not very sophisticated or snappy. That could pay big dividends in the move to cloud computing, especially when combined with new Web technology arriving in a new generation of faster browsers.

“We can build applications on the Web that are every bit as good as native applications,” said Linus Upson, engineering director for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS, in a December interview, speaking of Google’s aspirations for Native Client and a related Google technology called O3D for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web.

And there’s evidence to back him up. In a new paper on Native Client’s broader processor support (PDF), Google said its technology slows execution times down 10 percent on 64-bit x86 chips and 3 percent on ARM chips. That’s not a major hit, especially compared to the execution speed of JavaScript.

Native Client software modules running on a machine have limited abilities–essentially the permissions granted to JavaScript, not to ordinary native applications that run on the operating system. Think of them as a way to bring some new muscle to what Web applications can do.

NaCl software could work in conjunction with other Web application infrastructure to enrich programming possibilities. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Canvas, WebGL, and O3D could provide slicker interfaces. Local storage on the PC will let Web applications work with data that’s stored on the computer without having to rely constantly on the network. Other new work will let Web applications deal with Webcams and potentially other hardware attached to a computer.

Portable Native Client splits the NaCl software execution into two parts to make it work on more processors.

(Credit: Google)

Google’s power: Browser, OS, apps

NaCl is academically interesting to those concerned with the best way to get a computer to do work securely in the age of the Internet. But it’s got a very direct relationship to Google’s priorities, too: the company wants to make the Web the platform for software, and indeed with applications such as Gmail and Google Docs offers some of the most advanced examples to date.

Note that Native Client is built into Chrome and the browser-based Chrome OS. Google’s operating system for Netbooks is due to arrive later this year, and also remember that Google makes the browser in its Android operating system that typically runs on ARM-based smartphones.

In short, even if nobody else adopts Native Client, Google can make it relevant. Google’s position as a significant browser maker, Web application developer, and mobile operating system creator means it has the ability to singlehandedly break much of the chicken-and-egg impasse that often limits adoption of new technology.

For example, Google Spreadsheet is limited today by what can be done with JavaScript. Tapping into native computing power could open the application to heavy-duty statistical calculations or faster sorting, for example.

For Google, though, success will mean others use it, too. To that end, Google is discussing standardization of Native Client and O3D with other browser makers, though not at the expense of actually moving ahead with the work. “We’re excited about getting people using the system, but it’s quite early still, so there isn’t much to say right now about standardization,” Chen said.

Making Native Client standard, though, is a tougher matter. There, Google will have to win over allies with their own priorities, and the present Web standards agenda is already jam-packed with work.

But broadly, cloud computing is catching on, and Google has agreement on the vision if not the details. Even though Microsoft–the browser maker whose Windows and Office franchise means it has the most to lose from the migration of applications to the Net–is working on a faster, more relevant Internet Explorer geared for Web applications and on bringing Office to the Web.

Detailing NaCl

In its two new NaCl papers, Google describes what it’s been up to recently with the technology.

PNaCl essentially breaks the Native Client execution process into two parts to attain its portability.

The first part is the conversion of the human-written software into an intermediate state called “bitcode.” This represents a low-level version of the program, but not the lowest level, the machine code that a computer actually understands and executes.

This bitcode is the portable part. To actually execute it, the second part of the process, a specific module adapted for each processor architecture translates the bitcode into the machine code that can run. This is where the security checks are run to ensure the software doesn’t perform any of the forbidden instructions.

So far, Google plans translators for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors and for ARM, and the Google researchers said it should be “straightforward to support other popular general-purpose CPUs in future.

“Part of the point of this design is that we take portability very seriously,” Chen said. “The only ISAs [processor instruction set architectures] we’re working on now are ARM, x86-32 and x86-64. There are a lot of architectures and architecture variants in the world, and we surely won’t be able to support all of them, but we will eagerly support credible outside efforts to support other platforms.”

Translation adds overhead, though, Chen said, it’s not yet clear how much.

“We think we can make the translation time small compared to download times, and I’m hoping the typical effective delay will very small, much less than a second,” Chen said. “Apart from translation, we think the runtime impact of PNaCl will be negligible.”

The other paper concerns the move to the other processors. Doing so was tricky, because the initial NaCl technology relied on a feature of 32-bit x86 chips that restricted a computing process to a particular area of memory, making it harder for it to escape its bounds in a way that could be used in a computer attack.

Looking for a substitute for this memory segmentation technique that would work on 64-bit x86 and ARM chips, Google opted to use something called software fault isolation that it initially thought would make the system too sluggish.

“The overhead of fault isolation using these techniques is very low, helping to make SFI a viable approach for isolating performance critical, untrusted code in a Web application,” Google researchers said in their paper. However, with Google’s approach, one perk of 64-bit x86 software, the ability to use large amounts of memory, isn’t available: it’s bound by the 32-bit chip limit of 4GB. That’s still plenty for most applications today, though.

The upshot, in Google’s eyes, is that Native Client is closer to prime time, and not just for PCs.

“These results indicate that a browser running on virtually any modern computer or cell phone could run a fast, performance-sensitive Native Client application,” Chen said.

Source: DeepTech (cnet news)

Google Wave Coming to Google Apps this Year

TNA: My opinion on Google Wave: Bad execution of a good idea. The technology is there, but the user interface isn’t. Google needs to find a way to make it easier to understand and use.

As most people who have tried Google Wave, I have found no use for it. However, Google will soon make Google Wave available through Google Apps (their enterprise “suite”). This is a really good idea that may increase Wave’s popularity. Google Wave is the most useful as a collaboration tool on a project or document, making it a good fit for business users that must work together on a project.

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Google Wave, the maddeningly confusing yet highly innovative real-time collaboration tool, will become a member of Google’s online office suite Google Apps later this year. The service, still in closed beta, is meant to be a modern-day revamp of email – what email would be if it was invented in 2009 instead of the 1960′s. Yet the interface, a mashup of email, chat, and collaborative document editing, left many early adopters with mixed feelings about the product…at least in its current form. Called “unproductive,” “complex,” and “overwhelming” by the same people who usually embrace new technologies, it seems an odd choice to add the still-developing Wave service to the Google Apps line-up at this time. But Google has confirmed they will do exactly that.

Google Wave: Innovative, Confusing

The technologies at the core of Google Wave are impressive. With an HTML5-enabled interface and real-time protocols for instant interaction, Wave was highly anticipated among tech enthusiasts prior to its launch. However, once beta testers gained access to the redesigned inbox experience delivered by Wave, the results were those of confusion, feelings of being overwhelmed and apparently, eventual abandonment.

That’s not to say Google Wave is a failure. The service is just a little too raw right now for everyday use by a majority of internet users. The problem with Wave stems from its overcrowded inbox of “waves” – threads of conversation updated in real-time. Within a wave, users can have IM-like chats, share and edit documents, and even “replay” a wave to see a history of the changes made. At launch time, anyone using the service could add any other user to a wave – even if that other user had no interest in participating. This led to an inbox filled with waves, only some of which may have been relevant or interesting. In addition, communicating in real-time, while nice for IM, may not be as productive when attempting to share the sort of longer thoughts and instructions typically sent out via email.

There are ways Wave could be streamlined for better ease-of-use, though. Whitelisting and blacklisting tools could lock down waves to invited participants only and better filtering mechanisms could help high-priority waves rank higher than others. Not all of these tools are available yet in the current version of the product, though, and some may never be.

Google Apps Users to Become Beta Testers?

Google is also investigating how to integrate some of Wave’s features into their other products.According to Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard, the company is “trying to learn and see what sort of use cases evolve from it and how it changes.” Yet even he admitted that Wave is “not nearly at the level of understanding and readiness of the core Google Apps services.”

So why is Google rushing to roll it out this year? The answer may be that Google simply wants a larger test bed to help them generate ideas for improving the service. Although we’ve highlighted several use cases for Wave in the past, a good many people still say they don’t see the need for it. But all the effort and development that went into building a product like Wave isn’t likely something Google wants to abandon so soon.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

WiDi : Streaming your laptop Audio and Video to your TV wirelessly

TNA: Here is a very cool technology developed by Intel: Wireless Display (WiDi). It allows mirroring  your laptop’s display and sound on your TV without having any wires connected to your laptop. The technology doesn’t seem to be perfect right now, but we can expect even better performances in the future.

There are however a few limitations that may be a deal-breaker for some people:

• There’s a very noticeable lag between the laptop and the TV, making this largely useless for Web surfing or PC gaming, but music and video–where you hit play and sit back–seem like natural applications
• DVD and Blu-ray optical discs won’t play, due to DRM issues

See this video for a good overview of the technology or read the summary below.

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Hands-on: Is Intel’s Wireless Display a game changer?

The relationship between TV and PC is a complicated one. Over the years, we’ve used desktops, laptops, and small form factor machines to act as media centers, networked entertainment hubs, and more recently, as Hulu and streaming-Netflix players.

Our love/hate relationship with getting a PC signal on a large TV screen has recently moved toward ambivalence, as living room game consoles have taken over many streaming media tasks, adding Netflix streaming as well as their own libraries of movies and TV shows to buy or rent.

To that end, one of the CES announcements we were most excited about, at least in theory, was Intel’s Wireless Display technology. This combination of hardware and software would allow you to wirelessly stream whatever was on your laptop display to a nearby plasma or LCD TV.

Having seen a few demos of varying effectiveness (which didn’t stop the technology from winning CNET’s People’s Voice award at CES 2010), we were excited to be able to hook up a Wireless Display (or WiDi, as it is also known) setup in the CNET Labs to test it out.

While the underlying technology is part of Intel’s 2010 Core series platform, to start it’ll be available only in three specific laptops, one each from Dell, Sony, and Toshiba. All three are Best Buy exclusives, but they also, fortunately, come bundled with all the hardware you’ll need to hook the WiDi up.

That means these three laptops are WiDi-certified, and each comes bundled with an adapter from Netgearsomewhat awkwardly named Push2TV. When and if the WiDi technology gets rolled out on more laptops, the Netgear box will be available separately for $99.

Though there are other ways to wirelessly stream audio and video to your big-screen TV, the possibility of effortlessly mirroring whatever is on your desktops to another display, with near-zero setup, makes this a much better candidate for mainstream adoption.

With a new Toshiba E205 laptop (one of the three initial WiDi models) in hand, and the included Netgear adapter, we set out to test Intel’s Wireless Display. In practice, the actual results were not completely effortless, but they came pretty close.

Our first step was to take the Netgear-branded receiver (pictured here) and connect its AC adapter, then connect it via the included HDMI cable to our monitor (RCA composite connections are also supported). The Netgear box is about the size of a wireless router and small enough to sit unobtrusively behind or next to your TV. After turning on the set and selecting the appropriate input, the screen displayed a message that read, “Ready for connection. To get started, launch Intel Wireless Display on your computer.” So far, so good.

Then we opened up our Toshiba E205 laptop, and launched its Wireless Display app, via a quick-launch button on the panel of media touch controls. This launches a window that shows you all the compatible Wireless Display adapters in the area, similar to a list of Wi-Fi connections. We had a brief moment of angst when the app first said there were no detectable adapters in range, but we hit the rescan button a couple of times until it popped up.

We were then instructed to download a software update, which took a couple of minutes and sent us through the scan-for-adapter process again. When we finally connected, we had to type in a four-digit code displayed by the Netgear adapter on the TV screen.

The setup message displayed when the Netgear Push2TV box is connected to a TV.

However, once we figured out this initial setup process, the connection was seamless, and we were even able to grab the Netgear adapter and hook it up to other monitors without having to do any additional setup.

Our desktop was then mirrored on our TV, fulfilling the basic promise of Wireless Display. Keep in mind that you can only mirror the laptop screen, not extend it. There’s a very noticeable lag between the laptop and the TV, making this largely useless for Web surfing or PC gaming, but music and video–where you hit play and sit back–seem like natural applications.

There are a few basic settings you can access, including a tool for resizing the remote image. This just makes the entire image larger or smaller, so if your desktop doesn’t have the same exact aspect ratio as your laptop, it won’t line up perfectly.

We played a variety of 720p and 1080p video files on the Toshiba E205, and they popped right up on our TV after a couple of seconds. This initial generation of WiDi products support only resolutions up to 720p, but video files of both resolutions played fine. We also checked 480p Hulu videos, but DVD and Blu-ray optical discs won’t play, due to DRM issues. Also note that, at least in this test system, the transmitted audio wasn’t controlled by the laptop’s volume controls but instead by the specific media-playing application or by the TV’s speakers.

Image quality was good, but your TV may require some fine-tuning of its picture controls. We did, however, see that our streaming HD video displayed what looked like minor compression artifacts, and hit an occasional stuttery patch, but it generally worked very well. We could see this being especially useful for showing off YouTube clips (OK, or CNET TV videos).

A scene from an HD movie trailer streaming from our laptop to the TV.

While the system is intended for “same-room” use, according to Intel, we were curious to see how far away we could get. Walking the Toshiba E205 backward, we managed to get about 90 feet from the Netgear box before the signal broke up. That’s probably enough range for most people.

Though there are a ton of ways to get IPTV content or downloaded videos to play on your TV, the reason we think Wireless Display has potential is that it’s easy to set up, easy to use, and could be built into a huge number of upcoming laptops. If you’ve ever tried to connect your Xbox 360 to your networked home PC and play videos through it, you know how wonky that process can be. Walking your laptop over to the TV and physically plugging it in is also an option (and a good one in many circumstances), but it’s not for everyone, and requires plugging and unplugging cables.

While the availability and usefulness of WiDi is limited for right now, we look forward to seeing this technology improve, find its way onto more systems, and, we hope, reduce the lag enough to make big-screen PC gaming easy for anyone to hook up.

Update: As often happens with new technology, a handful of initial successes do not guarantee future functionality. The very next day, the Intel WiDi setup we had hooked up refused to see the Netgear adapter, requiring us to reboot several times, and disable and re-enable the laptop’s antenna, before it mysteriously started working again. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Check out some more shots of the setup process below:

Setting up Intel’s Wireless Display

Source: Crave (CNET News)

How Google Ranks Tweets

TNA: For those of you who are into SEO (Search Engine Optimization, the art of optimizing web pages to get good rankings in search engines), here is an article giving information on how Google ranks the newly added real-time results (results coming from Twitter).

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Doesn’t Google know how to rank social media?

Pagerank is not dead at all, its alive and kicking and its looking at Twitter. In an interview with Technology Review Googler Amit Singhal tried to explain the way Google looks at how to rank real time search results. The interview showed that Google is still looking at rankings like they did with Pagerank. This is Pagerank all over, only focussed on tweets, not links.

Amit Singhal was one of the lead developers of Googles real time search, so he knows what he is talking about. And without a doubt he is very smart guy, probably a lot smarter in what he does than I am. Still, I expected more from him, and more from Google for that matter. Google failed to come up with a new ranking method and therefore took Pagerank of the shelf. But with that they seem to hint at the fact they have no idea how to rank social media.

In the interview Singhal explained some elements of the ranking. Lets look at some of the things he says:

“In the case of tweets, the key is to identify “reputed followers,”. You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely.”

Ok, so this makes sense: you might not have to many followers yourself, but if someone with ‘reputation’ follows you, they give you a little of their reputation, just like linkjuice. That sounds good. Reputation matters. But how do they measure that reputation? If you look at the last line: “his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely” then it seems to be as if the reputation is based on… number of followers?

But maybe he will make it clear when the interview continues:

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,”

Again, Pagerank. Get as many “links”, aka followers, as possible and Google will reward you for it. One follower will be seen as more important then the other, but still the suggestion remains that a lot of followers will help you get higher rankings in real time search. If we are both followed by the same followers with a good reputation, the difference will be made by those without the reputation.

Luckily Google says they are also looking at the content of the tweets. In the interview Singhal talks about hashtags and how they can be seen as spam but also as a way of filtering out important messages. He is not very clear on the subject:

“While he wouldn’t get into details, he said Google modeled this hashtagging behavior in ways that tend to reduce the exposure of low-quality tweets. “We needed to model that [hashtagging] behavior. That is the technical challenge which we went after with our modeling approaches,”

He doesn’t make it quite clear, but it the general message he is sending out is that Google is mostly working on preventing getting spammers in real time, based on trends and followers.

The message which this interview gives out is: followers are important.

And that is where Google goes wrong. Followers should not be important at all. There are several things wrong with taking followers as a ranking method.

First of all: who cares if you are followed by Matt Cutts himself? Does that make you more important? Am I less important because he is not following me? I would say no. Google probably thinks so.

Singhal claims “It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest”. Google says its not a popularity contest, but it sure looks like one.

Second: Twitter is changing from a communication tool to a sending tool. Number of followers and following are getting so high it is impossible to keep track of everything your ‘friends’ are saying. That’s why applications like Tweetdeck and Seesmic are so successful: they let you look at Twitter a different way. You can filter tweets based on topic. And that means I’m seeing tweets passing by from people I don’t follow. I’m not following people, I’m following topics.

So why should you follow people? For one thing, because you want to be in touch with them. Following each other gives the option to DM each other, which can be very handy. Another reason could be that you are actually interested in these people, so you want to know what they are saying. When you start following them, they become important FOR YOU, not for the general crowd out there. Come on in social search!

So how would you measure authority? Not by followers, thats for sure. Google should be looking at retweets, mentions, clicks, etcetera. The ‘buzz’, that should matter as authority. And combine that with social search.

We are dealing with social media here. Which means there are humans involved, or at least there should be. And humans are not links.

By looking at Twitter in real time search like they do at links on the web, Google lets us know they do not know how they can rank social media. That is either a big miss by Google or a problem we will all be facing in the near future: getting clear what is important and what is not in social media. But maybe I’m all wrong about this? Let me know…

Source: SearchCowboys.com (another article available at SEOptimise)

The Mobile Internet is not a mass market product

TNA: As technology enthusiasts, geeks or whatever we call ourselves, we often take our reality as being the only reality. Here is a great set of statistics showing that the mobile internet is not a mass market product…yet.

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Combatting the Hype: 76% Don’t Access the Mobile Internet

A host of reasons conspire against the general population in whether or not they use a cell phone – smart or otherwise – to use the Internet. According to research by UK-based Essential Research, 76% of mobile phone users don’t use their mobile to access the Internet, and there are several barriers keeping them from doing so, whether actual or perceived.

The study, which focused on 2,000 people over the age of 16 living in the UK, found, among other things, that only 10% of mobile phone owners access the Internet on a daily basis. How can this be and why?

The Majority: Unconnected and Unconcerned

While we might wonder who wouldn’t want to have GPS-enabled Google Maps at their fingertips while they’re out and about, or the ability to unchain themselves from a desk and still respond to those important work emails, the study finds that 60% of respondents claim their phone is not capable of accessing the Internet and just 30% of those respondents would like to change this fact.

Even the most basic phones offered these days have Internet capabilities, but the fact that people believe they don’t is key. In actuality, of those questioned, nearly 90% had at least GPRS Internet connectivity. How can you lead a horse to water if the horse doesn’t believe there’s a path down to the stream?

In addition to this, cost and perceived usefulness are two of the biggest factors in keeping the mobile Web at bay. Over three quarters of respondents said that they thought it was too expensive to use, while 60% said that the effort necessary to learn how to use a smart phone wasn’t worth it to them.

Who Is Using the Mobile Web?

A majority of mobile Internet users are young, affluent, urban-dwelling professionals. They are on average between the ages of 16 and 34, living in a city and making more than $65,000 a year. Nearly three quarters of daily users are professionals.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest drivers of mobile Internet use is social media – Web sites like Facebook and Twitter. For daily mobile-Internet users, 70% user their phones to access social networking sites.

Overall, the study seems to contrast the general hype around mobile Internet and serve as a gentle reminder that, while we may surround ourselves with the technologically affluent, this isn’t yet the norm for the whole of society. There is a definite demographic that uses the Internet on their mobile phones and, outside of that, it remains a costly, unusable and unavailable option in the public’s eyes.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Google Plans to Upgrade Old Billboards in Street View

TNA: Patents are never a sure indication that the described technology will be created, but they are often a good indication of what companies are currently thinking about.

In this case, Google, is thinking about allowing advertisers to place their ads on the billboards we can see in Google Street View. A nice advertisement idea, and foremost, additional revenues for Google.

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According to a new patent that was just granted to Google, the company could soon extend the reach of its advertising program in Google Maps to Street View. This patent, which was originally filed on July 7, 2008, describes a new system for promoting ads in online mapping applications. In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties.

The patent describes a two-step process for identifying potential advertising real estate in these images. Google’s software first identifies interest points in the image (e.g. the edges or corners of an object) and then generates features around these interest points. Google can then augment this region of the image with a link or replace a part of the current Street View image with a new image.

What Happens When Somebody Wants to Put a Virtual Ad on Your Real-Life Billboard?

One of the most interesting aspects of the patent can be found in the following paragraph:

The link can be associated with a property owner, for example the property owner which owns the physical property portrayed. The link can alternatively be associated with an advertiser who placed the highest bid on the image recognized within the region of interest (e.g., poster, billboard, banner, etc.). Any portion of the geographic display image in which the region of interest is located can be selectable (e.g., hot-linked). For example, the image of the coffee shop can be hot-linked to an advertisement for the coffee shop.

This does open up some interesting questions. It makes perfect sense for the owner of a local coffee shop to advertise through this system, but in this patent, Google also describes an advertising auction. Does that mean that a rival coffee shop could also bid for ad space on the virtual image of a competitor’s store in Street View? Chances are this isn’t quite what Google has in mind, though it could definitely be a possibility. Instead, it looks like Google could potentially identify some billboards and banners in Street View images and then replace these real-life billboards with virtual ads from the highest bidders.

Source: ReadWriteWeb