Technology Drive: google

Showing posts with label google. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Google plans on selling endorsements

According to last week's announcement, besides the fact that Facebook is already doing it, Google will soon take the same route of selling users endorsements. In other words, people's private posts and other important stuff about themselves, or something they might have liked, will eventually become public, and it does not mean just airing their good or bad experiences at some hotel.

The timing is not particularly the most appropriate since these days there is a lot of talk on both sides of the Atlantic about information privacy concerns which are raising eyebrows at all levels, including high ranking government officials from some European countries.

Although these are supposed to be "minor changes" to the company policy to take effect on

Mobile devices closer to the human body

Upcoming mobile designs are trending closer to the human body and could even end up inside it.

With pioneering efforts from some Ivy League Universities like MIT, Harvard or Stanford which are offering edX or free online access worldwide to some of their curricular materials to students with an internet connection, particularly on science and technology, we should see some amazing developments in the near future since the move seems to be aimed at preparing a large pool of technologists for many significant human-affecting breakthroughs that are going to start taking place.

At the same time, not only Google but also Microsoft and similar companies are moving rapidly towards defining what will become the next mobile trend that will replace smartphones and tablets as the ultimate device of personal choice for accessing the internet or engaging in social media and other kinds of user interaction.

From large computers occupying entire facilities, followed by "smaller" mainframes, to

Convergence On Demand

The different kinds of integration taking place in the Tech world are more than just branding or attempts to engage in media stunts.

We are witnessing a process which has happened before and that will certainly continue as technology evolves or as people get more used to efficiency, fast access to usable data, and ubiquity.

In early 2000's we were talking about Convergence, and by that we meant having a platform or device that would put together TV, internet and telephony services. Nowadays, not only are such capabilities already covered by our smartphones or tablets, but today's Convergence is also looking into having the 'On Demand' label added as a nice bonus to these three venues: TV, internet and smartphone.

One example of this is Youtube's new offering with coverage of the London 2012 Olympics, currently available via streaming, totalling 3500 hours of 10 separate live channels to the United States via NBCOlympics.com, and also accessible from 64 other coutries around the world. For some people, this kind of offer means an opportunity to have a global branding moment, but the idea is to actually go beyond that.

This Olympics initiative is combined with several others by

IBM acquires Vivísimo

In 2004 while taking a seminar on search engines, which was part of my graduate studies, I learned about Vivísimo through Dr. Jaime Carbonell from Carnegie Mellon University. The things he said regarding its capabilities would let anyone believe that Vivísimo was actually better than Google.

Someone must have been paying attention to Vivísimo's evolution, and consequently, IBM has decided to purchase the enterprise search software company. With this acquisition IBM will boost big data analytics since the "software helps organizations access and analyse big data across the enterprise." According to Big Blue, the software excels in capturing and delivering quality information across the broadest range of data, no matter what format it is, or where it resides.

Back in 04, it seemed hard to believe that anything would come even close to

Facebook and Amazon plan to sell smartphones

While Android has proven to be tremendously successful for Google, Facebook is intending to compete for the enormous advertising market, as well as for similar opportunities which the search giant is enjoying at this moment.

The critical thing for the user to consider has to do with the well known issues and challenges in terms of security that the everyone would potentially face knowing that the much talked about

Google is going after Facebook

Google is gearing towards a more defined strategy that would allow the company to execute something other than the business model it has implemented so far due to increasingly heavy competition.

Considering the kind of success Facebook is having by becoming a social media powerhouse, it looks like the competition between