Big ups to ReadWriteWeb who along with GigaOm and VentureBeat are contributing to the New York Times‘ technology section. It’s a great win for a New Zealand blog (well OK of the RWW writers, only Richard (and on the odd occasion that I contribute to RWW myself)) hail from New Zealand - but if we don’t claim it the Aussies will so it seems best.
It’s also interesting in light of the Technorati survey which TechCrunchtells us indicates that a blog with 100k uniques per month should earn around USD75k. Does that mean Richard is pulling in USD900k a month with his 1.2million uniques? Do tell Richard!
Of course I’m pretty dubious about old media - I’m currently involved in a project that involves new and old media getting along - so far my experience is that it’s very much a one way street - old media is more than happy to have content from people who actually understand this stuff. However "partnerships" with old media tend to be fairly one way - which is why publications like Idealog start up that verticalise media without the old/new demarcation.
So anyway - I’ll not tell the story again - suffice it to say we’re proud of the quiet chap beavering away from a suburban house in Lower Hutt - give us a year or two and there’ll be another hyper successful New Zealand run blog!
A couple of reasons. Firstly unlike Firefox and Safari and of course the corporate supported IE, it doesn’t seem to get past the companies proxy server. Second, and most importantly to me I’m not prepared to give Google any more information about myself.
Don’t get my wrong, I’m a happy user of 3 Google services - mail, reader and analytics . But that’s about all i want Google to know about me. Read Write Web has a good history and synopsis of Google’s privacystance. To me, reading that I get uneasy… real uneasy.Ben Kepes and I have debated this before, I can summarise his position as more trusting than mine. Simple as that.
I know that Google has a stated position of “do no evil”. I also know what happens in companies when they get squeeze for revenue and profit. Not always the right things. Reason number 1.
Another way to think about this. Google is a company of nearly 20 000 people, they’re like a small city in terms of population. And even small cities have bad people. In the US 1 in every 136 people have been caught and convicted of a crime, if you extrapolate that out it means you would expect a company the size of Google to have 147 bad people. 147 people who could mis-use all that data that they now have the potential to access.
End of the day its your choice, but you should be aware of the privacy issues associated with cloud services.
PS I’ve dropped Firefox and moved to Safari as my browser of choice. I’ll let you know how it goes.
There has been a bunch of commentary about Google’s mobile platform Android. Most commentators seem to be banging on about how it is going after the Apple iPhone (R/WWseems to be fixated on this aspect). This analysis misses the point. Of course Android will try to emulate the best in class product, there’s no point going out with something 2nd rate. But Android is much much more important to Google than just an iPhone competitor, Android is Google’s punt on protecting its advertising business (98% of Google’s revenue).
How? Well we are moving into a mobile device dominated world. This trend has been happening for awhile and is a function of scale and Moore’s law. (basically laptops have gotten cheaper, performance is better etc).The PDA I have on my desk right now, clearly sits right between my desk phone and my notebook in terms of functions and performance.When you factor in cloud computing benefits and Web apps (SaaS in some cases), PDAs aren’t that far away from replicating at least 80% traditional computing hardware functionality (and by association replacing those hardware units).
Xero believes this trend is happening and has come out with an iPhone supported version of its SaaS Accounting app to get into that space early.
The proof is there, check out some of the stats in this (surprisingly from R/WW) piece from Sarah Parez about how fast the mobile web is growing (and here from GigaOm).
The implications of this are enormous. There is no dominant OS provider (why do you think MS has listed Mobile as one of its core strategies?). The other major player seeing this trend and having panic moments is Google. Think about it, if I use my mobile to browse the web more and more, then I logically would use it for search. That means Google becomes less relevant in advertising because (you try this) there are NO Adwords displayed in a Google mobile search.
Connect those dots, growing mobile internet use, no Adwords….
So, if you are Google what do you do? Well you try to create a mobile platform that is hugely popular and ensure that in that OS is a browser (or some other special feature) that provides you with an avenue to protect your advertising revenue (or provides you with a new one). This platform must be hugely popular for two major reasons.
1) for your advertising revenues to stay the same you need ubiquity (similar to their 67% of US search type ubiquity)
2) without that kind of demand, no carrier will support Android mobiles.
GigaOm outlines a couple of reasons for that here, but more importantly Google hasn’t exactly made a whole bunch of friends in the carrier world with its stance around net neutrality and the San Francisco WiFi project.
I’ve blogged before that Google appear to be having their challenges, the shine is definitely coming off their share price.There are other indications of a new commercial reality coming out of Google too. Check this out by Garett Rogers on the Google App Engine pricing…
“ This surprises me because Google is the king at making things ridiculously cheap — not comparable.”
My read on this move, Google is under the cosh for profit growth to justify its PE ratio.
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