Posts Tagged 'google'

Hurrah, TV catch-up on your iPhone!

As of autumn we will be able to catch that missed episode of Neighbours on the bus on the way to work, as Five are to launch a TV VOD app to coincide with their Demand Five relaunch. Sky launched their live TV app last November and app’s became available to remotely record programmes on your Sky Plus from your iPhone,  but Five will host the first video on demand app. They look set to beat the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to have a catch-up app on the iPhone along with the iPad, and have new plans for the relaunch including placing the VOD function at the centre of the channel with links so users can share content with friends on Facebook.

Who said the iPad would never catch on?

LG has revealed plans to introduce a thinner, lighter tablet computer running on Google’s Android OS. It is to be launched later this year and leaps on the iPad bandwagon along with Dell and Samsung, offering an alternative to Apple’s monopoly on the keyboard-less PC market. In response to record demand Apple is now producing over 2.3million iPads monthly and a Forrester research report predicts that tablet or slate style computer sales will outsell netbooks by 2012.
Matching the iPad seems a tall feat but there is room for competition. There may be apps available that are prohibited by Apple and a telephone function and removable battery would give a great advantage. As with the iPhone, if you encounter battery issues with the iPad, it is necessary to send the whole device to Apple.

LG boasts it “will deliver vastly superior performance than other similar devices currently on the market while still managing to be thinner and lighter than competing devices.” It’s rumoured LG’s device will use Android OS v2.2 (Froyo) with a 7-inch touchscreen, WVGA resolution, 3G, Wi-Fi and built-in GPS. Samsung previously announced they are working on the Galaxy Tab, a tablet with a 7inch TFT screen also powered by Google’s Android OS.

Watch and learn Prince, Radiohead’s Phil Selway offers his first solo single as a free download

After Prince’s outlandish comment that “The internet is completely over”, Phil Selway, drummer of Radiohead, has followed in his bands footsteps and embraced the internet, offering his first single as a free download. The new track ‘By Some Miracle’ is taken from his debut solo album ‘Familial’, set to be released over the summer. Radiohead caused a sensation in 2007 when they released their Rainbows album online offering fans the chance to pay what they wanted between £0.00 to £99.00. Figures from Comscore show the average amount paid per album download was US$6.00 and despite the free download option, fans bought more than 100,000 copies of the CD within a year. According to Radiohead front man Thom Yorke “In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together.”

Adding more power to digital’s elbow research sponsored by Microsoft and Intel, for a study entitled ‘The Energy and Climate Change Impacts of Different Music Delivery Methods’, shows downloading is better for the environment than buying CD’s.  All the more reason to embrace digital.

Twitter surpasses Bing as fastest-growing search engine

Brace yourself for some big number crunching – Fast Company brought us news of happenings at the Aspen Ideas Festival where cofounder Biz Stone talks of how Twitter is rapidly establishing itself as a popular search tool, pulling in around 800 million search queries per day. While the news is unlikely to have the daddy of search engines Google quaking in its boots just yet (88 billion searches per month), young Twitter with its 24 billion searches per month is certainly giving the likes of Bing (4.1 billion) and Yahoo (9.4 billion) a run for their money. Not bad considering Twitter is still in its relative infancy – search volumes are up 33% in the last 15 months. Fast Company say “this is something the service has been angling for. Last month, at the the World Innovation Forum, Stone argued that Twitter is “not a social network,” though many people view it as one. “That’s been a myth since the beginning,” he explained. “We’re much more like an information network or a source of news.”

As my trusty side kick Hannah is off getting muddy in a field this week at Glastonbury, Tim, our Head of Search has stepped-in in her place. It’s another week on the web, here we go…

World Cup fever hits the internet

Its World Cup time again and chances are that you are reading this blog post with one eye on another open browser window streaming a game. Occasionally your smart phone beeps with a tweeted reaction to a wonder strike, or an old school friend uploads a photo of himself blowing a vuvuzela in the stands. You know about it as it happens. You have passionate arguments with fellow fans in other hemispheres during the game. You form and share opinions well before the host in the studio has time to read the half time auto cue. Often you hear about the goal before the slightly delayed TV coverage shows it. For many viewers, connecting their HD screens to their broadband connections, television is nothing more than another media feed. This is a massive paradigm shift.

According to Akamai networks internet usage is up over 233% over normal. 11 million visitor requests to its network per minute on the first day of the football carnival. This has smashed the previous record which was for the inauguration of Barrack Obama and remember that this was not even for one of the big games. Wait for the figures for the final. The internet is now part of the experience.

AOL sells Bebo

Back in April we spoke of how AOL was to shut down social networking site Bebo if they couldn’t find a buyer. Step forward two months and Bebo has now been sold but for a fraction of the price AOL bought it for a mere two years ago. Although details of the sale have not been officially released its been widely reported that Criterion Capital Partners, a private equity group specializing in facilitating in growth plans and turnarounds were sold Bebo for less that $10m (£.6.8m), that’s less than 2% of the $850m (£574m) AOL paid for it in March 2008. More about that in the press release here. So where did it all go wrong for the once social behemoth? Bebo was sold at a time it was riding a wave of growth and opportunity, one of the first social networks of its kind, Bebo was hugely popular particularly with the teenage audience. For AOL it represented the chance to gain traction in the rapidly emerging social media channel. As we reported in April, social network new kids such as  Facebook – supported by robust ecosystems -  arrived on the block and began to steal scale and popularity from Bebo. In an article on Cnet news, Tim Armstrong CEO of AOL (who wasn’t yet at the company when it paid $850m for the social network) offers his view saying “the exorbitant price tag itself got in the way from the start since it made expectations so high. Bebo was a major distraction for the company,” Armstrong said. “Every meeting I went to, everyone was talking about spending $850 million, that it wasn’t really working out that well.” Bebo wasn’t a bad product, he insisted, but “the execution piece of it really fell apart.”

Twitter’s promoted trending topics

Figuring out how it can monetise its service has long been Twitter’s challenge. Its first ad revenue model came in the shape of Promoted Tweets, closely followed by the newly launched promoted Trending Topics – of which Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 3 was the first brand to test out the waters. The promoted Trending Topics are the same as a regular trending topics, the main point of difference being that a yellow box will appear next to the promoted trend to make the users aware of its paid for nature. Techcrunch have a few words to say around this “First, it’s interesting that Twitter is putting these at the bottom of Trending Topics rather than at the top. Still, the yellow badge draws your eye naturally to it. Second, the Promoted Trending Topic appears no matter which city or country you set your Trending Topics to. In the future, you can imagine these Promoted Tending Topics being even more highly targeted to just certain regions/cities.”

Stuff of the web we think you might like:

1966 spotify playlist: Created by us today, the day that England take on Slovenia for a place in the world cup second round. Turns out 1966 was not only a great year for British football but a cracking year for music too.
10 fun facts you didn’t know about Google: By their own admission they’ve never been a conventional company but little did we know they rent goats to mow the lawn and their first storage unit was made of Lego.
Embrace Life: This poignant and tear-jerking internet ad has become a global YouTube hit with more than 12 million views.
OGC Open.com: First of its kind 3D browser based online golf experience for all you sports fans out there.
The big picture: Images so often more powerful than words

Stuff on the web we think you might like…

Street Museum iPhone app: This clever app uses augmented reality, geo tagging and Google Maps to overlay a historical view of London over your real-world street scene. We couldn’t resist having a play, the above pic is round the corner from Pancentric Towers by the Thames.

Pixelise the world: Stunningly imaginative video illustrating the world as it would be if infiltrated by pixels.

So That’s How They Filmed the Star Wars Opening Crawl: For a film that was light year’s ahead the filming techniques for the opening crawls were ‘wonderfully quaint.’

How to suck at Facebook: The Oatmeal brings you the best of Facebook faux-pas. Laugh-your-socks-off stuff.

Accepting meetings honestly: Imagine if you could express or see how people felt about coming or going to meetings.

Google world domination, starting with your TV

Combining the best aspects of television and the web, Google have announced the launch of their TV box set. The platform opens up your TV to millions of channels of entertainment, type in what you’re looking for and Google will help you find it on the web or on TV channels. Alternatively, if you just want to browse, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen. Check the latest pop video’s on Youtube, show friends your photo’s or play online games, all on your big shiny 50 inch plasma screen.

Sky are rumoured to be interested in having Sky TV on the Google TV set, and Sony and Logitech are due to be the first to integrate Google TV into their devices. Sony announced production of TV’s and Blu-Ray DVD player’s with Google TV built in, while Logitech have plans to introduce an HDTV camera and video chat, along with apps to turn a smart phone into an advanced remote control. We need never leave the sofa again.

New Facebook privacy settings

In the wake of mounting public concern and a media backlash, Facebook have announced their new and improved privacy settings, releasing a detailed list of the proposed changes. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has already admitted in his Washington Post column that they ‘missed the mark’ with changes in privacy settings last December,  but comments that users will now be offered simpler privacy settings to give them more control over their personal information. They have acknowledged that their 50 privacy settings and 170 privacy options can be confusing for users.

The unpopular changes made in December 2009, dubbed The Great Facebook Betrayal by Gawker, removed the ability to hide your profile pictures, fan pages and network membership from all strangers. They also allowed advertisers within Facebook to trace back to individual users every time they followed a link to their ad, and due to the changes in privacy settings an increasing amount of user’s personal information was shared on the site by default. Check out this video of Mashable’s Pete Casmore discussing Facebook’s response to the user backlash.

A milestone moment

Apple has taken over Microsoft as the biggest tech company, pushing past its biggest Rival Microsoft. While Microsoft remains the highest profit making of the two companies, Apple is leading the way in terms of share price value thanks to the introduction of iPods, iPhones and iPads. Now, depending on your interpretation of the stats, you could see this as Apple taking nearly 20 years to get back to the position it held in 1989…