It appears they want to play: Google chairman Eric Schmidt speaks on March 22 in Yangon. The company has big plans for Myanmar, and they’re closely linked to the country’s plans for mobile. Myanmar’s President, Thein Sein, has set a goal of 80% mobile-phone penetration by 2015, from current rates of 9%. With internet penetration as low as 1%, and fixed-line telephony penetration in the single figures even in big cities, mobile networks will be the only way the vast majority of Myanmar’s 50 million people can get online, and will serve as the main communications infrastructure for a modern information economy, including banking, media and civic services. A speculative piece.
YouTube has hit a billion regular monthly visitors. Such milestone, also reached by Facebook last October, further solidifies Cisco’s projected dominance of video in the cyberspace. “If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India,” the company said in a blogpost announcing it now has a billion unique visitors every month. “Nearly one out of every two people on the internet visits YouTube.” Launched in February 2005, a year after Facebook, YouTube operated from a small office above a fast-food restaurant in San Mateo, California.
I just listening to Eli Noam giving a talk that claimed that Google was the world’s largest media company. The big PDF appears to be the base presentation he was working off. The slide that he used showing Google to be the largest media company, had Time Warner and Telecom Italia in it. He made references to HHI, but it is not clear how he claims that Google (a search engine and advertising company), Time Warner (a media and cable company) and Telecom Italia (a telecom company) can be in the same market and how their market shares can be calculated. When I questioned this, I was advised that the methodology is in two books, one for the US and one for the rest of the world.
We at LIRNEasia are seeking to apply nudge principles to how utilities (and governments) communicate with their customers (citizens). Therefore, it was not surprising that this caught my eye when reading about Google’s employee perks: So the candy (M&Ms, plain and peanut; TCHO brand luxury chocolate bars, chewing gum, Life Savers) is in opaque ceramic jars that sport prominent nutritional labels. Healthier snacks (almonds, peanuts, dried kiwi and dried banana chips) are in transparent glass jars. In coolers, sodas are concealed behind translucent glass. A variety of waters and juices are immediately visible.
The country with the worst ICT connectivity happens to be in our region, the Asia Pacific. But Google’s Eric Schmidt, again demonstrating the value of engagement, appears to have opened the door another few milimeters, according to IHT: North Korea will finally allow Internet searches on mobile devices and laptops. But if you’re a North Korean, you’re out of luck — only foreigners will get this privilege. Cracking the door open slightly to wider Internet use, the government will allow a company called Koryolink to give foreigners access to 3G mobile Internet service by March 1, The Associated Press reported. The decision, announced Friday, comes a month after Google’s chairman, Eric E.
ComScore has published its tech predictions. It’s all about mobile. The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.
We were early in talking about mobile being the principal vehicle for Internet access. The continuing discussion about the FTC terminating the investigation of Google has some detailed discussion on how search is being shaken up by mobile: Nowhere has technology changed as rapidly and consumer behavior as broadly. As people abandon desktop computers for mobile ones, existing tech companies’ business models are being upended and new companies are blooming. “Mobile is very much a moving target,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has been a paid adviser to Google. “This is a market in which new competitors come in a week’s time.
I entered the policy and regulation space through an unusual door: the AT&T Divestiture Case of the early 1980s. There the evidence of consumer harm was clear to all: Lily Tomlin had seen to that. That was not the case with Google. “The way they managed to escape it is through a barrage of not only political officials but also academics aligned against doing very much in this particular case,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has worked as a paid adviser to Google in the past. “The first sign of a bad antitrust case is lack of consumer harm, and there just was not any consumer harm emerging in this very long investigation.
It is said that the late founder of Hyundai helped break the isolation of N Korea by striding across the DMZ with a herd of cattle. Google’s Executive Chair Eric Schmidt is going to N Korea. Is he taking with him promises of 21st Century cattle? And as the Internet began connecting the world — a movement South Korea embraced — North Korea reinforced its moat of security. Travelers arriving in Pyongyang are ordered to leave their cellphones at the airport and all devices are checked for satellite communications.
This is a battle that was brewing. Mode 1 trade in services is when the supplier is in Country A, the buyer is in Country B and the transaction occurs over some means of communication, usually electronic. Given the costs of telecom these days, it really does not make sense to open warehouses/server farms in every country. So you have centralized means of delivering services that cross borders electronically (Google, for example) and one-way by post (e.g.
Google has released a new version of Chrome fitted with WebRTC. It is a collection of real-time communications protocols that includes everything to turn the browser into a high-end communications system. The browser-based calls will be clearer than mobile phone, as the former is equipped with built-in high-definition audio codecs. Mozilla and Opera are Google’s partners in this open project. Ericsson and Telefonica have already endorsed it.
ETNO has earned notoriety for its ill-considered proposal to impose the old sending-party-network-pays principle on networks that house servers carrying attractive content. It is clear that ETNO and its allies in Egypt and elsewhere are is looking beyond the “sending party” networks at the OTT players such as Google and Facebook, who they perceive as those with the real money. Greed loves company. The old style telcos who make up the membership of ETNO are not alone. The old-style media firms of Europe would also like to get their hands on the earnings of Google et al.
Google is entering the cloud services market. Cloud computing just got a lot bigger. On Thursday Google announced that it would offer computing as a service accessible over the Internet, much like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and others. Google said its prices would be about 50 percent below those of current market rates. Urs Hölzle, the Google senior vice president for technical infrastructure, said Google was drawing off its own long history of managing millions of servers around the world.
How can peer review be effective when the underlying data cannot be shared? When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists. At least that is how the system is supposed to work. But lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge. It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world.
I wrote about consumer transaction-generated information in the 1990s. Companies collected and analyzed data from sales points and loyalty programs. But it became sexy only recently. Why? It should not be too surprising that a Google-created entity should have this bent.
First there was searching. Then there was ego surfing, where one spent time and energy looking to see how big a profile one had on the web. Of course, there was help, with Google alerts and such. Now, as we venture into big data (also known as business analytics), it is no surprise that the introspection angle is coming up. Here’s a nice little piece by Stephen Wolfram documenting what he’s done to analyze his personal big data of the past 23 years.