Eideard

Even our shiny new Railrunner has free wi-fi

Google’s gift of free holiday Internet access at 47 U.S. airports only points out how backward those airports are. Don’t they understand Internet access in public places is supposed to be free?

This time of year, however, people…live in airports. And there, Google is beating the Grinch that charges for Wi-Fi.

Folks who spend part of their holiday snowed in at a distant airport will all have nice memories of Google, provided its free Internet actually works pretty well. Google’s announcement did not say, but I hope they have invested in enough infrastructure to support the number of users the free offer will generate…

Google said its gift currently includes 47 airports, including Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston, Baltimore, Burbank, Houston, Indianapolis, Seattle, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Louis, and Charlotte. Additionally, as a result of the project, Burbank and Seattle airports will begin offering airport-wide free Wi-Fi indefinitely.

Not included, however, are some major airports, including all three that serve New York City, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Chicago O’Hare, LAX, and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Having to pay for Internet access in airports and other public places is simply stupid and is part of the nickel-and-diming that has become the post-9/11 travel industry. Except that airport Wi-Fi usually costs dollars, not dimes.

Airports and airlines should offer free Internet because keeping customers happy, productive, and occupied is a good thing while they wait for their planes. Don’t we already pay enough for everything else at airports..?

I am, hopefully, not spending time at any airports over the holidays (the promotion ends Jan. 15), but if I were, Google would be my new best friend.

Airports are managed by the inbred cousins of people from the MPAA and RIAA.

Los Angeles City Council approved a US$7.25 million five-year deal in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps.

Google is touting the deal as a major endorsement of its cloud-based approach to computing, but it turns out that some of the funding is indirectly coming from an unlikely source: Microsoft.

According to Los Angeles City Council minutes, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft…

The migration from the city’s Novell GroupWise e-mail servers will be handled by contractor Computer Sciences Corp. Other applications such as calendaring, document sharing and chat will be handled by Google Apps too.

The five-year contract will cost Los Angeles about $1.5 million more than simply sticking with Novell. But because the city will get extra storage capacity from Google, while at the same time being able to run other software on the Novell servers, it’s worth the cost, according to an Oct. 7 city finance committee memo written by City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana.

Google has pushed Google Apps as an option for government agencies, promising to ship a product called Government Cloud, which will be certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), sometime next year.

The Los Angeles deal may hint at how this product will work.

RTFA. See how the GovCloud data environment will be implemented.

Of course, we’ll all be watching and waiting for security screw-ups. I don’t think they’ve figured out how to remove the last vestige of human carelessness. But, then – that’s just as much a problem with existing systems.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Google will launch an e-book store called Google Editions with a “don’t be evil” twist. Unlike Google’s biggest competitors Amazon and Barnes & Noble that rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google will not be device-specific — allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on a far greater number of e-book readers that will flood the market in 2010.

Google’s e-books will be accessible through any Web-enabled computer, e-reader, or mobile phone instead of a dedicated device. This will allow content to be unchained from expensive devices such as Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader…

The new e-book store will launch sometime during the first half of 2010, and will have about 500,000 titles at launch. Under Google’s payment scheme, publishers will receive about 63 percent of the gross sales, and Google will keep the remaining 37 percent.

Google also hopes to offer Editions titles through other online book retailers. In this scenario, online retailers would get 55 percent of revenues minus a small fee paid to Google, and publishers would get 45 percent. Google may also create deals to sell Google Editions books directly through a book publisher’s Website, but no details have been announced for how that scenario would work, according to Read Write Web…

Any device with a Web browser will be able to access a Google Editions book. After you purchase and access your online book for the first time, it will be cached in your browser making the book available when you’re offline.

Still haven’t played with anyone’s eBook reader.

Don’t forget I’m a retired old geezer who maintains his crankiness exclusively from home.

Will a new gadget stick around? You can’t tell from its first act, but you might know by its second or third release. Or maybe its seventh. Consider two new follow-on performances in the wireless-phone industry: One broadens the appeal of Google’s Android software, while the other cements the irrelevance of Microsoft’s aging Windows Mobile platform.

The first item is Sprint’s HTC Hero, shipping Oct. 11 for $279.99 before a $100 mail-in rebate for new or renewing customers. It’s the first Android phone available here from a carrier besides T-Mobile. That alone is good news: Sprint’s data coverage vastly exceeds T-Mobile’s patchy service, and its prices beat T-Mobile’s, too…

The real star of the Hero, however, is not its hardware but its open-source software. Android…

The other, less impressive new phone development of the month is Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.5 — the company’s first big update to its mobile software since the iPhone arrived in 2007. You might think that two years would be enough time for Microsoft to respond to its new competitor, but you would be wrong.

As tested on an AT&T HTC Pure, one of a handful of devices with the new software…Windows Mobile 6.5 is a miserable mess. Slow, clumsy and ugly, it offers a few surface refinements of the iPhone and Android but little of their underlying elegance…

Windows Mobile 6.5’s new onscreen keyboard seems designed for a shrunken species of human, to judge from its tiny buttons. And its menus often reveals cramped dialogs unchanged from older versions of Windows Mobile that required using a stylus.

With all these issues, it can be difficult to see many people wanting a Windows Mobile phone now. But it’s even harder to imagine how long phone manufacturers will keep paying Microsoft for this software when Android is not just better but free.

I don’t think anyone has a mandate to help Microsoft sort their countless internal problems. I know from a few friends who were recruited by Microsoft – their reason for turning down the offer was always the same. They were expected to be so happy about working for the Prince that they should be willing to accept a Pauper’s paycheck.

Of course that’s an exaggeration. But, whether you’re in Redmond or Mountainview [or Cupertino], the characterization of Microsoft as cheapskates is as consistent as the pundits who whine about Google employees being overpaid and coddled.

Microsoft’s Bing has seen slow but steady month over month growth since it launched this past summer. However, September saw Bing’s share of the U.S. search market fall to 8.5 percent.

New numbers from StatCounter show that rather than continuing its trend of acquiring more market share at the expense of competitors Google and Yahoo!, Bing fell by 1.1 percent (bringing the decision making engine down from 9.64 percent to 8.51 percent) while Google rose two full percentage points, moving to 80.08 percent, up from the 77.83 percent it had in August. Yahoo! also declined, moving to 9.40 percent from 10.50 percent.

This is rough news in itself, however the fact that its Bing’s first decline since it launched in May.

“The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid August,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “The wheels haven’t fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft.”

You can find more details than Microsoft wants to see over at statcounter.

The Telegraph’s headline: “Googlle: Google releases missspelt logo to mark 11th anniversary”

The url of the article is just as wrong – the Telegraph misspelled “missspelt” – which I somehow doubt was deliberate.

Maybe not. Maybe the copy editors have gotten hip?

UPDATE: Har! They not only fixed the headline overnight, they fixed the url + linked the original url to the new one.

Poisonally, I can’t wait to try this. Especially, if and when Google is allowed to offer out-of-print books.

Google has notched up the biggest rise in brand value, according to Interbrand’s latest listing of the 100 most valuable global brands.

The internet search company’s value grew 25% over the past year to reach nearly $32bn. In growth terms, it was closely followed by Amazon, which saw its brand equity boosted 22% to almost $8bn.

There were double-digit rises in the technology sector for BlackBerry and Apple, which made it into the top 20 global brands for the first time…

The top five brands, however, have held onto their positions. Coca-Cola remains at the top for the ninth year in a row, with its value up 3% to $69bn followed by IBM, Microsoft, GE and Nokia.

Luxury brands have also held onto their value; Ferrari was the best-performing automotive brand. However, Harley Davidson was one of this year’s biggest losers dropping 43% of its brand value and slipping from 50th to 73rd in the table.

I’m not concerned about acquiring a Ferrari anytime soon. I don’t drink carbonated beverages anymore. And there’s nothing in my home from the 4 brands following Coca-Cola.

My wife and I both Google – and sometimes I think we keep Amazon in business on our own.

Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.

“We’ve been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on,” the company’s green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit…

The company’s engineers have been focused on solar thermal technology, in which the sun’s energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun’s rays on the heated substance.

Weihl said Google is looking to cut the cost of making heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, by at least a factor of two, “ideally a factor of three or four.”

“Typically what we’re seeing is $2.50 to $4 a watt (for) capital cost,” Weihl said. “So a 250 megawatt installation would be $600 million to a $1 billion. It’s a lot of money.” That works out to 12 to 18 cents a kilowatt hour.

Google hopes to have a viable technology to show internally in a couple of months, Weihl said. It will need to do accelerated testing to show the impact of decades of wear on the new mirrors in desert conditions.

“We’re not there yet,” he said. “I’m very hopeful we will have mirrors that are cheaper than what companies in the space are using…”

Every little bit helps. Reviewing science articles as frequently as I do – I’m struck by the number of new approaches university researchers around the world are coming up with. Now, that there seems to be a climate of support for energy research.

That’s not really a pun – is it?

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Yes, that’s irony. One of my pet peeves is critics who babble as if they own a solid-state crystal ball – letting us know all the evil that will be committed by rather ordinary [but successful] companies by virtue of being successful at providing a service. Rather like keeping a horse because some car companies build pretty good cars.

Circuitous logic at best. Bill Thompson’s earlier piece on why he feared Google was going to destroy literature as we know it fit the bill perfectly. Which is why I didn’t waste time blogging about it.

After my criticism of the proposed Google Book Search settlement was published on the BBC News website Google offered the opportunity to talk about my concerns with Santiago de la Mora, the company’s director of book partnerships in Europe.

We talked extensively about the rationale behind Book Search, the detail of the settlement and my worries over its possible adverse impact on other digitisation projects.

It is clear that for those within Google who are developing Book Search the goal is to enhance user choice and build the market for books, not simply driving more traffic and generating more advertising revenue for Google itself.

Throughout our conversation Mr de la Mora was adamant that enabling people to find books online will benefit readers, authors and publishers.

Am I the only one out here who notices that authors’ arguments against Google book search are identical to RIAA fears about music file-sharing or the MPAA position on movie file-sharing?

Read the rest of this entry »