As you know I typically cover technology and Web related topics on this blog. However in this post I want to switch gears. Today I was invited to a fund raiser by my good friends Bill and Susan Wishon. They are part of a non-profit organization called Mariposa’s Art, which helps “at risk” youth by conducting after school programs.
They primarily operate within Santa Cruz, Watsonville and San Jose areas. In 10 years of their operations, they have helped over seven thousand individuals. Their after school programs provide classes on art and music to youth, thus fostering their creativity. This is an excellent program as it builds creativity and prevents youth from getting into the wrong habits They also have student teacher programs, which enable students to teach, thus building confidence.
I was very impressed by their efforts and success. I recommend you visit their website and make a donation if you want to help.
I wish them Good luck and thank Bill and Susan for making me part of their efforts.
I am sure most of you know about Google’s latest initiative called OpenSocial. Google launched this effort to simplify and consolidate the ecosystem for application developers and Social Networks.
According to OpenSocial, Social Networks and other similar services can play hosts and implement to the standard Google API’s. Developers can write applications to these API’s and are automatically enabled to deploy them on any one of these hosts. This introduces the “Write Once, Run Anywhere” paradigm in the ecosystem. You can read more on their official website.
According to Google’s Vic Gundotra, this is valuable for both developers and host networks. With respect to Users, he mentions that they will receive “more, more and more”. More Applications, More Choices across More Websites.
Frankly, I disagree with Vic there. “More” is not always good. I will even go to the extent of saying that the idea of “More” is the single biggest problem with the social networking experience today. I have written about Social Network overload several times before.
Read the rest of this entry »
As expected, on Monday (Nov 5th) Google announced their open mobile OS to the world, along with a very powerful new alliance with over 30 companies in the mobile space. Along with the announcement on their blog, they also organized a conference call where they brought industry leaders representing the strong alliance.
Over the past couple days I have been browsing and digesting the various aspects of this announcements and reactions from the blogosphere. This post is an attempt to distill down the details and offer my analysis of the situation.
Please bear in mind that this is only an early analysis. Once Android releases their SDK on Nov 12th, more details shall be available. I break this analysis into four simple categories, Salient items, impacts, issues and desires.
Read the rest of this entry »
This is the third and final part of this series. If you haven’t read the first two, check them out here:
- Part 1
- Part 2
The news around GPhone has heated up in past few weeks. There have been several reports of Google working with wireless carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint. WSJ even reports that the announcement can come as early as Monday.
So it will soon be evident as what Google has in store for us. Until then we can speculate. So in this final post of the series, I look at two major components of the GPhone ecosystem, the “Application Ecosystem” and the all important “Revenue Enablement”.
Read the rest of this entry »
This is the second part of my three part post on the GPhone. If you haven’t read the first part, please go read it here. This post takes a deeper dive and analyzes the possibilities around Messaging, Media and Productivity applications. Remember these are simply my analysis, as if I was building the phone. This is no indication of how Google may do it. Surely, I hope that I end up being pretty close to their thought process.
So without further ado, let’s begin with the Messaging.
Messaging
It goes without saying that Messaging is such an important function of our Mobile lifestyle. Pretty much all mobile devices attempt to innovate and improve the messaging offerings. SMS, MMS and Email are commonplace now on all phones. That is not to say that they have become simpler or intuitive. Any typical off the shelf phone offers multiple modes of messaging and involves a decent learning curve. It does get complicated for a mainstream user to navigate through this.
In my opinion, the GPhone can improve mobile messaging by leveraging its exemplary messaging portfolio.
Read the rest of this entry »
Those who are deep into blogging realize that this primarily a one way medium. People use it as a mode for self expression and reporting. Even if someone decides to respond they use comments or have to setup their own blog to express their views.
Comments although nifty are very simple methods of offering reactions. Most of the time they are positive or negative reaction to a topic or a fact/fiction within a post. In addition these comments typically get lost in plethora of other comments. They rarely end up being proper conversations between people. Not to mention that some blogs disable comments altogether to prevent spam.
This has been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time. As an avid blogger and surfer, I comment on many blogs. In the quest for a conversational mode of communication, I also tried CoComment with the hope that I can keep track of my comments across most blogs. However that didn’t quite pan out as I had hoped. It simply captured my comment and aggregated the comment RSS feed for all reactions. It was simple aggregation of comment feeds and not very relevant.
Read the rest of this entry »
The internet is buzzing with rumors about a possibility of a phone from Google. I too have posted some thoughts in the past. It is being said that Google isn’t developing a phone but an operating system. That kinda sounds right as Google is known for its software and not for its hardware capabilities. Although Andy Rubin (possibly the main guy running the GPhone operation) did create the SideKick, which was an awesome phone.
Based on this latest rumor, the threat could be more towards the likes of Microsoft, Symbian and other mobile OS providers. The OS play is interesting as Google will have to depend on OEM vendors and carriers to some extent for getting its service to the market. This is in contrast to Apple who has all or nothing mentality (of course excluding the RF infrastructure).
My intent with the post is not really to spread more rumors. It is more around analyzing how Google could solve this problem. They probably have the best armory of services and applications, which can be extended to a Mobile ecosystem. This post delves into the approach from my perspective. I will try and break my analysis down in various horizontal components, which comprise the ecosystem. This post will be in three parts covering:
- Base operating system and mobile features
- Messaging, Productivity and Media features (live now)
- Application Ecosystem and Revenue Enablement (live now)
So without further ado, let’s look at part one.
Read the rest of this entry »
