Posts Tagged ‘Google’

My Perfect GPS System

October 30th, 2009

Yesterday Google announcemnt about their new mobile navigation app created an havoc in the shares of GPS companies. Germin for example lost more than 1.2 billion dollar in just one day. Most days I will favor the any company who compete with Google, but this time I have no mercy for Germin and the rest. For too long these companies ruled the GPS market not really innovating and giving consumers what they really need.

Screen shot 2009-10-30 at 8.53.02 PM

I decided to make a quick list of some of the features I would like to see in my perfect GPS system. Here it goes:

  • Connectivity to Yelp. When I look for a Burger place, I want to see the top Yelp results on the map.
  • Voice uploads and personalities – Why can’t we buy new voices. Wouldn’t it will be cool to have Homer Simpson as your GPS system voice? And if we already have voices, why not give it a little more personality based on the character you chose.
  • Voice activation – Like the name. The ability to use voice to do searches.
  • Route by view – The ability to choose the between possible routes based on the view it will take me by.
  • Suggestions – If I need to do a 6 hours drive, wouldn’t it will be great to get suggestions for attractions that are on the way?
  • Recommendations – Similar to the Amazon concept of recommendations, if I chose to go to a specific attraction why can’t the GOS recommend me other attractions people who went there also went to.
  • Events – I would love to have the ability to see on the map a list of music events appearing near me.
  • And of course – live traffic maps and calculation of route time based on traffic.

So… Who is going to build it?

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Posted in Gadgets

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What’s Going On With Google Behavioral Targeting??

October 30th, 2009

I just read Eric post on Techcrunch calling Google behavioral targeting system a bust.
For everyone who are not aware of this solution, about six months ago Google started to deploy a new version of Ad Sense which will use behavioral targeting instead of contextual targeting. This was one of these moments that tens of ad networks out there feared. In theory, if Google will start to use their vast amount of data gathered on users they should be able to win also this emerging market and take everyone else out of business.

After reading this post that claims that not many publishers opt in to use Google’ solution, I decided to use Google Ads Preference tools to actually see what profile Google built on me.
To my great surprise the answer I got is: none (see image).

Now – I’m using Google Reader on a daily basis. I’m using 3 different gmail accounts. Google is the default and almost search engine I use. I browse many sites on which Google display ads, I even updated my Google profile with my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.
How can it be that Google can’t understand my interests (or at least have a calculated guess)???
(And no. I did not clear all my cookies and I use just one browser).

Screen shot 2009-10-30 at 7.40.46 PM

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Posted in Advertising, Google

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The Search Wars Are Back

June 1st, 2009

As many people noted today, most of the initial reactions to the new search engine from Microsoft, Bing, are quite good. In the past weeks we all read so many negative things about it, that I think we can all admit that we expected a complete failure. But surprisingly, Bing is actually very good.

The big question now is whether this is enough to compete with Google?

I think Microsoft was very smart in the way they developed Bing. They realised that they can't and should not try to fight Google over index size or even ranking of search results. Google are just too good there. But with the combination of their aquasition of Power set, and integration with some of their owned content sites like Farecast what they achived is something else – a more relevent way to display search results.

Search for example for "Lakers Results" in Bing and in Google and you will see the difference. WHile both point to the Lakers site as the first result, Bing also shows you the latest game results and the next games schedule, right in the search results.

Add to that some really useful new UI elements such as playing videos right in the search results, auto preview for sites and relates searches tab and you get a quite impressive search experience.

That said, this is still not enough to beat Google. The problem is that in order to beat Google, you actually need to break users' habit. And this is the hardest possible task. In order to do so, Microsoft needs one of the following:

  • A "killer" feature – A feature that is so good that it will make people start to use it just for that.
  • A "killer" marketing campaign – After the semi successful "I'm a PC" campaign, can Microsoft pull a winner for Bing?
  • Use their "windows advantage" – Basically integrate Bing so hard into Windows 7 that users will just have to start and use it. This is unlikely as the last thing Microsoft needs right now is more anti trust issues.

Another very interesting scenario could be if Microsoft buys Twitter and integrate it into Bing… Twitter "real time" search is getting better and better and could potentially be this killer feature. Make the twitter search box to actually do Bing search, and you suddenly get millions of new users…

Picture 1

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Posted in Bing, Google, Internet, Microsoft, Search

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Apple Marketing Machine Beats Google

November 8th, 2008

I’ve been saying for a long time that Apple is a marketing firm first and technology company second.
Yes, Apple does release amazing technology products like the iPhone, but what gives them their dominant role in the market is first of all their marketing.

It seems that even the big Google can’t compete with Apple.
I still remember the first days when the iPhone just came out. Every single day we saw all the blogs and news papers cover every single feature, every new application or hack that came out. Even now, we still see quite a large coverage of iPhone rumors and opinions on future releases.

It’s been a few weeks since Android came out and I can’t really remember reading anything about it. Actually, if you’ll check Google trends you will see that even now when Android is completely new and exciting it doesn’t even scratch the iPhone dominance of the news.

You can say that this is because the iPhone is just a better product. Maybe… but even so I would still expect to see Android in the news, even if with bad news and reviews.

You can say a lot of bad things about the Microsoft-Seinfeld campaign, but in the end we need to appreciate the fact that for a few weeks, it put Microsoft in the news again and again, even without a new shining product like Android.

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Posted in Uncategorized

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