The world of Google

obmar

Why we believe in Google Print

10/19/2005 08:54:00 PM
Posted by David Drummond, General Counsel and Vice President, Corporate Development

We've been asked recently why we're so determined to pursue Google Print, even though it has drawn industry opposition in the form of two lawsuits, the most recent coming today from several members of the American Association of Publishers. The answer is that this program, which will make millions of books easier for everyone in the world to find, is crucial to our company's mission. We're dedicated to helping the world find information, and there's too much information in books that cannot yet be found online. We think you should be able to search through every word of every book ever written, and come away with a list of relevant books to buy or find at your local library. We aim to make that happen, but to do so we'll need to build and maintain an index containing all this information.

It's no surprise that this idea makes some publishers nervous, even though they can easily remove their books from the program at any time. The history of technology is replete with advances that first met wide opposition, later found wide acceptance, and finally were widely regarded as having been inevitable all along. In 1982, for instance, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America famously told a Congressional panel that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone." But Sony, makers of the original Betamax, stood its ground, the Supreme Court ruled that copying a TV show to watch it later was legal, and today videotapes and DVDs produce the lion's share of the film industry's revenue.

We expect Google Print will follow a similar storyline. We believe that our product is legal (see Eric Schmidt's recent op-ed), that the courts will vindicate this position, and that the industry will come to embrace Google Print's considerable benefits. Even today, despite its lawsuit, the AAP itself recognizes this potential. The Google Print Library Program, AAP president Pat Schroeder said this morning, "could help many authors get more exposure and maybe even sell more books.” We look forward to the day that the program's opponents marvel at the fact that they actually tried to stop an innovation that, by making books as easy to find as web pages, brought their works to the attention of a vast new global audience.

The Inquisitor

obmar,

google is a product of the current mainstream think in the US. I use it all the time, even though I realize that it points me in a particular direction and eliminates other, perhaps more fruitful directions.

1984.

What's a homeboy supposed to do??

obmar

Google is more than a search engine...
It will be croaching into more and more of the things we do, from now on...

The Inquisitor

Indeed obmar,

We already have Google Earth and Google video along with the other options. I don't doubt that Google will become a powerhouse player in the internet world and perhaps beyond. Only time will tell.

obmar

Many tools are begining to trickle from the house of Google.

Spreadsheet, Notebook, anlytics, to name a few....

The Inquisitor

Obmar,

That sounds a lot like Microsoft back in the 1980s. They had programs like Word and Excel, but were nothing compared to Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect. Now, no one uses either of those and everyone wants to use Word and Excel.

What a difference a decade or two makes.

obmar

Everything on the web, thats how they are approaching it.

obmar

Google has agreed to purchase online video phenomenon YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, the companies announced Monday.

The deal, which had been rumored for days, will dramatically improve Google's video-sharing service with one of the Internet's hottest properties in YouTube, which allows Net users to upload video clips and share them with the world, for better or worse.

YouTube will operate independently, and the companies will work together on building new features for independent users as well as for aspiring directors, they said in a press release. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2006.

"This is one of many investments that Google will be making to put video at the heart of a user's online experience," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt on a conference call after the deal was announced. "When we looked at the marketplace and saw what was going on, we saw a clear winner in the social networking side of video, and that's what drove us to start the conversations with YouTube."

From the YouTube side, co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen described their excitement at taking advantage of Google's deep pockets and advertising contacts as they continue to build out their site. "We now have the resources to take our service to the next level," said Chen, who serves as YouTube's chief technology officer.

Google's acquisition of YouTube comes as online video is really starting to hit its stride. As more and more people have signed up for broadband Internet connections and the technology behind video-sharing services has improved, traffic to YouTube's site has skyrocketed. The site has about 45 percent of the online video market, according to recent figures from Web traffic monitor Hitwise.

Users have made a very big deal of uploading videos of themselves, sharing the minute details of their lives, dancing to popular music or, more controversially, rebroadcasting clips of popular television shows.

One early example of the phenomenon was the frenzy around the comic "Lazy Sunday" video, pulled from an airing of "Saturday Night Live." NBC first demanded that YouTube pull the sketch from its site after people flocked to the hilarious rap song featuring two mild-mannered cast members affecting gangsta-rap personas while recalling a trip to the movies to see "The Chronicles of Narnia." But YouTube later cut a deal with NBC to allow YouTube users to post content from NBC programs, and it has followed up that deal with others involving companies such as Warner Music and on Monday, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and CBS.

Google's heft gives YouTube more credibility in this emerging market for online video, said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. "I think the combination of the greater potential to make deals and also the greater technical ability to solve copyright problems puts them in a much better position than YouTube is (in) by itself."

Around 100 million videos are available on YouTube on a given day, with 65,000 new videos added every day, according to the company's Web site. It cited numbers from Nielsen Net Ratings, claiming 20 million unique visitors a month.

All of that content requires search technology to make it easier to find exactly what users are looking for, and improving YouTube's search capabilities with Google's technology will be one of the first priorities of the merged organization. But Google also sees advertising possibilities in those numbers, said Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and president of technology. "Video is a great medium for advertising," he said.

The companies struck an all-stock deal in order to make the transaction tax-free for the YouTube shareholders, according to David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development for Google. Google will issue the number of shares required to complete the deal based on the 30-day average closing price of Google's stock two trading days prior to the close of the acquisition. The company's stock closed at $429 on Monday. Sequoia Partners provided the original funding for YouTube of $3.5 million in November 2005, and followed that up with a second $8 million round of funding in April.

YouTube's suitors over the last six months have, according to reports, included Microsoft, Yahoo, News Corp. and other online and traditional media giants looking to get in on the viral video craze. However, the process of trying to determine YouTube's value over the last six months reminded more than a few analysts of the dot-com bubble frenzy in the late 1990s, when companies were being purchased based on a user base and a dream, regardless of whether they were actually able to turn a profit.

Google used a "synergistic" model to value YouTube, said Drummond, declining to elaborate on just exactly what that meant but acknowledging that traditional "standalone" methods of putting a price tag on the company were hard to use in this situation.

Executives pointed to the similarities between a young YouTube and a young Google as one of the reasons for the acquisition. "Everyone here knows they've built an extraordinary business and phenomenon. The thing that tipped us over was not business success or working relationships but the vision of serving users," Schmidt said.

Still, the combined organization will need to make money serving those users. The early strategy appears to be a combination of targeted advertising next to YouTube videos combined with better search technology for helping content owners identify copyright violations. "We're going to be exploring a lot of options utilizing Google's advanced ad technology that benefits the experience and helps partners monetize their content," said Hurley, YouTube's chief executive officer.

With this move, Google has launched itself ahead of competitors such as Yahoo and Microsoft in taking control of online video, Forrester's Bernoff said. "Every one of these portals now of any size has announced its own user-generated content area, it's apparently very easy to put in place, but that doesn't help much. The people at YouTube have figured out how to do this better, and I think the other portals have to implement a system similar to this to be successful," he said.

Microsoft was looking into buying something like YouTube earlier this year but eventually decided to build its own video sharing service, known as Soapbox, according to Whitney Burke, a spokeswoman for the company. "We are excited about the potential we are seeing in the beta of Soapbox on MSN and believe building our own solution is a more cost-effective way to compete in this new space," said Burke in a statement.

CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this article.

obmar · Clearer Focus on Google Earth

http://content.techrepublic.com.com/2346-10878_11-1868.html

Google Earth 4.0, unveiled on Monday, shows a high-resolution version of Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, in Australia.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin (left) and Larry Page join Chief Executive Eric Schmidt onstage before the unveiling of Google Earth 4.0 at Google Geo Developer Day.

Google shows a page with links to crop circles, including the Pac-Man crop circle, on Google Earth

Google product managers demonstrate how to use the SketchUp 3D modeling tool to create buildings from scratch and insert them into Google Earth.

In the current version of Google Earth, the navigation and other controls, such as the zoom feature, are located in a frame under the main image.

This image of downtown San Francisco taken from Google Earth 3.1 shows how the details become fuzzy around the edges.

Details remain sharp from corner to corner in the same image as the previous slide taken from Google Earth 4.0. Also, the bottom frame is eliminated and some controls are moved to the upper right corner of the main image. They are not visible until you move your mouse into the area.

Notice the blurring of the white car in the intersection in the middle left portion of this image from Google Earth 3.1. Now, compare with the clarity of the same car as seen in Google Earth 4.0.

The clarity of the car as seen here in the intersection in the middle left portion of this image from Google Earth 4.0 is an improvement over the blurring of the car as seen from Google Earth 3.1.

obmar

Google: Should we cheer it or fear it? Posted by Donna Bogatin @ 5:50 pm

Digg This!

Every day seems to bring another reason to cheer “everyone’s favorite garage band,” Google: Multi-billion dollar acquisitions (YouTube), strategic alliances (Intuit), product introductions (Google Apps)…

Now may be the time to stop the cheering and start the fearing, however. Fear Google? Unthinkable to most, but real to many. Why? Google is steadily realizing its unflinching objective to control the world’s content (information) and then use that content of others to its own strategic and profit objectives while determining how it is made available, stored, manipulated, accessed…

Google proudly proclaims its desire for worldwide domination.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Google Q2 conference call:

we are in the search business, so we need all of the information. We want to partner with people to get information so our search end users can see it. We’re also in the advertising business, and we’d like to provide advertising services to people who have their own proprietary content.

So depending on where we are in that spectrum, we either do an advertising deal or a content deal or a hybrid deal.

But ultimately our goal at Google is to have the strongest advertising network and all the world’s information, that’s part of our mission.

Google defines “all the world’s information” literally.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in August:

If you think about it, all the world's information includes personal information.

Isn’t it time we started thinking about the long-term consequences to businesses and individuals of a consolidation of every piece of public, private, and personal “information” within one $122 billion (and growing) market cap corporation’s “cloud” and worldwide server farms?

The Inquisitor

Yes,

I think that Google has outgrown its fun-loving status of yore. They have become part of the infamous big business that has probably bought into yellow journalism.

michaelclark

Hi obmar...

Thanks for posting nice Google image in your first page.
In this article you have targeted Google but don't understand the reason behind it.

obmar

michaelclark;

You have made me dig into further and here are some things that I found. Wink

Try this

Want some ebooks? Oh, yeah… google does that easily. Another power searching lesson coming right up.

Google: -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” +(”/ebooks”|”/book”) +(chm|pdf|zip)

Looks like that could open more from the pandora box.

Try it.

If you use the “index of” string you will find directory listings of specific folders on
servers. An example could be:
‘index of” michaelclark or index.of.michaelclark
which would get you many directory listings of obmar folders. (don’t forget to use the quotes in this
case since you are looking for the entire “index of” string, not just for “index” and “of”)

The world of Google

Clearer Focus on Google Earth