Since I’m keep on blogging about Google lately and since it seems that this fact is part of their marketing strategy here is an intersting list of Google’s main marketing principles:
Aren’t the latest middle-east events expressing exactly this?
No further comment. See all controversial Danish Mohammed Cartoons
UPDATE:
Blogosphere on the subject – here.
Mainstream media on the subject – here.
Technorati Tags: Danish Mohammed Cartoons
The Google guys made it to the cover of Time magazine which runs an inside look at how success has changed Larry and Sergey’s dream machine:
Is there a grand strategy for Google? It seems as if you’re diving into almost everything.
SCHMIDT: We try very hard to look like we’re out of control. But in fact the company is very measured. And that’s part of our secret.
PAGE: We don’t generally talk about our strategy … because it’s strategic. I would rather have people think we’re confused than let our competitors know what we’re going to do. That’s an easy trade-off.
Tags: google, time magazine, time cover, larry page, sergey brin, eric schmidt
Even if I had the feeling from the very beginning that the whole wave of protests in the arab world was orchestrated I didn’t have any solid proof on this. Meanwhile, this post just gets me closer to this belief:
Egyptian newspaper, Al Fager (as pronounced in Egyptian Arabic) has published the controversial Danish Mohammed Cartoons five month ago on Oct 17, 2005. Any ideas why it might have taken the Muslim community so long to react?
See scans of the egyptian newspaper here.
Tags: danish cartoons
From the category “I live in a country where you can never get bored” here is one thing I think I knew, but never actually saw the numbers:
The time span between the political decision and the inauguration of one kilometer of highway is 58 (yeah fifty eight) months, which means 4 years and 10 months. That because of some time consuming procedures. That means 50 cm of highway daily.
For the romanian language readers, more about it here.
In order to help online organizations bridge the gap between themselves and their markets, Deep/Young Anodyne Laboratories was commissioned to REbrand several web sites. The first step in this campaign was to add a welcome page (also known as a “splash” page) to each site. Each splash page attempts to more honestly represent the true nature of the site.
Here are some examples:
Tags: branding, rebranding
First of all today Google released the beta version of its Google Desktop 3.0. Besides some new important features like dragging panels out of the sidebar and place them anywhere you want on the desktop or sending content from your sidebar to others, probably the most important new one is the Search across computers one.
Important from the utility point of view as well as the privacy issues debate it will launch. That because:
In order to share your indexed files between your computers, we first copy this content to Google Desktop servers located at Google. This is necessary, for example, if one of your computers is turned off or otherwise offline when new or updated items are indexed on another of your machines. We store this data temporarily on Google Desktop servers and automatically delete older flies, and your data is never accessible by anyone doing a Google search.
Basically Google Desktop gathers all manner of data on one’s computer and makes it available via another, if the user chooses to store it on Google’s servers.
More than that Google added lately new features to its free mail service, in a try to push its IM client to mainstream. As such Gtalk chats are now integrated (along with the chat hsitory) in the webmail client. In terms of gmail too, it seems that is more than that:
Their next big move will likely be GMail for domains — a powerful way for anybody who owns a domain to utilize GMail as a mail server, not just a client.
More here.
Romania ranks 85th out of 159 countries in 2005 Corruption Perceptions Index recently published by Transparency International.
The Corruption Perceptions Index, now in its eleventh year, aims to provide data on extensive perceptions of corruption within countries. These perceptions enhance our understanding of real levels of corruption from one country to another. The CPI is a composite index, making use of surveys of business people and assessments by country analysts.
Overall, 16 sources were included in the 2005 CPI, originating from 10 independent institutions and using data compiled between 2003 and 2005.
The first 10 corruption-free countries are:
1. Iceland 9.7
2. Finland / New Zealand 9.6
4 Denmark 9.5
5 Singapore 9.4
6 Sweden 9.2
7 Switzerland 9.1
8 Norway 8.9
9 Australia 8.8
This year’s edition has a special focus on corruption and health although it has some in-depth analysis on some of the problematic countries on the subject, including Romania, as well as a final part which surveys the latest in corruption research.
The Romanian section is of course focused on two main subjects:
Check the report downloads section here.
Tags: corruption perception index, transparency international, romania, eu accession
Mozilla Firefox has achieved an market share of over 20 percent in Europe, according to the latest figures released by French Web metrics firm XiTi and an estimated global market share of 11.5 percent. That happened in only a little over one year.
What if same trend will follow in operating systems? While until recently Firefox’s only support was the open source community, Google recently jumped in and said something like “yeah, we support Firefox browser“. It seems that this was only the beginning and Google really want to join the OS market. Recent reports confirmed that:
Google is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop, in a possible bid to take on Microsoft in its core business – desktop software.
A version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian and the Gnome desktop, it is known internally as ‘Goobuntu’.
Uh!! That can get big, but it’s not all as there is one more piece of news that I wouldn’t even imagined one year or five ago. Recent alliance between Intel and Apple made it possible to have:
an IBM ThinkPad that dual boots Windows XP and Mac OS 10.4 (the Intellese version). It felt like I was in the twilight zone seeing the shiny Mac interface on a black IBM laptop.
Running Mac OS on non-Apple hardware isn’t Apple’s intention with 10.4, but now that it’s possible, surely a community will spring up around the possibilities – and hopefully get their hands on the necessary drivers.
Something to keep an eye on..
UPDATE: It seems that Google denies the Goobuntu rumor:
technology spokeswoman Sonya Borälv responded very quickly to my query on the topic. She said that “[w]e use Ubuntu internally but have no plans to distribute it outside of the company.”
Same thing happened with Gmail, doesn’t it?
Tags: Goobuntu, Mac OS, Windows, operating system, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Firefox
