Want a Second Classroom?

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]

Although it’s common to hear technology entrepreneurs and investors express concern about the possibility that Google will move into their market niche and take away their business, the reality is that neither Google nor anyone else is guaranteed success in a new area.

Google’s social network, Orkut, has not challenged MySpace or Facebook, online calendar services like 30boxes are still doing well despite Calendar, and the recently-launched voice and video add-on to Gmail is unlikely to supersede Skype as a business tool.

Last week Google announced the closure of Lively, the web-based virtual environment it launched in July, in order to ‘prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business’, as the announcement puts it.

Continue reading “Want a Second Classroom?”

Who is responsible in our cloudy world?

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

In the next few days [in fact it is now published] a number of large technology companies, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are going to announce that they have signed up to a voluntary code of conduct on how they do business in countries that curtail freedom of expression like China and Singapore.

The code has been drawn up by the Washington-based digital rights group The Center for Democracy & Technology and a non-profit in San Francisco, Business for Social Responsibility, and it is believed to address the terms of business companies should adhere too and also to call on them to try to ensure that suppliers and business partners also sign up. Continue reading “Who is responsible in our cloudy world?”

A link to eternity

[You can read this on the BBC News website – sorry it’s late being posted here. But one day I’ll be late too..]

While Google is as secretive about its internal processes and systems as Apple is about product development, every now and then senior people post articles on the official Google blog and offer their thoughts on the development of the web.

In the latest posting two Google engineers, Alfred Spector and Franz Och, look at how search strategies will benefit from the faster computers, greater volumes of data and better algorithms we are likely to see in the next decade, speculating that “we could train our systems to discern not only the characters or place names in a YouTube video or a book, for example, but also to recognise the plot or the symbolism.”

Continue reading “A link to eternity”

My del.icio.us bookmarks for May 21st through May 29th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between May 21st and May 29th: