The Excitement Of Android

I read a lot last week about Google’s new mobile phone initiative – Android. It’s not an actual phone, that much is perfectly clear. Instead, phones will be built on Android.

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications.

My current Samsung Blackjack runs on Windows Mobile 5. Android would perform that same function. There are many similar, though different, phones using WM5. I expect the same thing with Android.

Does the world need another mobile platform? Maybe not. But what makes Android so exciting and different is, it’s open source. That puts it in the same category as Linux, MySQL and Apache&#185.

In a video (see below), Google co-founder Sergey Brin makes it perfectly clear he wants Android to be supported by the same type of free software tools he used to get Google going! This time, in his role as super rich guy, he gets to be the one who pays to have them developed, then set free.

To that end, the Android SDK (Software Developers Kit) is open and free. The SDK is the tool with which Android applications will be developed. SDKs for platforms are pretty commonplace. Having them be open and free is not.

Finally, Google has offered a $10,000,000 bounty for Android software developers. That might not be enough to excite Microsoft or Motorola, but it will spark many propeller head geeks into action. That’s big money if you can write a killer app all by yourself, or in a small partnership.

This open source phone talk can’t be pleasing my cell carrier, at&t, or any of the other incumbent carriers. Their business model is predicated on control of both the network and the hardware you buy. Right now, they decide what you phone can do, not you.

Understand, this isn’t a perfect solution. Free and open software can lead to ‘crashed’ cellphones, with no one to take responsibility. Still, it’s a very exciting concept.

My limited time with the Blackjack has shown me the potential in the mobile platform. We’re barely out of the stone age. My hope is, Android takes it to the next step.

For someone like me, who still fancies himself a bit of a hacker, it’s pretty exciting. There’s a lot of upside potential here. This is actually better than if Google had just gone ahead and announced a phone!

&#185 – Even if Linux, MySQL and Apache mean nothing to you, understand that much of the Internet would stop running immediately without them! That includes Google, EBay, and a gaziilion other sites… including geofffox.com


Concerning Google – What An Idiot I’ve Been

What’s the biggest Internet success story? Google, right? And everyone, until recently myself included, thinks it’s because Google is so good at performing searches.

Tonight, I’ve changed my mind.

Before Google, there were some very good search engines. There were AltaVista and Metacrawler and others whose names are now lost to me. Yahoo!&#185 was more a directory than a search engine.

As a power Internet user in the late 90s, I was not unhappy. I was able to search and get the results I wanted with little trouble.

So why is Google such a big deal? It’s not the search as much as it’s, their search seems benevolent.

Google was very smart. They cleaned up the home page.

All the other site where you could find stuff were gravitating toward being portals. Their home pages were full of news and tips and links and they included display ads. It was obvious to their users, they were sales machines. Please click. Please buy.

Google was basically a box where you entered text and not much more. No ads.

But searching is not a one web page affair. The search page leads to the results page. No search ends on the home page. Google was satisfied making their money on that landing page.

After the home page, every subsequent page on Google does contain ads. And, they are contextually tied to what’s on that page. If it’s possible to say, they are good ads.

It’s genius. But I don’t think it would have worked had Google not been willing to treat their home page as a loss leader. No ads!

As time went on Google has been able to extend their brand. They have contextual ads on webpages, like this one (look to the right). The have a mail service, also with contextual ads. They have other services too, but the payoff (to them) is always the same, and you never see any sign of commerce when you begin to do what you want to do.

Even better, since each ‘lead’ is prequalified, they can charge a higher CPM.

It’s not like a movie on TBS, where the first block is 45 minutes long and by the end you’re stopping for spots every 120 seconds. Google works so well because they run commercials and no one minds!

In this TiVo world, where the publisher of the New York Times worries he won’t have a paper based paper in five years and where CBS has just announced they’re selling a handful of TV stations for a few million more than they paid for just one of them, Google has succeeded in making us forget they are running commercials.

It is the genius of what they do, and any other elegance in the performance of search is no more than an interesting footnote.

I doubt, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were testing Google at Stanford, they had a clue what their success could be. They were lucky wise to give away the product they had worked so hard to develop.

Business is always better when you don’t worry if people will buy what you’re selling, but instead try to sell what they are dying to buy.

&#185 – I have been on the Internet long enough to have sent a comment to Yahoo! and gotten a personally written response that referred to “Jerry’s reaction” to what I’d suggested. “Jerry” was Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang. That ain’t happening today.

Second Thoughts At Google

More than nearly any other large company, Google has had a mostly good reputation. It’s a company made of smart people who revolutionized Internet search.

It’s no exaggeration to say Google has changed the Internet. They did it all through innovation. After all, they weren’t the first search engine, coming out of the blocks against already established players like Yahoo! and AltaVista.

Have I spread enough honey? My last few Google posts were more pointed and brutal. Like many others, I was quite upset by Google’s loosening their principles in order to operate in China.

Tonight I read this from Google co-founder Sergey Brin:

“Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense.”

In other words, maybe we shouldn’t have done what we did. I would feel better if this change of heart came in the abstract, but it looks like China has been limiting or totally cutting off access to Google within China.

If that’s the case, selling out hasn’t produced any gains – just awful publicity. And, like the old joke, the argument is no longer whether they’re whores but just dickering over price.

Criminals Of The Internet

I am fascinated by the ‘dark side’ of the Internet.  Maybe that’s because I was here (wherever here actually is), back when it all began… or close to it.

How long ago was that?  My first surfing of the Internet was done with a browser (Lynx) that only saw text – no images, much less multimedia content.  I remember sending a  technical comment to Yahoo!.  The person responding (get an actual person to respond today) said he’s pass it along to “Jerry.”  He was talking about  Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder.

The Internet was trustworthy.  In fact, many of the Internet’s biggest weaknesses are caused by the innocence of software coders who didn’t feel it was necessary to verify much of anything because it was a relatively small group of American geeks – mostly affiliated with colleges, universities or the military.

When I send email from home on my geofffox.com account, it comes from servers run by Comcast.  The same mail, sent from work, comes from a server I use at 1and1.com (not the station’s mail server).  I hardly ever use the server assigned to geofffox.com (long story about its dependability).

No one checks to make sure I really am entitled to use geofffox.com.  I could use anything as my return address with little fear of getting caught or suffering consequences!

It’s that ability to do what you wish with little scrutiny that has allowed parts of the Internet to become a cesspool.

I am often call upon to fix friend’s computers that have slowed down, as if a computer was a mechanical device that doesn’t run quite as well with age.  Of course the real reason for the slowdown is that they’ve been bogged down by hidden garbage on our trustworthy Internet

I read a long article, Invasion of the Computer Snatchers , in today’s Washington Post that shows how far all this scamming is going.  It’s scary.

Compromised computers are turned into ‘bots.’  It’s the PC equivalent of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

As is so often the case with crime, a few criminals can affect hundreds or thousands of unsuspecting computer owners.  And, since the thieves and scammers are giving away your time or money or convenience, they really don’t care how insidious their actions are.

What I don’t understand is why there isn’t a more concentrated effort to crack down on this crime?  OK – maybe mere individuals don’t have much pull, but Citibank, Bank of America, PayPal and others must.

And, since at some point these transactions must lead to the movement of money – why can’t it be tracked down and stopped?  I just don’t get it.

The Internet has such an incredible promise, which will never come to fruition if the net is allowed to remain the cyber equivalent of Times Square, circa 1975.