Google | The CEO Game

28May

The Pacman Effect

Economy, Web Comments Off

The Pacman game that has taken over Google’s home page in the last few days has caused the loss of 4.8 million work hours that are estimated to be worth 120 million dollars.

These celebrations for the 30th birthday of Pacman, which Google celebrated last week, had cost many US firms dearly.

Google published their own version of the original Pacman game, which was originally developed by the Japanese company Namco, on their home page. Google had reported that game was activated over a billion times in three days.

Eating your money.

According to research conducted by RescueTime, the average visitor had spent 36 extra seconds on the site to play the addicting game that Google had added for the special occasion. When summed up the time spent, you get a waste of 4.8 million work hours, which are worth around 120 million dollars.

Ailon.

The CEO Game.

Rating: 6.8/10 (12 votes cast)

Rating: +5 (from 13 votes)

Tags: Google, Pacman, US economy

05May

Your Government and Google

Technology 1 Comment

Ever wondered just how many times your government has requested Google to remove content or to provide user information? Well, Google’s new Government Request tool does just that. The newly launched service shows exactly how many times, governments from around the world approached Google with these ’special’ requests and how often did Google comply. In the age where government censorship of the web is growing rapidly: from the blocking and filtering of sites, to court orders limiting access to information and legislation forcing companies to self-censor content. Here is a more transparent look around these government requests.

Google

It’s no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies from around the world to remove content from their services. However, data about these activities has never been broadly available and now it is out there for everyone to see. The figures which are currently shown, are based on information gathered during the second half of 2009. Google promises they will be updated every six months.

Brazil is currently leading the board with almost 4000 requests, in both date and removal requests. However, experts suggest Brazil’s stats probably rank so high because of Orkut’s extraordinary dominance over there. Falling behind Brazil, you can find the US in the second place with over than 3500 data requests and 291 removal requests between July and December of last year, some 80% of which Google complied with. Germany, India and South Korea also rank high in removal requests with 188, 142, 64 accordingly. Amongst the top five in data requests you can find UK with 1100, India with 1050 and France with 850 requests.

On the contrary, Canada made ‘only’ 41 requests for data and only 16 removals: 43.8% of removal requests fully or partially complied with (1 Blogger, 2 Groups by court order, 1 Web search, 12 YouTube). Israel had even less: 30 data requests, under 10 removal requests (20% of these complied with). China is also protruding country, in the sense that its details are the only ones not shown. Google said “Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time”. Many countries were left out since they had too little requests to begin with.

Google points out, the “vast majority” of these requests are for legitimate legal purposes, one obvious example is tracking child pornographers and additional online crooks such as con-artists, spammers and more. Despite of this, as more and more information “goes online”, the line between what is a legitimate request and what’s practically invasion of privacy, becomes more and more blurry. The Google tool doesn’t drill down any further (behind jurisdiction sums) into the numbers (some requests revolve several sites and there are some repeating requests) and in removal cases how often they were complied with, buy hey, it is a start. Many human rights activists hope this move, will lead governments to think before digging for people’s personal data or attempting to censor their opinions.

To sum it up, Google said it best on their blog “we hope that this is just the first step toward increased transparency about these actions across the technology and communications industries”.

Omer Shachnai

The CEO Game.

Rating: 8.5/10 (14 votes cast)

Rating: +11 (from 13 votes)

Tags: Censorship, Google, Government, Search Engine

06Apr

Google Buys – YouTube Smiles

Economy, Technology What is Your Opinion?

Google buys web video company Episodic in order to beef up YouTube.

Internet searching giants, Google have made another big acquisition and this time it is in the video arena. Episodic, a start up web video company based in San Francisco, will become a part of Google. Thus, Episodic surpassed its key competitor Brightcove, also an American company which offers services for adding video to your website. The deal was announced on last Friday (2nd April) on the Episodic blog. Although the financial terms are undisclosed and haven’t been revealed yet, both companies are said to be very pleased and satisfied with the results.

Episodic. The Newest Addition.

Episodic offers a platform for live and on demand web videos. Content sites, advertisers and practically any enterprise use the platform in order to broadcast streaming video, analyze it and offer video content to their audience via different platforms: computers, laptops as well as mobile phones and IPTV gadgets (televisions who are connected to the Internet). Basically, the platforms allows every type of enterprise to deliver innovative technology and also to make money from it through advertising and online sales. Many experts claim that Episodic resembles YouTube and since Episodic’s technology and team are being folded into YouTube, it’s possible that we could see new ways for video creators to profit from their YouTube videos. This looks like good news for mid-level YouTube dwellers who did not have the leverage to work out money-making on their own.

Episodic also provides a content management system and offers an advertisement server, which allow clients to place adds in the videos and pay for it in credit card. Currently, Episodic supports Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Blackberry and intends to support Symbian devices as well in the future. On their blog, Episodic explain how they and Google also share the same ideas and goals for the future: “Episodic and Google share a common vision for video on the Web. Online video will be ubiquitous, engaging, entertaining, informative and effective. Both teams place value on creating a great experience for viewers and on delivering a powerful and flexible platform for publishers, marketers and advertisers of all kinds.”

Google’s shopping spree, or blitzkrieg if you wish, comes as no surprise. Last year Google completed purchasing the online advertising company AdMob for 750$ million in shares and Teracent for targeted display ad technology. This year, Google already bought On2 for 106.5$ million and many other companies, amongst them you can find: Docverse (a file sharing site), Appjet (a collaborative real time editor), Aardvak (social search), Picnic (photo editing). Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt claimed on September 2009 that Google plans to return to making purchases, after a minor pause, or setback if you wish, due to the global financial crisis. At the time, he also said that Google wishes to “buy a company a month” (on average). It seems that Google is definitely keen on fulfilling its chairman’s announcement.

Omer Shachnai

The CEO Game.

Rating: 6.6/10 (8 votes cast)

Rating: +1 (from 7 votes)

Tags: Episodic, Eric Schmid, Google, Google's shopping spree, Mobile market, Video, Youtube

03Apr

iPad Here You Come

Technology 2 Comments

Google, Amazon and even the White House are already prepared for the iPad release and they will support it. As usual only Microsoft isn’t.

Everybody is getting ready for the iPad. Apple is expected to start selling her tablet computer later on today, and now large service providers had announced that they will support Apple’s iPad along with other tablet PCs. The expectation is that the iPad will take the tablet PCs into the mainstream.

iPad, will it meet the expectations?

Starting from Google, the search engine giant had announced the release of special version of it’s mail service (Gmail), that is designed for tablet PCs. The new version will support the HTML 5 protocol along with other visual features.

Amazon had announced the release of its Kindle application for the iPad. The application itself will contain few unique features designed for the iPad. Amazon kindle will directly compete with Apple who had released its own book store application. Currently Amazon already offer its Kindle application for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The White House official blog had announced that the Whitehouse site will now fully support the iPad.

And who is left behind? Microsoft. According to different reports, Microsoft currently does not have any plans to release an iPad version of its Microsoft Office tools. The company still waits to see how much success the iPad will gain before investing in supporting it.

Ailon.

The CEO Game.

Rating: 8.5/10 (6 votes cast)

Rating: +4 (from 6 votes)

Tags: Amazon, Apple, Gmail, Google, iPad, Kindle, Microsoft, White House

13Mar

YouTube Turned 5 Years Old

Economy What is Your Opinion?

The video content site continue to entertain millions of visitors from around the world – But Google are far less than pleased: The site simply isn’t making enough money.

YouTube only exists for 5 years, but it seems like it was part of our live since ever. It’s hard to recall what we did before YouTube , when we had the rush to hear some old song or entertain ourselves for few minutes.

Turned 5 years old

Not only , we the consumers, are having hard time to remember how was life before YouTube, the life of Cinema and Television corporations had also changed. Only that they look back in sorrow. Since YouTube’s breakthrough they had lost most control on the habits of the consumers.

Since the site was first open for the public it had few ups and downs, the most important one was it being bought by Google in 2007 in a deal worth 1.65 milliard dollars. Although YouTube has a financial and marketing support of Google, It been marked as one of the worlds’ most popular sites, and the fact that every minute visitor are uploading 20 hours of video, YouTube is still hardly pays for itself. With costs of over 365 million dollars a year for bandwidth and advertising revenues hardly reaching the 500 million dollar mark. Google has beating itself for over two years about how to produce more revenues that will maximize YouTube’s potential.

YouTube’s main problem is the difficulty to attach advertisements to 98% of videos it got. Google had made a major step in the last weeks when they added the automatic caption service which will aid in this subject.

Ailon.

The CEO Game.

Rating: 8.4/10 (7 votes cast)

Rating: +3 (from 5 votes)

Tags: Advertisings, Google, Web 2.0, Youtube

09Mar

YouTube to Launch Auto Captions

Technology 1 Comment

Google, YouTube’s parent company has announced on its blog that automatic captions will start rolling out across the site. The world’s largest video hosting service will begin automatically add subtitles to videos using Google’s voice recognition program. Thus YouTube, will become far more accessible to speakers of different languages, the hearing impaired and additionally YouTube will make one giant leap towards search engine dominance.

Youtube - Now With Captions

YouTube announced on November 2009, on launching a new automatic caption service. The service was good but limited, it offered English captions but those were found only on 13 of YouTube’s streaming channels. These include National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels. But, from this day and on, all users will be able to use Google’s speech recognition technology, in order to create subtitles for their content.

Google already admitted that the new technology is not perfect, nevertheless it still provides a better solution than manually captioning the content. In a demonstration held the phrase “sim card” became “salmon” in text, but Google also promises that the technology “will continue to improve with time”.

Automatic captioning, will allow the hearing impaired to enjoy video content over the web, without any need for additional help or program. In addition, the service will allow watching content with no need for speakers, that might intrude the surrounding environment. The automatic captioning service, is currently supporting only English soundtracks, but Google says that making it international is its top priority and it is only a matter of time before they will achieve that.

Still, that does not mean you won’t be able to enjoy the clips in your own language. The English subtitles could be translated with one button click to any of the 50 languages supported by Google’s translation service.

How will it work? Upon uploading a video to the site, the user would be able to create an automatic caption of the clip’s soundtrack and then fix it manually, if there is a need. The user then, would be able to download the subtitles file to the personal computer in a SUB or SRT file format. Users who already uploaded content, are expected to find a new button for requesting captions for their existing content. According to Google, processing each video could take some time. Hence, Google promises to add more servers if users will experience a slow service.

One of the big challenges of the video medium is whether it can be made accessible to everyone, and now Google is raising the standard and doing just that. In the web 2.0 age, where “content is king”, Google- the web’s searching giant, will become even bigger by “writing down” and indexing every video we have got.

Omer Shachnai

The CEO Game.

Rating: 7.6/10 (7 votes cast)

Rating: +5 (from 7 votes)

Tags: Google, Search Engine, Web 2.0, Youtube

14Feb

Buzz or Fuzz?

Economy, Web What is Your Opinion?

What’s all the fuzz about? Now that Google’s Buzz has struck root in our Gmail and after some few days of everybody playing around with it and publishing nearly 10 million items, its advantages, weak-points and bugs are become more and more apparent. The truth, we are kind of mixed up here at theceogame.com so we decided to go and check out what others think about the Buzz.

What's all the fuzz about?

Here are some opinions we gathered from users who already made up their mind about Google Buzz:

Google CEO must apologize: “Whoever made the decision to make all our contacts visible to all other contacts in Google Inc. should apologize profusely, because that person doesn’t have a clue about what privacy means. If the person, even if it is the CEO, doesn’t apologize, he/she should be fired.”
Excellent work Google: “Who would have thought it’d be possible to juxtapose Google and Microsoft for the roles of “evil corporate entity” and “solid technological concern!” Wow, you out evil’ed MS just as they started getting their shit together and are bringing competitive tools to the table. Fantastic!”
Like having a really terrible day- every day: “Facebook is you stepping out to greet the day with shoes, socks, pants, a full tummy, some coffee and a shower. Buzz is you being dragged effing directly out of bed and onto the front porch naked at 5am.”
Force-fed features are a NO-GO: “I did not want. I immediately scrolled to the bottom to turn it off. It of course it re-loaded the next time. I am REALLY mad about the privacy issue.”
Breach of trust: “I am a lawyer. The names of clients, witnesses, investigators, and expert witnesses are all confidential, and Google just breached the trust that my clients have in me to keep ALL of their information confidential. I signed up for email. Not social networking. We can no longer trust Google. They do not appreciate our privacy. Lawyers must immediately cease using Google provided services since they breach our client’s privacy.”
What happened to Wave: “What happened to Google Wave, a seemingly far superior service, one that could actually change the way we socially network and not merely augment e-mail with broadcasting? Wave is way better- more private, more content, better interface. Why they forced Buzz on people but have kept Wave in sem-private beta is beyond me.”

In conclusion, although Google’s shot at creating a social network seems like a bright idea, many users have already turned away from the service. The most recurring comments talk about a breach of trust or how Google simply did what it preached against all along.

So if you have been Buzzed, and want to share as well like these guys did on the web, please tell us how it made you feel, whether you liked or disliked it, whether you found some bugs or just made a revelation about the service that everybody has got to know.

Omer Shachnai

The CEO Game.

Rating: 7.4/10 (7 votes cast)

Rating: +2 (from 6 votes)

Tags: Buzz, Google, Internet, Social Networks, What do you think?

12Feb

Eric Knows Best

Economy 2 Comments

Yesterday (Thursday), the Washington Post has published a letter sent by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, portraying Eric’s five step plan for changing the American economy upside down and making a real change. Here are some of the key points:

Eric Schmidt.

Congress should help start-ups. He claims that smaller businesses should be able to compete with their larger rivals: “They don’t need favors, just a level playing field. Congress should ensure that every bill it passes promotes competition over protecting the interests of incumbents”.
We need to realize that not everything we do will succeed. “If we want to be a leader in new industries such as green energy, we have to accept that some of our investments won’t pan out.” Schmidt says there are no 100 percent successful innovative programs and society must become tolerant to failure on the way.
Extend R&D taxes. Schmidt wants more emphasis on our knowledge base: “The decision by Congress to double science funding last year was a big step in the right direction. Now we need to extend the R&D tax credit so businesses can confidently invest in their future.”
More government support for broadband is critical. “Government-funded research should be made public through “a Wikipedia of ideas,” so entrepreneurs can harness ideas commercially.”
Let me hire foreigners. Eric requests to hang on to talented people: “The best and brightest from around the world come to study at U.S. universities. After graduation, they are forced to leave because they can’t get visas. It’s ridiculous.

In conclusion in his letter the searching giant’s CEO lays out what he thinks should be done in order to fight the high unemployment rate, the lack of innovation which is also known as the “innovation deficit” and more. He believes we have everything we need in order to climb out of this downhill, and that information and innovation are the keys to success.
Omer Shachnai

The CEO Game.

Rating: 7.8/10 (8 votes cast)

Rating: +1 (from 7 votes)

Tags: Financial Crisis, Google, R&D Taxes, Start ups

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