Kaizen Bits

In the country of Telefonica, the incumbent Spanish telco that has become the third largest operator in the world, after China Mobile and Vodafone, it is difficult to think of how Google may become a disruptive team player. It all started when they released the Nexus One phone, the long time expected mobile phone competing with that marvel called the iPhone and with the wide spectrum of Android-based phones, and also Blackberry. I followed last week when Google announced they were launching a fiber to the home network and also providing a small town in Oregon, The Dalles free wi-fi.

And now what? Well, Google has requested historically to the FCC, the competent authority in the US, freeing the waves for them to supply wi-fi, so it is easy to deduce that they wanna jump on the ISP or telecom business. So when I read the rumors of Google purchasing T-Mobile, the American subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, I can logically and loudly foresee that we will see soon the beginning of the Google Phone Company

I was warned via email (because I had previously subscribed in Google) but I hope it has been worthwhile. Actually, I have tried Safari, Firefox and also Camino for Mac, but I am always hoping the best from Google because I just simply (and I have no interests or disclaimers or whatsoever to do, since I am purely an academic) think Google has always the best and last word to say!!

Update: Bloody hell!! I can´t install it with my OS version, Tiger 10.4.11

After this time of low blogging or no blogging, here I am, back to the typing to rant about Google Chrome. Simply because it´s way too wonderful,like everything Google does.
Let me clarify. For me , Google is simply THE COMPANY. Not a company or an Internet search engine. No, for me, it changed the world or at least my world because there is no one single day that as a professional tech I can spare using one of their applications.
And that is why I am looking forward to seeing Chrome for Mac (and Linux, also). I´ve got two Windows computers, one at home, one at the office and despite I am the very Firefox supporter, I couldn´t help moving to Chrome. It´s simply perfect. Perhaps it does not have the add-on environment Firefox has, but the performance, zen appearance and gorgeous style of the browser beats by far Safari for sure.

And that is not the only thing. Gmail is by far the best Google app.Or so does most people think. And I agree point by point with the article: spam filtering, conversation organization, performance, scalability and so on and so forth. In a nutshell, the perfect killer app every software engineer would like to outcome.

After all the buzz about the financial crisis, I got to hear about a couple of investments in so-called “semantic companies” or projects. First, it was the purchase of Powerset by Microsoft, what shows the interest of the software colossus, specially now that they will open three major research centers in Europe about “Search”.

Secondly, Independent News and Media signing an agreement with Canadian firm Nstein to semantically tag and organise its entire library of media assets.

This might not mean too much, since I think Semantics are still far beyond the meeting point with industry but it is always a good step to get to know about.

It is the big techie news of the day:  the Redmond software giant is bidding $45M Yahoo. Quoting the people:

The deal would pay Yahoo shareholders $31 a share, which represents a 62% premium from where Yahoo stock closed on Thursday.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, called the move the “next major milestone” for the software giant.

To be honest, everybody was expecting this type of tour de force since Yahoo! was falling non-stop face to the super Google engine. Now let´s see if Terry Yang company accepts or we are just seeing the first episode of a long season.

“Don´t be arrogant”, it is said to be and makes some sense, according to this note by Eric Schmidt to the New Yorker:

[Google is] run by three computer scientists we’re going to make all the mistakes computer scientists running a company would make. But one of the mistakes we’re not going to make is the mistake that non-scientists make. We’re going to make mistakes based on facts and data and analysis. What kills a company is not competition but arrogance. We control our fate. 

Face to the “Don´t be evil”, it shows that times are a-changing and there is actually no company like Google in the world. It is a proud for Computer Science and for the Web because it helps us everyday but please, please, don´t be arrogant. It is a good message.

There is this Quaero, the new French-German search engine being developped. Right today there is an article (in Spanish, sorry) about how this (almost) state-driven initiative (Siemens and French Telecom have full support from their Governments and 400 M€ funding) wants to combine Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, buzzworded already as Web 3.0, to enhance search results.
And there is now (via Genbeta) Pharos (Platform for Search of Audiovisual Resources Across Online Spaces), un new search engine with a focus on multimedia, launched by FAST which previously released All the Web. Alltheweb was bought by Overture in 2003 and now Yahoo bought Overture a couple of months later, so it is all about Yahoo those results belonging.

Why all these initiatives? I guess it is not enough to remind a number of reasons for which it is believed that Quaero will not work but also it is important to see that the focus is shifting quickly towards a more academic approach. Why not making that a priority for technology in the upcoming EU Framework VII?And even if we don´t believe in that, why not sharing current results from previous EU Framework VI projects to make this (almost) happen.

How to bring search engines inside the Chinese Walls of companies have been always one of my major interests for resarch. Now IBM and Yahoo have joined to launch IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition which shows up as a potential competitor for several solutions out there in the market, such as Google Search Appliance or Google Mini.

To me, this is really the future of search engines, a combination of the information napping behind the organizations boundaries and the huge cosmos of information which is out there on the Web. But for that we need more powerful search engines that probably would need some kind of semantic technology (or something similar), such as Hakia or the Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE).  If I understood correctly, the first one is not really using semi-structured data and it is also keyword search based but the second one does crawl, index and navigates through structured data. Having so much out there (and also in companies), the second seems to be the right track to follow.