Apple’s gone out an bought itself another mapping company. This time it’s Canadian firm Poly9, which makes interactive 3D software designed for use in a browser. It could be an important step towards Apple cutting ties with Google Maps altogether. More »
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Opera today released its Opera Mini 5.1 browser for Google Android handsets, making it the next major smartphone platform the Oslo, Norway, company hopes to conquer with a free third-party web browser. The Java-based client is popular because it brings a full web experience to lower-end devices while also reducing bandwidth — all browsing activities are funneled through Opera’s servers where the data is compressed up to 90 percent. The Android version of Opera Mini offers the same features as the browser on other platforms and adds pinch-to-zoom functionality.
When Opera brought its browser to Apple’s iPhone a few months ago, I questioned if consumers would actually use it. And now that the native Android browser is faster — I’m running Android 2.2, which adds speed optimizations, Adobe Flash 10.1 and a faster V8 JavaScript engine — it would be logical for me to ask a similar question: what’s the appeal of a third-party browser on Android? But a key aspect of mobile broadband has changed since I originally asked that question. In June, AT&T eliminated unlimited data plans on new smartphone contracts and other carriers are likely to follow (subscription required). Given that change, a web browser that compresses data suddenly becomes a bit more attractive for consumers that don’t want to pay data overages.
I took Opera Mini 5.1 for a short spin on both my Nexus One and a loaner Droid X and the browsing experience is peppy, just as it is on other platforms. All of the major features Opera provides for iPhone, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry are present: one-touch Speed Dial for fave sites, tabbed browsing, and Opera Link for synchronizing bookmarks and other data between Opera on the handset and the desktop. Even with all of those and other features, I still find the experience to lag slightly behind that of a native browser.
Text doesn’t reflow in Opera Mini, for example, and while that’s tolerable in portrait mode, it’s painful in landscape mode. I often had to reload a page in landscape to enjoy the text — something that negates the data transfer savings offered by Opera. And the new pinch-to-zoom seems a little gimmicky in this first iteration. The same exact action is accomplished with a double-tap because the pinch-to-zoom doesn’t yet offer varying zoom levels.
So while I find Opera Mini quite usable, it isn’t up to snuff compared to Android’s native browser. Of course, if I was on a limited data plan, I think I’d make the concession. Even if you’re happy with the native Android browser, Opera Mini is worth the free look — especially if you’re on a limited data plan or if you use Opera on the desktop and want to sync bookmarks.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
These days, just about everything makes its public debut in Beta form. Google launched Gmail into an immediate state of notability with its Beta strategy, and chose to hang on to the tag for years for good measure. Online games have more players in their Beta period than the games of yesteryear ever had. There’s a joke to be made here about Apple managing to sell a few million iPhone 4s before it was out of Beta, but I’ll leave that flamewar fuel (mostly) untapped for tonight.
Sooner or later, all good Betas must come to an end. The latest product shedding its Beta skin? Opera Mini for Android.
If you’ve been using Opera Mini 5 for Android for a while, the sans-Beta 5.1 build won’t seem too much different. Same proxy-powered compression magic speeding up browsing and cutting down data usage, same tabbed interface, same PC bookmark syncing functionality — in fact, outside of a few minor tweaks and a laundry list of bug fixes, the only new feature warranting the bump from 5.0 to 5.1 is official support for devices with big ol’ screens, like the HTC Evo 4G and the Moto Droid X.
Alas, that means that at least one worthwhile feature is still missing from the application: multi-level multi-touch pinch/zoom support. Yeah, that’s a mouthful. In other words, it lacks the ability to zoom as much or as little as the user wants by way of the now familiar pinching/zooming gestures. Like its iPhone twin, this build does support multi-touch zoom in some sense; it’s just all or nothing, fully zoomed or not zoomed at all. It may seem trivial, but that little discrepancy is make or break for some.
With that aside, the little bit of time I’ve spent with 5.1 has been nothing but pleasurable. It’s lightning quick, and has been stable as a rock so far. Between Android’s already solid default browser and other alternatives like Dolphin and Skyfire, it’s getting waaay too hard for me to recommend just one — so I’ll let you do it. What browser are you using on Android? Let us know in the comments below.
Check out the rest: MobileCrunch
Found under: Ubuntu, Google, Hack, Nexus One, Android, Linux, Port,
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Google today created a site to provide information about its broadband plans, and to encourage the thousands of people who submitted proposals to the company — trying to convince it to launch its experimental fiber-to-the-home network in their towns — to take action to improve broadband. In short, Google is trying to create a community-action network around better broadband, starting with the more than 200,000 people who have already weighed in hoping to get fatter pipes.
When Google announced its plans to build an experimental 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home network in February, I wrote that the search engine wasn’t just looking for new web applications, but also for information that it could disseminate in order to show people and governments what a modern broadband network should cost– possibly lighting a fire under ISPs who are reluctant to upgrade their networks. Its new site gives people and municipalities a match to help with that fire, by encouraging citizens to email their representative in Congress and by providing a list of helpful suggestions municipalities can implement to ensure that fiber-ready conduit is put in place during road construction.
None of these actions, or even Google’s planned network, will change the dismal competitive landscape in the U.S. overnight, but it’s certainly a start. And yes, Google still plans to announce which town gets its network before the end of the year.
Below is what I think of as the “we want fiber” montage created by Google — with the obligatory emotionally manipulative soundtrack.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
Google today created a site to provide information about its broadband plans, and to encourage the thousands of people who submitted proposals to the company — trying to convince it to launch its experimental fiber-to-the-home network in their towns — to take action to improve broadband. In short, Google is trying to create a community-action network around better broadband, starting with the more than 200,000 people who have already weighed in hoping to get fatter pipes.
When Google announced its plans to build an experimental 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home network in February, I wrote that the search engine wasn’t just looking for new web applications, but also for information that it could disseminate in order to show people and governments what a modern broadband network should cost– possibly lighting a fire under ISPs who are reluctant to upgrade their networks. Its new site gives people and municipalities a match to help with that fire, by encouraging citizens to email their Representative in Congress and by providing a list of helpful suggestions municipalities can implement to ensure that fiber-ready conduit is put in place during road construction.
None of these actions, or even Google’s planned network, will change the dismal competitive landscape in the U.S. overnight, but it’s certainly a start. And yes, Google still plans to announce which town gets its network before the end of the year.
Below is what I think of as the “we want fiber” montage created by Google — with the obligatory emotionally-manipulative soundtrack.
Check out the rest: GigaOM
Google has a lock on the web habits of hundreds of millions of users, but it has so far failed to translate that dominance into anything approaching a social network or community, despite its many attempts: Buzz had a number of issues right out of the gate and has yet to get much traction, Wave appears to have sunk without a trace, and Orkut is popular in Brazil and parts of Europe but virtually a non-entity elsewhere. Google is now reportedly working on a Facebook-style network, but no one seems to be giving it great odds. So why does being social continue to elude the web giant? Adam Rifkin, former co-founder of Renkoo and a former staffer with KnowNow and CommerceNet, says it is because Google caters to pandas instead of lobsters.
By pandas, Rifkin (who clearly identifies with the giant bears) means web users who simply want to search for something and then move on — in other words, those who want to find a specific piece of information and make use of it, rather than hang around chatting or socializing with others. This is what psychologists call “goal-oriented behavior,” and it is a completely different type of activity from what most people engage in on social-networking sites like Twitter or Facebook.
The kind of application that Google knows how to make well are the kind that embody the “eats, shoots, and leaves” model of Internet behavior. Pandas spend every waking hour foraging — aka searching — and consuming. The most successful Google applications serve such a utilitarian mandate, too: they encourage users to search for something, consume, and move onto the next thing. Get in, do your business, get out… where Google does not excel is in making applications that are by their nature for lingering and luxuriating — the so-called social applications.
Rifkin contrasts this with Facebook, which is what he calls “a lobster trap,” or a place where the activity of friends — in posting photos or playing games or engaging in other social behavior — is constantly pulling users back in and convincing them to spend more time there.
“Every time a friend shares a status, a link, a like, a comment or a photo, Facebook has more bait to lure me back,” he writes. Rifkin also correctly notes that sites such as Quora (the question and answer site) and services such as Foursquare and Twitter are successful in ways that Google is not because they offer real-time social interaction and repeated incentives to return and spend more time.
I think Rifkin makes a good point — Google is good at software that focuses on specific tasks, but doesn’t do much to convince users to stick around or interact with each other, and that is increasingly important. Call it a portal vs. a utility approach. What Google needs to do, obviously, is think a bit more about how to appeal to lobsters, and less about the pandas and their goal-oriented behavior. But can it do this? The company’s culture seems motivated almost entirely by an engineering ethos, according to many observers as well as former employees: in other words, see a problem and solve it. Even its recent socially-oriented hires, such as open-web advocate Chris Messina, seem aimed primarily at the technical side of things, such as the OpenSocial and ActivityStreams standards discussions. But social networking doesn’t involve a problem with a specific solution — it’s simply a human activity that people enjoy, for a variety of reasons.
Google is clearly looking for ways to attack this defect in its makeup: it is thinking hard about how social networks function, if a recent presentation by a Google staffer is anything to go by, and it is attempting to hire a “head of social” to try and coordinate its efforts. There have also been reports that it is working on a gaming platform with Zynga as a way of helping it build a social graph. But while Google may own search and advertising, it is still a babe in the woods when it comes to understanding how human beings relate to each other outside of a specific suite of tools. And corporate culture and DNA are difficult to change.
The reality is that the web titan needs to figure out the social element of the web quickly, or it will start to lose ground to Facebook and its ilk — and it’s not just about playing in the same pool as Facebook, it’s about the impact that social networking is having on both search and advertising, the two pillars of Google’s empire. If people are spending more time on social networks, then advertisers will want to be do likewise, and that is a real threat to Google’s future, as Om has pointed out in a GigaOM research report (subscription required). Time to figure out how to appeal to those lobsters, and pronto.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Future
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Chi King and tm-tm
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Apple’s plans to prohibit companies that also own competing mobile platforms from collecting iOS app data are about more than just analytics, said Omar Hamoui, the former CEO of AdMob, appearing on stage for one of the first times since his company passed through regulatory scrutiny to be acquired by Google (where he’s now VP of mobile ads). “It’s not technically possible” to serve mobile ads without analytics, he said — disallowing AdMob from tracking clicks would render its advertising useless.
Apple, “thankfully,” has not started enforcing the policy yet, said Hamoui, speaking at MobileBeat in San Francisco today. Getting shut off Apple devices would eliminate 30 percent of AdMob’s traffic today. But publishers and advertisers are already using more caution and “asking more questions” about AdMob as a result of the rules change, he said. Apple’s rule change is also being looked at by federal regulators.
But of course there’s a backstory: that Apple tried and failed to buy AdMob, and is openly bitter about it. Hamoui said his company “did seriously consider” the Apple deal. But he said he welcomed Apple’s entrance into the mobile advertising market with its competing iAd platform earlier this month. “The Apple sheen is an important thing,” Hamoui said. “Rich, pretty ads are at the highest level getting ad agencies and brands to think about what mobile means.”
But Hamoui’s allegiance is now with Google. Asked to predict when next year Android would surpass iOS, he said June.
At Google, Hamoui now oversees existing display ad products for mobile apps and content, as well as mobile search ads. He is working on projects such as automated scalable conversion metrics — an amped up version of what Apple is disallowing. Eventually, when it’s more certain privacy can be well maintained, Google will start integrating its various ad platforms on and off of mobile, Hamoui said.
But in terms of something more radical, like Google releasing an advertising-subsized phone? That’s a long way off, in Hamoui’s opinion. “Carriers are making trillions of dollars,” he said. “Mobile advertising is barely a billion. We’re not going to make $150 over the lifetime of a phone to subsidize it.”
Related research from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Report: The In-App Advertising Landscape
Check out the rest: GigaOM
Google’s been busy recently adding HTML5-powered features to Gmail, such as the ability to drag files onto emails to attach them and to drag and drop images into messages to insert them into the message body, but they’ve only been offered to users running the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome. Those features are becoming more widely available, with the news that Google has now extended support to Safari 5.
Why is Google actively pursuing a strategy of rolling out HTML5 features in its web apps, even though some browsers — notably Internet Explorer — don’t support them yet, and the HTML5 spec itself is not expected to be fully complete until 2022? Google wants to tempt more users away from the desktop to its web app products, and as I discuss in my latest Long View on GigaOM Pro, “HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps,” (sub req’d) HTML5 will allow Google to build more complex applications that behave much more like desktop apps. Unlike competing rich web app technologies like Flash and Silverlight that require the use of a plugin, HTML5 is an open web standard that will be widely supported on mobile devices. This should enable Google to build richer apps that will run anywhere without having to build native apps for various mobile platforms.
Google’s also betting on HTML5 because it should also improve speed and responsiveness. At his keynote recently at Usenix WebApps ‘10 in Boston, Google engineer Adam de Boor said using HTML5 and CSS3 should slash Gmail’s load time by 12 percent, with the eventual aim to get load times to under one second.
More broadly, HTML5 presents a huge opportunity for web app developers to gain an advantage in a highly competitive market and we should expect to see more web app vendors following Google’s lead. So while many web app developers will be licking their lips over the opportunities that HTML5 provides, web workers should be rubbing their hands with glee, too. The explosion of useful collaborative web apps we’ve witnessed over the last few years — which, coupled with an increase in bandwidth and better hardware has helped power the web work revolution — is about to be followed by a new wave of rich, desktop-like HTML5-powered apps.
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d): HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps
Image by Flickr user justinsomnia, licensed under CC 2.0.
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Google’s new Open Spot Android app turns finding open parking spots into a social game. You earn “karma points” for marking down available parking spots while others earn open parking spots by tracking down those marked spots. More »
Google – Android – park – Searching – Search Engines
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