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More and more often developers are skipping the PC when designing consumer applications. The latest example is Google’s new Flipboard competitor: Google Currents. Like Flipboard, the application is designed to make a tablet or mobile magazine reading experience better and more interactive. The one interesting wrinkle is that it’s also set up to import your Google reader feeds, taking that content and making it beautiful. It’s good enough that it makes me want to read the content on my phone instead of on my laptop.
Also this week, Twitter released a new version this week. The trick to get the new look and functionality? You had to download it to your Android or iPhone first.
Two travel brands are essentially telling you to leave your laptop home this summer. If you use any of the Google services like Gmail you won’t need it. Why? They’re offering free Chromebooks for their passenger and customer use. Starting July 1, Virgin America and the Ace Hotel will provide the devices to their customers. The idea is that all your information is in the cloud so the device will let you go out and grab it. The Ace has even created an app for the device that provides a field guide to New York.
Google has recently unveiled a new form of email communication entitled Gmail Motion that may just sweep you off of your feet, literally. This new method of maneuvering through your inbox, writing emails, and updating settings enables you to stand up from your desk and “speak” to your Gmail account using your whole body as a keyboard.
Gmail Motion is still in its beta phase, and I, for one, am curious about the learning curve involved in becoming proficient in this new language. Even if the new system works for some and not all applications, anything that encourages workers to move more during the day is just fine in my book.
To check out a video of how the Gmail Motion email system works, click here.
Google has released its Zeitgeist 2010, highlighting the search trends for the past year. What’s up, what’s down, what do we care about? There’s a lot of information to look at here, but in a year that the United States saw mid-term elections and a host of other contentious issues the fastest rising queries included:
- iPad
- chatroulette
- iPhone4
- World Cup
- Justin Bieber
You can find additional trends for rising and falling terms across news, image, maps, etc. here.
Last week Google added phone calling to Gmail, a nifty service that let’s you call phone numbers from Gmail. Today they announced they’re rolling out priority e-mail. For those overwhelmed with the amount of e-mail, the service will sort incoming messages based on priority. The good stuff goes to the top for immediate attention, the rest sinks to the bottom. Instead of reading and reading and reading, you’re able to sift through the junk.
While I’m sure the system won’t be perfect at first, it’s another attempt to curate the massive amount of information thrown at us via the internet.
Google has a lot of stuff going on out there and this week they’re rolling out a new feature: phone calls from Gmail. There’s some nice integration with Google Voice which allows you to send your Google Voice number out to caller IDs OR receive phone calls in your Gmail inbox. While it’s not a killer app, it does signal more convergence between your inbox and your phone which may eventually reduce costs for some of the services we all currently use.
The service was just turned on in my inbox this afternoon so I plan to play with it and even try receiving a call using it. Pretty cool stuff.
I came across an interesting article on Baidu.com, the dominant search engine in the PRC. Focused on their market dominance versus Google, who seem to still be struggling with strategy for growth (and particularly in administration) in China, the article provides some insight into how this company has succeeded, and where their recent past and current focuses lie.
An excerpt: “‘Once Baidu went public, they invested in brand advertising, something that Google has just been arrogant in their reluctance in a growing market to invest in any kind of advertising to increase their brand awareness,’ explained Harrington. ‘Baidu went into all the smaller cities and put up billboards, bus ads, and even commercials.”‘
Internet proliferation and usage differs across the world, and the online experience varies widely based on cultural factors, government and other regulatory decisions, and commercial forces. In the U.S., we see a handful of companies branching out into new technologies and usages umbrella-style, for example, growing from a search-based model to include media technologies, social networking tools, communications functions, and even platform and user interface technologies. We also see companies that were formerly communications (email) based wrap their arms around “Web 2.0″ features and strategies in order to stay relevant. Baidu is doing some of this too, certainly aware of leading trends in the U.S., however they are acting in strategic consideration of limitations related to Chinese government restrictions. The thing to keep in mind is that the Internet evolves in different ways in different parts of the world – our own “user experience” does not necessarily represent that of others.
Check out the article, though. There are some really interesting facts about Internet usage in the PRC.
