Why Google Bought TxVia →

Felix Salmon in Reuters:

TxVia is a company which powers roughly 100 million prepaid debit cards. And here’s the thing: the amount of data that TxVia collects from every single one of its prepaid debit cards simply dwarfs the amount of data that banks collect with normal debit cards linked directly to a bank account.

There’s also an interesting discussion of how Simple is using TxVia to power their “debit” cards. Simple is shaping up to be a very very interesting company.

Forks, Forks Everywhere →

Christopher Mims in the MIT Technology Review, on how more and more device manufacturers are considering forking Android:

Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless, has a unique window onto this phenomenon, because his company provides geolocation services for these yet-to-be-announced devices.

“I’m spending a lot of time with companies forking Android,” says Morgan. “Nobody wants to just be a manufacturer for Google. You see that with what Amazon has done, where they made it their own, and you also see a whole host of manufacturers taking Android down their own path.”

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet runs a modified version of Android 2.3, “gingerbread.” Because Android’s source code is readily available, companies can do what they want with it. The only thing keeping them tied to Google has been, up to now, the desire to be part of the official lineup of Android devices. Given how fragmented that space is, however, it appears that compatibility with the Android ecosystem is increasingly irrelevant.

Indeed, Morgan says his company is going to be part of a “major” new phone device that will be released at the end of this year. It will be based on Android, but not controlled by Google.

Samsung? Samsung, is that you?

ADmented Reality →

If Google Glasses does ever graduate from vaporware status, Jonathan McIntosh has a vision of what it would actually be like. Hilarious.

'Android Economics' →

Horace Dediu:

This shows a positive trend for Google: revenues per smartphone per year is increasing. However, the growth is coming from non-Android devices which means mostly iOS. Revenues per device for Android is probably declining.

Google Gives Samsung the Tools to Compete With Google →

There’s no doubt that a very big reason for the success of Samsung in the mobile market is Android. Now, Samsung’s looking to get into the mobile ad game, competing directly with Google. John Letzing in Marketwatch:

OpenX’s technology competes with the advertising exchange provided by Google Inc.’s DoubleClick, which offers advertisers space on mobile phones and tablets. A Samsung spokeswoman declined to say whether DoubleClick had been a candidate to provide the new exchange for its mobile devices.

Samsung sells something like 50% of all Android phones. As Jean-Louis Gassée pointed out two months ago, that left Samsung with a very strong position against Google. What’s Google supposed to do against their biggest partner in the mobile space?

Tablets Aren't Consoles →

Watts Martin, on the rumors that Google may be subsidizing their tablets to make them more competitive:

But subsidizing the tablets to get to that point is boggling. This isn’t like a game console, where you expect to make all your money on the ongoing purchases. Apple makes most of their money on the hardware, and Google makes nearly all of their money on advertisements. If Google spends $100 to get a Nexus tablet into your hands, they’re going to need to serve you a lot of ads to make that up.

A lot of ads.

If this is their plan, luckily for them they can also use the money they’re making off of Apple devices to subsidize tablets as well.

(via MG Siegler)

Al Franken Puts Google and Facebook on Blast →

Nilay Patel in The Verge:

But Franken also cautioned that the lure of crossing those lines would become greater as both companies become larger, calling them “essentially tremendously innovative and profitable advertising companies” whose incentive to collect data is held at bay only by slowly-fading market pressure.

Franken raised the specter of antitrust regulation, which is interesting. It implies a world where both Google and Facebook are antitrust targets yet they’re increasingly targeting each other’s revenue sources and both feel vulnerable to each other.

Search Marketing Isn't Good Enough for Google →

Amir Efrati in the Wall Street Journal, on how Google plans to spend $213 million advertising its products, almost four times what they spent in 2010. Google’s also spending $70 million on television ads. $12 million of that amount went to promote Google+. They seem a bit embarrassed by this:

Rob Shilkin, a Google spokesman, declined to comment specifically about the company’s ad strategy. “Our focus is on uncovering and telling stories about our products, our users and the magic they both create. The discussion about how to reach people across different media is a much later conversation.”

Bet ya didn’t know about all the magic you were creating whenever you were using a Google product.

Common Crawl →

Pete Warden:

Common Crawl is one of those projects where I rant and rave about how world-changing it will be, and often all I get in response is a quizzical look. It’s an actively-updated and programmatically-accessible archive of public web pages, with over five billion crawled so far. So what, you say? This is going to be the foundation of a whole family of applications that have never been possible outside of the largest corporations. It’s mega-scale web-crawling for the masses, and will enable startups and hackers to innovate around ideas like a dictionary built from the web, reverse-engineering postal codes, or any other application that can benefit from huge amounts of real-world content.

Common Crawl was founded by Gil Elbaz who also was the co-founder of Applied Semantics which Google bought in 2003 for their AdSense tech. Elbaz now runs Factual. Interesting.

File Under: Terrifies Google →

This is why Google will keep fucking with their product. Tonya Cordrey, director of digital development for Guardian News and Media:

Eighteen months ago, search represented 40% of the Guardian’s traffic and social represented just 2%. Six months ago – before the launch of our Facebook app - these figures had barely moved.

A recent Pew report echoed these figures, revealing that just 9% of digital news consumers follow news recommendations from Facebook or from Twitter. That compares with 32% who get news from search.

But last month, we felt a seismic shift in our referral traffic. For the first time in our history, Facebook drove more traffic to guardian.co.uk than Google for a number of days, accounting for more than 30% of our referrer traffic. This is a dramatic result from a standing start five months ago.

The two things I’m wondering:

• What effect has this actually had on Google’s bottom line?

• How will a native mobile Guardian app affect Facebook?

Frédéric Filloux has further analysis of this trend:

In theory, being able to tap into Facebook’s 845 million users is attractive. But reaching readers in a remote African country, thanks to Facebook’s growing penetration in the region, makes very little economic sense from an advertising standpoint. More broadly, the web already suffers from of a loss of audience quality as publishers are pursuing eyeballs or unique visitors just for the sake numbers. A Facebook page (or app) doesn’t carry any stickiness: 8 out of 10 readers look at a single page and go elsewhere —and every marketer knows it. Being big on Facebook won’t translate into big money.

The Google Commons →

It’s pile-on-Google day, apparently. Alexis Madrigal, in the Atlantic:

It isn’t that anymore, though. Searches are geospecific and social network-dependent. All of which is fine and useful, but that’s not what made us love Google’s search engine. The more the search engine — and the web more generally — adjust themselves to us, the less they represent a collective idea of what is known.

I’m not the first person to make this point, but there is an important lesson that I hope we take from this relatively minor tragedy: The aggregation of individual data does not a commons make.

Hey, we still have Wikipedia.

'The Case Against Google' and the Right Tool for the Right Job →

Mat Honan, Gizmodo:

One Googler authorized to speak for the company on background (meaning I could use the information he gave me, but not directly quote or attribute it) told me something that I found shocking. Google isn’t primarily about search anymore. Sure, search is still a core product, but it’s no longer the core product. The core product, he said, is simply Google.

Here’s where I think Honan’s wrong though, and it illustrates what I think is wrong with Google:

Facebook did for people searching what Google did for Web searching, in a very similar way. While Google used existing links between Web pages to determine relevance, Facebook used the existing links between people—the connections that we ourselves defined—to determine social relevance.

The utility of information that people get off Facebook searches is not even close to the utility of information people get from Google. Facebook’s promised that utility for a long time — in the form of one “Graph” or the other, but so far it’s been largely bullshit. Twitter is another example that Honan uses for a different type of information that Google is bad at delivering — but, once again, its utility is severely limited by the constraints of the medium.

The bet that Google and these companies are making are that all these forms of information are equal and flow naturally from one another. They want some sort of ür-search engine that does everything.

I’m fairly certain that this is a fundamentally flawed strategy. There’s a word for cramming in all sorts of functionality that keeps a product from gelling — bloat. It’s easier to notice in software and applications than it is with services like Google, Twitter and Facebook. But that doesn’t make it any less problematic. We don’t want the Microsoft Ribbon — but that’s what Google is giving us.

The history of products has shown us that humans tend to prefer the right tool for the right job. The right kitchen knife. The right hammer. I don’t see any difference on the web. I want Google for Googley searches. Twitter for real-time stuff. Facebook for — well, something, I guess.

That’s not the future Google has in mind. What we’re seeing play out now, I think, is something like the time Homer Simpson tried to build a car.

They've Got to be Putting Something in the Water →

Mike Swift in Mercury News on Andy Hertzfield’s role in Google+:

“I love Google,” he said unapologetically. “I believe Google is a mighty force for good in the world.”

Add him to the list.

Do You Rip the Band-Aid Off Fast or Slow? →

Google’s moving their apps to a unified payment mechanism. Alistair Barr in Reuters:

Developers say the Internet search giant is trying to simplify consumer payments, hoping apps-buying will rise and offset their higher costs. Google’s payment service charges a higher cut per transaction than some rivals’. But the move also suggests Google is using its powerful position in the mobile apps market to promote an in-house offering.

Good. It’s high time Google started to make things easier for developers and users. But the way they’re handling this is bizarre — they don’t want to admit that they made a short-sighted strategic decision by pursuing the “open” strategy when they first got serious about Android. The way they’re making decisions are coming across as heavy-handed and autocratic but are ultimately better for the platform.

But by doing things in drips and drabs, Google is creating a lot of uncertainty about the future of the Android platform, which isn’t good for users and developers.

Google's Increasingly Cluttered Search Page →

Ed Bott on his experience searching for “pet meds”:

There is only ONE actual search result on that entire page. If you want to see the rest of the search results, you have to page down.

Surrounding that link are nine ads, plus a link to a PetMeds user account at Google+. There are 10 links to Google services at the top of the page. Below that is my Google+ profile picture (which leads to my Google+ account settings) and a big Share box.

That’s a total of 23 links on that page, as it appears on a typical computer. Only one is a search result.

People are noticing that Google’s core product is starting to look like a teenager’s bedroom.

(via John Gruber)