Google kills Google Wave!!!

Finally, it is official. Google says that they will stop active development in Google Wave - which earlier they thought would change the way people communicate in the internet.

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked."

"We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product"

"....extend the technology for use in other Google projects."

Google's blog post @ http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html

Honestly, I wasn't excited about using Google Wave at all - though in bits and pieces it was good, but it wasn't useful to me anywhere. Instead of projecting it as a stand-alone product, if it was established as a protocol, I think it might have been a good alternative to email.

I hope as they had mentioned, the good bits and pieces of Google Wave will be more useful after being part of other Google projects.

Google and the PAC-MAN's 30th Birthday!!!

Google's Doodles are always interesting.

Today to mark the 30th anniversary of the popular computer game PAC-MAN, they have put an HTML5 based game in their home page.

Rush and play the game, before they remove it tomorrow.

This really deserves a wow!!! After a very long time I am feeling "Google Rocks!!!"

New Operating System from Google : Google's Chrome OS for Netbooks.

One or two years back there were rumors about Google working on an Operating System. Well it is no more a rumor now.

Today the Google Team have made a post in their official blog about Google's new operating system called Google Chrome OS designed exclusively for the Netbooks and Internet experience.

Few points from that post:

• Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system
• This operating system will be initially targeted at netbooks (so that means they have plans for complete version of PC OS - direct competition with Microsoft!!!)
• This Operating System will be available to customers in the second half of 2010.
• Speed, Simplicity and Security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS' design.

Here is the link to the blog post by Sundar Pichai of Google Team.

Netbooks seems to have gained some good popularity in the recent times. Though Microsoft claims that about 96% of the Netbooks run on Windows - their Windows Vista is of no use to these devices that have very low resource profile. Windows 7 was expected to offer better experience in Netbooks. It is interesting as Google is also planning to launch its new OS during the same time.

If Google coule bring the easy-to-use feeling of Windows into their new Open source OS- I will be happy!!!

Google [Success Stories -1]

I m planning to write about some of the successful ventures and starting with the story of Google.

How it started...
The founders of Google didn't intend to create a search engine, when they started. In the year 1995, two Ph.D students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, decided to work on someting interesting for their Ph.D research project. They worked on understanding the Mathematical properties of the links in the world wide web pages. They designed an efficient web crawler and a page rank algorithm for this project.

When analyzing the results of their research product, it occured to them that a search engine based on this Page Ranking algorithm would give better results when compared to some of the search techniques that were available then.

Thus the research project evolved into a Web Search Engine. They named their company as Google Inc.

Initially they ran this new search engine under their university domain and on September 4, 1998 they started the company Google Inc in a friend's garage.

Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

The First break
By the end of 1998, their crawler had crawled about 60 million pages but at that time there were several other popular search engines like Yahoo, Hotbot, Excite.com, Lycos etc. The same year, an article in Salon.com praised Google's search results were better than its competitors. This feeling spread, and that time period was the beginning of the dot-com bubble and Google's this search technique was seen as the future of the Web search. The rest is history!!!

Google's Home page in 1998

Google's Revenue and Growth...
as Google Search became more and more popular among the users, they introduced sponsored ads in their search results. These advertisements based upon the keywords turned out to be the treasure for Google as it constitute major portion of their revenue.

During early 2000s when many other dot-com companies were suffering to generate cash flow, Google was growing in both popularity and revenue.

The company went public on August 19, 2004 giving Google a market value of about US$23 billion.

Today's stature
They didn't stop with the search engine. They acquired Blogger (a web blog hosting company). Then they came with GMail, collaborative service named Google Docs and Spreadsheets and lot more.

Today the brand Google is one among the very few popular software companies in the world. They have achieved this in just 10 years.

Lesson for start-ups :
# Google efficiently solved a problem of the Internet users and had a powerful business model on that.
# Google was not the first to invent the web Search Engine but they were the best in that.

if you have any points/facts to add, please feel free to post them as comments. I will add them to the post.

competition boost Google's revenue...

I was searching for "99acres" in Google and their site www.99acres.com was listed first in the search result. In the same result page they also had an ad displayed at the top of the results (as main sponsor link). On the left side, other competitors' ads were displayed.



Google Trend shows, some considerable amount of people have searched for this keyword "99acres". I assume most of them would have searched for the real estate portal and not the mathematical calculation.

If Google charge 99acres based on the count of impressions, then by this time 99acres would have paid some considerable amount of money to Google. Suppose if the users had clicked on that Sponsored Link(which is actually the first link in that page), then they would have paid even more money.

Sad 99acres. Even after coming first in the search result, they are still paying Google to get their own visitors. If they don't bid the highest amount for this keyword, some of their competitor will do it and get listed first as sponsored link. Same applies to the keyword MagicBricks.

By the way is this legal to allow someone to bid on their competitor's brand/product name?? I don't think Google have any policies on this. Smart Guys!!

Well its because of these companies like 99acres and magicbricks, I am using many of Google Services - free of cost!!!

Thank You Guys!!

My First Google Adsense Cheque!!!

Here is another good reason for me to celebrate. I have received my first cheque from Google Inc.,

It has taken nearly 2+ years to get this. I didn't spend much time for this program. In the last one year I almost forgot to check the revenue in Google Adsense program. So it was a great surprise when I saw the first Google cheque delivered at my place.

Considerting the no-use-contents of my blog and my laziness towards blogging, 25 months is too short for this sweet US$100.

though the amount isn't that big, I am excited about this money. Thanks to Google!!!

Live Cricket Score @ Google...

With the start of Twenty-Twenty World Championship, even Google seems to be caught up by the cricet fever. Now you can check the latest cricket score through google search.


Just type "Cricket" or anything similar to this and the score of the latest cricket match, would be displayed at the top.

Happy cricketing....

Google Gadget Ventures

Are you a Google Gadget Developer? Then there is a good news from Google.

Inspired by the grand success of iGoogle project, which was developed by third party software developers, the search-engine company is planning to provide grants and seed investments to gadget developers and gadget-related businesses.

Google's anouncement in their Official Blog is HERE.
Web page for the Project is HERE.
... and they do have a FAQ, HERE.

All the best friends.. [;)]

PS: The eligiblity criteria says this is only for those who have developed a Google Gadget in their Google Gadgets directory and generates at least 2,50,000 weekly page views.