Google Street View trikes arrived in South Africa in November last year, when they started collecting imagery of historic landmarks, heritage sites, scenic panoramas and sports venues around the country. South African Tourism compiled a list of 20 special locations on which the public voted. As a result, Google’s Street View team has been visiting the places that the South African public really wanted them to cover, everywhere from Soweto to Kruger National Park, and from Blyde River Canyon to the Kirstenbosch Gardens.
The Google trikers have been met with excitement from those they’ve crossed paths with along the way, including tourists who’ve said how useful they’ve found Street View for planning their holidays elsewhere. Street View is not always the first thing that comes to mind when seeing the Trikes though…in fact, in Kirstenbosch Gardens, a group of schoolchildren were convinced that the Trikers were actually ice-cream men!
Starting today, the millions of Google Docs users creating and sharing online documents and spreadsheets can now upload and share any type of file, making it easier to access content on the go.
Google Docs lets people create, edit and collaboratively share personal and business-related content online. Users can access files uploaded to Google Docs from any browser, anywhere in the world. Combined with shared folders and multiple file import and export, it is easy to use Google Docs to collaborate and share files with coworkers, teammates, and friends. Now, instead of emailing attachments to oneself or colleagues for “back-up”, Google Docs users can upload content to a shared folder and access content from any computer.
Users can utilise 1GB of storage for free, with additional paid storage available. Files up to 250 MB each can be uploaded in their native formats (uncheck the “convert” option while uploading). Although only Google Docs formats can be edited in the cloud, most common filetypes are viewable with the Google Docs viewer, and all can be shared and accessed from any connection and at any time.
In South Africa, the credit for the development of the certain new services on the mobile platform goes to ordinary people in the lower income brackets who have led the way by adopting, even instigating new ideas to turn the cellphone into a powerful transacting tool.
Compared to a low eight percent fixed internet penetration, South Africa has cellular penetration of a 114 percent. It is clear from the statistics that South Africans have leapfrogged fixed-line telephony and internet in favor of mobile telephony and have called for an increasing array of data services to be delivered to this platform.
This is patently true when it comes to banking and transacting using the mobile phone. To the surprise of the airtime providers, the African continent has witnessed the use of multinational pre-loaded airtime (most notably MTN airtime vouchers) as a type of cross-border grassroots currency, swapped and bartered via sms, and a way to send “money” quickly back to family in other African countries. The informal airtime-economy is an excellent example of the organic development of technology by ordinary people to meet their transactional needs in contexts where credit cards and banking facilities are lacking.
Meet MiMoney
mimoney works essentially like preloaded airtime, or, in other words, converts cash into an electronic currency that can be used to make purchases in a secure and controllable manner. The currency is free to buy, free to get and free to keep, so a R100 note converts into exactly R100 mimoney to be used online, with no leakage or transaction fees incurred. Read the rest of this entry »
The book sales business is getting tougher and tougher with Amazon accusing Google of trying to gain monopoly. But funny thing, Amazon fails to look into their own yard.
The guys who have been busy selling online books at a loss just to gain market share — which is something that will not happen forever — are now accusing other companies for wrong intention. However, it’s interesting why the whole fuss since Google caters to out-of-print books and doesn’t constitute a threat as of now.
Well it looks like Amazon (which is currently the largest seller of books online) is trying to cement their rank into the e-book industry, too — the only problem is that their Kindle is not yet popular — so the only solution was to play the smart game of pointing the finger at someone else.
You know Amazon, as much as we like you, we’re not dumb and we can figure out what you’re up to in the back.
Google has announced that street view’s latest destination will be South Africa. Soon, Toyota Prius models mounted with cameras will start their journey across cities of South Africa, taking pictures along the way. Cities to be included in the Google Maps Street View are Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Durban.
Google’s Street View is a very popular service that currently includes a number of major metropolitan areas across the globe, where cars fit with directional cameras did the job of capturing the 360 degrees view from the street. In some locations, Google also used a trike to capture images, though it is not immediately clear if they will be used in South Africa as well.
Where available, Street View can be accessed by zooming-in to the lowest level, or by using the “Pegman” icon on a highlighted street. Also, roaming about in the environmentally friendly hybrid Prius helps to give Google’s image a boost, while bringing good PR for the Prius as well. Once the images have been collected, they go through a process of being “stitched” together, and may only be available on street view after several months.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with Google and supplying our fuel efficient and environmental friendly Prius for this groundbreaking project in South Africa. South Africans and international visitors alike will benefit tremendously from Street View, which is both fun and practical. We hope that people across South Africa’s major cities keep their eyes peeled for the Street View cars, and feel part of a major new initiative,” said Toyota’s Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing, Andrew Kirby.
There were so many rumors of a business amalgamation between the two Internet giants, rumors which we thought would materialize some day — and yesterday the deal became official. Microsoft and Yahoo have in reality joined forces in a search deal for a future endeavor that could finally challenge the mighty Google Search.
As per the new agreement, Microsoft will power the Yahoo search engine and Yahoo will be the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both the companies. The search experience is sure to get enhanced for users and advertisers as there will be more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice for a market currently dominated by a single company — Google.
Here is what Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz had to say about the venture:
“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry and I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development.”
The only problem is that the back-end infrastructure required to power the two companies’ operations will have to be revamped and the data centre requirements will have to be re-thought.
Do you think anything will change in the search business? Will Bing get even more exposure now? Is Google scared?
The Google request to run Google Voice as an application on the Apple iPhone has been rejected by the App Store. Surprisingly the big G isn’t disappointed by the development as they will continue to work to bring the services to iPhone users — for example, by taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers.
Except GV Mobile, all third-party applications that use the service have also been pulled out by Apple. The reasons that can be cited for such a development is that Google is a direct competitor to the iPhone OS with its Android which is fast conquering the market share. The official reason is that the application had “duplicating built-in iPhone features” — which we think it’s bull …
A ‘spicier’ reason could be that AT&T is behind the whole deal as Google Voice offers free texting whereas AT&T is still charging minutes for texts. Also, international calling plans for AT&T can suffer a severe setback given the advantages offered by Google Voice. If the latter one has got more to do with the development, the future of Google Voice on the iPhone is very much over.
While the behemoths of the business world are feeling the pressure of the continued macro-economic downturn, Google is one such name which still manages to reek in better revenues.
In the second quarter ending June 30, Google’s year-over-year (YOY) revenues went up by 3% and as per their CEO, all these happened because Google remained focused on investing in technical innovation to drive growth in its core and the new businesses. That of course and their cost reduction policies (19,786 full-time employees as of June 30, 2009, down from 20,164 full-time employees as of March 31, 2009)
The reported revenue for this quarter is $5.52 billion, an improvement upon the $5.37 billion from same quarter last year.
Google-owned sites raked in $3.65 billion which is 66% of the overall share and this again is a 3% increase compared to the $3.53 billion in 2008. The revenue from partner sites (the AdSense Program) generated $1.68 billion which is 31% of the total revenue. Revenues from outside US totaled $2.91 billion, which is 53% of the total revenues in the second quarter.
“Google had a very good quarter, especially given the continued macro-economic downturn. While most of the world’s largest economies shrank, Google’s year-over-year revenues were up 3%. These results highlight the enduring strength of our business model and our responsible efforts to manage expenses in a way that puts us in a good position for the economic upturn, when it occurs,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “We remain focused on investing in technical innovation to drive growth in our core and new businesses.”
It is been an intriguing query for years now. Google being the giant it is, they could never get of the beta tagging from all their applications, making people curious as to why such a huge concern has to stick to beta testers and not the ready form. While you might go looking for answers, the better option is to rejoice for the fact that Google Apps are out of beta tagging.
There wasn’t much in the query anyway. It’s just that Google felt the application wasn’t ready for the whole public. The tag would now be removed of Google Apps services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs.
Gtalk incidentally has borne the tag for the longest duration of five years.
Ever since the Google Apps suite have been introduced two years ago, Google offered a service level agreement, 24/7 support, and has met or exceeded all the other standards of non-beta software. It wasn’t just fitting for more than 1.75 million large enterprises around the world, Google itself run their business on the Google Apps.
Google Squared is the latest product to come out of the Google labs. Supposedly threatened by Wolfram Alpha — some sort of a new search engine that parses information in their own databases and offer the exact answer to what is being asked (like “how many km from Jozy to Cape Town”), Google is trying to get to a whole new level with search. Maybe Search 3.0?
Announced at the Searchology summit yesterday, the new service will add an extra layer of semantic search to Google’s research efforts. That means that they’re going to try and gather as much unstructured information as possible about a subject, and then turn it into a nice, structured database, where everything is labeled, stamped and categorized. But to structure the whole web is something unimaginable. Well that’s what they want to do …
Google Squared is going to present you the search results as squares in an online spreadsheet. “So a search for Small Dogs returns results with names, description, size, weight, origin, etc., in columns and rows.”
Will they succeed? Probably! Meanwhile take a look at this amazing video that will show you what a search for “camera” or “rollercoasters” would look like on Google Squared.
