Google Maps to Sync Android Mobile and PC Searches

Many users have grown accustomed to the idea that their appointments, contacts and email can be synchronized across their mobile and PC devices. Now Google wants to make that same sort of experience possible in Google Maps run on Android devices.

Google Maps for mobile now will "sync" searches made on PCs with searches on Android mobiles. "Personalized suggestions" make it easy to find places users previously have searched for.
There is one immediately practical value: instead of searching on a PC and printing out directions, users now will simply be able to recall searches and have the information displayed on their mobile screens when they need the information.

"For example, imagine you're on your computer and you come across the Place Page for Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe," the Google blog say Michael Siliski and Taj Campbell, Google Maps staffers, on the Google Mobile Blog. "When you're ready to go and want to get directions, just open Google Maps on your phone, start typing "mar," and you'll quickly see a suggestion, saving you from re-typing a long query and making it easier and faster to be on your way."

The new feature also adds a way to "mark" places on your own maps that will appear on either a PC or Android display whenever a map near that place is displayed.

"When viewing place details, just press the star icon next to the place name; these starred places are automatically synchronized between desktop and mobile, and can be accessed from both the 'More' menu on your phone and from the My Maps tab on your computer," they say.

"Starring" and "personalized suggestions" both require that users be signed in with their Google account, and "Web History" must be enabled in order to use personalized suggestions.

Both features are available in Google Maps 3.4. On Nexus One phones, users get this version of Maps after accepting the over-the-air update that already is in progress.

For other Android devices, starring and personalized suggestions will soon be available by downloading Google Maps 3.4 from Android Market.

Can These Economic Growth and Unemployment Forecasts be Right?

As part of the annual budget, the Obama White House assumes real gross domestic product growth of 2.7 percent in 2010, followed by 3.8 percent, 4.3 percent and 4.2 percent in 2013.

At the same time, the forecast assumes unemployment of 10 percent in 2010, with a decline to 9.2 percent in 2011, 8.2 percent in 2012 and 7.3 percent in 2013.


I'm no economist, but at least some trained economists have to be wondering how growth can occur at those accelerating rates if unemployment remains so stubbornly high. 


There are some obvious answers, including the possibility that the White House does not actually believe both sets of assumptions are congruent, but have some other compelling political motivations for claiming the figures. 


Other forecasts suggest that we will not recover the lost jobs of the recent recession until 2014 or even later. As consumer spending drives 70 percent of GDP, it is hard to see strong growth and high unemployment at the same time.  


Perhaps growth will be higher, and unemployment less bad, than these numbers suggest. As somebody who believes in the vitality of the U.S. workforce and economy, I would not bet against the United States, if impediments are not thrown in its way. 


But then, I'm not a professional economist. 

Comcast To Buy New Global Telecom

Comcast Corp. apparently has agreed to purchase New Global Telecom Inc., according to XChange. The deal should reemphasize the growing role cable operators expect to play in the business IP communications space, beginning with the small business segment.

Based in Golden, Colo., New Global Telecom provides wholesale services to carriers and competitive service providers in the U.S. The company has recently announced a series of private-label deals, under which NGT supplies branded VoIP services to operators like American Broadband Inc.

Text Rules, Even for Older Users

A survey by Tekelec shows that text messaging, once seen as the main communications tool for teenagers and young adults, has become prevalent among older generations. The 500-person survey shows that 60 percent of users older than 45 are just as likely to use SMS as they were to make voice calls from their mobile.

That's perhaps not good news for voice usage but shows the value of text messaging plans. About 40 percent of female users say they "mainly text," rather than talk. About 30 percent of male respondents reported they are likely to text rather than call.

Text messaging also is catching up to e-mail as the preferred means of daily international communication, with 32 percent of responses across all ages preferring SMS, compared to 33 percent who prefer to use email.

So is the fact that text messaging is displacing some amount of voice a good thing for mobile service providers? Not entirely. More than 80 percent of mobile service provider revenue still is derived directly from voice, says Alan Pascoe, Tekelec senior manager.

"Of the remaining data piece, SMS has the largest chunk of revenue and the highest profitability," he says.  "Texting is particularly appealing for operators because nearly every subscriber can do it and networks have sufficient signaling bandwidth."

"Still, profitability isn’t quite keeping up with usage, thanks to all-you-can-eat plans, but operators can reduce costs with a more efficient SMS network infrastructure," Pascoe says.

Pascoe says Tekelec is not sure how much email volume is being displaced by texting. But as a general rule younger users are more comfortable with texting than older users and businesses still prefer email.

"A key reason is that an SMS message implies an urgent request, whereas email is typically less urgent," he says. "Personal communication often revolves around an immediate need, like making plans, so texting is the more natural approach outside of the office."

But email is also more conducive for business tasks like sending attachments, he adds.

So will text messaging ultimately be as "archivable" as email? Certainly operators are looking at a number of ways to "add value and stickiness to SMS offerings, including archiving," Pascoe says.

"The most common ideas we hear discussed are email-like functionalities: archiving, copying, forwarding, black and white lists and group distribution," says Pascoe. "The wild card for text message archiving demand is Google Voice, which allows subscribers to store SMS in Gmail instead of on their phones, keeping messages indefinitely."

"With Google providing this for free, it may be difficult for operators to generate revenue from it," Pascoe notes.

Person-to-person messages are the foundation of SMS, and will dominate for the foreseeable future, he thinks. "But the model is evolving so that growth is strongest for person-to-application, application-to-person and machine-to-machine communications."

Why Cloud Computing is the Finger Pointing at the Moon, Not the Moon

The thing about "cloud computing" is that it is very difficult to isolate and separate from other broader changes in computing infrastructure, all of which are happening simultaneously. We are, most would agree, on the cusp of a change in basic change in computational architecture from "PC" centric to something that might be called "mobile Internet computing," for lack of a more-descriptive and well-understood term.

The point, simply, is that the shift to "cloud-based" computing is inextricably bound up with other crucial changes such as a shift to use of mobile devices as the key end user access device, the rise of Web-based, hosted and remote applications and user experiences.

For most people, businesses and organizations, the shift of geolocational "places" where computing takes place will occur in the background. The main change is the evolution in things that can be done with computational resources.

Aside from something like an order of magnitude more devices that are connected to computing resources, the new mobile Internet will mean the creation of something like a "sensing" fabric will be put into place. Cameras will create "eyes," microphones will create "mouths to speak," and "ears" to hear. Kinesthetic capabilities will create new ways to interact with information overlaid on the "real" or physical world.

All those new devices also will create new possibilities for enriching "location" information. GPS is fine for fixing a location in terms of latitude and longitude. But what about altitude? What about locating devices, people or locations that are in high-rise buildings? Emergency services and first responders need that additional information.

But the possibilities for "sensing" networks grow exponentially once communications, altitude, attitude and other three-dimensional information is available to any application. Lots of medical and recreational devices now can capture biomedical information in real time. Add real-time communications and many other possibilities will open up.

The point is simply that cloud computing as computational architecture will enable other changes, going well beyond simple ability to send and receive information of any sort. The shift to distributed computing will, with mobile sensors, devices and people, lead to vastly-different ability to monitor the environment, process and annotate or contextualize events and objects in the real world with granularity.

That is not to understate the challenges and opportunities for a wide range of companies in the ecosystem, caused directly by a shift of core competencies. By definition, a change of computing eras has always been accompanied by a completely new list of industry leaders.

Keenly aware of that historic precedent, none of today’s computing giants will take anything for granted as the new era begins to take hold. At the same time, it is hard not to predict that key stakeholders of just about every sort might find themselves severely disrupted by the shift.

So far, whole industries ranging from media and music to telecom, advertising and retailing have found themselves struggling to adjust to a world with lower barriers to entry and radically different ways of creating and delivering products and services people want.

As the shift to the next computing paradigm occurs, many more human activities and business models will find themselves subject to attack and change.

Within the global communications business, it should be noted that the incremental growth of just about everything “mobile” will hit an inflection point. Whether that happened in 2009, will happen in 2010 or takes just a bit longer is not the point.

To talk about a world where a trillion devices are connected, in real time, to the Internet, to servers, software and applications, is to talk about a world where mobility IS communications. Mobility will not be merely an important segment of the business, it will be THE business at the end user level.

That is not to say the core backbone networks, data centers and other long-haul and even access networks are unimportant; to the contrary they will be the fundamental underpinning of the “always on, always connected” ecosystem of applications and business activity which will depend on those assets.

Without denigrating in any way the “pipes,” dumb or otherwise, that will be the physical underpinning of all the applications, there is only so much value anybody can wring out of plumbing. Most of the economic value is going to reside elsewhere.

That said, there already are numerous ways to look at cloud computing infrastructure, as it is used to build businesses that create added value.

Almost by definition, cloud computing enables consumption of software and applications that use remote computing facilities. We sometimes call this “software as a service” and the trend is an early precursor of what happens in the shift from PC-based to mobile and cloud-based computing.

Such uses of cloud computing will have intermediate effects on end user experiences. Lots of everyday computing or application experiences will shift away from local computing or storage, and towards on-the-fly rendering.

The shift to utility computing—enterprise use of cloud computing—will shift data centers from “owned and operated” facilities to outsourced services. But that likely will have less impact than the shift to SaaS-based applications.

The former is an “industrial” shift; the latter is more an “end user” shift. And all cloud computing effects will have most impact when they directly touch end user experiences.

Utility computing contributes to many end user experiences, but much utility computing is “behind the scenes.” Hosted applications are, and increasingly will be, everyday experiences for most human beings.

Web services are the area where end user impact will be noticed most strikingly, and where the most-profound transformations will occur, as Web services—mostly mobile—will touch end users with services and features that cannot be provided any other way.

Cloud computing is important, to be sure. But we will miss the bigger picture in focusing too narrowly on what it means for data centers, utility computing services, transport and access providers. Even the huge trend towards mobility is a sub-plot.

Cloud computing will enable an era of ubiquitous computing, with social and economic consequences we cannot begin to imagine. It is a huge business change for all of us in communications. But it is just a finger pointing at the moon; not the moon itself.

Google to Launch App Store for "Google Apps"

Google is preparing to launch an online store in which it will sell third-party business software to Google Apps customers, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The Wall Street Journal says that Google's store could arrive as early as March with the works of third-party developers available as enhancements to Google's office productivity software suite. It appears the store would allow Gmail and Google Docs users to purchase add-ons for niche features too specialized for the mainstream Google Apps product.

The Google Solutions Marketplace contains lists and reviews of third-party software for Google Apps and Enterprise Search, but it does not let you buy the applications directly from Google. That might be what is about to change.

Developers would have to share revenue with Google from sales of their software through the store, and it would be reasonable to assume revenue splits similar to those used by mobile application stores run by Google, Apple, and several other companies.

Typically, the developer gets 70 percent of the revenue.

As iTunes was the "secret sauce" that helped propel the iPod to prominence, and as the App Store has been the surprise attraction for the iPhone, perhaps app stores might provide similar value for service and device providers.

99% of BitTorrent Content Illegal?

A new survey suggests that about 99 percent of available BitTorrent content violates copyright laws, says Sauhard Sahi, a Princeton University student who conducted the analysis.

Some question the methodology, pointing out that the study only looks at content that is available, not content transferred. That might not be such a big distinction, though. Copyright holders are growing more insistent that Internet service providers actively block delivery or sending of such illegal material.

That, in turn, raises lots of issues. BitTorrent can be used in legal ways, so blocking all torrents clearly violates Federal Communications Commission guidelines about use of legal applications on the Internet. That said, the fact that the overwhelming majority of BitTorrent files consist of copyrighted material raises huge potential issues for ISPs that might be asked to act as policemen.

The study does not claim to make judgments about how much copyrighted content actually is downloaded. But it stands to reason that if such an overwhelming percentage of material is copyrighted, that most uploads and downloads will be of infringing content.

The study classified a file as likely non-infringing if it appeared to be in the public domain, freely available through legitimate channels, or  user-generated content.

By this definition, all of the 476 movies or TV shows in the sample were found to be likely infringing.

The study also found seven of the 148 files in the games and software category to be likely non-infringing—including two Linux distributions, free plug-in packs for games, as well as free and beta software.

In the pornography category, one of the 145 files claimed to be an amateur video, and we gave it the benefit of the doubt as likely non-infringing.

All of the 98 music torrents were likely infringing. Two of the fifteen files in the books/guides category seemed to be likely non-infringing.

"Overall, we classified ten of the 1021 files, or approximately one percent, as likely non-infringing," Sahi says.

"This result should be interpreted with caution, as we may have missed some non-infringing files, and our sample is of files available, not files actually downloaded," Sahi says. "Still, the result suggests strongly that copyright infringement is widespread among BitTorrent users."