The Power Of Google Analytics

It has been approximately three weeks since Google announced their Analytics service. I connected Analytics probes to my blog page as soon as I got the message (I think this was a Reuters announcement on a stock - screening site). The probe itself is a tiny Javascript that lets Google gather traffic statistics on the page where it resides. And since the early days of the service I watched my fellow readers visiting my site. It is amazing how much information is available. First, I know where you come from. So far most of the audience is in the United States and in Poland (locations whre I have realtives and friends, who spread the word). But I also have visitors from Australia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Iceland.
I still cannot understand why there are no visits from Canada (anybody has friends over there? - ask them to click here and we will see...). Then I know the ratio of new versus returning visitors. The trend is good so far, since the blog is gaining in popularity and new faces show up every day.
And I know much more about you! Technicals like operating systems, browser make and model (IE stil rulez), screen resolution, connection type (dialup / dsl / corporate), your Internet provider (Comcast leads the pack). I know how much time you spend on the pages, where you start wnd where you leave, and even where you come from (ie. the page you browsed just before going to the Headworx). Are you afraid? Do not be... This is all the information any browser submits to a web server, and by knowing your public IP address, your whereabouts can be determined. The power of Google helps here, since they keep a database of Internet providers around the world and IP address ranges they are assigned. And based on that they can plot your position on the map.
As you imagine a service like that helps tune your site a lot. When you know your audience and its habbits, you can deliver more what they like. And if your web site sells something (that is mostly the case), you can simply sell more by tuning the pages accordingly.
Now you may wonder what Google gets from this (especially that Analytics is free). Hey, haven't you read the Meta Brain story? They have to eat information to grow. And of course now they have all the information I described above. About any site and page that inserts Analytics probe in the body. This is enormous value of information (if you have brains to process it of course). One of derived values from Analytics probes is more precise ad targeting. Meaning more value for advertisers and less hassle for users. And more value for shareholders of course. The power of information, the power of knowledge...
As a side note for investors, I looked at the Analytics user interface. Its rich graphs are rendered using Macromedia (MACR) Flash. Recently I have noticed, Google Video is Flash-based as well. So is Adobe (ADBE), just closing the Macromedia acquisition, becoming a "Google / IPTV" investment target to watch? They are present on every platform, from PCs to MACs to even Qualcomm's mobile phone chipsets. And it looks like Flash becomes de facto standard for rich multimedia delivery over the Web. If Google bets on them, shouldn't we?

The Best Music Smartphone Ever

We have expected an iPod killer to come from one of the big three mobile handset players (Nokia, Motorola or Sony-Ericsson). Or may be from the strong far-east challengers (Samsung, LG or Sanyo). But it looks like HTC has come from behind. Again. I've been a proud owner of the i-Mate SP5m for two days now, and must say it is an awesome device. It is not perfect (yet), but it is likely the best mobile phone on Earth at the moment. It has got all the goodies you can dream of (like WiFi, Bluetooth, EDGE, 1.3 megapixel camera...), managed by easy to navigate, elegant and fast Windows Mobile 5.0 and an absolutely gorgeous 240x320 portrait screen.
There are several pioneering design details.
WiFi. This is the first mobile phone I have had, to include WiFi along with some other connection options. SP5m has a dedicated Communications Manager button that lets you turn on and off selected transmitters (especially WiFi and Bluetooth). Windows OS takes care of intelligent least cost routing for data connections. If WiFi is present, all the traffic goes there, otherwise it tries to route via the PC you synchronize to (by means of Bluetooth or USB connection). In the end, when no "free" connections are present, it establishes GPRS/EDGE session to get your data. The real pity, there is no version of Skype (yet) for the Windows Mobile 5.0, as this would be absolutely awesome to have a Skype - enabled mobile handset. I hope it's coming.
240x320 screen. Screens of that size (or resolution to be prcise, that is 3 times the resolution of an original PalmPilot) are common in most of today's PDAs. But so far this amount of real estate was not present in a phone. The screen is simply gorgeous, with vibrant colours and razor sharp pixels.
Music. We all know Apple has to come with an iPhon sooner or later. But before it happens, SP5m is the winner in a convergence category. With dedicated media/music buttons and Windows Media 10 player (that is at least equally easy and powerful as iPods are), SP5m does great job in managing the gigabyte of memory and storage it can be equipped with (64MB on board and a 1GB mini-SD card). That is typically more than 300 songs and with 2GB and 4GB mini-SD cards on the horizon this will go up to a 1000 and more. And sound quality is excellent. The only drawback in the package are the factory supplied headphones (I strongly recommend music fans here use the in-ear headphones from Sony or Shure).
Internet, Email, Outlook for calendars and contacts, and hundreds of applications on the market make this little wonder the most versatile gadget to carry. And the last thing I really love about HTC designs, is the univerasal USB port. First of all it is a standard mini-USB, so you can use any USB-to-miniUSB cable, second it synchronizes all the data (music included) with your PC and third, it charges the phone, so if you travel with a laptop, there is no need to carry another power brick along, a tiny self-winding USB cable will do.
So, great job, HTC. For the next version we want Qualcomm MSM6280 inside, for 3G/HSDPA with 3G-324M stack for mobile video telephony, 4 megapixel camera and more storage, some 100GB for music, photos and movies would do... And Skype (or better - Google Talk) preloaded :)

Microsoft Singularity

Singularity, the term originally coined by Vernor Vinge, and made recently famous by Ray Kurzweil is spreading all over the world. Redmond is not behind. Microsoft Research has been working on a Singularity project for two years now. Somewhere in its background, singularity means breakthrough, and this - I suppose - was the reason why Microsoft chose the name for the new prototype operating system. The goal is to (finally) have a software you can depend on. Microsoft defines system as dependable when it behaves as expected by its creators, owners and users, noting that many systems do not fit this definition [:)].
Singularity started with a question: what would a software platform look like, if it was designed from scratch, with the primary goal of dependability, instead of the more common goal of performance? This statement however casts a shadow of doubt, whether an architecture like that will ever be accepted by consumers. Of course, we hate software bugs and instabilities. But we are still paying a lot of attention to price, and we are gadget loving geeks, and we demand backward compatibility. And Singularity will be neither cheap nor full of gadgets. And it will completely break backward compatibility with older systems and applications. Are we ready for such a step? Most of us are not. We prefer BMWs with a computer and 38 electric motors in its 8-way power seats over ascetic Subarus. And we absolutely have to run every old application on every new computer we bring home. But some of us, directly or indirectly hit by one of the history's worst software bugs, may be getting the message.
Singularity project is significant from yet another perspective. All its predecessors relied on specific hardware architectures below the OS. Namely addressing buses, assembly instruction sets, execution rings. Singularity takes different approach, with SIPs (Software-Isolated Processes) being the center of the gravity, TAL (Typed Assembly Language) allowing verification of code safety before it is executed and MIV (Memory Independence Invariant) that prohibits cross-objects space pointers. All this is crowned by strongly typed, higher-order communication channels with system being able to verify both the protocol and values being passed between processes. Elegant and mature software architecture as described above drastically simplifies the hardware requirements below. In the prototype implementation all SIPs run in ring 0 in the kernel's address space, having dramatic effect on performance. Calls from a process to the kernel are 10 times faster than on current implementations of Linux and Windows. Creating a new process takes 300,000 CPU cycles, while the same operation is about 1 million cycles in Linux and 5 million cycles in Windows.
I am very happy to see an initiative like that. Sooner or later we will have to switch to dependable software. Especially when, according to Singularity prophets like Vinge and Kurzweil, to achieve immortality, we transfer our souls from biological bodies to machines.

Epic 2010

This time I had a plan to write about something else than Google. I thought I explored its potential impact for a while. But just as I was starting to make up the title for today's entry, my good friend Glenn reminded me of the Epic 2014 story. Yes, I watched this movie before. But it was fairly long ago, at least before I got involved (both financially and emotionally) with Google. So I tuned in to the Epic 2014 home page and watched it again. What strikes me, is how close the movie authors are in their predictions to my own thoughts, on how the information flow chain will evolve (or evolves, should I say). The only difference is timing. Since I am sure 2014 will happen before 2010. Actually I can feel the story is happening now, with the headworx blog being one of the participants and contributors to the changes.
Events happen around the globe. Life, science, politics, technology, literature, music... How do we learn about them today? We read newspapers, watch television, listen to radio stations. Millions of journalists collect the information and submit to the media distribution channels (news agencies, newspaper publishers, TV broadcasters) that in turn deliver the information to us. We also use the Internet to actively search and find relevant information. Most of the time we turn to the same distribution channels, or more precisely - their online presence hubs. So we go to CNN.COM, FOX.COM, BBC.COM, NYTimes.COM and others. Is there a difference? Not that much, really. We can get some information earlier than its printed or aired version, but the source is the same - people who work there by profession, collecting information at its source and delivering it to us.
But this is going to change. Internet technologies remove unnecessary rings in many chains. We get more direct access to sources. As you have probably watched Epic 2014 already, you know what I mean. The sources of information already are on the Net. Most of them blogs. Millions of them. People passionately writing about the events they witnessed, the ideas they created, the observations they have. On the other side there are billions of people reading (or watching in case of video blogs). They need to be connected. And here comes again the need for a profile / pattern matching engine. Readers are profiled by what they read. And based on the profiles, a clever computer algorithm is able to choose the content they will like to read. This is the same algorithm that will be your "channel selector" in Life After Television. It is making your news and entertainment custom cut and personal.
We know Google has been working on this for a long time. At least since the inception of Google News service, that is put together entirely by computers. At the moment Google News takes its input from professional sources, but soon it will start taking more and more from personal blogs. Why? Trust me. I know, because I have been through this already. I stopped watching TV and reading newspapers a couple of years ago. Then I turned to the on-line services like Google News, and started visiting some other sites like CNN or BBC. But recently almost all the newsfeeds I have, come from blogs over RSS feeds that aggregate in my personalized Google Reader. Directly from the sources. No delays, no distortions. No middle-man in between. I love this. And you will too, soon. Kurzweil's law of accelerating progress guarantees 2014 will happen before 2010.
Ah, I would forgot the investors corner... Newspapers and TV are going away. Where do you think the 600 billion $ advertising business will go to? OK... now you know why Google is still cheap :)

RSS: Life After Newspaper

As you already know, I do not watch TV and do not buy newspapers. I get 100% of my information feeds from the Internet. It started to be like that a couple of years ago. The first enabler was a WiFi network covering my house and a Compaq Tablet PC as my electronic newspaper. I could sit in any room (yes, the bathroom included) with my tablet and navigate to any site and read. Local news, technology, stocks, email, bulletin boards, blogs... There is the power and freedom to choose exactly what I want. And then RSS technology came along.
RSS has been occupying a pole position on a starting grid of technologies set to transform and revolutionize the Internet for several months now. But it needed an enabler. A good reader application that would help organize the news feeds from various sources. Actually hundreds of RSS readers and aggregators have emerged recently, but to be honest none of them took me by heart. I've been waiting for the One.
And while waiting and waiting, I just have not been able to understand how Microsoft missed the boat. They did it for the second time in a row. First they were challenged by Netscape's web browser in the 90's and it took them enormous amount of resources to regain the position. Now they had their second chance with RSS and missed it again. Has it been so difficult to envision personalized streams of news and information flowing to the Windows desktop? Or was RSS too difficult to implement in IE? BTW the official story is RSS will be native in Vista. Hey, Steve, do you really think the world will stop and wait until your next OS goes gold? You've lost it, it's over!
I have been obsessed by a concept of intelligent and personalized content aggregator for some time. Even thinking of starting my own venture to develop one, I did some research on the subject, pointing as far as the paper by Corin R. Anderson of University of Washington, Seattle. And I still think content aggregator is going to be the killer application in the years to come, as we shift to electronic information feeds, killing the Newspaper for good. And as it could have been anticipated...
...Google has come again to the rescue with the new Google Reader service. I will not try to get in too much details here, pointing you rather to the official FAQ. Just play with it an you will love it. First it starts with a search for new content button, effectively looking for RSS publishers. You will find there your local newspaper, and many other information publishers. One search I would recommend for tech geeks is "TheRegister" - type it in the box, hit the "search for new content" button and then click "subscribe" button below the search result. This will add the newsfeed to your favorite subscriptions and after hitting the "Home" link you will be taken to the lens view, that will allow to scroll up and down through the feed. Oh, have I mentioned you need a Google account for this? I thought you already have one. If not, set it up, its easy and free and you won't regret it.
Now is the part for Google investors. TV is getting killed by the Internet. Newspaper is getting killed by the Internet. Business models shift from subscriber financing to advertiser financing. Ads money flows in torrents to the Internet. But not all Internet ads are equal. Google's are very high quality. The Internet ads will shift from being "provocative and annoyingly repetitive" to "interesting, relevant and useful", and Google's approach will ultimately prevail. If you are looking for some spicy toppings - there is the 20050165615 patent application you should explore :)
And for those of you who want to stay current with my blog - enter http://headworx.blogspot.com/atom.xml as one of your personal Google Reader subscriptions.