I believe that the iPhone 4 will be remembered as the device that invented video chat. Just like how the iPod is often seen as the first real mp3 player. It wasn’t at all of course. There were dozens of mp3 players before it. But the iPod set a new quality bar which was so [...]
...full articleIt’s been two and a half years since I started working for Google. Now, as I walk out the door, I’m going to try to capture some of my thoughts about the experience and share them here.
In the summer of 2007, as I was finishing up my MBA, I was faced with a choice of [...]
Google recently launched some major improvements to their online document-editing suite. The spreadsheets are faster and more powerful. But IMHO the most interesting change is an update to the word-processor (originally known as Writely) which allows for real-time collaboration. Now the text documents act like the spreadsheets do. You can see [...]
...full articleAs promised, I gave a talk at the Pacific Northwest Association of College Physicists conference today. The topic was Physics at Google, or more specifically, “How a background in physics helps to solve Google’s engineering challenges. Real-world examples of how making the world’s information accessible and useful leans on the principals of physics.” My slides [...]
...full articleNothing exciting here to report, but I thought I’d share pointers to some of the jokes I’ve stumbled upon that I like.
UniXKCD command line console
My favorite webcomic, Randall Monroe’s brilliant XKCD, is running a command-line version of itself today. A few commands you might want to try include:
find
wget http://xkcd.com/
Make me a sandwich
go west
Google renames itself [...]
...full articleI’d like to extend congratulations out to all my friends over on the Google chat team. They just announced a set of improvements to the web based chat clients in both iGoogle and Orkut. If you haven’t been there in a while, Orkut is Google’s original social networking site that was born around the time [...]
...full articleI’ve been invited to give a talk at the Spring meeting of the Pacific Northwest Association for College Physics. The theme of the conference is “The Unknown Physicist.” Along those lines I will be giving a talk about Physics at Google, and how a background in physics helps to solve Google’s engineering challenges. [...]
...full articleCoincident with the launch of the iPhone 3G hardware, Apple has started a couple of new online services: MobileMe and the iPhone App Store. In some ways these are natural extensions of existing product lines. But I believe their launch actually represents a fairly substantial strategic shift as Apple attempts to diversify from a hardware-only company to one that runs on a mix of hardware and services. In order to make this strategy work, Apple will need to sacrifice its much coveted high hardware margins. Diversifying from hardware Since Jobs pulled the company out of the doldrums, Apple has been…
...full articleWonder what I’ve been up to at work lately? Here’s a tiny glimpse. Google just launched another way to access the Google Talk network. It’s a web-based instant messaging chat client optimized for the iPhone browser. It’s not my primary project or my secondary or tertiary, but I did write a blog post about it and made sure the whole thing got out the door today. If you have an iPhone, try it out at www.google.com/talk. Warning: Non-iPhone browsers will be directed away.
...full articleAlthough most corporate mergers fail (often due to mis-aligned incentives on the part of the deal-makers) there is a solid economic foundation for the proposed Microsoft + Yahoo! merger. Most of their assets will work no better combined than separate. But the merged Microhoo ad network would be significantly more valuable than the sum of two ad networks alone. Why bigger is better for online advertisers The reason lies in network effects of the online search + advertising industry. Imagine you’re an ad buyer which is to say you have a service you want consumers to find online. Unless you’re…
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